Y'know, I really enjoyed this game. I think I lost my first match, but I had done the tutorial, and by my second game I already had a reasonable idea of what I was doing. My record by the time I had all the badges was something like 22-7, which is pretty good.
I'd say the biggest gripe is the matching system. Like you said, it's really fun to play against an opponent who's about the same level as you, but all too often you end up fighting someone with a bajillion+ wins already under their belt, or a new player who's entering the fray for the first time.
The other major problem for me is the second village. I can pretty much always knock out the first tier 1 village in each fight I have, but reaching the next tier 2 or 3 village is, quite frankly, a bitch. The slight edge in money that you get from knocking out the enemy's tier 1 just doesn't quite make up for the fact that the enemy dino now has access to much cheaper weapons. I'll make it to the tier 2, and maybe even knock it out, but then I'll lose all I worked for when a newly-flamethrower'd opponent shows up at the scene. It never causes me to lose the match, because there is a very slight upper hand, but it's the main reason that games between two good players generally end up being upwards of 10 or 20 minutes long. I think the easiest way to fix that would be adding a discount for all villages that increases depending on how many villages you have. That would make the tier 1s a decent tactical objective, instead of the no-man's land it so often ends up being. As it currently stands, the tier 1s just aren't worth the money it takes to rebuild them, or even to a certain degree the money it takes to knock them down.
That said, though, I liked pretty much all the other parts of the game. My favorite strategy for victory is SAM pimping, followed by cluster bombs if I have the opportunity and the money. What amazed me, though, was just how well balanced the game really is. I was beaten at least once by just about every other combo that players ever use. I had a few losses to flamethrower+jetpack combos, one or two to Iowa/Meteor+Flamethrower combos, some to other SAM/Cluster bomb users, and some from even more embarrassing cannon rushes. What I noticed, though, was that despite the wide variety, there's no clear "winning" combo. In the end, it really comes down to player skill, and I liked that.
Certainly there are some significant flaws as the game currently stands, but I think they could be fixed with a few tweaks to the matchmaking and game pacing. I hope you keep working on it, though! Dinowaurs is definitely one of my favorite games to show up on Kongregate!
(Well, looks like I wrote my own novella
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