Let's take a look on curent situation. Machingun, minipod, cannon, flamer.
mg: availability, cheapness, amazing possibilities of being upgraded. These 3 qualities are too much. Ok, so being a 1st weapon availeble means mg are suposed to serve as an early game preasure for agressevily oriented players. Or for cleaning up those trucks from getting your oils etc. They are quite bad at dealing damage to structures though. I can accept cheapness and availability, but posibilities of being upgraded? Simply, mg is THE ONLY way to go. Making them is your only starting weapon and the fastest path to advanced weapons. Not only you apply preasure, but you are also always on track with the events in the game. Simple mg towers are even capable of dealing with some bug VTOL units, it is just... laughable.
Also mg towers.. they are veeeery strong against mg bullets which also means tower rush cannot be cleaned with 4 times as more units of same weapon type. 10 mg units cost way more then 2 mg towers and they still loose in battle against towers. Laughable again.. So THIS might lead to a thought that defences are balancing the situation, making mg spam countered with some correct plays with defence. Not at all. Units can move and towers can't. You can not protect yourself from preasure with anything except for same mg spam. And we will discuss it further. Warzone machanics make it useless to make defences. The traps are useless, they should be availeble as a 1st upgrade to be used in 1% pf cases at least.. concrete. The main problem with it that you have to build it block by block. Takes time.. too much to give no effect. I believe that if we put a truck on the one side of our upcoming wall and the other on on the opposite side and let players to create a wall of any lenght between 2 trucks just limiting this with condition of both start and finish of the wall being built close to your structures (with some certain maximum lenght to avoid abuses) this will be a mechanich fixing the situation a bit.
So why aren't mg prioritised at other games or let me say.. at real life? Cause they become useless. And warzone, quite awesome with its' conception of growing, quite misses that with curent balance. If we make concrete upgrade, unit armor upgrade and structure armor upgrade available imidiately after engineering and providing high resistance from basic mg bullets up to twin-maching gun and mg mk4* upgrade, this might fix the situation. This neither means that mg will become useless neither that engineering will be prioritised over machingun. This will give reasons for going tech early or going preasure only. Early mg SHOULD serve as oil advantage atempts ONLY. I've just suggested one of the possible and easiest ways of fixing situation - early armor upgrades. Well, if you imagine a picture of mg units going around the oils which are protected with concrete from all sides and not being able to enter oponent base cause of some wall, though the oponent having no combat units himself - sounds quite warzone-like and reminds campaing, doesn't it? Also some basic concrete-constructions should be availeble for trucks, at least to suround oils from all sides in one click, a must have mechanic I think.
I went too far talking of mg.. but let's finish the thought. Minipods: disadvantage at availability, damage output, acuracy, cost, bulding time to mg. Hilarious, isn't it? Though it has bigger range, better damage output with higher counts. So with 10 minipods you can snipe 10 machinguns at 45% of cases, though half-track already make it almost impossible. Minipods might be used to snowball against your oponent, they nicely clean early units, but relying on them gives more then enough time for your oponent to get something better then early units also gaining economical advantage. Minipods are cleaning structures way better then mg.. but not good enough at all. Yes, they are just a way to get launchers, anti wheeled unit oriented weapon, so it should at least have.. some use, shouldn't it? This would be quite sensible to make machingun bad against cyborgs and minipods good against them.. the situaton now is opposite.. for no sensible reason. Minipods should be good against cyborgs and amazing at destroying structures. You know, warzone t1 really lacks any benefits from atacking oponent's base. You don't really get his money, don't get his upgrades or any upgrades at all (not literally but still) and you quite don't kill any sctructures until you double or tripple the size of his army, which is pretty difficult to achieve at always-mirror-match game. So making minipods a situation weapon against cyborgs and a valuable benefit-guarantee for barbarian atacks on enemie base... when you beat oponent defences and only have 4 untis left when 2 of them are minipods and kill his 2 labs.. this would make sense. And it's really easy to make this, I believe. This would also fix the situation with cyborgs. Cyborgs used to be useful only against minipods.. this is painful to watch such an amazing game at such stupid situation.. when a useless tehc is only good against other useless tech... cyborgs were also quite resistant to cannons, but this doesn't change much.
So, flamers. Flamers are cheap and their availability is fine. They are not created to be main weapon, just supporting one, quite good to deal with outnumbering enemie and there is a rumour that they make structures less resistant to bullets or incoming damage at all.. this sounds fine to me. This actualy is very interesting. They are anti-bunkers, though useless against basic mg towers and quite good against any concrete.. this is perfect. If you would be forced to use flamers against concrete constructions (buffed as I suggested earlier) this would be awesome. Also, should be challanging if mk2 concrete is resistant to mk1 flamers, and mk2 flamers burn it fast, but mk3 concrete almost immune to mk2 flamers.. this would be just fine for me, and when flamers achieve something like.. termite fire (inferno is quite too much to just treat hardcrete, would be imbalanced) upgrade wich makes any walls useless, this would be interesting, giving different reasons for differeng tech-tree branches. So current sitiation is fine, flamers will just need some rebalances to adapt to all the changes I've suggested below. For example, they are quite too effective against units for now, which makes them a little bit too useful.. also would be fine if the black traps would be immune to fire, giving them something that concrete can't provide. Mindgames, etc... what warzone misses so much!
And the last one, but not the least... cannons. They are strong and if you snowball them, they can deal with mg. They are more reliable then minipods, good against structures and low-level units, as they are themselves. Their armor got buffed which is ok. But... they need buff and some deeper speciality. Basicaly, they might be considered as the next step after machinguns. It's good. If we consider mg as early antiunit only and cannons the next level antiunit only, while the best anti-unit - launcher is abaileble only after not-anti unit minipods.. this sounds balanced!! Simply, what cannons miss now is splash. They get it only with medium cannon and it's a shame. Splash is pretty conceptional if you compare them to real life examples.. But just making them better anti-unit would be quite boring. So I'd suggest to connect this case with unit-components issues. Some armor being at all ways better then some other armor is boring. Yeah, I know bugs are quite resistant to fire and there are more issues.. this is great. I just think that cannons should gain additional resistance to mg, not more basical armor. They should be bad against concrete, even worse. And sould be bad against... well, for example against yellow armor types. And yellow and some nerfed green should be available.. at same time. And probably grounded armor should become independent from VTOL type detail upgrades.. something like that. Cannons are for now medium at everything and that's interesting but leaves no cheap way to deal with them. Certain armor types having resistance and not so late availability should sound fine.
Overall, this would already make the situation interesting. Every unit having specialities, direct counters, so that you will need to combine them or trick your oponent is the way to go, the reason why people like strategies. But still this sounds like T1 games will be always destined to remain t1.. if someday this suggestion, fixed and corrected, will become true, call for me and I will lead you to balance at T2 era as well
For now you don't need it, you've got much to do with t1. But let me add that VTOL is useless... comparing to other strategy games, getting conceptionaly different "propulsion" or "state" for your unit.. like invisibility.. should grant rewarding benefits, like free damage dealt to base or forcing to waste efforts and money and time for protection.. VTOLs need too much. Just bulding 5 VTOL pads and 1 VTOL factory doesn't give you anything, you still need numerous upgrades, which will anyway be more helpful on grounded units then on flying ones. Needs a hotfix.Let me know what do you think and be constructive. Thanks.
