Starting loadout option are sadly lacking.

[Dragkna]

The worst part of the game is easily the starting loadouts. It's a great idea but there's few options and you stop unlocking anything new early on. There's also an obvious best pick so you're really left with only a single loadout which defeats the whole point of having a starting loadout in the forst place.

There needs to be more starting loadout options to unlock, and they need to be relevant with useful combinations / card synergy without having a single obvious best loadout.

[Rogue Command Official]

So what in your opinion is the best loadout?
Because the perspectives vary *wildly* on that. Same goes for the correct build you should go for.
There will definitely be more specialists coming throughout Early Access as well.

[Dragkna]

The engineer is the last one, the combat one has no late game scaling and is suicide, moreover it's ability to teleport units to it makes it very hard to split your army to tackle multiple objective or guard your base while attacking. Plus the all out attack strategy is dead with the enemy invincibility so long as one offensive unit is alive near their core. The last engineer has some shield and way more range. (The resource bonus from the first one is negligible)

For the resource harvester it's still the last one, they simple acquire resources twice as fast and seem to drain the nodes at a third the speed of the other ones. (the runner up would be the speedy transport ones for their easy map coverage) All the other ones have gimmicks that don't make up for their downsides, cards that boost resource harvesting or damage based on the number of refineries or units. You could double your damage if you want to have half the resources to work with and run out much faster.

The support unit is the free turret spam. It gives attack speed to everything and no penalties. With 6 of them spawning themselves and turrets in a mass wall with the card that speeds up mana gen by a third... You just keep spawning them 1 space away and make a massive f*ck off wall/cluster in front of your base. This allows you to completely ignore defence on any map where you don't spawn in the middle and send all of your units out with no worries, scouting or strategy for the enemy core. And it's basically free... and it's the only support unit that scales so crazily, everything else you'll just get a few units (that you pay for) and that's it.

The other support units, a roughly t1 tank with a global health boost, nice but not game changing. A spawner unit that buffs spawn units, actually pretty good but not a broken as the free ever growing turret wall. The zombie one... meh too many penalties. The melee sacrifice creature with drain; interesting but sadly melee which means that even if you sit there and scale it up it just gets shat on anyways and doesn't have any major buffs to make up for it.


It doesn't matter what your playstyle is (except possibly zombies which isn't my thing), this loadout works the best for all of them. It buffs everything, it provides the most resources, it protects your base in a ridiculous way for basically free and allows you to fully commit. You can even get away with not upgrading the miners. I've tried other option and wanted to like them but I just keep coming back to this one because it's far more effective.

[Iglocska]

Weird, I have a completely different favourite starting loadout, so maybe that is just a testament to multiple options working pretty well for different playstyles.

- Engineer is the only one where the one that can drop buildings on enemies is simply too powerful because of that one mechanic
- Support unit: I'd argue that the support tank trumps all, especially on the ascension 10 final mission, it makes your deathball impervious to the turbine mechs (10 second aoe invulnerability is amazingly good). I sometimes take the turrets as my second best option, but using it mostly similarly to queens in starcraft 2, building "turret highways" for faster reinforcing. The mantis is fun too, but the debuff on your own units is too crippling for my taste.
- Harvesters: I am either using the hover harvester (which can also act as an excellent scout!) or the basic harvester for the +1k rush potential.

As a caveat: I play extremely aggressively, keeping constant pressure on / trading with the AI rather than turtling, so static defenses aren't high on my priority list. I would probably be investing more in defense if I the building drop mechanic was removed, as that acts as an extremely overpowered last line of defense.

[Funky]

Here's my opinion on the starters.

Engineers : The Reach engineer is the best by far and feel almost mandatory for the end game, mostly due to the fact that dropping buildings instantly kill any enemy unit, but it also doesn't need the refinery to drop more building which allow you to start unit production a few seconds sooner than the other engineers which in the higher ascensions can be the difference between victory and defeat. The very large build radius combined with the fact that it can virtually build anywhere makes it the most tactically versatile engineer and a great force multiplier as it can easily destroy a large number of enemies on the offence instead of almost only defensively for the other engineer. It's only problem is that it can die to pretty much any enemy units that is able to attack it.

The combat engineer teleport ability is a mixed bag it is very good at allowing you to sustain an offensive, but it leave can your factories fairly vulnerable if your engineer support an attack and don't have a good defensive structure, as it very much promote a "death ball" play style. The fact you have to build near a refinery and that combat unit must spawn near the engineer makes it fairly inflexible in your tactical choices and makes it harder to handle multiple fronts which makes you more vulnerable to flanking attacks from the AI, as the position of the engineer will have a major impact on the distance your units will have to cover to respond to an AI attack or to reinforce an attack of your own. While it's pretty good in combat and it can be pretty devastating with the monster ray drop and engineer increase range on kill combo, the fact that all engineer become passive after they drop a building can make it hard to use in combat if you try to build at the same time.

