The main point why I have a different opinion about more time is that as far as I understand the reason for implementing a new difficulty is to force the players to think about their strategies and also to force them to change them. And with all that time that you want to add to the stage the players can do everything the same way they always did. And then insane difficulty makes no sense in my opinion.
Firstly that is a faulty assumption insane is simply about providing players with a challenge, and has nothing to do with the way you actually play the game at all and nor should it you should be able to play the game what ever way you like with what ever units you like.
Don’t get me wrong I get where you are coming from, and to a certain extent I do agree BUT… you have to step back and look at the bigger picture here and consider the fact that different people play the game different ways and you need to account for that because if you don’t then what's going to happen when this gets released is that you are going to end up with complaints from players, which I'm sure everyone agrees is not a good thing.
The big problem I see with the position you seem to hold on this is as I have stated before that you are forcing players to rush and you are preventing players from playing the level the way want to with the units that they choose, don’t get me wrong I'm not expecting the level to be easy it is insane after all but neither do I expect to be barred from using all the technologies at my disposal simply because those technologies are slower than others which is more or less exactly what is happening here.
The ironic thing about this is that this situation only exists because of another bad design decision on alpha 08 which forces players to wait till alpha 09 to research composite ally mk2 and python body, when you pick up the artefact that unlocks this tech on alpha 08 and to be perfectly honest I see no justifiable reason for making players wait.
I could understand making players wait if players where some how gaining an unfair advantage that they are not supposed to have but that’s not the case because by the time you have collected the artefact in question the base is already in pieces anyway and all that you need to do is a bit of clean up so to me the decision to force players to wait till alpha 09 before being allowed to research this technology makes no sense this is not alpha 05 where you can't upgrade units because your factories need to be upgraded first, and it shouldn’t be treated that way.
Ultimately the simplest, easiest and my preferred way of dealing with this issue is to simply let players research composite ally mk2 and python body on alpha 08 that way gaining any advantage from that is a matter of skill, and that is something that we should be encouraging, if you are skilled and you can do alpha 8 quick then you will have a bit of extra time to go about upgrading your units if not then you wont and you will have to do it on alpha 09, and if I can deal with the whole upgrade issue at the end of alpha 08 then I wont have to spend that time on alpha 09 and therefore this issue goes away with out having to meddle with alpha 9 at all.
Alpha 9 on insane difficulty: It's not that bad once you take out the factories/LZ and I only started the mission with ~23 minutes on the timer (I built a large amount of defenses to prepare for Alpha 10). I build groups of about 3-4 repair facilities and let the heavy machine gun/lancer group gain experience (attached to a commander) while I slowly start moving closer into the base and building another batch of repair facilities. Most of my units were still Cobra half-tracks with only my best units using Python body.
Certainly Alpha 09 is possible using medium units it's just more difficult because they have only a fraction of the health and armour that python units do which means that they take damage more quickly and are more likely to end up being destroyed, its why I usually go the route of bombing there factories with bombards from the ridge line because that is a proven, effective and safe tactic all be it a little slower.
As for building turrets to deal with alpha 10, I used to do that but always found it to be a slow wasteful and ineffective tactic so I figured its probably better to just handle that situation with a couple of squads of heavy body tracked lances set to retreat at medium damage and then just build a couple of repair bays near by to keep your units up although I'm beginning to wonder if it may in fact be better to use half tracks instead of tracks due to the fact that tracked units are so slow yes your half track units take damage more quickly but the trade off is that damage units get out of the way more quickly and more easily and are therefore less likely to get destroyed certainly I know this works better at the northern entry point where you have more room to manoeuvre not so sure about the southern one though I'd have to test that out.
Alpha 12, Wow. There is no way you are going to brute force the New Paradigm on this mission (on insane anyway). One good thing is that provides a lot of experience while sitting around an array of repair facilities with all my tracked units. ~40 minutes left and I have destroyed the LZ with a group of scorpion bombard hovers attached to a sensor. Going to try moving along the east side of the base with my bombard group before rushing in with a group of lancer/heavy machine gun/bunker buster hovers to take out the factories.
Now you see why on my last attempt at alpha 12 I was down to 15 minutes by the time I knocked out there first 2 tank factories don’t get me wrong even with the level of unit production that you are facing off against in alpha 12 its still possible to complete the level you just need more time a lot more time particularly if you are going for the total annihilation victory because the usual tactic of just doubling up on numbers simply doesn't work because you don’t have the space to manoeuvre and going full hover mode doesn't really help either because then all those units that you would otherwise be fighting if you go up the middle path will be waiting for you when you get up to the base which can make it extremely difficult to get in to there base because every time you try you get swarmed.
So far I've not figured out how to get around this in older versions before hold position got remove normally I'd just set up a bunch of repair pads just in front of where you get the hover artefact and then have a squad of heavy body tracked lancers attached to an experience commander park in-between them thus blocking the enemy from getting to my LZ and drawing there fire leaving me free to roam the map with my other 2 squads of units
typically I'd use a squad of hover bombards to take down there turrets and a squad of hover lancers to protect them from hover tank attack although sweeping the map and destroying all there turrets with artillery is a really slow and tedious process because its not particularly effective against bunkers and unfortunately bunker buster don’t really help they are ok for turrets that are on flat ground but for the rest they tend to miss a lot so for those turrets using bunker busters isn't really any faster than using artillery, and unfortunately unlike later on in the game you have really really limited options for dealing with that on alpha 12.
Of course currently this tactic is problematic due to the fact that you can't make your units say still within the safe zone of your repair bays which means that in order to make sure that they stay repaired you are continually having to move them back which is a real distraction when you are trying to take down there base making for an incredibly difficult situation and one that I haven't figured out how to combat yet.
Although once i get back to Alpha 12 I'll maybe try the suggestion that alfred007 made about using a group of cyborgs on a suicide run to get the hover artefact within the first couple of minuets and see if that helps me make progress any faster, because after thinking about it i had another idea rather then going up the west side of there base and then trying to go up the ramp into there base I'm wondering if it might be a better move to simply circle round behind there base and then start picking stuff off with artillery, i know certainly i can get to at least 2 of there tank factories that way and at least 1 of there cyborg factories and i should be able to pick off a bunch of there units that are parked around those factories as well and in theory they shouldn't be able to fire back, the big question is going to be the whole time factor because while artillery might be a relatively safe way to go about this its also an incredibly slow way to go about it as well time will tell, certainly if i can knock off a couple of there factories that would make life much easier as you wouldn't have as much resistance to deal with.
I am looking into fixing the units getting placed at the corner when produced offworld and loading the save file.
Good stuff because that is an old and really really irritating bug that should have been fixed ages ago.
Even if units simply got moved to your landing zone when the computer looses the co-ordinates of units produced off world instead of in the corner of the map where they can't be recovered unless you fly them in on an away mission that would at the very least be a step in the right direction although it would be better if units appear where there supposed to appear regardless.
) should be two of the most important things to be fixed. The main point why I have a different opinion about more time is that as far as I understand the reason for implementing a new difficulty is to force the players to think about their strategies and also to force them to change them. And with all that time that you want to add to the stage the players can do everything the same way they always did. And then insane difficulty makes no sense in my opinion.