The balancing act, nerfing with a sledgehammer.

Traditionally, and especially with RTS games, issues arrive with some units slipping through beta testing and being OP upon hitting mass release.
Also traditionally, these units are dealt with by sledgehammer nerfs...mercy anyone?
IT seems under-powered units receive slight, often ineffectual buffs, but any unit considered game breaking is dealt with..more harshly.

Can I beg of Uber to not fall into this trap, often times an OP unit can be fixed with a minor tweak in one area, the Mercy for example really only needed a damage nerf, but instead it was rendered virtually obsolete by decimating it across many areas.

I remember back to Star Fleet Battles, a board game for those of you too young to know, that introduced a very different race, the Andromedans. They were OP, as their shields absorbed energy, and returned it as usable power for the ship to use next turn. All it needed was a reduction in the efficiency of this return, but after a rules update, they became virtually useless...

Let's try adjusting one parameter of an OP unit, and testing, Before we swing the nerf hammer freely!

All units should be useful at least in a couple of situations. If you nerf stuff too hard and they become useless then it`s bad design. But if said unit is needed in all situations it should be nerfed to hell to make sure it`s not as omnipresent as it once was.

Design is as much math as it is personal taste, so if the designer wants to balance the game in a certain way it`s your personal opinion to like the direction or not, but as long as the game is balanced you have to say he did a good job.

I agree with you that many times all that you need to a unit is a very small nerf, but other times you need a larger dose of the bitter medicine. Not all issues can be solved with small nerfs.

If units are only created to serve a role or position in the unit tree it comes from, or terrain it functions on then balance should be subjective to the gameplay the devs want.

High accuracy units make great AA and should do it very well, but it shouldn't have an alternate motive or purpose, that's for the smaller scale RTS games who can't have huge sprawling army's.

AA>Bomber>Tank>Raider unit>AA

Or something along those lines. (Raider units because AA units are probably faster then tanks)

Complexity doesn't just have to come from the unit designs but the environment as well. Certain environments may favor some designs over others, or render a certain class completely non viable. After all the game won't be just fought across green, grassy plains.

There are plenty of other classes of worlds, some more lucrative, some more hostile, and some that open up new ways of fighting. Every class of world may very well develop its own way of fighting and optimal units. This makes interplanetary fighting more interesting, and limits the potential for a "one size fits all" unit that rolls over everything.

I agree with you there, would you think that it would be based on the resources on each world?

With lava worlds favoring super heavy tanks who can be eaisly affordable and resist the hazards of the environment, and Ice worlds favoring light speedy units who are light on the metal cost and won't get messed up by the ice and snow.

Yeah, pretty much. Picking resource costs at this point is kind of premature, since even vague trends may dramatically change depending on resource model. For example the lava world may instead favor hovercraft to avoid touching the dangerous terrain, while an ice world favors heavy amphibious units that don't care about dropping into the water. There's reason to go either way.

It's okay for planets to strongly factor into unit choice. There will be many planet types to play with, and there are many play styles to explore. What's important is having enough unit roles to make the terrain interesting, lest any one world type turns into a spam fest.

I like this idea a lot. I can imagine some cool gameplay where one player is able to capture or build near a field, for ease of mobility, where another player builds between valleys for shelter. One player might make tech choices better suited to the map conditions (ice, fields, paths, ruins, etc).