I'm not the biggest fan of the Zephyr dragon loadout. Purifying flames is good but due to the spammy nature of land combat coupled with the fact that land combat is most of what you get in early game Inspire and friends with benefits don't fit in too well in the very beginning. Both of those abilities are amazing with higher end units (bomber balloons, juggs, ect..) but being able to boost a grenadiers movement speed and attack or protecting a warlock doesn't really help the battle that much. Even the higher end land units need to be used in decent numbers to do much at all. Now by the time you get units that can really benefit from that skill you could have easily picked up those skills on another dragon.

In contrast acid blaze is amazing for devastating those early game trooper/grenadier hordes and soar is a very useful all round ability which can combine with sabotage to suppress a turret in the early game, and then scales up to knocking out higher end units after a few turns have passed. As a result while the dragons eventually become balanced, the Zephyr seems to be at a big disadvantage in the first few turns (which is when the difference in starting skill loadouts really matters).

As for other balancing I am really loving the new RTS AI. When I first started playing the beta the RTS AI was by far the worst part! I would never lose a battle (even on insane) unless the AI had a HUGE advantage in starting troops. Now I had to scale it back to normal to stay up with it most of the time, so kudos to the guy handling the RTS AI.

My only major reservation about this update is I absolutely despise the new shaman behavior! I don't see why it was changed in the first place as it worked fine before but now I have to manually micromanage all my shamans and keep sending them back into the fray to heal units. This means that I can't go into dragon form, and I can't use other unit abilities or manage other fronts. If I ever don't micromanage shamans I end up with all my units dead and a ton of shamans far away doing absolutely nothing. I felt they worked best mixed in with the other units so they could heal whoever needed it. Now they just run away and never heal anything.

Edited: Spacing

Last edited by Ravenhoff; 16/07/13 08:04 PM.