EPTI've been playing Soviets the past week or so, who I have neglected. I've come to the conclusion the faction balance in the game as things are is something like the Allies are greater than or equal to the Rising Sun, and the Rising Sun is a lot better than the Soviets. The Allies are also probably greater than or equal to the Soviets.
The problem with the Soviets is there's really only one obvious way to get things. You have to get a crane early or there's no way to build quickly enough or repair (it does repair insanely fast and a lot of units at once however). You probably should get two ore refineries after that, and then a barracks and a factory.
From there it's a mandatory to get a nuclear plant to unlock the airfield and the battle lab. This thing costs 2000 ore. That is a ton of money to unlock the rest of the tech tree. Herein lies the real problem: it is insanely hard to expand and tech as a Soviet.
The main reason for this is because most good Soviet units are insanely slow. There are ways around this, but even a good harass doesn't feel as strong as a weaker Rising Sun or Allied harass.
There are three units that are good for harassing: sickles (they can jump over cliffs, quite good for getting into bases), bullfrogs (they can act as an amphibious infantry carrier and can parachute infantry somewhere...), and twinblades (an air infantry transport, hit/run air unit).
The problem is sickles die really easily to almost any resistance and are expensive, bullfrogs don't even have a ground attack and infantry get mowed down very quickly, and twinblades are really late in the tech tree. You can use terror drones, but any defending units or a dock/factory nearby and your investment just went down the drain.
One can quick tech to the airfield to get twinblades and do an engineer/infantry drop on their base, but if this doesn't work you're more or less screwed economically. You've also sacrificed ground and naval superiority in the mean time, and probably haven't had time to expand.
Whereas if you go sickles against the Rising Sun, they get their expansion up way before you can get your sickles there, so even if you do significant damage, you've probably lost economically.
None of this is really game breaking by itself, but the problem is the Rising Sun has a much better navy, their ground anti-armor infantry is strong, and they have good mobile anti-air. I feel like against the Rising Sun the Soviets almost are required to get Twinblades to slow down the Rising Sun economy. But they slowly become worse and worse.
What really breaks the matchup is the Soviet navy is terrible relative to the Rising Sun navy. A single Rising Sun cruiser can eat through a ton of Soviet ships. I think I threw like 15 or so of cheap electric ships against 2 cruisers (12000 ore vs 3600 ore) and lost badly. It wasn't even close. He didn't even need to use his torpedos to win. I used twinblades to help try to shrink his navy down, but the Sea Wings (Rising Sun anti-air) can't even be targeted by anything until they're firing against air units. Not even sea units can attack them! Their range is roughly one screen wide in one direction (this is an insanely large distance) while the twinblades range is like a quarter of that. They only get rockets for one attack, so you have to clone off all your twinblades on the proper targets while they're getting shot at, which is obnoxious and not easy given the UI. Even worse they could bring Tengus as backup and then you'd need anti-air air units and twinblades to take down the seawings.
Even if you win the air battle, you can't do enough damage quickly enough to matter. You only get rockets every 10 seconds or so on the twinblades, and each unit in the Rising Sun navy has a ton of hitpoints. Kirovs would work, but they're too slow (any Rising Sun ship can run away). Natasha gets hit from a mile away by Shogun battleships. Terror drones? Sea wings switch to their ground bomber mode and they kill them.
On top of that, I'm not even convinced Soviet ground is necessarily better. King Onis do a ton of damage to tanks, and while I was trying to win the sea battle all of my apocalypse tanks died to King Onis in their little Super Saiyan mode (press button and dominate)
So with all of this in mind, I manged to kept a Rising Sun player on even resources with me for an entire game (like 30 minutes) and lost on every single front in spectacular fashion at the end. It wasn't even a micro issue or even unit composition issue, I just got steamrolled.
What really annoys me is something is borked with my account on EA's website so I can't even give feedback. -_-
I guess it's still beta, but this particular matchup is ridiculous. Also seems like this argument is hardly anything new.
