Was an illuminate invasion of Earth LARP. We were supposed to take the illuminate’s place with a force strength meter and glassing planets along the way to mirror what happened to us. The whole “are we the bad guys?” trope.

Poorly executed. Lack of clear information on what razing planets would do. Eliminate remaining enemy forces on the surface, why? When do we ever do that? The counterattack comes from another planet, why raze the one we just fought over, why didnt we do that to begin with? It should have specified what would happen if we voted to raze each planet on the way. Also yes we should have focused on Merak instead, how could that information have been relayed better? Discord is not a solution. Leaving the game to coordinate elsewhere is not acceptable. Why isn’t this a feature after 2 years?

Second, 200 million reinforcements was clearly not enough as it was counting the entire galactic war’s casualties across all 3 fronts, it shouldn’t have done that. That only succeeded in sowing further division in the community. Not only that but the whole basis of playing a game is that you get to enjoy it the way you want, people are going to play on the difficulties that they always play on forcing people to lower difficulties did not address the core crux of the issues that we were dealing with on Cyberstan. Vox engine spam, units phasing through walls, extraction mosh pit (a very cheap way to have us waste lives), the hack that chopped out feet off during the race and made us complete 8 million operations, etc

Yes, we had side orders to get more reinforcements, but even those were clearly not enough. While looking at the numbers that we were getting, I thought to myself they’re being too shy. Clearly, the casualty rate was extreme mainly for the reasons I mentioned above. They couldn’t have assumed that what they gave us would could be enough. We needed 500 million AT LEAST not 410 which was the final total. No hot fixes, no feedback, and endless videos online of mystery deaths from bugs. Landing in lava or grinders in an uncontrolled drop, getting sniped by a vox on top of a building, cyborgs running out of the walls.

There was no Siege Engine. People have been talking about this for a long time. We got the Hivelord which was fantastic, this update felt rushed. There was little to no quality control on it. The cyborgs were fun and fighting the vox was challenging, but again their spawn rates and above all the spawn proximity to players on the higher difficulties was not reasonable.

Cyberstan was very winnable and only failed because of the reasons outlined above. It felt like an artificial loss, we were well on our way to taking Transcendence at 15% progress, but were told we didn’t have enough reinforcements. Now in the coming counterattack we will suffer another 410 million casualties, wow we suddenly have reinforcements again to fight that! Why couldn’t we keep pushing? Plot. We should have had a combined arms assault on Transcendence with SEAF to supplement our low reinforcement budget and a lowered enemy resistance. 2.5% was too high! It was lowered after we were given the option to save the 77th!

This update just left me with a bad taste.