Hi, does anyone know if there's a more effective way to repair derelict buildings than to click on each one? Thanks.
Edit: I have since learned that the button is B on PC. You can hold B to select areas to reclaim. Thank you for the answer.
This will be a fairly long rant about recent V8 changes and my personal enjoyment of the game. I will start by saying that I have been playing for years, with about 300 hours on PC and many more on mobile. I have been loving some of the V8 changes, particularly the new campaign levels.
But I really despise the direction that the unit-based features are going in. I've always seen it as my turrets vs the enemy's units, and that unit factories are exclusively for attack maps, where I will build one or two high-tier units and meticulously plan my attack to surgically dismantle the enemy base. No ill will to those who don't play like this, but it's how I prefer to play.
The game however seems to be going towards a very different playstyle, which encourages mass-producing units and spamming them against enemy defences to overwhelm them. It encourages multi-unit control instead of manual piloting. And this really annoys me, because the manual control has always felt like switching between tools in a toolbox to achieve the desired result, but the top-down multi-control thing feels like herding a few dozen distractible chimps through a minefield.
As an example, I would look at an enemy base and think "I need to destroy a particular conveyor, which carries titanium to a particular mixer, which supplies coolant to a particular reactor, to cut the power to a particular mender, to allow me to break a particular wall, which lets me hit the core from a safe distance if I stay at this particular position and shoot at this particular angle.". I used to love putting these kinds of plans together, and dealing with every hurdle along the way. Now I just feel like the intended way to deal with this situation is to throw enough units at the core until something important breaks and the base falls apart from attrition.
I remember previous runs of the campaign when my plan to take a high or extreme tier base was to turtle around my core with Spectres fed by thorium while trying to scavenge enough resources to build an Omura, Vela, Corvus, Antumbra or even just a Mega. Now when a lot of bases have as many as six enemy cores, with Foreshadows and Meltdowns and multi-layered walls, it feels as though my surgical playstyle is being punished - as no unit I can pilot myself can inflict nearly enough damage to outpace the escalating threat. It feels like I should resign myself to just printing a swarm of Zeniths or Spirocts and spamming a few waves at whatever is nearby to win, as the tutorial sections of the campaign teach you to do. It's the main reason I never put considerable time into Erekir, because while I appreciate a new take on the gameplay, it just really wasn't for me.
This is made worse with the introduction of difficulty settings. I could previously clear a high tier enemy base reliably with a tier 3 unit, usually a Mega or Quasar, and would only need something stronger for extreme or eradication bases. Now high tier bases will invariably have more than 3 cores, Foreshadows, multi-layered walls and tier 4 production facilities of their own. I simply can't compete like I used to, and have to adopt a playstyle which feels so much more mundane and hands-off. This is all on normal mode, and in another game I would just reduce the difficulty, but my main gripes are with the maps themselves which AFAIK do not change whatsoever - the difficulty only applies modifiers to units and the wave timer. This is obviously more pronounced when more units are in play, which again, shows how unit-heavy and RTS-like the game is becoming. It's about overpowering the AI, not outsmarting it anymore, and that is a bit depressing.
I want to know what other people think. I haven't heard many people mentioning it so I might be alone on this, let me know how others feel. I will continue to play and enjoy the game, just not quite in the way I used to.