The good:
10/10 Progression
Progression is done very well, even though it can be confusing sometimes, but thats also what kept the game interesting for a long time even without using behaviors.
10/10 Variety
Variety is great, tons of modules and units to discover, there is always something new to explore, simply because of the volume of little mechanics (and lack of descriptions). Its great to always find a new hidden unit ability, thats definitely something you should expand on.
6/10 Faction Design
Faction design is interesting, with distinct playstyles and abilities on each faction, but suffers from balance problems and some inconsistencies.
7/10 Graphics
The graphics overall look very decent, it just needs some work in some areas like the blight stuff, weapon vfx variety (most of the robot weapons use the same laser beam), power grid visibility, weather effects (it needs an option to turn these off) etc.
9/10 Performance
Performance is really good considering the ammount of stuff going on, and the multithreading is done very well (in other games its usually non-existant), great job that you pulled this off on unreal 5.
6/10 Behavior Editor
This is what really offsets this game from others in the genre. While the editor itself is done really well, the variety of functions is very poor, and integer maths is cringe
The Bad:
3/10 Faction Balance
Faction balance is practically non-existant, humans totally wipe the floor with robots, and aliens wipe the floor with everything else. Aliens have an absurd advantage in health and damage on top of early teleportation, but virtually no drawbacks.
0/10 Enemy AI
Your game has no proper enemy AI at all, all we get is some bugs and all they do is randomly spawn new hives and do an attack move, even factorio had more interesting enemy design. On top of that you are also preventing people from making their own AI enemies by intentionally making communication between units unnecessarily complex and slow (as if the entry barrier for this game wasnt big enough already).
The regulars in discord are constantly masturbating over how great their AIs are, but strangely there are no servers where we could see these awesome AIs in action ever.
In reality, their AIs probably arent even feasible because of all the cancerous subsystems they had to make just to get the most basic things working. I see myself easily wiping them out using no behaviors at all.
1/10 Multiplayer
Its hard to get anyone to play this game, the people who have no coding experience are pretty much clueless about behavior coding, and can only make very basic use of it, and the people who can actually code, are not interested in working with this limited library and / or integer maths.
There isnt a single server on the experimental branch, and only a hand full of inactive servers on the main branch. I did manage to get some friends to try the game, but for them it was just too rough around the edges and they lost interest quickly.
From what little i got to see about multiplayer it seems to be working well though, but again i never really get to the point where i could test it under heavy load.
1/10 Automation philosophy
On one hand, you want people to automate the game, on the other, you are doing everything in your possibility to prevent people from automating their stuff properly.
Nobody enjoys working with castrated coding tools, no matter how much the 5 regulars in discord are trying to make you believe this.
These guys dont care if the ship is sinking, all they care about is to keep the status quo so the work they have put into their monstrous scripts wont be for nothing.
The overwhelming majority of people who play this game will want to make behaviors that are performant and reliable, and most of all they wont want to put hours of extra work into the most basic stuff.
Ultimately, the unit communication sadly is what makes me abandon this game, i am just not interested in playing the clown and jumping through hoops to achieve something that could easily be done by remotely reading a units registers. Apparently the only reason given for this is that it would be "too overpowered" without further specifying why.
Personally i am wondering how you would even determine this when literally nothing in the game is balanced to begin with, and the alien race just overpowers everything else anyways, without using behaviors at all, but if you really think this is the way to move forward with automation then i wish you best of luck.
This could easily have been resolved by adding a map option for unlimited automation or whatever, but the dev wants to force everyone into this cringe system instead, which is really sad.
Maybe you should take a break from developing for a few weeks and just play your own game for a bit and do some base automation and see how annoying it actually is to make anything decent... Or try re-coding your game but this time do it in ASM, that will be just as fun as creating an AI faction in your game...
Surely there is more to say about your game, but i have hit 5000 characters and am going to sleep now.
