A lack of necessary QoL features prevents me from playing this game in any meaningful way after the campaign is finished. They are:
1. The ability to paint a line of buildings regardless of size over an area, for an example, look at Creeper World 3, this feature would massively help PHC place Refineries more easily. This would also help both factions place quantum relays/archives more easily and would go miles to alleviate carpal tunnel.
2. No region-locking of factories to specific armies in terms of reinforcements based solely on proximity (Aka, if there's an army/factory to the north, and another pair of both to the south, the northern factory never reinforces the southern factory and vice-versa unless they are within a region that is adjacent.)
3. No on-screen terrain mode to show you where regions are while refineries are selected to build, how am I to tell where to place Refineries to buff a region's income when its 3 hours into a game? The players should never have to guess where to place something to get benefit, it should be fully obvious, I'm not asking for much, just lines for region borders that overlaps all entities visible with an opacity of 20-30% (or make it customizable in the options menu).
4. No ability to deselect units from selected groups in this game, for an example look at any RTS that isn't this one. It's always Hold Shift+Left Click a unit to add it into the selected group and to remove it from the selected group respectively, even AVP: Extinction has the ability to deselect specific units. Sometimes you have a really strong, expensive unit that is important and you don't want to send them into an obvious suicide raid but instead use them as a defensive unit.
5. No in-game map editor. I'd like to make more skirmish maps myself without needing 3rd party software. I'm aware you have to add a launch parameter to the game via the advanced launch options, I don't believe this is remotely necessary and just only serves to inconvenience the players, potentially leading them to reconsider as giving unnecessary barriers to modifying the game tells them the developers don't want them to, being able to freely make new maps is as necessary for a game's post-launch future as an oil change for your car.
6. Game in Steam should be configurable to skip the game launcher when the player decides they like their settings so when you click "play" you are just thrown to the main menu, the extra step only serves to waste the time of players.
7. In-game accessible hints that each give essential tips for controls and what they do, an example is the very same feature in Starcraft Broodwar in the pause menu mid-match. Things like "Press F3 to select all on-screen air units"
8. Hitbox for region right-clicking should be larger while the hitboxes for selecting buildings should be locked to their model, but are instead 30% larger, causing overlap, this causes mountains of issues for players trying to snipe specific targets (or just order their giant army to take a region).
9. Units that are capable of firing up onto higher ground should be able to if you know where a given building is, at a cost of accuracy ofcourse, the lack of this feature makes the Altaria mission very difficult as I've ordered 4 dreadnoughts to attack the enemy's base only for them to sit at the bottom of the low ground for no reason.
10. Units and armies should automatically attack any target that is attacking them if no other orders have been queued, I've had numerous instances of dreadnoughts and whole armies being attacked by enemy units and never firing in self defense. I've also had cases where armies will ignore and move over/past enemy defenses and armies on a patrol command.
An addition: Sometimes Attack-moving causes units to fight less effectively than right-clicking on a region, I have often fought battles where the only main difference between is whether I attack-moved, or right-clicked the generator. This is especially clear when trying to take heavily defended regions that have numerous defensive structures.
11. Formation move needs to stop existing immediately and has at times lost me fights because any army that contains an Apollo will never utilize melee units in base attacks, but if the army itself is too large, the units will still take damage and die, never moving forward to, or I've lost an army because I ordered them to retreat and instead of them all moving individually at differing speeds to remain in the group towards the area, the group itself will rotate to move towards the location, which means, your army, in the attempt to order it to leave the fight, will actually just get wiped out, when they have enough time to have half of it survive if the game's pathing was designed for it to operate that way.
11b. This problem is fixed by never using Armies, at times I'd rather have control groups, and a far larger unit selection cap and just delete the armies mechanic completely.
12. For campaign missions, allow us to restart the mission from the pause menu.
13. A larger more obvious mission elapsed time counter, it being the color and size that it is, is genuinely frustrating. I want to minimize the leaderboard within missions and hide it completely, in a 14 player match, it takes up far too much space. I would implement a smaller window mode where it shows your score, and the top 4 others within the match, a minimal mode where it shows only your score, and a hidden mode where the window is not there, but a + button is there to put it back onto full mode.
14. Allow Gateways to build Avatars, and Orbital Fabricators to build Sappers. Combine the defenses build menu with the technology building menu on the Avatar/Sapper but remove T1 defensive buildings from either one, as there's no point to their inclusion to begin with as they should also require Radioactives to build and would be a later-game option to switch from Engineers/Constructors to Avatars/Sappers.
The game lacks the polish in these specific areas that I find frustrating and I cannot recommend it at this time. I understand a sequel is in development, I struggle to bring my interest to it due to these issues existing as of now.
I love the game, but while an unpolished and partly uncut gemstone is still beautiful, when you have a far more polished and well-cut gemstone to look at, the unpolished and partly uncut gemstone will be admired far less often.
