Overall impressions of the game
I don't know if I really enjoyed the current state of the game. For the most part, it felt that the game has about two outcomes: either you dominate the other team early on and make a quick win, or you have a mexican standoff for long periods of time where neither of you are making any real progress, and you are just trying to gather more gems than the other team so you can build more neutral weapons and overwhelm the enemy.
The first 10 minutes of play or so isn't all too exciting as you mostly just try to get gems from the middle of the map and avoid your enemy's army. You could engage with your enemy, but it doesn't feel like early engagements are worth it since respawn is quick and you'd mostly lose out on gem collection if you lost. So best you can do is try to snipe the other teams gem collection nodes while avoiding losing your army.
The strategic depth of the game dwindles as the game goes on since you can't really do anything to hinder your opponents late game. The gold bases are either used up or your enemy didn't take them because they were fast teching to neutral weapons. With their main base being indestructible (making it a terrible idea to try to kill their workers) there is not really a good way to hurt your opponent or slow them down once they reach a full capacity army.
This most often that leaves you with both teams not being able to take any ground and mostly doing even exchanges. It is far too easy to get into a mexican standoff situation with one team building ion cannons offensively, holding the middle of the map or a side or two, and the other team building them defensively around their main base so the other team can't build any neutral weapons any closer.
Overall, the game felt like League of Legends in the fact that for a lot of the games, you know who is going to win early on and you know that you can't do anything to change that. So it was just a bore to play after that point (I've had teammates say they were bored in chat) and you just mostly do what you can while the game goes nowhere.
In summary, the game would be more enjoyable to me if:
- there was more strategic depth mid to late game
- there were ways to hinder or harass the opposing team that would allow you to break mexican standoffs
- there were viable ways to make a comeback in situations where you thought you couldn't win
Comments
It's a bit hard to know what to do with your comments without a more clear "I felt X when Y happened." Many things that you write are conclusions from experiences, rather than the listing of experiences. By listing when/where these events happened, we can both agree on what the problem is AND how to target them. For example
In this, you conclude that the lack of depth comes specifically from being unable to hinder the enemy. It could be a contributing factor. It could be other factors. But, pinpointing the correct "conclusion" doesn't help us identify when the problem occurs. Instead, suppose you said something like
"I played two games of Atlas both as Vela in south. In the first game, I didn't attack expoes and he had a huge army. So, in the second game, I tried to harass his bases as much as possible, but he still had a huge army. This made me feel like my attacks didn't matter very much." Or, maybe you write "I like to harass bases in SC2 to slow my opponent's teching down. When I found out I couldn't harass my opponent's tech, I felt like I couldn't have any impact, and so I felt like my strategic choices didn't matter."
Base harassment vs tech harassment are two very different activities that can instill a strategic feel to a game. What was it that happened for you? Why are you saying these? By identifying when/where your feelings come from (ie I feel X when Y happened), we can try out a new solution and then look at a precise moment in time to see if we succeeded.
If you'd like to reword any of your points so I can comment, I'd love to!