I'll post my feedback on the missions
Thank you!
In general, the missions seem impossible to win
Agreed. I really have an issue there, that I can't seem to ever make an easy mission even when I begin with the specific intent of making a really easy introductory mission. I must learn to restrain myself on enemy unit count.
require a way to make minifacs stay dead when killed (perhaps just making them not be rebuilt).
Technically, that'd be easy to do: I'll just have to remove the enemy builders. Makes me wonder why I though it was a good idea to have a Regenerative AI in the first place though. And wish I had coded a way for bugs to be rebuildable only at their native place (because right now, a single window, given enough time, will repopulate the 170 bugs of the team. And a single hole, can rebuild everything.) In newer versions of the mission, I removed some datavents. I should probably remove more datavents, so that only a few minifacs are rebuildable.
giving the player side more units to secure and build on the newly liberated geovent
The blue allied system in the middle was meant for that. I hoped it would send builder to secure the newly liberated datavent, and send units patrolling to prevent the enemy from regaining lost territory. Though that didn't work out so well, as lone assemblers are easy prey to the massed enemy, so unless you take upon yourself to carefully escort them, they fail. And anyway, I'm pretty sure that the allied system was added to that mission after 6.732. Though, you had your own kernel spewing unit, which ought to amount to the same.
Ports and Connections are too hard to kill by conventional means: hit them once and they spawn a dozen Packets to kill you, and they can do this remarkably frequently.
I noticed that too. Plus the packets laser are instahit, so you can't dodge them like other weapons. And spawned packets often stay there, which means the more failed assaults, the more spawned packets around the port. Adding a network side to that mission was a bad idea, in retrospect.
You can change the Kernel's build order with the KP buildbar, which is useful for spamming some Pointers to suppress the Network AI opponent near you. Is this intentional?
I hoped people wouldn't notice.
But that won't be possible anymore. I added a mod option to allow or forbid giving orders to other units in "hero" gamemode, and set it to forbidden for that mission.
the only way is to kill the homebases and then all the builders so they can't rebuild
Truth. And that probably does not make the mission fun. I have to rethink the whole thing.
It just gets too laggy during the second half of the game with all those units.
I took upon myself to actually try to play that mission from start to end, and noticed that as well: after killing purple, and while green was mid-killed, game lagged badly. Like a half second hiccup every three seconds. And then it went smooth again once green was fully dead. From this, I deduced the cause of the lag, and fixed it. Basically, when half the units are dead, and half the units are alive, for every dead unit, for every live unit, it runs a complicated check to see if the live one can build the dead one. Which lags as much as (dead units)x(live units), so lags most when you killed all factories and builders but still have all the bugs. So I added some sort of cache, to remember for each unit type if the AI had tested it can be rebuilt yet. In short, that lag issue is fixed.
At one point, one of the Connections built a Terminal which the player can't fire. Is this a one time glitch?
I hope you mean assembler, not connection. The AI running ur dudes would have fired it. Eventually. Maybe. It would have been possible I mean. In theory at least. But simply disallowing terminal for that mission would be best I reckon.
Worms are too annoying to hunt down and kill once the game is over; the player should just win when all factories are destroyed.
Good point. I left the end condition at "kill everything" because I though slaughtering all the bugs at the end would have been enjoyable. But I can understand how having to hunt cloacked units, when you control one single unit and on such a large map, must be quite irritating.
Incidentally, all the missions also crashed when I won
Known bug of Spring 0.80.5.1. Get 0.80.5.2.
Wait did you just say you won all the missions? Even the "Tight Camp" one?