Hi Callum

I whole heartedly agree with your proposed direction for 2.6. (General gameplay + QoL) 

Comments on your proposed changes

1. As a pure substrate player, I love your proposed changes to the air production.

2. Happy with your proposed changes to healing, but we will need the slow health regeneration. Otherwise, why would we care if they are destroyed @ low health? If we know we could have re-healed and re-used those units it'll have more impact.

A couple of changes that I think are a must for 2.6:

1. Make the interface more intuitive interface: There is no indication what the resource symbols are in an ordinary game. At minimum, you should at least add the labels in the tooltip when hovering over the icons. As a relatively new player, it took me ages to figure out which was which.) Small things like this do really help. The more frustrations we can eliminate for new players, the higher the adoption rate. 

2. Bug fix: If you are hosting a multiplayer match, if the host has a starting location set, you can't assign that location to any other player. So lets say I'm the host. I am on starting location 1. I change my location to random. I can't than assign anyone else to location 1. 

3. Feature: Alert system for when resources are being taken. Shouldn't be hard to detect when a resource point you own is getting drained. (Limit the number of notifications per point to 1 per minute or something so users are not spammed with alerts) Expanding it further, it would be cool it said something the lines of: "Resource point in sector 17 is under attack".

4. Feature: If you die in a multiplayer game, allow that user to continue watching. Just hide the menu dialog, add full visibility, and add a count down so the game is a minute delayed or something.

Have you guys thought about adding some sort of "Donate for accelerated feature development" model? I am sure there would be many players, myself included, who would love the donate to accelerate development. Example on how it could work:

For every $1 you donate you get 1 vote. There is a prescribed list of items in which can be voted on. Once a predefined donation amount has been reached, the highest voted option is accelerated. I am a full stack developer and I would be happy to develop a system to handle this for you, if you're interested let's get in contact and talk details.

Please can someone put me in the picture as to why this is currently unfair for substrate?  All Substrate units and buildings have shields which can be replenished by a Caregiver, similar to a Medic.  In addition; the Substrate units and buildings also have Shield Regen, so both units and buildings can replenish shields over time without the need of a support unit (admitted the regen of building shields is quite low).

If Medics can no longer heal buildings does that go for Caregivers too?

Medic/Caregivers healing units only and Engineers/Constructors healing buildings only does seem to make it more intuitive.

Air production rework looks good but that makes balancing the cost of the Advanced Sky Factory a potential problem.  I would guess the Aviary cost would need to drop to that of the Sky Factory which would then mean the Air Rampager and Air Harbinger unlock could almost be for free if locked behind a tech building such as a Subspace Streamer or Orbital Drone Relay which are likely to be built at some point anyway, especially the later.  The best solution I see would be to make the Aviary upgradable like point defences are, the cost could then be slightly under the cost of an Advanced Sky Factory (would need to be less as you effectively only have one factory output compared to two with PHC to get tier 2 air tech).

Your reference is out of date by quite a margin.  The cruiser and armor rework happened a few balance patches ago.

Your statement is not accurate there are 5 Substrate units that have the same amount of HP as they do Shields, the Reaper shields for example make up 82% of its total HP.  If you wanted 100% shields then a PHC player would be hitting a Substrate player with EMP more often and I don’t know how you would balance that unless you removed it from the game.

There is always a tough balancing act with RTS games with multiple factions trying to implement diversity.  Planetary Annihilation took the easy route with effectively only one faction.  Star Craft has managed three factions of which Protoss and Terrain Health regen is quite similar to Substrate and PHC respectively (I hope my recollection of Star Craft is correct as not played it for a long time), the Protoss can only regen their shields too.

Games I have played as PHC against Substrate seem fairly balanced now and it has only been getting better, the only thing that seems slightly OP to me is the Annihilator Cannon, but that is another story.  Certainly none of my games I have played as PHC against Substrate felt they were won or lost because I had medics or didn’t have medics.

Guess I just didn't notice the change.

And while the Reaper has a pretty crazy ratio, it's a Frigate. It doesn't particularly matter much, because even at full health Frigates die if you look at them funny. Besides that, there's also weird exceptions in the other direction (The Martyr and Savager, for example). On average though, shields and health only allow you to get to half way through "healing". It's a bit insulting when your heavily damaged Retributor can't even get back to "half health", whereas any of the PHC units can heal all the way back up. And I've read that the Dreadnoughts are getting a small regeneration factor - this is good, it's something I hope gets applied across the entire Substrate army, because otherwise we cannot heal fully.