This is a sort of incomplete review of the game. I don't want to give my full opinion until I've finished the core game with the other factions, but I'd like to get some feedback about what I've observed so far after winning with the Eurasian Dynasty.

First of all, I'm wondering if there's something wrong with my difficulty settings, because "Easy" gave me a game that I frequently couldn't win without cheating, for three reasons: tech, AI aggression, and apparent poor level design.

For the first point, the first few levels were manageable, but pretty soon I hit a major snag in that I was ALWAYS behind everyone else in terms of technology, even if I cheated to get more resources and stay on top of the latest researches. When I got aircraft, the enemy got aircraft with missiles; when I got missiles, the enemy got plasma weapons; when I got laser weapons, my enemies got energy shields; when I got my own energy shields, the enemy got super-heavy tanks, and when I got super-heavy tanks, my enemies started deploying superweapons. I was always on the losing side of the arms race, just like the real USSR.

For the second point, I think I can say without much fear of contradiction that the enemy AI of Earth 2150 is some of the most aggressive I've ever seen in any strategy game. As soon as the enemy notices you exist, it seems to be programmed to attack your base or bases relentlessly until it runs out of resources or one of the players dies. The UCS usually had an edge in terms of ground units and the LC usually trumped me for air power, so if I ever wound up fighting both at once, I'd spend all of my resources just trying to defend myself and would be unable to meet my mission objectives.

For the third point, the difficulty of the levels was very erratic. There wasn't so much a difficulty curve as there was a difficulty zig-zag. Because of the aforementioned technological deficiencies, I noticed that the early levels were easy enough, the middle levels were very hard, and the later levels became easy again (as my enemies reached their technological caps and I was able to catch up). Besides said middle levels, there were several "challenge" levels that gave me some objective other than destroying all enemies or getting a certain amount of CR. These "challenge" levels were ridiculously hard, to the point where saving and reloading constantly was my only assurance of victory.

In retrospect, I have to wonder what might have happened if I'd allowed myself to "fail" any of the missions I lost, particularly if I lost the challenge levels that earned me the laser cannon, the energy shield, the UFO, and the ion cannon. Without any of those weapons, the game would have been even harder than it turned out to be, which was one of the most frustrating RTS experiences I've ever had.

I'm trying to figure out if I did something wrong, to make the game harder than it needed to be. It is possible that I just suck at this. Then again, maybe there's something wrong with my difficulty settings. Or perhaps it's the faction I chose: I played Earth 2140 as well, and I noticed then that the ED was harder to deal with than the UCS, for technological reasons similar to those noted above.

I am unsure if it's worth the effort for me to continue playing. Are the other factions easier to handle than the ED? Is the content of the expansion packs better balanced? I don't want to need cheat codes just to get by, as has been the case so far.

EDIT UPDATE: I've finished the game now with the UCS. More thoughts:
Generally speaking, the UCS is easier to play with. Once you develop the Panther and mount some heavy missiles and plasma guns on it, there's really no ground-based vehicle that can threaten you anymore, and seeker missiles will take out airborne threats too. Superior firepower and defense basically ensures victory... or it would, if the computer were not a cheating bastard.

I'm sure of it now, the enemy is developing tech faster than I do and getting access to technologies before I can. I noticed that the ED developed those special double-120mm tank cannons very early, when I NEVER got the opportunity to research them during the ED campaign. The LC, for their part, somehow managed to build a working weather-control machine by the 8th mission, and was freely destroying my bases with lightning storms. And, just to add insult to injury, the hacker NEO would show up during later missions to hijack my entire army and turn all of my units hostile, costing me tens of thousands in mechs if I was lucky and my entire base if I was not lucky. During the last mission in which I had to confront him head-on, he would hijack all my units every 15 minutes, making it virtually impossible to fight him.

Once again, mission difficulty is not so much a curve as it is a zig-zag. On levels where I'm actually allowed to play this game like a conventional RTS (build up, defend, overwhelm), the game is easy. However, every other level throws a wild curveball at you, like "Neo has taken over your entire force (again)" or "The LC has decided to turn on you after your alliance broke up." You're always either playing a simple game or an impossible, crazy nightmare that is too hectic to manage and always ends in defeat if you don't use a lot of cheat codes; it is an either-or proposition, and there is no middle ground. There are the "Stanford Labs" breather levels, but those don't really do anything for the game's plot or provide you with resources.

Masochist that I am, I'm going to play another run with the Lunar Corporation. Maybe the group with air superiority will be a little less troublesome to manage.

