Coming from someone who loves SupCom 1 and FA it was still worth my money, even though I bought it for 45, but it is clearly a step down from FA. However, it is different enough and has a more casual feel to it so I don't feel like I'm just playing a worse version of FA.
However, it is pretty simplified and the online community is one of the dumbest I've seen. Seriously, I'm in the top 50% of players for most RTS games I play and generally I find playing online RTS's to be very challenging especially compared to other genres. Anyways, even though I'm usually only in the top 50% of players I'm globally #2 in win ratio for assassination games, which is pathetic.
Most matches are snooze fests where I can just build a factory or two and win in less than 6 minutes. I have never seen such braindead opponents. Even if you are a strategy noob and just build a few factories and send units out units you'd be far above the average player I see. Way too many people try teching up to an experimental without building other units or they try building 30 energy plants and few units. Everyone in my hometown clan is on the top 20 players and we had to stop playing because the only way to make it challenging was to purposely handicap ourselves. I'm not trying to sound like we're godlike; we frequently get our asses handed to us half the time in every other RTS. Something about this community makes it seem like everyone is 8 years old.
Other than the community my biggest annoyances with the game are:
-The building of research centers. Slow research should have been the default (with a little bit faster gain for killing stuff. This would also stop all the noobs that just build energy and research centers from getting killed so easily since they wouldn't even attempt this strat.
-Research itself. I think it closes more strategic doors than it opens. It's far harder to react to opponents and it encourages players to keep railroading down the path they've already chosen and keep making units they've already researched. Whereas in FA I would see all sorts of innovative midmatch strategy switches, these are far rarer because of how many points would be "wasted" by switching.
-Team games. Because of the research system any team games end up with each player building only one class (I go ground you go air) or in larger games (I build adapters, you build crabs, you build fighter bombers and you build gunships).
-Bases. I am a very aggressive player so I'm not primarily talking about turtling here, but I miss being able to have all sorts of forward bases, radar jammed secret bases and such in FA. A single mid-map factory complex seems to be all I ever need in this one. There definitely seems to be a lot less fun in making base defenses too.
-Weak Experimentals. They are just less satisfying overall. Most of them feel weak and I'd rather just have them cost more and be stronger instead of building 2 or 3 for the same effect. That's just a minor nitpick though. The real problem is how many experimentals are still useless this far in. The Kraken is probably #1 on the worthless list and I would never build it under any circumstance.
