[raynor]

In space-based 4x games with tactical combat, designing ships is a lot of fun because you can actually see and hear the different weapons and so forth. In a terra-based 4x game with no tactical combat, IMHO, a primary advantage of designing units is to tweak the unit cost to suit your individual strategy. So, instead of building one unit that is strong in both attack and defense, you can instead build a couple of good defenders with no attack rating and a whole bunch of units with a strong attack. So, I would say that SMAC is going quite well in the unit design arena. Given that SMAC doesn't have tactical combat, I think they did quite, quite well with their design choices.