Just in: Snowsuits are no longer considered heavy, unlike heatsuits. This makes it so that you can use double and triple jumps in the ice age areas even when not playing an ice age character.
Regarding buoys: I looked at the code, and saw nothing that seems amiss. So I tossed it over to Keith, as guardian power seeding was originally his thing.
Regarding meteor defense: I think that the friendly fire aspect and the enemies are what make this unique. Friendly fire I could see losing, but the enemies are vital to the longevity of any mission. Let me put it this way: if enemies aren't involved, then that mission only works a single way, period, forever. As we add more enemies, we get a combinatorial effect on missions that use enemies where new things start happening and there are interesting unexpected twists, thanks to the enemies. Without the enemies, it's just a kind of minigame version of meteor shower.
Regarding anachronism missions: good point on the bats, I'll make sure that they are excluded from those sorts of missions. Some types of enemies just don't fit well with certain kinds of missions, and excluding those sorts of enemies I'm not opposed to for any given mission type. For instance, I think that also desert burrowers and urban crawlers should be excluded from meteor storm missions, thinking about that more. Desert burrowers make it way too likely to friendly fire your own crates.
KDR_11k: I don't think the ice age folks get an extra point anymore, I think I removed that a while back.
Sirian: Welcome to the forums! If you have a savegame that we can use to test that, we'd love to have it on mantis. However, I think we already have one report of this with a save, so in this specific case I think we have what we need. And in general, big changes are coming to the ocean shallows to make them more distinct from oceans and way less annoying in general -- because I quite agree they are really annoying right now. Thanks!