With 6 players, for instance, once you get down to a single-wormhole chokepoint and have all players with a full cap of Riot mkIIs with tazers could create a permanent-paralysis zone to stop the guns of all non-para-immune parts of a wave, cpa, etc.
In my couple of games, the level of coordination was a little more along the lines of "don't let the devourer eat my stuff while i'm in the john." I mean, not quite, but yeah.
In Starcraft 1 I had a MP group that used to do the multiple-players control one team mode.
I'm jealous. I absolutely loved that mode because of the huge increase in potential organization (not to mention controlling all three races), and nobody ever ever played it. (Well, almost never.) Good thing there's AI Wars
mindloss, do you play with lots of other things switched on? Hybrids, Golems Hard and suchlike? Or is it just basic options on 7/7?
I think one of the unusual things about this game also is one's definition of "finding it hard" shouldn't necessarily equate with "no winning". Losing is half the fun!
Well, to be fair to myself, I should say that after I beat my first game (the easy one), I went straight to a 7/7 with a bunch of options on while having no idea what they did. Died a few times, and went back to playing easier levels and slowly learning all the options one or two at a time. I generally avoid loading in most of my games if I lose in a 'reasonable' way (including a couple games that were 10-15 hours in). And now that I think about it, I haven't really played a proper 7/7 since I started (the one I won was that 10-planet snake shield-bugged ship-stalled-bug cluster-f). I'm doing a Fallen Spire on 60-or-something 7/7 now and it's going fine.
So yeah, I'd probably do okay now. I'm finding there are maybe three really important things that kill you often which you have to learn, and then a bunch of small random things that will kill you but are relatively infrequent (e.g. EMP Guardians).
The important things, IMHO:
1) If you poke unsuccessfully at the AI, it will poke back. Hard. (This goes 10x for homeworlds.)
Corrollary: if you poke successfully at the AI, it will still usually poke back.
2) The AI likes to hit you while your attention is on hitting it, so don't leave your guard down and keep an eye on the alerts.
3) Identify your primary defensive chokepoint(s). Figure out about how many turrets you think you'll need. Multiply this number by 5-10.
I've been doing better since keeping those in mind.