To add to the better camera control, which is a big issue - especially in multiplayer as you could hide stuff behind buildings that would be impossible to see with fixed angles, please let me zoom out more!

I feel trapped, or like an xbox 360 game. If it's a performance concern, make it a menu option so people without gpu's or weak ones won't cripple themselves by zooming out, but those who have nice equipment can get over the claustrophobia by zooming out! If it's a design philosophy, then stop it! Please. =)

Personally I prefer if games have fixed angle and try to design assets so hiding units isn't a problem. On the beta 4 version of Gates you have these huge boxes as placeholders for the walls, and it is deffo possible to hide something behind them. The community manager did it to me in a game by accident, he'd grabbed all nearby supply drones and told them to root my melee mech, one went behind the wall and I ended up having to blow the wall up to get free.

With art considering that problem and trying to minimize it it wouldn't be an issue, the only case I have run into where this was a problem was the above case with the wall on Gates.

Having said that, surely it can't hurt to have rotate camera bound to some modifier key + middle mouse drag. It is better if the game doesn't ever require rotating the camera but why not have the capability anyway? Better handling for when units go behind something would be nice too, something making it easier to click enemy units through big buildings and map props. For props it is already possible to click through, the games 3d picking seems to prioritize units, buildings, wells, bloom cans etc. When it is something like a huge cube model like on Gates maybe the game should outline the units and prioritize picking those units over the big unit/building if the user clicks inside the outline. Changes to how units pick targets when idle might help too, so you can just tell units to stop near the hiding units and they'll attack it instead of focusing the closest target, which might be what they're hiding behind.

On zoom, yeah I wanna be able to zoom right out too. The game has very quick drag-scrolling and max zoom range is high enough that your vision will always be greater than the range of weapons/abilities your servos and units have. But sometimes you don't need to be zoomed in enough to micromanage your units and want an overview of things, zooming out more would be great for that. Other zoom things that annoy me are how it resets to default zoom each map, meaning 'zoom out to max' is my first action every game. It is a small thing but when you have to do it every single time it gets annoying!

Thinking back to Dave Pottinger's other productions like the age series they never really had supcom levels of zoom control, so it might be possible that it is a design decision. It wouldn't be the first time an RTS had a limited zoom range, Blizzard never lets you zoom out to see the whole map or whatever in their games. If I had my druthers current max zoom would be default zoom, new max zoom would be 2x current one. If there were sliders that let me do this in options I'd be real happy.

Last time this was on sale I gifted it to a bunch of mates and pretty much the first thing they noticed was speed of the keyboard and push scrolling, and speed of zooming in and out (too slow). I told them to try drag scroll with MMB instead and that improved things for them, but they shouldn't have to use drag scroll for a scroll speed that feels good to them. They all went 'attack move doesn't work' too but that is a known issue and not really that useful to know. I do hope that's fixed soon though. It forced me to get better at queueing up attack orders though, lol.

i tend to enjoy the single player elements...in addition to a story based campaign, i would like to see something similar to Galactic War that Planetary Annihilation has..or WH40k's dark crusade. something with a bit of over-arcing strategy. perhaps more like the dark crusade example where controlling a planet gives you a significant buff. also defending these planets would be cool.

it wouldn't have to be as elaborate or in-depth as a Total War game for the strategic map. i think it would add a huge amount of replayability.