A very brand new perspective the RTS genre
I'm no game critic, but this game has the potential to possibly rival that of the top RTS games currently on the web. There were many similarities and innovations from many games that I've observed so far, i.e. Spore, and (Shapes of cells, traits) Starcraft, (Zerg unit incubation) and many more.
Game play is fairly solid; you must evolve your cells in order for them to acquire new abilities, whether it is gathering input, offensive power, poison specializations, etc.
This must be done by inserting one of four nucleobases into your cell's DNA. Although at one point you may gain a kickass ability like drain, you are going to have to do a lot of time-consuming experimentation for the best results. At the start of each game your starter structure, in this case the cell pool, determines your starter cells initial attributes.
You have also created an attack trinity, alpha -> beta ->gamma, and so on. This gives you a hard time of knowing how enemy cells will cope with attacking or defending. I think this teaches you a lesson on how the player really needs a genetically diverse force.
The only thing I found difficult about this system was that the player is forced to play a more active role in the supervision of the evolution and growth of each cell, although this has been eased somewhat with the cell's ability of cell division. I don't know if it's just me though, I just find it a little difficult to adapt the cells to suit my needs.
I think the reason why you laid off on making so many unit or upgrade buildings was because of the fact that the cell pool would be kind of decentralized as a result and that would also arrest the diversity of many cells, or I may be wrong, you may have made a lot of aesthetic revisions and I have no doubt that would have taken up a lot of your time.
The things that I would like to see for future versions would to hopefully see a Laboratory room that would allow you to preview and review cells and their abilities. Perhaps you could start off a game with a specialty, could we choose an economic start with perhaps a more emphasis on exploration/speed? Then again you still need to mix and match, so I don't think this would be a problem for the duration of a game, but then again, I'm not sure how that would be accomplished.
I don't know what you did to the A.I. but sometimes it just acts a little weird (in a good and bad way). There were times when neutral cells attacked each other, I noticed that the behaviour was similar to certain sea anemones attacking or consuming each other over their differing appearances.
In addition, several of my opponents had a great start; others did not do anything at all and just sat still for a long time. I was hoping that in the future, you could choose your opponent's play styles and difficulty, or maybe just stick with random uncertainty, I don't know.
That's really all I have to say for now, I was hoping for a more thoughtful a longer and more generous criticism, I don't know if others would support my opinions, maybe it's just me being picky, or it could be the fact that I've been having a mild cold for some time. I've also at times experienced some minor bugs but they haven't been any major problem for me. Other than the fact that people have been a little picky about unorthodox games such as these, I think it deserves front page.
Cough* Anyways congrats on your comeback though, it's been a long time since Kingdom Fire, I hope to see more from you again someday.