There have been a few attempts to merge the RTS and FPS genres together. What makes Battleswarm's design different?

Battleswarm tries to do something very different I think. Merging of two genres was not the goal. In such games, you tend to end up with different elements that are fun for different types of players, and elements in the game that aren't so fun for a particular player. A player who likes shooters really doesn't want a hybrid game, they want to play a shooter. Same holds true for strategy players. Battleswarm's design respects this up front, and makes two great games that both benefit from the expertise of the other type of player. Good RTS players make the FPS side more fun, and vice versa.

The other thing that makes it great in my opinion is it's medium session nature. I will often join a map that I want to play, and minimize the game, and go about my life on the computer reading emails or doing whatever online until I hear the "click, click, click" that means my mission is about to start. Then I have 6-10 minutes of total mayhem and fun until the mission is over, then I go back to what I was doing online. There were also some great design decisions that made both sides a lot of fun. The maps and game types are great, with capture the flag, offense defense, pure defense, hostage and PvP maps. The RTS is really a shorter mission based tactical strategy game that lends itself also to short bursts of play time, although many people can and do play for hours on end, playing mission after mission perfecting their tactics, using voice chat, and creating better guilds and teams.
How do you maintain the balance between the human's FPS gameplay with the alien race's RTS game design?

We spent a lot of time in Beta with Battleswarm getting the balance right. The maps, first off, are designed with balance in mind, but some definitely favor one side or the other. First we shoot for an overall balance in the win loss ratio between all of the maps with the weapons, items and armor, HP and MP and bug spawn rate, and then also fine tune maps for specific balance by adding and subtracting hives, having more or less humans on the team, and strengthening or weakening barriers.

We've also found that certain maps change in balance as players get more experience, and so for those maps, there are certain items that are more advanced in nature that we can strengthen or weaken. It's also important to keep players all fairly close to the same level, so there are different server channels for different levels. You have to be careful with balance and gentle, because just when we think for instance that a certain map has gone totally towards the bugs, humans will decide they've had enough and band together and find a tact that works to start winning. Having things sway back and forth naturally in balance is good and keeps things fun and interesting. We also introduce new items very carefully as one simple item added or taken away can have a large effect. For every item on one side there tends to be a counter item on the other side, but the speed that human and bug players learn these counter measures vary, so that also keeps things interesting.