First of all I played this map 4 times in single player (For a total at about just above an hour), the furthest I got on "Very Easy" was the purple remember forgotten spirit or whatever that one shotted all my buildings. (lost 99% of my dps when my boulder towers died)
I quite liked the map, but in my opinion it's basically too much of a bother to learn the game. I can't even imagine how many times you would have to restart and replay the same first 20+ minutes just to learn what you have to do so you can actually understand what everything does.
Then every time you get a bit further you have to replay it even more to find out what the new stuff you unlocked or what the new enemy does and how to counter them.
As an example my first game was lost by default because I didn't know the units would spawn outside of the playable map area, so my base in the corner was obviously no good.
After the initial 10~ minutes there's no more pauses, so very little time to think. As a beginner I want to have a fairly easy time to read figure out how to play, read descriptions, stats, and so on.
The constant flow of units meant that I couldn't really take my time and learn the game. Obviously this isn't necessarily a bad thing for experienced players, but shouldn't they at least be playing the "Normal" difficulty? Why does this unending flow also apply to the "easiest" difficulty? To me it seems very much counter-intuitive.
It seems like the difficulty hasn't really been related to skill level, but rather the number of players.
There should be one selectable scale for player skill (V-Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard, V-Hard) and the second automatic scaling related to how many players there are in the game.
- If you're bad / noob you should be able to win Very easy or easy.
- If you're not bad but not good you should be able to win in Normal and sometimes maybe Hard.
- If you're a good player you should be able to play alone and win in the hard and very hard difficulties.
Now it's entirely possible that I'm completely clueless and is overestimating the game's difficulty here, but I'm pretty sure I even saw the Map Author say that he's only won once on very easy difficulty somewhere early in the thread.
That should be pretty telling that the difficulty scaling is pretty screwed up.
Ok, so now my suggestions here:
-Scale the difficulty by number of players separately from the selected difficulty. Whether or not you play V-Easy, Easy, Normal, Hard, or Insane shouldn't be strictly proportional to how many players are in the game.
-Make the building time scale with how many players are playing and/or the selected difficulty level. (Including the cooldown for powerbuilding)
After making my base I just couldn't expand it any further without my buildings instantly being focused down and eventually there wasn't enough room or even worse I made my base too big so I couldn't wall it off in time before the purple ghosts came and one-shotted all my towers.
I can see how the powerbuild mechanic would make this a non-issue for multiplayer (assuming there's some basic communication), a couple of players could blink forward and place walls and some could place some towers and voila you've got an instantly built extension to your base.
I didn't have that luxury in singleplayer.
-Give some short breaks in the lower difficulties so beginners aren't overwhelmed by having to read and learn massive amounts of information without dying while they're doing it.
-Increase the Acquisition range of the units, especially melee, they just stand there like dumb bricks. My units weren't attacked at all until I literally made a wall of them to block the enemy movement.
I don't see how there could be any risk of the units running off on goose chases all over the map, none of the enemy units care about your units besides the towers and buildings being built, so there's just no way your units will run away from the base.
p.s. I didn't read the F9 quest log, but considering that there is no room for any breathers and that opening quest log doesn't pause the game in multiplayer you shouldn't be expecting beginners to spend much time there to begin with.
In my mind it's more of a tool like google and wikia pages. After you've already caught their interest first and they want to find out more about your map, certain details, tricks & tips, they will take their time to read on their own at their leisure as new things show up one after the other.
You know when you buy games, how often do you read the game manual that come with it? Probably never, right? At the most you'll quickly gloss it over while the game is installing.
You shouldn't expect any player to invest half an hour or whatever of their time to read front-loaded info dumps before they even know what the game is all about.
Especially so for online multiplayer with randoms.