Such a cool concept, to be able to construct/upgrade your mechs based on the parts you find. This gives the player so much control over how to distribute his strength over the army. I also love the style, i think it looks gorgeous and fits well together with the audio as well. The mech voices have a nice effect to them, that really seems like they are talking to you over radio, and all the different voicelines by mech type and encounter is amazing.
I also love the fact, that mechs are damage by individual parts and can loose individual parts as well. The general physics of this is amazing, having destroyable trees and bushes as well. And then the small things, that sometimes enemy parts just fly far away as if they where hit by an explosion.
All of this beeing said, i think the combat needs some work. The encounters feel completely random, the mechs are just running in circles around each other shooting seemingly random around the place and barely hitting anything. So every fight is dragged out incredibly long while i feel like watching a chicken fight :P. The enemy has a health bar, which doesn’t seem to represent his dmg state at all. Sometimes they have full hp, and suddenly collapse, other times they survive forever without getting hit. Even in the first encounter, fighting 2v1 in one of my 4 tries i lost one of my units with it. This is very confusing, i have no idea what is going on at that point. In a RTS i generally want the fights to be deterministic, i want to be able to know, that two 1 star units will always beat a single non star unit without dying. Because it feels like, you have already an ambiguous setup, with the individual mech customization, and then you add on top of it alot of bullet rng (that what it feels like).
Then i had 2 minor issues, the first one beeing, after a while you collect so much body parts, that it becomes really crowded and it gets hard to find stuff. I think it would probably be helpful if you could just convert some parts into scrap to keep it shorter (which i beieve is currently not possible?), and/or also, be able to use these parts to build new mechs, without needing new parts. Currently i have to always pay the full price for building a mech, even if i put in the parts from scrap, why would this be the case? I would expect these parts that i have then reducing the price for construction, why else can i create new parts for no cost? That’s a bit inconsistent.
I had also the issue, that my 3 star heavy mech lost his arm, and then just wast standing around, despite him having weapons on both arms, as well as his chassis, which was very unintuitive as well. If you have a by body part dmg counting and separation, then this should be taken into account in this situation as well, and i would expect my mech still to function.
Also sound leveling needs a bit of work, especially when the music comes it it’s quite a bit too loud.
I think when the combats get’s cleaned up this will be an absolute banger of an RTS.