PvP balancing: should be more difficult to build "behind enemy lines"

Describe what you would like changed, and why.

I'm not sure how to word this to get my meaning across, so this will be more of a playtest report and I'll try to come back to it for clarification. Spoiler in advance, this entire game was accidentally played without units, neither side got around to sorting them out and I suspect that significantly affected the outcome.

Match setup

LAN in person multiplayer, varying levels of experience, no online play
Veins PvP, two per team
Deliberate teams for playstyle, largely one weapons and one base builder

Early game

My initial base building was basically a large source of copper and a little lead while my partner explored and tried to remember how the game works. Then I found luck with flying directly to the other team's base and running interference, attacking their root supply lines, or the ammo into their basic defences. While I did that my partner built up some very basics tech-tree wise.

Their team got quickly up to graphite, power and the start of silicon. They also reasonably aggressively built small walls and lines of duos pretty much bang down the very middle of that map. Given that's 3 gaps to block up, it was where I spent a lot of time flying back and forth breaking their copper supply while they were fixing one of the others. I did find conveyors took a long time to kill and eventually I was dying quicker and quicker from the duo arrays. The defense builder was understandable frustrated and we nearly restarted the game.

Mid game

The bottom bulge of their side was completely empty, I noticed decent resources and literally built a drill and neighbouring scatter. Their base economy was levelling up and ours had simple close in defences slowly getting more resources and power. I was able to build patterns of 4 square lead drills surrounded by 8 Scatters entirely unnoticed and lure in their avatar to practically instant death - giving me the regen time to assault their now established defenses from the better range of the Dart, trying to make them run out of ammo.

I needed land attack: repeat the 4 square drills, this time on copper patches with 16 Suos. This obviously had to be done in range of the defenses, but copper is cheap and this made their duos actually run out of the disrupted copper as well as having my buildings to destroy before rebuilding supply. They countered with Ripples larger range, but higher ammo usage and sometimes I could sit there for a full minute or so wearing down the health so I could rebuild the duos. Sometimes I got lucky and destroyed builds in progress, but I wasn't able to make more inroads and they weren't able to re-establish a perimeter.

We now had a small amount of silicon, they had solid production but no safe space to route e.g. pyratite from base to defences. I started using Hails from random patches of coal to help against the Ripples, they had a large variety of things like power, Salvos and had reclaimed my initial foothold of Scatters. Ultimately we abandoned the game as no longer fun because of my "dick moves".

Describe the changes you want to propose. Include possible alternatives.

Post game analysis

We had a great discussion as I found the to and fro balance really engaging constantly having to adapt and obviously I had left my own base completely weak and open by doing this, viewing it kind of like rush vs turtle. However, from their perspective it was really boring having to rebuild all the time, unable to complete even the most basic of defence plans and move on to the next stage of planning an attack - I was behaving very unpredictably and chaotic as if we hadn't even agreed to play the same game.

The thing that made it click for me was that Mindustry, as played through the campaign and other survival maps, is supposed to be some form of tower defence. Yes the AI can be exploited because they follow particular paths that a player wouldn't, but there wouldn't be a sensible way to program an AI to abuse the game in the way I did because then it wouldn't be a tower defence. The units that can simply fly over the defences don't appear until later waves and get distracted by taking out buildings.

I'm afraid we couldn't think of a "fix" to this, the no-build zone is already quite large so you can't simply surround the enemy base and bombard it. We thought something like sure, if there's a route you could walk through go ahead the long way round, but maybe once those have been blocked off by solid walls that area becomes "claimed" in some way preventing flyover. Please let me know what you think!

Anuken / Mindustry-Suggestions