I spent some time with the demo when it came out and enjoyed it, but one of the main issues with GSB appears to still be present: balance. That said, it was fun.
I initially focused on 5 custom unit designs when playing defender: shield-stripping infantry, shield-stripping turrets, hull-killing infantry, and hull-killing turrets (there's also armor but I found those 4 units could handle the armor without specific bonuses against it), and an infantry-killing light machine gun turret.
That worked pretty well, and all were necessary: the shield-stripping stuff was generally ineffective against armor, and the hull-killing stuff was generally ineffective against shields (laser infantry against a shielded mech is an exercise in frustration for the infantry, for example). And all but the hull-killing infantry was largely inefficient at killing enemy infantry. But the anti-infantry machine gun turret could eat huge amounts of infantry for lunch (it's a super-hard counter).
Gradually I shifted more to just using as many of the heaviest cannon (anti-shield) turrets I could and filling in the relevant infantry trenches (infantry on defender mode was like 1/10th as expensive as on attack mode), and found that particularly when I used the range-upgrade augments those cannons could shred most things without difficulty. But some of the heavy-armor tanks were troublesome.
But then one of my victory unlocks was the mkV missile launcher. Game over, man. Game over. Well, not really, I still had a lot of fun, but it was like plasma torpedos from (early-in-the-patch-process) GSB all over again. All I had to do in that game in the time when I played it heavily was stack as many plasma torp modules on my ships as was physically possible, put some half-decent shields/armor on, and plunk down as many copies of that as I could on each map. There may have been a few exceptions, it's been a while for my memory.
Here the missile launcher seems to fill the same gap due to a combination of factors:
- It has no negative against either shields or armor (no bonus either, but this really sets it apart from cannons and lasers). So it can effectively hurt mechs and tanks regardless of defensive loadout.
- It still has a major accuracy penalty against infantry (heavy cannon and heavy laser turrets have abysmal accuracy against infantry, to the point that they simply cannot take down large groups), BUT it does a significant area of splash damage. So nowhere near as effective as a machine gun turret but still capable of mowing down swaths of infantry given sufficient time.
- It has the longest range of anything I've seen in the game thus far. And the range-boost augment is percent-based, so that boosts it still higher.
So for defender mode I basically had 2 designs: the heaviest missile V turret I could build, and some anti-infantry/anti-hull infantry to fill out the trenches. If the infantry weren't so cheap in defender mode I might not have bothered with them.
The results were basically superior to anything I'd done before, all around. There were a few cases where judicious use of an anti-shield or anti-armor unit might have gotten some kills faster, but I think the missiles still would have outperformed overall.
Thankfully, this sort of balance issue is reasonably easy to fix (maybe make missiles fire a lot slower, be way more expensive, have penalties against both shields and armor or maybe just a big penalty against shields, etc), but as of the time I played mkV missiles were basically the "can kill anything reasonably well, and have so much range you can saturate an area of the map with their coverage" module. My understanding is that the lower-mark missile modules aren't nearly as overpowered, so at least you have to get this unlock first to use the strategy, but I haven't tried the lower-mark ones.
Will it get fixed? I dunno. I don't know if the plasma-torp thing in GSB really got fixed or not, I think it did. I think the main unbalancing thing left in GSB is the effectiveness of stationary ship designs. There's a lot less room in GTB for that kind of thing because everything has to have all its primary slots filled (and you only get one of each primary slot type... not so happy about that). So perhaps balance is more attainable here.
