So far I like the difference on the strat map. It makes saving gold vs spending it right away a real trade off. Before I always felt more benefit from spamming lesser units like hunters and shaman. Combined with the harder counters those lower tier units are no longer the most desirable.
I agree that I really like the harder counters. I don't really like the upped gold cost on the strat map though. I feel that the increase in gold just means less units to play around with. While I like the increase of forces, when they cost so much to put out on the strat map I still end up with roughly the same sized armies I did in the previous betas. this completely nullifies the point of increased strat map representation as I still start out with similar forces (now sometimes even smaller) and the whole point of increasing the units per counter ratio was to have bigger starting forces.
As it is unless you do a MASSIVE buildup in the strat map your starting forces still don't really matter all that much. I can see Larians point about larger starting forces making it so leader skill doesn't matter as much but I still feel that the current setup renders that strat map near useless as you can just throw a few troopers against a massive force (at a 70% or more disadvantage) and the battle really doesn't feel that different from a battle where the roles are reversed. As it is unless the advantage is huge (90% or more) all the battles feel really similar regardless of what goes on in the strategy map (in terms of forces, research of course makes a big difference)
Another thing is wasn't some of the ground units already 3 per counter? I remember grenadiers always being 3 but I might be wrong. Just a though but how about light units are 5 per counter while other ground units are still 3.
One other thing, I don't know if it's my imagination or not but the AI is doing really well with the new counter system. I started producing hunters to counter their grenadier swarm and they stopped making grenadiers and made armors instead. When I switched to producing more grenadiers they switched back to troopers. So nice to see how fast the AI reacts, the RTS AI is getting really good!
Side topic; has the dragon gotten weaker? I took my dragon against just a small few grenadiers (maybe 4-5) and I was shot down in just a second or two it seemed. I used to be able to strafe huge blobs of grenadiers as long as I was quick and used dodge a lot. Now if I go near any AA at all I'm dead in seconds.
