Nox667

Also, Hailstorm main purpose is long-range siege if memory preserves. Is it still that or is the role shifted? Last I checked their building damage is not strong when compared to other siege tanks like say Magnetron or SCUD Launcher. Did I miss something?

Its supposed to fill the same spot as scud, magnetron and the like: T3 long ranged siege indeed. But yes, Hailstorm anti building damage is rather sad, which i guess is due to their pretty decent anti unit capabilities. They heve the insane range of scuds, but dont miss, are more difficult to intercept (since the hailjet fires before it reaches its actual target), and deal more damage to units, most notably infantry.
My main gripe is that they are even worse vs defenses than vs main structures due to their main damage against buildings coming from the spread out cryo clouds, and its defenses you want your t3 siege units for mostly. Then again, PF got suppressors to deal with defenses in theory, in a much better way than outright destroying them. Supps however need micro, arent exactly cheap and fairly fragile outside BTs, while BTs are *really* expensive to use.

Cadre BTs are better for wrecking bases and defenses, but so much more expensive its frustrating. In short: I'd really wish for hailstorms to at least get an anti defense boost.

The meta seems to be generally absuing OP units, namely rocketeers, tyrants, minermites and sweepers atm.
 

Thing is... Plasmerizer has ridiculous damage and aoe. One shot vaporizes most ground armies, the very long precharge can be mitigated by manually force firing the thing to precharge, then force fire at your actual target after the charge has built up a bit. You also have your own army to deter your enemy from approaching the thing head on.
All its downsides are there for a reason, the thing is broken powerful. Imagine that being set up on your doorstep with nanocoat buff and blasticade protection. Imo its in a very good position and certainly does not need nor deserve any buffs.

Its not a real siege weapon btw, it sucks vs buildings, but units beware.

On another note, its affected by suppressors which is a bit silly...

The thing with hijacked opentopped/carrier type units is known and im pretty sure it happens occasionally with mc aswell. The issue is theres no way to actually make the passengers switch alignment with the carrying unit thus resulting in this behaviour where the passengers still fire at their original opponents despite the carrying unit having been mc'd/hijacked. Amphibious hijackers sounds good until you realise they can disguise, resulting in gis, conscripts or somesuch walking on water and looking really weird.

As far as im aware, the possibilities for AI are very limited in this engine, as hande pointed out already. Pathfinding and how waypointing works is screwy to say the least, a difference of one unit in the selection or presence of one unwalkable tile can mess things up big time already. For ai this seems ot be even worse.

They are already "countering" your units, since they have scripts that trigger certain teams to deploy when the player gets certain stuff, but its in no way dynamically feasible, mostly extends to them sending dogs whenever you get some spies. Even if such counter teams were more pronounced, the way attack scripts for the ai work would still leave the units braindead in the field. They attack their originally designated target (a miner for example) until something shoots them, and if they are attacked, they retaliate and ignore anything but the unit that attacked them first. This in turn would result in the counter teams becoming pointless since the units will still run into defenses and die and we are back to square one.

Another heavy limitation is that AI can not be made to respect shroud at all, they are always omniscient. Stealth is only respected to a limited degree. As soon as a stealthed unit has been revealed, the ai will send attack teams/throw support powers at it, and this stuff might arrive/attack the target long after the unit has been cloaked again. Disguised units can and will be attacked by ais supportpowers even though their units respect the usual engagement rules on them.

Dont know if different AI personalities akin to CnC3 are possible in the engine, but since i dont know any mod that attempted implementing smth like it im suspecting its outright impossible, or just not worth the effort.
About ressource issues, one word: spies. AIs near infinite cash makes it the best money source in the game. Outside of that, bear in mind that the game is and always will be balanced around pvp, not pve. Thus any changes to economy will have to be taken according to pvp balance, and as such, stronger eco for long slog type games is rather improbable. Reprocessor in general is a troublesome thing, for both pvp and pve though. I'd wish its bonus would just be completely changed for smth else, though i dont know what the replacing bonus could be.

Online play will always run less smooth than offline, since data has to be transferred over the net between the players. It gets worse the more units are on screen/on the map, since all these units, their current state, position, etc. etc. all needs ot be synced between the players.
Only things that can be done about that is picking a stable tunnel server thats preferably close to all participating players, avoiding to play with people on the other end of the world and improving the local internet connection of each player, though thats usually not in the affected persons hands. Even with ideal conditions an online match will always run slower than an offline one.