EDIT: At this point, I'm pretty sure that no one is reading this, and it's entirely probable that no one visits this board, ever. So be it, I'll just keep using bandwidth to write stuff down for my own reference. I have finished the game with the Lunar Corporation, and I have more notes.

The Lunar Corporation's gig is very, very easy compared to the other two. For starters, they only need to accumulate half the resources to win, and for most of the game the UCS is backing you up. By the time they STOP backing you up, I'd accumulated enough resources to flee the planet already.

Their units are pretty fragile, which means a high casualty rate if you're not careful, but being given the "Fang" tank at the gives you a huge advantage from the start; it can kill pretty much any other ground-based unit, without exception, and it regenerates health, too, so it can defend your base from petty raids indefinitely. In fact, all LC units automatically regenerate, keeping casualties from accumulated scratches to a minimum. On top of that, they get to research their Weather Control superweapon early, so lightning and meteor storms make short work of enemy bases.

What more can I say? The mission objectives are almost always easier to achieve, there's a large number of missions that you can (and are expected to) solo with your Fang tank, and if Neo ever appears to screw you over, he only ever turns UCS units on you, which are generally less numerous and not as well armed as your units, and which are usually at a disadvantage compared to your antigrav airforce. If the entire game was like the Lunar Corporation campaign, I'd have far fewer complaints about it.

Interesting read.
Only ever tried the ED, have just re-installed so might try the LC campaign. I did find myself getting more frustrated with the cluttered UI and dodgy pathfinding during my previous playthrough and it got to the point where i had just had enough of 2150. Hopefully if the LC missions are more chilled and i can sit back and enjoy the game and not get so irritated by some of it's weaker points.

The Moon Project, I found, runs in a similar vein, but with some significant differences, mostly in the resource management department.

For all Moon Project campaigns, a huge emphasis is put on troops that you bring in from the outside. Many missions are literally impossible to win without shipping in troops from your home base, and I found myself spending a lot of time loitering around in my base between missions, waiting for things to be built or researched. On the plus side, hoarding resources for spaceship-building is no longer necessary.

The ED, as before, is outgunned most of the time and usually outnumbered too. Unless you sit on your ass and wait for energy shields to be developed, you'll lose a lot of tanks. Oh, and I had to cheat to get resources early on, because they just weren't available during the campaign. Plus there'd be random airstrikes on my home base every so often. Generally, ED missions were harder to finish and more arbitrarily designed than those of the other groups; it's like whatever developer made this game deliberately designed their campaign to be more "challenging"...

The Lunar Corporation has the easiest campaign, by far. Why? Because, in the FIRST FREAKING MISSION, you are given the Fat Girl (plus researches to make more of them), a never-before-seen super-heavy tank that, equipped with four weapons and a large energy shield, is almost indestructable and possessed of more firepower than anything but the biggest UCS mechs. A group of 12-15 of those, armed with missile and electro-cannons, slowly overran EVERY enemy I fought. Really. I only used that one group of them for the entire campaign, and almost never had to replace any. The fact that electro-cannons can stun gave them a huge advantage. This was all great until the very last level, in which you were up against four UCS bases, each of which had its own plasma control center, which would fire on your base as soon as your base became visible, and if certain buildings in that base were lost, you would fail the mission. Still, compared the the cheese I had to put up with from the ED and UCS, this wasn't so bad.

The UCS campaign was a massive exercise in patience, because the LC would never stop trying to rebuild their base even after you'd completely destroyed it. The one and only thing I found that was effective against them was an overwhelming volume of plasma fire; 10 or so mechs (the toughest I could make!) with the heaviest plasma weapons, backed up by a smaller group of mechs with AA plasma guns that would shoot down aircraft and any descending buildings. Once I got my army built, the campaign wasn't so bad, but it took some time to reach that point. Your early missions have you shepherding around a couple of Grizzly mechs that you cannot allow to die, ever, which is tricky because you don't have a home base to work from for about half the campaign and must escort your grizzlies across maps full of hostile LC units with no way to repair or rearm them.

I'm putting off playing Lost Souls until my own soul has recovered.

I played ED campaigns for the whole trilogy. Encountered the same problems as well. It was a great experience nonetheless.

Dear Lord....I'm not sure I want to play this game now...(shifts around nervously) It sounds great...but I'm not sure I'm ready for so...obscenely unbalanced gameplay. It's one thing if occasionally the AI gets an awesome weapon, and you have to think of imaginative strategies to get around it. It's another when it's EVERY SINGLE MISSION. I understand that the ED has a major tech disadvantage (really cool that the game forces it on you), but it makes no sense why an under-advanced army can't be CHEAPER AND EASIER TO MASS-PRODUCE. Apparently, the game doesn't seem to believe in SOME cosmic fairness....

