Feedback from today

I figured I'd just run through the games I played today and share any feelings about them:

Game 1 - Played as the blue melee squad on the solo side, against one of the purple squads. Early game was just a lot of gem contesting - it felt really difficult to engage with melee units, but they were very durable so I mostly just tried to zone and hold my ground, getting enough gems to get to tier 3. The tier 3 guys were a massive power spike since they let me finally engage on my own terms. After dancing between top and bottom a bit to break out of the "laning phase", I went super aggro on bottom while they were distracted and that push eventually won the game. It felt nice to be able to outplay the solo lane and win from there, but I think a lot of that was just inexperience from the other team.

Game 2 - Played as the blue ice guy, someone on our team disconnected so it was a 2v3. It said there was a bot on our team on the squad selection screen but they didn't actually do anything ingame, so eventually we just got overwhelmed and lost. Feels bad, not much else to say there.

Game 3 - Tried another game as blue ice guy, was solo again against the plant guy. Early game it felt like I was able to keep up with their army pretty well and I was slightly winning the engagements, but at some point their units just wouldn't die anymore and every engagement was a slaughter in their favor. I tried to dance between top and bottom to make them go away but they just ended up taking over the entire bottom side, and then the game ended up being this hour long back and forth struggle. This was SUPER frustrating because I felt completely ineffective in every battle - the tier 2 AOE did basically no damage, my ultimate didn't do anything useful, and the tier 3 guys were always stuck behind other units so I couldn't use their ability at all. So the other team ends up with like 75% map control, and we're just repeatedly replaying the same battle for 40~ minutes while they struggle to close. Eventually by the end we all learned that cubes were better than turrets for closing the game and they won. I don't think I ever want to play as ice guy again.

Game 4 - Plant guy seemed insanely broken in the previous game, so I picked him this game. Was solo lane again against one of the red squads, I tried to be extremely suffocating and keep them from getting gems, while using mine on the 4-gem cubes and backdooring their expansion when they went up to top(this didn't feel very effective, but I had nothing else do with my gems anyway). Their solo had to quit the game so I ended up dominating the whole bottom lane, and eventually I got like 3 ion cannons in the center and we won from there.

Takeaways and other random thoughts:
- Early game melee has to basically just sit there and take it against ranged, and hope they can tank it out. This feels really dumb, and I know this is a super common thing in every MOBA, but guess what - this isn't just a MOBA, you can actually have a mix of units! I think it would help a lot if you could have access to both melee and ranged units at tier 1, so you aren't just screwed at the start.
- It felt really dumb to be sitting there with 0 map control for like 40 minutes and still not have lost. There's something weird about gems being the way to close out a game - since gem units are isolated from fighting regular armies, all you have to do when you're defending is kill their army and then all those extra gem units go to waste because you can kill them for free. I think map control needs to better translate into army advantage somehow(why can't you take enemy turret nodes?).
- Healing wards are ridiculously slow. I ended up just suiciding my hero into creeps and reviving them instead of wasting my gems.
- I know in at least 2 games I had a huge early/mid-game gem advantage over my solo opponent, but I had no idea what to do with them. I get an expansion, tech to tier 2/3, and then...that's it. I've tried using them aggressively in various ways(using turrets and the 4-gem cubes), but it never felt like a truly effective strategy(more like my opponent just wasn't ready for it). I could expand more and turn them into an economic advantage, but creeps are blocking everything past the first expo. I think it might be good if the gem units could attack creeps as well, so then you can turn them into an army advantage.
- I'm not really feeling the creeps at all right now. It feels very suffocating to have them in the way when you're trying to just move around the map, and they take so much effort to kill when you're looking for objectives to do. Maybe this is a consequence of me being put in the solo lane every game, but in that case maybe the solo creeps should be weaker.
- It's weird to have workers and buildings and yet there's no base management at all. The game feels like a MOBA where you control a squad instead of a hero, so unless the base management gets expanded I think it would be better to just streamline all of that stuff instead of going halfway (which can mislead people into thinking they're playing something like Starcraft when they're not).

Anyway, those are my initial thoughts. I've only played 3 bot games and 4 PvP games so there's probably a lot of stuff I still don't understand yet, but hopefully some of this is useful!