I'd argue that the original com you start the game with represents your avatar with in-game "character development" mirroring a moba. When you make your heroes producible in the late game at a time when they have not the faintest chance of having impact, this turns them into a unit, and a bad one at that.
Basically, it dilutes the 'moba' experience. There are a lot of players here that have played Mobas. I've been in the mobas. I believe
Aquanim,
GoogleFrog,
[Fx]Drone, and
Orfelius have all played too. None of these players build additional coms.
raaar is the most com-centric player there is, he consistently makes his com a central lynch-pin of his game-plan. But even
raaar doesn't build additional coms. It's rare in mobas to control multiple characters while also having an army and economy behind it.
Building additional coms is not moba like. And even if it was, the way coms are done in ZK is shit compared to a moba. They're near the bottom of the power-curve, they don't look that fancy, all the flashy stuff is bad, they're slow and relatively unresponsive. I can't really see how this design choice could help secure that crowd. They're in the same factory as dante and bantha. If people want to do something cool in the late game, building a grinder com that you could have been working on since the start of the game simply pales in comparison to the raw power of any strider.
The only game I've seen where building additional heroes later in the game was a realistic option is warcraft III. That was mainly because said heroes worked of a third resource (XP) to scale, and ended up with insane impact. ZK is nowhere near the equivalent.