The starting engineer has a better economic start compared to the others thanks to higher passive income and high obstacle damage for faster crystal pickup harvesting. While it's not as good as the others on the offence it's definitely better than the combat engineer when defending on multiple fronts or against a flanking attack as units spawn at the factory. It's also easier to handle multiple fronts at the same time compared to the combat engineer.

Economy : The core harvester is very good mostly because harvested resources are available instantly, it also make crystal patches last longer and in some case it allow you to gather resources that are too dangerous for other harvester to gather, but the gather rate depends a lot the shape of the crystal field. As far as I know, it's also the only harvester that can operate without a refinery.

The hover harvester has the quickest base capacity fill time (6 seconds to go from empty to full and it can go down to either 2 or 1.5 seconds depending on how the harvest rate buffs stack) and the best move speed, making it the best regular harvester in term of effective resource gather rate per unit. The big down side is it exhaust crystal fields very quickly, which mean that you will have to get out on the map and gain control of more resource fields or else the harvester will dive head first into enemy forces and bases crippling your economy. This harvester required a very aggressive play style if you don't have a way to spawn new fields.

The armored harvester feel somewhat counter-intuitive as usually you want to keep your starting harvesters and refinery in the back of your base for safety, but the optimal use seems to be to put let the enemy get relatively close to them due to how their abilities require enemies to be killed near them. It's also, in my opinion, the least viable harvester for high ascension run, as resources come in very slowly, due to the base fill time being the slowest of all the harvesters at 10 sec and having the lowest move speed, which mean resources come in slowly. This is not helped by the fact that it's extremely expensive and has the slowest collective gather rate (8 crystals/sec * 2 units for 16 crystals/sec) on refinery drop (base gather rate time number of "free" units) if you include abilities (without abilities robo harvester is slower at 2 crystals/sec * 5 units for 10 crystals/sec, but it's increased to 17.5 crystals/sec thanks to its ability and the refinery is half the price).

The robo harvester is pretty flexible in term of play style and income is probably the most stable outside of the core harvester not much else to add.

Specialist: I have been able to reach and/or complete the last map of ascension 10 with most specialist beside the support tank.

The Robo recycler reduced cost and faster production does help a lot in closing the production gap between you and the AI on high ascension run and it's ability can help turn around a losing battle or give you the edge in a prolonged battle. Seems to be best paired with a cheap and quick to produce starter unit to get a critical mass quickly, but can be used with some of the more expensive shielded options as well. Area of effect spam AI attacks (mostly bomb spam and high number of artillery) tend to be a weakpoint of this specialist.

The swarm walker seem to be a bit hack dependant as it perform better when spider creepers are more resilient as they are a good distraction even in low number. It's ability is pretty good at disrupting and destroying AI production and economy and is very impactful in most fights

The rush beacon is probably the most passive oriented of the specialist as it's very dependant on hack roll to improve its aura and its DPS is very low and its slow to get going and the spawn can die very quickly if try to spread them out. It's only really impactful when you can kite an enemy army. Because it does not provide production cost/speed bonus or expandable meat shields this specialist seems to be very reliant on having a good source of healing to preserve unshielded units, if you can't outrun the enemy units.

The mantis was very good when I last used it (before the selfcast nerf) has it was the only one I have been able to reach the final map of ascension 10 without using the reach engineer and without using buildings to kill AI armies (didn't know you could drop them on enemy units to kill them), though this was when it could use its ability on itself. At the time it seemed especially well suited for rushing enemy production. The reduction to attack can be mitigated fairly easily with the right hacks.

The support tank is the one I struggle the most with I'm probably using it wrong. It seem to be the specialist where most of the power budget is in it's active ability. The unit itself is somewhat resilient but its is attack slow, single target and pretty weak. The passive doesn't scale particularly well into high ascension as it doesn't really help you to deal with the increased enemy strength and number and the health increase doesn't really scale in my opinion. Most other specialist help you by allowing you to get more units (Mantis and recycler), getting a disposable meatshield (recycler and Swarm walker) or by avoiding damage and dealing damage faster(rush beacon). The support tanks almost feel like you should destroy the unit once it reach 0 energy as it would be faster to build a new one than waiting for the energy to refill (40 seconds build time vs 75 seconds to refill to 15 energy) most other specialist unit have passive effect that are useful and/or deal more damage. I feel like I lose most runs because I eventually get overwhelmed by the enemy production capability because I don't have the number or DPS to deal with the problem, but it might be the way I play the specialist that's the problem.

[Rogue Command Official]

Interesting discussion. My impression is that all the starters are good for some people. The idea always was that you are pushed to try out different things, but eventually settle on what your preferred combo is.

That being said the balancing is not where we want it yet and there have already been and will continue to be pretty big changes to the starters in that regard, so that you do not get pushed into using something you do not enjoy, because it is objectively a lot more powerful.
It will never be completely even and that is not the goal.
The goal is that all are viable in the sense that, if you are a competent to good player and make good choices for your deck in the run, you should be able to beat A10 at least after a handful of tries or so.

So I am always super excited to read these kinds of discussions and they help form our opinions for sure, but in the end we have to try to make decisions that factor in all the different takes we see plus the data we get plus our own experiences.