The PHC strategic bomber is pretty tough so may still be useful with those AA buffs. But the Harbinger gets fried even with the current AA, at least the Substrate AA anyway. I watched some of the streamed game last night with Creature and rrfarmer. Rrfarmer's aa tore Creature's Harbingers up and talking to Creature about it later he said he had 19 levels into his unit HP upgrade...

Otherwise, very nice to to see bug and crash fixes with some UI improvements. Good to see new languages starting to appear, long may that continue.

you still don´t tackle the imbalance and problems

-map imbalance- still not fixed

-caregiver useless - still not tackled even worse..

-pathfinding

-bad behavoir of substrate units in patricular mauler and savager... - at my frist test seems to be fixed

-athena imbalance- not sure should be more expensive like the mauler

-overmind is useless... not fixed

-harbinger  is useless; too less hp (a lot too less) not fixed

-dreadnought armor imbalance not fixed

-dreadnought instant heal have to take out of the game... not fixed

-new dreadnought abillities overdue- still overdue

-replay feature has postponed for months  still overdue

- wasd scrolling is just terrible; if you use them, there is no hotkeys anymore.... still not fixed

- eradicator should be a long range anti dreadnought unit, it does almost no damage to dreadnoughts... and to build in the meantime its useless. the player unit you have to raise such a high amount of metal and radioactive to build the techlevel, thus its not worth. -seems to be fixed instead of  aoe and radar contact it has armor piercing now

and many more problems and bugs...

instead of fixing anything, the most time you make it even worse

For example:

- to take a away the building attack of the mauler and on the other hand don´t take it the athena. This decision broke the balance for 2 month.

- now again boost the athena, which is less expensive as the mauler. Do nothing with the mauler.

and you need month to fix strange design decisions, thus its just playable for a short time until the next patch breaks the balance again.

Its like dasunding told me on a call. Most of the time, it is more balance before the patch than after.

its always the same...

i gotta agree on this one. we still have the issues that irritated people the most about the cronus and artemis (that they moved away just as fast as advancing units, while firing on them) so the balance was to weaken these two units so that they are almost useless, but they still move away just as quickly, so the actual annoyance still exists..

while we have new issues (that never existed) like the OP athena spam. i still dont get the justification on the mauler not damaging buildings while the OP athena can? SS HAS to build destructors while PHC has a number of anti building options, like the stationary artillery..

i appreciate the improvements to the game, but there are still seemingly simple things that could be fixed. we know its easy to change balance, so why not do it? the patch is tiny, the files are simple number changes, yall could release a patch every day until the balance becomes fair..

pretty please

There was a time, when mauler and athena could attack buildings (october 2016 i think). Their were better in destroieng buildings than destructor or artemis. 

If you see my old videos, you will see how useless the destructor was... it was a oneshot by the phc turrets, due to the range was too small and the destructor always moves in melee attack 

thus stardocks took the mauler the to attack buildings away without to change destructor or athena

It can't. That was an issue when Maulers and to a slightly lesser extent Athenas, tore through everything, units, T3 and buildings. Now they can only use their secondary fire vs buildings.

(Sorry, I didn't mean to thumb up your comment, was just trying to quote the above line and hit the wrong button, but er, have it on the house I guess . Though I agree balance stuff takes too long to come down the line, and I did like your suggestion about slowing down when firing the big guns on T3, so the like can be for that )

I have been playing some hours during the past 10 days after a 20 day break.

TBH nothing essential has improved. My concerns:

- Taking out resource limit for substrate is awesome... and broken. I don't get penalties for abusing inherent substrate powers with production flexibility...heaven!

- Introducing "tech requirements" in the form of orbital necessary to build a unit is a harmful decision. It is unnecessary constraint to flexibility and further encourage players to spamming mauler/athena armies to punish opponent's decision to "tech-up" 

-Dreadnoughts' power is disproportionately low relative to their cost. 4-6 athenas still own a dread lvl 1 while cost far less so why would I build one? 

- MAPS - dump small and stupid maps as asked by community members for quite a while now. 

- Aviary units are bad...borderline useless. 

