EA Staff (Retired)I'm in the Top 50 and play against the highest ranked players in the game. I have some concerns about the scaling of unit levels at the higher levels. As levels on units get higher and higher, the relative difference in power per level seems to get more noticeable. The handful of times I've encountered players with level 9 units, those units had a distinct advantage against level 8. This creates some really frustrating imbalances when the units in question are the kind with a slow rate of fire but high damage. A few examples where level variance has an outsize effect on gameplay are things like:
GDI Talon needing 4 hits from a lower level Talon, but killing lower level with 3 hits. This is enough of an imbalance that it more than negates defensive advantage because Talons fire so slowly. It goes, You hit, I hit, You hit, I hit, You hit (my talon survives with a sliver of life), I hit (yours dies). And now my surviving Talon will guaranteed get a shot off when you come to fight, and I'll do 1/3rd damage to your Talon before it finishes me. In practice this means each of my talons is like 167% of your talons, because of a slight level difference. Unreal.
The interaction between Stealth Tanks and Pitbulls is also out of whack with levels, given the Stealth Tank has a massive delay between salvos. A level difference is the difference between if my Stealth Tank can kill a Pitbull in a single volley, or leaves the Pitbull slightly alive, at which point the Pitbull can kill the Stealth Tank before it can reload.
As the game continues this gets more an more frustrating. It's not really that rewarding of a feeling if I smash somebody because I know how to abuse a level difference I have over them - I want to win because I outplay them, not because my same-cost unit is 150% more effective than theirs.
I haven't had a chance to go through this whole thread, but I want to bring up the Obelisk. It seems very overpowered to me. It has a very long duration and health. It's the only power I've seen that can even have two deployed at once. Combine that with the range, power, and that it can be placed right against the control tiles, it's something that can entirely control a match without rival. The only counter is air units, which themselves seem to be generally easily countered.
Kane is in a weird spot right now because of how the meta splits out at different player levels. At lower player levels he's amazing because you tend to have slower less pressured games where 150 is a laughable cost anyone can hit. Up at the top Kane sees no play (outside havoc who doesn't count because she almost never makes obelisks and just likes Kane :P) because 150 is a meaningful cost, obelisks are completely worthless when you fall behind, and aren't particularly hard to kill on even footing given that you just spent 150 to build an obelisk while I built 2-3 other units to overwhelm it...
I've long said the obelisk should have more places it can be put on maps, cost 120, and not be able to have multiples. The last bit isn't actually relevant at my level, but it sure seems to matters at yours.
I'd suggest you go over to the replay thread here, watch some higher level games, and see exactly how much pressure there is, obelisks aren't playable for us, tech units are fairly rare outside of dedicated liang builds (which are already a bit iffy with the epic unit problem going on), really a lot of dealing with these things is more in your mindset and how you approach the game than in what counter you should use, obelisks die to most things, be that air units they can't hit, a cat missile from Jade, an ion cannon blast, flame troopers/mlrs who take them down in seconds, or a sheer crush of tanks and other "weak to obelisk" units that just overrun them because the obelisk takes forever to fire and your opponent has a unit disadvantage when they make one due to the cost. I'm honestly surprised much of this strategy hasn't trickled down further to render Kane worthless across more levels
