Final Kickstart Goal

Hang on, did you just call a Monkeylord a long range support unit? The Monkeylord with a couple of medium range popguns and a short range gigantic sweeping laser beam of death?

This is the bit where you claim lots of small units are always far more interesting as if it were a fact. It is actually an opinion. You also set up a nice false dichotomy implying that the existence of experimentals means the absence of armies. No one ignores their army and rushes straight to experiementals (well, no one who actually wants to win anything but a no nuke no air no artillery no rush 4v4 on settons clutch). The existence of experimentals actually gives you a few more strategic options late game. Monkeylord type experimentals are great for cracking defences too tough for conventional assault. Experimental artillery is an existential threat to any other player, forcing them to come after it in your base. Fatboys are actually at their best when supporting a conventional land army. And most importantly, the decision to build an experimental itself has major strategic implications - you are commiting yourself to pouring a huge quantity of resources into its construction for an extended period. That makes you vulnerable. It's the same class of decision as when/if you are going to tech up.

Actually, you got this backwards. Common units are very easy to balance compared to extremely expensive super-units. The reason for this is that expensive units involve a massive single expenditure to yield a massive quantity of one type of function. The efficiency from resource consolidation of this function must be balanced against the inefficiency from HP consolidation, and various other considerations, make experimentals very tricky to balance. Typically they alternate back and forth between "never use" and "always build if you can afford it."

Armies of smaller units behave very normally as you increase their numbers and as they suffer casualties. You claim that the Fatboy is easy to balance, but a micro-Fatboy, such as a T2 artillery vehicle (i.e. Luger), with the same function, but much weaker, for much cheaper, is a horrid balancing nightmare? Really?

"Special abilities" such as the Magnetron or the Cloaker bot thingy (in a game with no detection) do not belong in this game. An "ability" in the context of TA is a function, such as being able to fire anti-air, or the ability to build structures. The magnetron and all its mutated siblings can all take a long walk off a short pier. They are gimmicks that are utterly irrelevant, except for the lulz, maybe twice.

I am not saying that there is not a place for very powerful, very late game units. However these units should basically be extremely powerful main combat units, for an extreme price tag. You don't really need that many types of unit in that role. Pretty much just one, as in TA. And if your side doesn't actually have such a unit (Arm), it doesn't really matter, because they are so rarely built it is almost irrelevant.

Experimentals are whatever the maximal case is of tech stratification. If there are two tech levels, plus an experimental T3, then the pattern from T1 to T2 should continue on to affect T3. T2 should not obsolete T1, because having more units be viable at once is good. What T2 gives you is greater absolute power, and less resource efficiency. When a big army of T1 can't deliver enough force on a point (one localized area), use T2. And similarly, when a big army of T2 can't deliver enough force concentrated in one location, use T3. However that focusing of power will cost you a high premium.

The unit cannon was as much of a "gimmick" as the unit magnet but that made it into the trailer and no one's protesting.

Upon second thought, it's probable that some things could be balanced, but i want my experimentals dammit

Yeah but in PA it serves a Roll that so far as we know nothing Else does, unlike in SupCom2 with it's magic tele-Transports.

Mike

How is a SC2 transport with a short-range teleport any worse than a SC1 Commander teleporting vast distances?
For my mind it was a great way of speeding up the whole load/unload process and one of the few elements of that game I'd like to see stick aroud.

Oh and please don't use magic as a pejorative.
When you're talking science fiction this fictional it's nonsensical to imply fantasy is a lesser genre.

I hope if we have experimentals they are made prohibitively expensive. As in "you've lost get out of my game" expensive. They are just too weird to fit into balance.

Right now my main hope is that we finally get a TA style game where T1 doesn't mean "don't build this after 5 minutes". I want a game where T1 is useful when T3 comes out.

I think it would be near enough impossible to have useful experimentals while also balancing across the tiers so they are never obsolete.

They didn't need to re-work the transports. I made a mod for FA that tended to the problem that inspired the departed from exposed transports. It was just some minor tuning values (there's a deliberate stage at which the transport hovers before deploying, this is what caused all the complaints. It's a configurable blueprint setting, so I just set it to the minimum value and viola!).

You can't not have experimentals but the stupid number of them in SupCom 2 just made them into the next tech level. I liked the 3-4 (mostly) very diffident experimentals in SupCom 1 of course this is totally subjective and by the time you start throwing planet about it'll just be a bigger target.

Thinking about it the giant thrusters that sent the asteroid flying in to the planet has to be considered an experimental structure.