Cons:
1) Less Micro/Macro. I was really engaged when I was defending several fronts against allied AIs... and it felt interesting and challenging.
2) There is now even less balance - Dragon vs Macro/Micro. It was one of the points of the game. You could not spend a lot of time as a dragon without hurting yourself in terms of macro. Now you can easily spend a lot of "free" time as a dragon, since you are waiting on units, especially at the start of the game. I suspect that a person with a lot of dragon skills can just destroy opponents at the start of RTS mode, but I have not played against people/ only AIs.
3) AIs flaws are more visible and I am not really surprised by its actions, since I see them a mile away.
I really can't say if I like the change or not.
I tend to dissagree with you on those points.
1) I think that thanks to the different pacing, micro'ing your units is now easier and makes me use many unit's abilities that I simply ignored before, due to battles relying majorly on quickly producing amny units and sending them to the front.
Having some breathing time also helps with planning and acting instead of spending most time reacting to the faster AI.
2) Before the patch you had to keep your dragon time short, or you would be set back too much due to not keeping up a constant stream of fresh units. I think that de-valued the dragon form too much.
Keep in mind that the dragon can not be used for the first couple of minutes. In that time you can already capture several build sites and build factories on them. You have less to do in the first minutes, but it's not only waiting.
3) The AI has to be improved, yes. OTOH, this was true before as well, so not much change there, maybe with the exception that you can now pay more attention to it.
