Zero-K Brutal Coop Campaign review

This campaign is the best campaign I have played in any RTS.
I played the campaign together with Znack almost completely aswell as GoogleFrog for a few missions.
Most of what I write in this review will be directed at the brutal difficulty of the campaign and might not be directly applicable to lower difficulties and less experienced players.
What the campaign does better than any other campaign is introducing new units with wacky mechanics which is what Zero-K gameplay excels at in my opinion.

Balancing
What is the definition of a good balance for a mission?

I my opinion a good balance is when the mission forces you to use the unlocks because they are simply the best option and you can win without cheesing(terraforming or just porcing and ecoing up).

If you look at the skills required to finish the campaign, some promote expansion and raiding, some promote ecoing up but most missions promote using certain units or strategies. I like it.
I have to say that some missions really capture the meta of some maps like the Felon mission, Altaris, and the Minataur mission, Voholon Delta, for example.
Now if you are a total noob in RTS or Zero-K, this aspect might be lost, because at lower difficulty levels, the difference between knowing how to eco or not can make such a huge difference, that the player will win with any strategy if they can just eco better. I think this can be deincentivized if the player starts with an established economy, and letting the allies control most of the eco for you which is done in many missions.
Now, the campaign doesn't seem to handhold the player much and I would imagine some new players to Spring games and Zero-K feeling lost among all the UI options or never experiencing the power of Zero-Ks UI. But I can't really review the campaign from that perspective since I'm not a new player and I would probably be bored from a campaign that promoted and tried to teach all the UI features of Zero-K.
I'd say the campaign missions are really focused on making the player use the unlocks without much distraction, which I personally, really enjoy.

Coop makes the missions much easier as the AI really tries to keep their units alive and you have to watch engagements carefully to not lose units of your own aswell as targeting enemies before they retreat and repair. Being able to divide tasks to your teammate allows you to pay much more attention to the engagements.

OP commanders
On some maps, commanders can have a huge impact. This can make a mission easy or hard just depending your commander level and specifications.
Some missions are just easy because of this and I'd imagine it would be hard to balance the missions in the middle of the galaxy for this, because the commander level combined with the amount of unlocks can make or break the balance of the mission.
But on the other hand, you can view this as a dynamic balance, where the players might fail and return later with a stronger or very specialized commander that makes the mission easier aswell as more unlocks. Giving the AI a stronger commander doesn't really compensate as the AI isn't that good at using commanders and you can usually just avoid the commander, rush it with some raiders or just outright kill it with your commander if you have the right setup(like Personal Cloak and Disintegrator gun).
The Venom and Hermit mission, Hastus, being quite late in the campaign and where both sides started off quite evenly without large bases, was just ridiculously easy with an upgraded commander for example.
Panther mission, Aspiris:
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OverPowered unit combos
The following are usually the goto units that we spammed if given opportunity.
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Hardest missions
Crabe, Old Falsell. Cheesed.
[Spoiler]
Disco rave, Zhurou, cheesed[Spoiler]
Nuke, Nashpvos, meticulously planning and executing our strategy after many failed tries.
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Thunderbird mission. Fel Diacia.
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Sea missions
The pure sea missions felt quite difficult and spammy. I'm not saying spammy is bad, just that it is different. It might be due to the balance of ships and my lack of understanding of using ships but also due to that most ships are fast, and Torpedo defences being relatively cost effective but individually weak.
On the mission where you get Corsair and Seawolf, Juliburg, the enemy would continously pull through the frontline with their faster ships and raid us in the back. They were also extremely fast at rebuilding in lost territory with plenty of defense. We didn't finish the mission in time.

Dynamic difficulty
There are a lot of factors more or less under the players control which can make a mission easier.

Com level and com setup
Generally it is best to go with a com with lots of DPS or enough range to compete with skirmishers.
On missions where the enemy starts with a lot of stuff and it is too risky to use the com, it is arguably best to use a resurrecting com with additional buildpower. Cloaking the com is a great way to just sneak by enemy units, while Dgun is a great secondary weapon to use if there is a heavy unit that needs to be killed.