Still I guess you are smarter than the AI? Guess you could outmaneuver them and take some of their mineral fields using blitzkrieg? Though yea, sometimes you have to exploit by save-loading after you grasp the situation :) As far as I remember it is something like you described and I didn't want to cheat. I gave up somewhere in the middle. I guess I was not persistent enough and I don't like to use cheats.

There is one trick to this game that has made the campaigns quite easy for me, even ED at hard difficulty.

Air power. Use it!

Are you kidding? My helicopters drop like flies. I've usually got a squad of twenty or so that I have to constantly keep rebuilding, despite the fact that I give them the best armaments available. They last longer than ED tanks, admittedly, but that's mostly because it's easier for aircraft to retreat.

When I first played it, I did it in easy then eventually hard mode which is brutal. However you can play the game for more than a few months for only a few bucks if you pick the masochistic hard mode. I found that if one rushes the enemy with a few scouts and is always skirmishing with air power one can introduce delays in the development of the enemy AI, but you have to do it right away. I have not yet played Escape though, the first one and Moon project which I found very easy as if the programmers had to tone the game down a little from all the complaints when it first came out.

Spoiler/Tip:

To get the aforementioned double 120mm guns, you need to find a secret area in one of the early missions in order to get a "challenge mission" and unlock the part of the tree. These babies are what you need to crush the enemy under your mighty treads.

Interesting, I'm tempted to buy this as it's on sale.

You are right, sadly the ED is for those who like a certain measure of pain

That said, they have some real advantages. Their bomber aircraft are bar none, the best (of course, getting them there is another matter...). And their superweapon not only is the most powerful, you get four salvos, AND they arm up really quick. Just having a dedicated Supply Center next to them, and you can launch salvos of four, eight, twelve, whatever your heart desires around the map every two minutes or so!

Their superweapon is nuclear missiles, right? I never got those. I don't know if I got enough resources to leave the planet before I reached whatever mission triggers them or if I just passed over another challenge map (did I mention I hate that mechanic? The game punishes you for not being observant by making the campaign harder).

As for bombers... I never got much use out of those with any faction. By the time I could make bombers, the enemy always had top-notch anti-air defenses, and to get rid of those I'd usually need an army of tanks/mechs, and if you've got an army of tanks/mechs INSIDE the enemy base, destroying their AA guns, why bother with the bombers afterward?.

I have to respond to the original post: I had an easy time re-playing the ED campaign on hard mode (last time I played this game was 8 years ago). At the end of the last mission, I'd managed to pour 4.9 million credits into the space port (I had to turn it off to not prematurely complete the campaign).

The reason was my strategy, from the very beginning, was hyper-aggressive. The first mission, Ural, I attacked the moment I was able to and destroyed the entire base. I destroyed the enemy base and took their resources for myself. This strategy is initially difficult, but gets much easier after you obtain the repair technology and the amazing type C tanks from the arctic 2 mission.

Later on, once I got the UFO from the UCS mission, my strategy became even more successful because, in virtually every mission, the UFO could single-handily destroy an entire UCS base with no more than occasional repair support. I'd then use my type C tanks (and later on, heavy assault Volgas) to take out any LC bases.

The enemy isn't like you: They don't have central bases where they can perform research. Any research they do has to be done in the mission area, and they don't get any for free, so if you consistently suppress their research, you can gain a technology advantage.

In the final mission, which for me was the Amazon because I did that mission last, I'd done such a good job destroying bases previously that the UCS has never managed to acquire Jaguars, Heavy aircraft, or even shields, so my UFO always tor their ground units to shreds. The LC fared even worse, having only ever achieved double chain guns, light aircraft and electro cannons: They had NO shields, NO heavy weapons and NO heavy chassis, much less a weather control device.

I'm now replaying the UCS campaign and only a few missions in but having a harder time because the mission setups are making hyper-aggression strategies more difficult. In the first mission, the Ural, for example, in my first attempt I was able to destroy the ED forces soon enough that I stole 3500 of their resources, but they managed to conduct 4 researches to my 1. I re-started the campaign, re-attempted that mission and managed to steal 6500 of their resources while limiting their researches to only 3. (The after-mission report screen shows you how many researches each enemy got.) Catching up to the ED will be harder, but you can bet I'm going to kick their asses every chance I get.