There is a balance issue with leapfrog strategy:
You can easily enter good positions with turrets and transport belts moving ammo around the map, because you take aggro from the aliens, you can set lines of turrets, move forward building the ammo transfer system and build more row of turrets, whenever the aliens come to kill you, you run back to the previous line of turrets, you have alien aggro and your turrets dont take much damage and all the aliens die and you are safe to continue.
In the demo I could only use basic materials and limited production but when I managed to secure a ~10k size iron deposit, it was impossible to have any lack of ammo and transport belts.
Against any ranged turrets the aliens have, you can place a transport belt, power line and inserters safely as those dont take aggro from aliens (units and buildings) and then place 4-5 turrets at once to clear the alien turrets and eventually kill their spawn point.
This kind of strategy has one big weakness that doesnt exist in the game: deploy time - if turrets needed longer deploy time the further they are from a certain building, then it would be much harder to execute this strategy.
Also making it so the aliens aggro to the closest threat will cause turrets to take more damage, forcing to repair or delay the next turret line because the back lines took too much damage.
Leapfrog is really easy to do when you have stable iron income, so making the turrets more expensive when it comes to power (basic turret is currently free) will make it more risky going for the mass turret lines, again, if it is possible to make it so turrets take power the further they are from power source will make it more balanced towards inner deference systems.
The demo does not represent the whole game but it took no effort to clear the map with the most basic type of game features while those aliens in the demo are supposed to be there to rush the player to end the mission.
Buffing the aliens in the demo wont help because that will take away from the demo, I think nerfing the defense systems to prevent this safe and easy to execute strategy will be the best step.
Thanks for making this amazing game.
picture of leapfrog strategy on the right side of the demo map
