Bethrezen says it is too hard, I say it should be a real tough competition.
In my view you have the different difficulties for that. A new player can use easy to become familiar with the game and the competitions. Then he can train his skills in normal and hard and at the end with insane. A new difficulty like insane would make no sense, if everybody could play it from the very beginning of playing warzone.
not quite, i have no issue with the game being challenging it is insane difficulty we are talking about after all I'm just of the opinion that there are better ways to go about it than simply setting some arbitrary time limit with no consideration to the needs of the player.
Setting some arbitrary modifier for the time limit like 0.75 for all the levels is not a good way to go about things its much better to tune each level on a range according to the players needs at that point in the game, which is why you will quiet often find me saying that xyz level needs another 5 / 10 / 15 minuets typically followed by a reason such as i don't have enough time to conduct research, i don't have enough time to upgrade units, i don't have enough time to sweep the whole map and go for the total annihilation victory condition (killing all units and structures) etc.
granted a lot of the levels did have to much time so it needed to be reduced but you should still have enough time to do what you need to do without rushing while at the same time not having excessive amounts of extra time as it was previously.
I'm of the opinion that setting some arbitrary time limit doesn't make the game more challenging all it does is forces the player to rush and before NPC units where made stronger you could see this by using the toggle time cheat to take the time limit our of the equation.
if you enjoy a time attack mode style of play more power to ya but personally i don't I'd much rather play at a pace that suits me but still have the computer put up a decent fight, think Command and Conquer / Dawn of War on hard mode or M.A.X against 3 on God mode opponents with the turn timer switched off
sure you could have tight time limits and weak opponents but where is the fun in that I'd much rather fight against a strong opponent and not have to worry about time limits at all.
Alpha 12 is a case and point you could remove the time limit from that stage altogether with the way it was set up in the last master and it would continue to be a really tough challenging because trying to fight your way through an avalanche of units from 6 factory is not easy especially when there armour, firepower and production rates have all been increased, in accordance with the difficulty level as you are no doubt aware after trying to take on that level in the last master your self.
Certainly tweaking time limits is one lever that you can use but it is by no means the best lever why do you think most games don't use time limits ?
my opinion ? because time limits are not a good method of balancing.