The music

I think more music is very welcome as long as it's consistent with existing tracks.

I think the current music is perfect[*]. It's reminiscent of the OTA soundtrack, and that's a good thing. Denny Schneidemesser's work is impeccable; his themes are interesting and moving, his development is engaging, his execution is flawless. We're fortunate to have found such an excellent collection of CC-licensed pieces.

Switching to a different style would need an equally-large and equally-high-quality collection of pieces in the new style. The pieces would need to fit perfectly with each other, so they would likely need to come from a single composer (and remember we'll also need some pieces for the lobby). If we found such a collection, or if someone produced such a collection just for us, I wouldn't be opposed to switching styles. But I don't think it's necessary at all.

(Footnote: almost perfect. I don't like Far Beyond the Stars - it's too tranquil; it should not have been added.)

I consider the current soundtrack mediocre.
Classical/orchestral is good for the slow, macro-oriented gameplay of TA and Supcom.
ZK's fast micro gameplay is closer to Red Alert; I think rock/industrial/electronic would fit us better.

However a genre change is highly unlikely because you'd have to recreate (and outperform!) the entire soundtrack to keep it consistent.

I think the music is just a disagreement that depends on how much you like either orchestral or electronic music. Anarchid is heavily in the electronic music camp so sees the current music as little more than a placeholder. I'm with CrazyEddie. I think Licho tends towards the electronic side because he set this (in the post by Anarchid). I have some nostalgia for the Red Alert 2 soundtrack but I think neither of the examples posted by Anarchid are appropriate as RTS tracks. They have too much of a lead in and fade out and their pace varies too wildly.

The sound effects are another matter we've never had a sound person as far as I'm aware.

I think the quality of the SFX is good for Zero-K, and the design is very good as well. Coming from DotA2 I appreciate how much you can know about a battlefield based on just the sounds it makes. Being able to narrow down approaching enemy units to around 5 possibilities or fewer is very valuable for team vs team play. I would tentatively suggest even more unique sounds, perhaps for small lasers and large explosions in particular, but this is not urgent and more quality of life.

I like the orchestral music in game but the Hollywood scifi feel wears off after a lot of games in a row, I'll admit. Perhaps something more electronic should be introduced, or maybe a medley of different styles. I think a shift towards a more Space Opera style of music would be better; unfortunately, I don't know many examples off by heart apart from a nice Stellaris addon I found https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=684454645 (I particularly like the Endless Space soundtracks and Alien Hand- The Kill)

Titan Slayer / Neon Ranger / Vlad Zhuravlev has a lot of material. A quick skim suggests that someone could assemble a pretty solid soundtrack for ZK using various pieces from his library. It looks like Mr. Zhuravlev does commercial work; I don't know if he'd be interested in granting a CC-NC-ND license for some of his pieces but if someone wanted to give it a shot it couldn't hurt to ask.

Otherwise, there may well be some similar tracks available under a CC license elsewhere. There's been a lot more free music produced since Denny Schneidemesser's tracks were added to ZK years ago. But someone who is interested would have to do the legwork to find it, confirm the licensing, and assemble a very good collection of tracks for the devs and community to review and opine on.

The current ZK music is very good, but is in a very common style. This kind of epic orchestral style was used in Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, Planetary Annihilation, and Ashes of the Singularity, so saying it's not appropriate for a game about giant sci-fi robots is pretty odd. On the other hand, something different might make us stand out a bit. But merely being different isn't good enough; it needs to be different and very, very good.

The music we include with the game is really just for first impressions. People who stick with the game will probably end up muting the soundtrack and playing their own favorite music anyway. But first impressions are important.

If we did switch the default music to a different style, I for one would appreciate an option setting to easily switch back to the old tracks.

katastrophe I think the current effects could be cleaned up, although depending on the engine's support for viewpoint dependent sound modulation and dynamic range compression. I don't have any actual suggestions for now. The goal would be to turn team battles from white noise into interesting soundscapes which needs a lot of fine-tuning. Anarchid did a great step with the new scythe sound.

As for soundtrack, I love the tracks from Evan King's Enchiridion album (attribution license). They have a modern orchestral feel. I don't think it's a perfect match, yet I'd much prefer it over our current soundtrack.

Classical/orchestral is my favorite, fantasy is great too.
I don't think there is any problem in current soundtrack it sounds nice but improvement is fine too.

Use design of a product as example, some product with material contains metal and wood together, the compound feeling is so unique, even better than pure metal or pure wood, it feels like bringing future element inside classic or bringing classic element inside future. But it need to do carefully or it will become noise easily.

As same concept, bringing classical/orchestral/soft music in lobby or in game will soften the hardness of the whole design, since the theme of game is sharp and iron/sci-fi like (RTS pace, model design, interface of lobby and website), bringing some soft element in some place is needed for balance in my opinion or the whole feeling will become too monotonous.

And I think design balance is probably more important than the quality, that means consistent.

quote: katastrophe i don´t think it is physically possible to make the soundscape of a 10v10 completely transparent...

It's impossible if you just stack sounds all over another.

Sounds further away from the camera need to be modulated to give the feeling of distance (and use a smaller frequency spectrum). Multi-Band Compression is needed to only make the most important sounds audible. For example you could hear 2 glaives fighting each other on an empty battlefield, but in a full on battle their volume would be reduced in favor of a goliath or nuke. The sound effects themselves should be restricted to a well defined frequency band each. This allows multiple sounds to play in parallel without conflicting.

This requires a lot of work and only starts paying back towards the end.

I doubt there is any change you could make that would ever make me want to enable sounds.