I like building bases. It's fun putting up some defenses and trying to hold off the mindless horde with just my spear or tank.
It's not fun to gather cortium. First off the poverty ant capacity doesn't let you carry shit - on most runs with a basic 6000 cap ant you're carrying back 7200 in the form of raw material and a building. A decent base takes about 18000 cortium to set up, and that's if you only put your own buildings down and don't need more than one try for each building. A 5000 cap ant has it really bad, because then you're leaving cortium nodes unfinished and unable to respawn. You're basically fucked if you don't have at least 3 ants that are well upgraded. At this point you're relying on pubbies and cortium spawns to power you through the initial setup most of the time unless you have a lot of people who like watching paint dry. This is not including the mandatory escorts by the way, because ants are simply unable to defend themselves against most threats. On top of most of your group having to drive forever for resources, you have to delegate a few people to AV duty just in case some asshole shows up in an AV vehicle deep in your friendly territory and kills all 3 of your full ants. All of this is hoping that you can deliver the cortium for a puny amount of experience.
The buildings are painful to place. Bunker is the most extreme example, where it basically requires flat ground to place and can't be anywhere near anything. There's no snapping either, so good luck fitting everything together afterward without spending several thousand cortium replacing your bunker. Many rocks are counted as "man-made" for building purposes too.
If you make it through the gathering and building processes without dying to enemies or boredom, you now get to guard your base for potentially hours without a single enemy attacking. Let your guard down once and there's no notification, no warning, you just come back to a destroyed or crippled base. Don't let your guard down at all? You're still losing the base to a max drop or two repair galaxies with drakes.
Then you get to hope for a core. Your faction doesn't want to support the 63% or 87% or whatever solid base you've made but can't activate without population? Too fucking bad, go suffer in orders/leader chat until someone drops a platoon on you. Then either observe as they get bored and leave, or drain your silo to put down the shittiest possible building placements. This is after they make every attempt they can to teamkill your things because they don't have brains equipped and can't find their way in, or some dude just decides he doesn't like you and drains your base. Of course, you don't even get to go through that hassle until you can get a core built. First you have to ask the dude who built 450m and 4 hexes away to disassemble his own VP gen.
Then there's the issue of one faction hoarding cores - yes, they had to take down cores to get them. No, it's not fun when your faction is completely unable to build a VP generator because some dumbshit made a barebones undefended 15% efficiency base and lost it.
The AI modules for the turrets are horrible too. The only mildly functional one is the xiphos turret, which still takes maybe 15 seconds to acquire a target at 50+ meters most of the time. The spear turret with an AI is laughable at best. Aspis is good when it works, but like the xiphos it refuses to acquire targets for some strange reason very frequently. Just this morning I had a liberator flying very slowly in front of the aspis and sky shield at 150m, and it still wouldn't acquire so I had to leave my spear turret and take control. What's the point of having an AI module if it's only reliable for shooting infantry that have already breached using 1/3 of the turrets available?
On top of that the aspis and xiphos without AI targeting are trash. Manned aspis is actually best used for killing infantry at range because lol it's a walker. It doesn't have the heat capacity to be functional as a manually controlled AA gun, and the decision to make a non-explosive AA gun with phalanx turret turning limitations is questionable. You already have to pull a walker rep bus and attract people if you want your base to stay up under fire, so the aspis turrets really just end up functioning as better infantry killing guns. Xiphos is a joke just like it was pre construction, unable to hit shit at any reasonable range, but reasonably able to defend friendly spears when harassers get under the gun angles at very close range. Frankly the xiphos turrets should be much better at anti-infantry than they are now, especially manned. If you want to attack a base with infantry, you should have to take down the anti-infantry stationary guns or get fucked.
And when it gets into a base fight, the "fight" is essentially an MBT and a spear turret holding mouse1 on each other until the spear turret dies. And then the base is lost, because nothing is as strong for defending bases as the spear turret that isn't given out in the stock construction kit. Just like a bunch of other construction essentials that aren't given out to everyone and make the construction system cost more than some full vehicle loadouts.
TL;DR