While I like the idea of the enemies included in the mod their current implementation is problematic for a number of reasons. The bottom line is that they are to difficult, and not in a fun or challenging way. I understand I could just turn them off, but I'd rather just see them rebalanced to not be so problematic.

• Unit HP: Right now I'm looking at biters with 200 HP and infected with 500. This is a melee biter and a ranged infected. That's an insanely disproportionate HP pool.

• Auto Hit Weapons: Obviously the weapons are copy and paste from the engineers weapons code wise, but because they auto hit assaulting a biter base is nearly impossible early game. On foot, tank, or car. Normally you can keep moving to avoid enemy fire, but with the auto hit attack you have to out DPS them which might be physically impossible in some scenarios.

-Weapon Range: At the point in the game where I am just starting to swap over from gun turrets to lasers I am seeing enemies with range ~21. This puts them at the very edge of laser turret, and completely outside of bullets. This phenomena does eventually happen with spitters range increase, but not so early and not nearly as long range. Pairing this range with the excessive HP pool means a small number of infected can destroy what should be solid defense, since; only a handful of lasers will be able to reach.

The enemies might be 'doable' in the same sense that you can win with the rampant mod or death world, but I don't think the colony builder mod should include that level of expected difficulty. I think the easiest solution is a sharp drop in the HP values. If a unit has longer range than the standard biters; then, they should have less HP than a comparable unit. I know this is a long read just to say "Give them less HP" but the other issues with range and damage wouldn't be as big a problem if they weren't such a sponge. And those ranges and damage do make them unique enemies compared to the biters.

you've forgotten about the ALLIED soldiers!!!!!

anyways, seriously, the soldiers' ai isn't very smart and just goes, stands and attacks. the problem i have is that they don't strafe or even move at all while firing, and i feel like the acid resistance nerf(i think there was one?) basically made most friendly units into a free kill once there's more than 5 spitters counterattacking, as even movement order spamming barely shifts fighting units. if the dev DOES add strafing or a milder version of the biter mid-battle-breakoff it would go a lot with balancing and would open the door to better balancing.

however, i do agree very much with your point on infected having too much health. it would be nice if the range they fired at was also reduced a little, as the early part of midgame is a hellhole because of it.

Update: I'm turning off the enemies for the time being.

I'm not sure if I'm missing some military upgrade that the mod provides, there doesn't seem to be something that would solve this. After shoring up my laser wall and still being slammed by infected pelting them from range I've had enough.

• I didn't notice before, but because the infected snipers can littleraly stand on the exact same pixel position and entire group of them can fire at a single turret while only exposing them to 3-6 turrets to return fire. This is assuming that your laser turrets are packed in a perfect wall.

This is actually very good feedback, thank you for that. I suppose for the early/mid game the enemies may be a bit too tough. I can see that rebalancing the HP and maybe weapon range makes sense.

As for the enemies and soldiers' AI, they basically use the vanilla biter AI so there are some limitations there.

As for dealing with acid pools, I tried to adress that by giving certain units the cleanup ability so they can remove the acid pools and damage stickers from other units. It makes sense to mix these units, along with some medics, in an attack force.

There have been some balance changes in the latest patch.
HP of the infected is adjusted, making it scale more from low to higher tier units. Also infected with large range weapons have had their range reduced to just under that of a gun turret, so they should always be targetable by turrets now. Infected soldiers do slightly less damage.