Squad Design
After having heard some of the stuff from the AMA as well as having had way more time to just kind of sit and think about my play experience, I wanted to sit down and really delve into why the squads felt so uninteresting to me. This is a significant expansion on my feed regarding feeling limited and bored by the unit limits and the constrained squad compositions.
Let's start with the plus side of things:
Alder: Seedbots were an amazing t1(which as you'll find out in the bad section was extremely rare). They had an entirely different micro scheme focused around both being durable and being able to throw out "disposable" units. Not only were they interesting in themselves, they became even more so once I teched up to t2 and got the grove tender evolutions for the saplings. This was by far the best experience of all the squads in terms of the synergy between t1 and t2. They built off each other beautifully, generating a totally unique playstyle compared to all of the other squads. The t3 unit was almost awesome as well, given it's own intriguing interactions and optimizations with the saplings, but in practice it felt clunky and ill fitted to the squad. Saplings were rarely near it to eat, and the squad already suffered terrible when kited and the t3 only exacerbated that fact.
Hydros: In terms of overall squad design, this felt like the best, period. I don't even like doing the "tank" or "support" things and I still loved it. The pathing for melee units was abyssal and I could still feel how perfectly this squad seemed to fit together. Everything works on this from the hero having a heal that synergizes well with his durable early units to the invulnerability to support late game diving. The t1's slow really helped control the enemy, keeping them in a position where they have to deal with your army. Plated was excellent at soaking hits, especially from those obnoxious purifiers. The T2 helped fill the gap after plated ended providing damage reduction and healing to cripple what is by then an already hurt and struggling enemy. The t3 provided excellent initiation power to force late game fights and demand attention. This design was a thing of beauty to me. It was also the only one that seemed to have that kind of vision and cohesion to it.
The bad:
"Marines": There are like 5 flavors of marines in t1 units. Long range marines(Vela), slowing marines(rhyme), fast attacking marines(celesta), a second group of fast attacking marines(vex), and jet pack marines(Eris). There were distinct optimization differences between them for sure, but they got so monotonous that I would play a squad FOR THE FIRST TIME and already be bored with it because it was the same stuff again. With only 8 squads, I really could not believe there were this many that felt like they had practically the same t1 unit.
Seemingly out of place units: Eris t3, Celestas t1, Vela's t2. Basically some squads seemed to have units that worked directly counter to what that squad was trying to do. Eris is a squad about being fast(blink, move speed aura) yet has a unit that requires your enemy, and thus by you, to be standing still for a long period of time. It did not provide a good tension for me. It just made me sad to buy Apocolytes and that was especially bad because they were the unit in the squad that most interested me.
t1 driven squads: Because you get so many more of them than any other unit, t1's tended to dominate a squad's strategy while t3's were never more than a garnish to shore up some slight deficiency. This would be fine if 5 of the squads didn't have basically the same t1, and if t1 units were more interesting but they tended to be extremely boring units. Firing extra far for one shot every 10s is a lot less compelling than basically every t2 and t3 unit in the game. Note that Hydros and Alder both avoided this problem by having actually interesting t1 units and any one or two of the marines could have been interesting if not for there being 4 others.
No graduation: Because units are bought once and respawn forever, you never graduate out of units. A big part of a lot of RTS's is using bridging units to get you to your actually strategy, like hellions in SC2. They are rarely something you actually want in your "final" army comps, though. This was a big frustration point for me because I really wanted to stop playing marine focused strategies. I also found it very confusing that there even were bridging units. If a squad is about purifiers for instance, why not just make those the squads t1 unit so they can actually play what their squad is about from the start. This isn't a traditional RTS where you're building like a million strategies into one race(not to mention all sorts of other macro/tech/building stuff that's different in your game). You seem to want squads to be far more focused than that, which makes these units all the more perplexing.
Suggestions:
Do more to make your squads feel different even from the very first buy. A big part of this is that if t1 units are going to be such a big deal, and I think it's possible to get that to work, actually make them a big deal to your squad. Make them the kind of units you'd want to pick the squad for. After all, they are the unit you'll have all game every game.
As an extension of that, make some squads that have extremely expensive, number limited, and powerful t1 units. This fixes a lot of the problems I list in the bad. It gets more squads away from marine variations. It allows for squads with extremely different control paradigms. It allows for extremely interesting inter squad strategies from game start. It helps people like me not get bogged down in units they find boring and uninteresting. At the same time it preserves the design clarity of your squads by keeping them within a very focused niche, and preventing too many abilities from firing all the time.