Hello Uber Entertainment, I can't afford the beta, but I am patiently waiting for the release of this awesome looking game. Looking at gameplay videos I am the more eager to play. However I do have suggestions: first off, being a multiplayer intensive game, it would be awesome to be able to evolve your forces into your own unique army. By this I mean, gaining schematics for certain types of units, gaining plans for specialised weapons or technology that boosts a certain aspect of a unit but nerfs another (like TF2 items) after wins both in single player and multiplayer. An example would be after a win you gain an item such as "Titanium C340 chassis" which increases the armour of a unit of your choice, lowers its speed slightly and gives it a new look. You can assign this to any of your units. This would give the player the possibility of not only aesthetically customising their army but customising their strategies for playing. You can also gain items that boost your units to be more effective on certain planets, for example you could get "Thermal enhancer engines" or whatever, that cause units on ice planets to move faster (assuming certain environments on planets effect your army). The environment acting on your army would also shake up the strategy from game-to-game. On arid, flat plain planets your track units (if there's tanks) to move faster, water planets... well pretty obvious, you would whip out your naval arsenal. It would also introduce the whole 'evolving machines' thing - which is cool. That is all for now, I will be posting more eventually.
These machines do not evolve or upgrade. They have already reached their technological peak. The weak candidates have been weeded out long ago. You will not see this in the standard game. All players will fight with the same options, and custom unit design is going to be done entirely through mods or patch notes.
I think that you don't need official "customizations" to your units to make a player's army unique. Just looking at the alpha, every player has their own "build" -- some players use a lot of air, some players use bots instead of vehicles, some players turtle while others expand with dozens of t1 vehicle factories spamming expendable ant tanks. As long as each unit is unique and has advantages and disadvantages, players will develop unique strategies and army layouts, use unique tactics, and force opponents to develop new counter-strategies.
Bots in general are very poor units right now. The reason is that, yes, they are slightly faster than tanks, but they aren't fast enough to outrun tanks, or fast enough to strike an enemy base before tanks can mount a response. Tanks are always, 100% better, unless you micro the unholy HELL out of bots, which is nearly impossible because of the borky pathfinding. The game, at the moment, is undergoing very minor balance changes. Uber is only fixing things that are clearly, 100% broken balance-wise, stuff like the Stomper being able to flatten entire late-game bases in 10 seconds flat was fixed, the Leviathan having longer range than the T2 Artillery and just as much damage output as the Stomper was fixed, and I'm sure Walls will be fixed soon, because they are the end-all solution to... Everything regarding defense.
