Invasion is more reasonable in 0.88 now.

I just solo'd Stalemate on InvasionUS. Sort of like I thought, the main point where things started turning around was when we got 3 bases. I started in Suburbs. Getting Town (E) and actually holding it just took a lot of tries and a damn good defensive position. I had to bring my A game and push constantly towards Town (W) slowly and methodically, and I played more solid defense after capturing it so the AI could get everyone in position and clear out any stray greys. At that point the AI could pretty much hold its own without me babysitting constantly. I then pulled some shenanigans with Hospital and I think Warehouse as well, all while the AI was advancing through the trench. Before they knew it the greys had a war on their hands More backdoor shenanigans along with some straight-up murder, and suddenly victory!

So yeah, InvasionUS has advanced to Aeolian Coast.

ya that's a bit of a balancing issue in invasion. It's very tough to have a second base but once you settle down there and achieve to get a third base then it's not that much of a challenge to get the rest of the map. Maybe the bot amount shouldn't decrease linear but more logarithmic to raise the challenge again towards the end of the map.

There's a factor for this in the code that makes winning faction have a bit smaller soldier increase with every additional base capture they make.

Currently this variance factor is at 0.1, which results in only a mild change, it's notable to compare it what it would be with 0, but to compare in 0.76 it was 0.4. A lot of people complained back then that the final attacks get starved or are too hard to succeed.

Of course, plenty of things have changed since, e.g. bot respawn rate is much more than it used to be, AI deliberately boosts the final attack by reducing some forces from defense, so maybe the variance factor could be again greater.

Another point in this is that the battle in the last base (or two) most of the time wouldn't even have to happen, especially in maps with plenty of bases like map1, map3 and map5. The enemy should realize to retreat as their morale has been crushed by the invading force and they are regionally down by numbers clearly.

In Invasion, they probably should only make their last stand in a map specialized for this. The map could be a 2-base map, the enemy could have a bit of boost, it could be arranged to resemble something of a boss-fight. Once we have new factions, there would be maps designed similar to this for all of the enemy factions.