Having that in mind I shall withhold my opinion on both the significance and impact on the above mentioned changes.

Please do not do this is wrong.
Let it be the player that decide that.

Imagine that during the destiny there are several attacks on these units, who manages or controls them?

Must be the player ,the player may not want to lose these units if they reach this destination .

No, this is a good thing. It means if your units capture the node, then other units you have sent there but haven't yet arrived will currently just stop in the middle of nowhere. They should complete the original order, which this now addresses.

Ah ok cool ,then thats a really a great way to make the units think ,for some moments i was scary when i read ( Units will longer not stop moving ) they could say if you capture a region the units that have not yet arrived stop...

But i might want that they dont stop unless i give that order !

What seems to be said, is that units will not stop if the region is captured but by who?

I think i wasnt the only that get confused....

RE: If i want that in 5 diferent places units captured a region and keep to a diferent location ,half of them will stop?

yeah i was also wondering on that one due to the typos (double negatives).. so u were certainly not alone

i think there could be a happy middle ground atleast(minor damage to buildings so there is still some effectiveness for raids or vs T1 defenses), and even if the end result is maulers cant damage buildings, then i would think its fair the athenas cant do it either.. but yeah i certainly dont want to go back to the days where both sides just spam either maulers or athenas to kill everything..

(u made me cry, i thought the thumbs up was legit.. but thanks!)

i wouldnt mind if PHC also had limitless storage, as opposed to giving a limit to SS.

i dont think tech requirements are the issue, i think the unit strengths are the issue, the tech locked stuff should be stronger than they currently are. otherwise why not let everyone build everything from the start?(jokes) "strategic bombers are go"

dreads are weak, except the insanely hard to kill hyperion at level 2? or is it 3? (+ nano mesh ARM)

agreed on the rest!

It is an old issue, since forever really. If you grab a bunch of units (group A)to capture a node and then grab another bunch of units (group B ) and also send them to that node, then at the moment, if group A captures the node before group B gets there then Group B will just stop, where ever they are at that time. So when you go looking for them, expecting them to have joined up with group A they are not there and you have to backtrack to find them sitting around somewhere else and not where they should be. This is also the case that if you have one Army meta unit but it is a bit split up, then if the front runners capture the node the rest of the army will just stop where they are, strung out behind.

No need to worry, it is a welcome fix.

Balance changes should have been fixed a long time ago. As many have stated there's no shortage of people highlighting the issues and it's simple .txt changes and inputting data a process that takes minutes. We should have really got past the balancing by now but they seem to come in drips and drabs which I personally don't understand the reasoning behind. 

I'd personally like to see more substantial fixes, suggestions added which I've made and many others have made on the steam forums. It's really starting to feel there's not enough people working on Escalation, I could be wrong but that is definitely the impression I'm getting. 

I'll be honest the constant balance changes are quite frustrating and I feel they are being dragged out longer than they have to be. There's been plenty of input by the community, it doesn't take long to input those values in I just think the balancing should be rectified once and for all and put to bed and focusing on other fixes, stability and improvements. 

I appreciate the work being put in don't get me wrong. looking forward to a more substantial update whenever that may be. 

As I kind of explained on Steam, that is not going to happen. I guess you have not followed other RTS games before but balancing can be a long process. There are a lot of things to consider and not everyone will agree on everything. With all the new content from Escalation balancing coming to the fore again is natural. I certainly agree they can be very slow with changes coming through though, and some explanation behind the changes would be appreciated too. 

If you are only playing the AI the balance issues are less impinging as AI plays a certain way each time and won't change strategies to better utilize OP units, or ignore under powered units.

This looks like an interim patch between the current one and 2.1 so I expect you will see a more significant patch with 2.1, which was said to be coming Jan or Feb. I'd guess the latter.

yeah i agree, it is nearly impossible to balance a game to perfection, and that means it is basically an ever on going process that only ever really ends when interest is lost in the game. even starcraft is still being balanced, and that has essentially existed since 1998... every time a new unit is added (like the ones coming "soon") there will have to be even more balancing even if somehow everything is balanced before then (which i highly doubt)