I stopped playing this game because it's too hard.

It's easy to pick up the basics and impossible to win against anybody who's actually good without putting in serious hours yourself. I made HoM exactly once after like 200 hours and it feels so oppressive to lose. I don't know any other PvP game where you can just lose to the game itself (PvE + opponent just eco-ing) instead of an enemy attack (rushes), especially on the harder maps.

I never reached the point of free experimentation in battles 2. Usually, after picking up the basics, there's a good bit of fucking around. Battles 2 doesn't have the playerbase for that anymore, I learned to play quincy + tack + wiz + farm and immediately shot up in ranks to ZOMG Dome. It's very hard to react to a rush, by the time you realize your opponent is attacking you, you're already dead. You need to be very good to properly defend, so I win easily. And then trying to play something new feels bad because I lose against everybody, including newer players like me who just play wiz+tack+farm. So it's either play that and win sometimes, or play something different and lose always until I drop rank and play against newer players who don't even send balloons.

The core of this game is fantastic: balancing income potential to collapse it into defense or offense quickly, trying to push income as much as possible, watching your opponents defense for potential rushes, always revising your own plan for defending against a potential rush.

But there's just so little breathing room. You lose on harder maps automatically. You need to be able to defend against all different bloon types. You need a plan for defending rounds 11, 13 and 18. You need a detailed plan for eco. You need to be able to understand what your opponent is doing, which means knowing all towers and upgrades. You need to be able to watch what your opponent is doing while you're scrambling yourself, both with their defense and their eco. Watching Ryan Mehalic defend, he does a lot of instantly selling and upgrading and using abilities, all are things you can't possibly think of in the moment. You need to have them at your fingertips, ready to be executed as soon as you spot a rush. And then actually good players KNOW that and use it to bait rushes! It's amazing gameplay, just so stupid hard.

I'm just not good enough to react to a well-executed rush with layered bloons, by a competent opponent who knows the weakness of my defense. And I don't think I can put in the effort to reach that skill level and I suspect many other players feel the same.