From my skirmishes toying, light canons are vastly superior to heavy machineguns in the early game, it's simple i did a full machinegun (upgraded with researches of course) army in a skirmish (as you get machinegun before light canon it allowed to field a couple more tanks before the AI arrived) and the AI initial rush toward my based simply destroyed me and my reinforcements without a problem.
Other skirmirsh, i decided to go with full light canon (upgraded too obviously) army and this time completely obliterated the AI initial rush then pushed it back inside the middle of the part of his map. Yeah so early game go with light canon to kick the early AI rush, going with machineguns will get you killed.
Until the AI noticably switched its production to nearly only cyborg (i didn't remembered they even existed in that game
), cyborg being super resistant to canon and only vulnerable to machinegun, it pushed me back by atomising my big light canon tank army.
I don't know if the AI actually adapted or if it just build units randomly, but if it adapted it's a very nice AI play.
I just wish i remembered i needed to power up in energy my base as at that point i had too many things in construction (lots of defense towers actually) and not enough energy to sustain/complete them, so nearly all my builds were paused, allowing then the AI to march toward my base as no more reinforcement were built, i'm so rusty i forgot to cancel most of those useless (at the time) build
Anyways, this dev build is running vastly better than i remembered tne post-2.3.9 releases were. Definitively recommended to get a recent dev build on github
EDIT : finally got time to play to the end a little 1vs1 skirmish.
Started like previously, light canon tanks to deal with the initial AI rush, then instead of wasting ressources into building tons of towers (early game they're near useless anyways) i quickly build 2 cyborg factories and started to make machinegun cyborgs to complement my light canon tanks
upgrades after upgrades damage and armor was getting nicer so i was pushing the AI back easily to the point i started my forward operation base at a short distance of the AI main base.
There i spent time just repel AI desesperate assaults after desesperate assaults instead of doing the final attack, as my goal was to upgrade more until i started to see more varied units.
Though after +/- 10 minutes like that once i got some mortar/bombard units i had enough and stopped waiting for higher end units and just decided to move toward the AI base
The entrance to the enemy base was well defended, bunkers, strong towers and tanks+cyborgs, but the "steamroller" army just destroyed them all and entered the enemy base now defenseless
And victory fell in our hands
Units are supposed to get stronger with experience, but in practice it's hard to keep them alive long enough, and spending time to retreat them and repair means you leave some time to the enemy to do the same, so in the end you just leave them die so your assault is left undisturbed by retreating troops (right click on a group of unit to give them various orders, to retreat automatically once reaching a certain level of damage, order to stand ground or pursue automatically , etc..)