Clearing mission objectives one by one.
While me and Znack had initially set out to clear all mission objective in one go, we sometimes didn't feel like replaying the mission just to finish all the objects if we failed some. If you have the goal of clearing all Bonus Objectives, clearing them in separate games can sometimes make them much easier to do.

Pause micro and game speed.
Since there is no buildup phase in most missions, it can be hard to know what you are facing unless you have played the mission before and as such, I am really tempted to pause the game or lower the gamespeed to better be able to assess the enemy assets aswell as microing my units. The AI can have infinite APM so why shouldn't the player be able to abuse that aswell. :P
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Memorization
Once you have failed the mission a few times, it is generally much easier to tailor your strategy to fit the mission. So even as you are failing, you are getting closer to victory.


Some notes about AI:
AI Thunderbirds
I often saw Thunderbirds just fly around, not doing much and just get killed. Sometimes they would attack static buildings. I rarely if ever saw them attacking just mobile units. The campaign would be a lot harder if they actually attacked the mobile forces of the player. On the other hand, it might be more frustrating than fun to have your forces randomly disarmed throughout the game and your cloaked units randomly decloaked depending on AI targeting.

AI Gunships
It seems the enemy stopped making gunships after a while. Maybe it is them responding the amount of AA the player has. However, I think that gunships are some of the best anti-cheese there is in regards to terraforming or porcing.

Gunships are arguably one of the best anti-cheese/terraform units and would really have annoyed our cheese on the few missions where we terraformed.

Cheesing
In general, cheesing isn't a fun way to win as that typically goes against the missions goal of using certain types of units or strategies. On the other hand, it is hard to prevent all possible forms of cheese. When I played the original Total Annihilation missions, I mostly cheesed them by just porcing and winning with air units as the enemy had such weak AA defences.
I think the campaign is good at incentivizing the player to play the missions as intended, and the situations presented in the missions are usually trying to make the unlocks the best way to win. However, winning a mission by cheesing, while clearing all Bonus Objectives in time is usually a puzzle in itself and is kinda fun and interesting. Maybe it is fine or even desirable that the players can cheese missions if they really struggle with it, but on the other hand it feels cheap to win a mission by terraforming and abusing the AI.


Randomness in difficulty
The targeting of the AI in some missions can really make a mission difficult or easy.
Particularly the difficulty on the Zombie mission, where you get Ultimatums, Tempest, an early death of heavy unit can snowball into the enemy losing their defences early in the game.
This randomness is probably less impactful in lower difficulty settings, as the player should have an easier time just improving and overpowering the enemy defences. I wouldn't consider this a big issue, and it is easy to argue that some randomness is good, as it forces the player to adapt, rather than just memorizing all the things the mission throw at you if play the mission several times.

Replayability.
Personally I don't see much reason to replay the missions except just finishing off the few Bonus Objectives that we haven't already finished. Some of earlier missions will be ridiculously easy with higher com levels, more unlocks and especially, if you gear the commander specifically for that mission. I suppose you could gimp yourself by removing all the com modules or restrict yourself to only winning with a few units if you really wanted, but then you are just making your own challenges.
A lot of the difficulty in the first run of the campaign is figuring out what you need to do in each mission. Now, if we had played the campaign on lower difficulty settings, we could replay the campaign on higher difficulties, but now we played it on the hardest difficulty, and I feel that raising the difficulty even more, would most likely just force the player to cheese which would decrease the enjoyment of playing the campaign, as you basically would have to abuse the AI, use porc and terraform to win on the harder missions.

Edit:Added replay links.

My first take is that I'm surprised the Scorpion mission didn't make the difficult list. I made changes to make the Nuke mission easier but I don't know whether that was before or after your playthrough.

Scorpion mission in the Dominatrix campaign?