I had some enjoyable rounds on ND during the intial Beta, before they did any updates at all. But out of the 2 maps I played, one was enjoyable, one was horrific. When I joined once or twice during release, I seemed to end up on the horrific maps, where I spent every round stuck in my main base being sniped and rocket launchered within 2 seconds of spawn, for about 10 minutes until I quit. And then there were the turrets. I enjoyed the stealth aspect of the game but too much stuff (turrets again) seemed to detect you, and it was never particularly clear when that was going to happen, so it was pretty annoying. I also feel like the commander is really disconnected from the game, I had virtually no interaction with ours. I know games need to have less interaction with the comm than Empires if they're going to be commercially successful, but Natural Selection 2 does this a lot better. In short, I enjoy ND as an FPS, not an FPS/RTS, because it just doesn't feel like that. Most rounds felt the same and there wasn't much dynamic play. My commander felt irrelevant. I think that if you look at the game as an FPS, play it like that too, it's pretty fun. It's fun with friends as well although I didn't manage to find any squad features or huge teamwork aspects beyond the basics, but I still enjoyed it. But as an FPS, not an FPS/RTS. I could call it a tactical FPS at best. Fun, but not what it claims to be. Maybe they're on their way to fixing that though, because they've had about 20 large updates since I last played. And above all, more maps, because that one shitty map put me off from playing the game again. The game does not do clusterfucks well. Also, in a game where it takes maybe 30 seconds to run from one side of the map to the other, then teleporting raxes isn't an issue. In Empires, given the size, it would be pretty ridiculous to move so far, so quickly, without a penalty.
I don't get why people constantly say the commander is useless here. The commander plays a very important role. Placing spawn points, supplies, base defences, etc. To make the commander useless, you need to make an agreement with the other team to not use the commander feature at all, so you're both playing District.
I'm not saying he's useless, more that there's very little interaction between players and the commander, it feels like a total disconnect.
