Let me lay out how to deal with his:

1. You scout. Figure out ASAP what they are rushing.
2. Concert your team to work on an effective counter.
3. You run. Just accept that their rushed unit is strong. Don't let stuff die to it. Just go back and let it come.
4. Your counter deals with it.

Having said that, defending is losing. So better be on the team that rushes the better thing.

in your professional opinion is out expand a good counter to strong unit rush?

ie. if they rushing krow - > try push and rush mex and the light units to take enemy mex?

or is it better to gimp your own expand to focus a counter over eco?

In our defence....
Godde said "Rushing? Me? Never"

As soon as we realized that they are rushing something, we should probably have stopped building anything (I mean anything, not even mex anymore) and send everything to Chudy for racketeers.

Yes, as scouting isn't and shouldn't be free, a bait and switch is a good strategy. I think it's not a good aspect of the game design and therefore I think canceling a construction should only return a part of the invested metal. This would buff scouting, which gives depth to the game, and forcing a cancel would be more rewarded, which also would improve the game.

Replacing the instant cancel by a (boosted) reclaiming would be nice.

Cancelling the construction does not give energy back.
This is pretty severe in the beginning of the game as you don't have excess energy AND buildpower to just use that metal right away anyway.

Cancelling a rush is already expensive enough.

Nah, those cancels are usually pretty comfortable.
Like when you are building a skirmisher and the enemy comes rushing with few raiders towards your factory and you need to cancel the production and start building cheap raiders yourself.
If the unit would have to be reclaimed first, it would be really clunky.
Also how would it work with assisting caretakers and cons?
Seems rather clunky overall to require units in factories to be reclaimed before new construction begin.

quote: Like when you are building a skirmisher and the enemy comes rushing with few raiders towards your factory and you need to cancel the production and start building cheap raiders yourself.

Imo it's a reasonable expectation that you lose if you decided to go skirmishers against raiders.

quote: If the unit would have to be reclaimed first, it would be really clunky. Also how would it work with assisting caretakers and cons?

Valid issue. Maybe instant reclaim for only 50% of the metal is a sweet spot. Maybe assisting units can be triggered to also (boost) reclaim an unfinished unit.

quote: I don't think rushing units is OP in the first place.

Combining efforts is strong because it allows you to bring more metal more coordinated to the battle, which gives an advantage in metal vs metal in the encounter. It's much harder to get people to work on synergetic metal spending in other ways.

Recent experiences in small matches have shown that rushing a unit is really strong. But that's not what I want to get at here. I want to buff scouting and rock-paper-scissors.

quote: Recent experiences in small matches have shown that rushing a unit is really strong. But that's not what I want to get at here. I want to buff scouting and rock-paper-scissors.

This map in 4v4 might be one of the strongest maps to Grizzly rush.
Is that really a problem?
Grizzly rush is decently strong on some other maps too.
As an experienced player, you should expect it to happen frequently here in 4v4 with experienced players.
Your suggested change doesn't really nerf Grizzly rush on this map.

Well you are suggestion very sweeping changes to a minor problem that I don't even think is a problem.

quote: Not about that fact, but about what systemic issues lead regularly to it. A small improvement is buffing scouting.

Rushing has been part of like every RTS ever.
Scouting in Zero-K is already very easy, decreasing the impact of blind Rock-Paper-Scissors of rushes.
Swift costs 150m and can typically scout the whole enemy team on big maps.
Fleas are super cheap and can screen the whole map at the beginning of the game.
Raiders are cheap and fast and also forces the enemy to react and protect their mexes early in the game.
Sparrow is decently cheap at 230m and can be easily morphed from any radar.

You seem to be describing coordinated teamplay as a "systematic issue" and I just can't get behind that.

quote: This discussion doesn't feel productive, so we probably should just stop.

I mean, that is fair.

Personally, I don't like how much units like how Strider Hub and Big Berthas have been nerfed in favor of uncoordinated lobpot play.
Now you are taking it to the next level by trying to make changes to favor uncoordinated high skilled small teamgames.

But yeah, if you make a thread about why rushing big units in a highly skilled environment is bad, then I'll gladly join that discussion :-)