I play on advanced too, Unity does most of her damage on the front side, on the back she struggles, but really everyone struggles once they flip, and your heroes that need to build up should be ready to roll by then. A good start by Unity can have half of the Ennead dead by the time they flip.
A not so good start she can usually still do a good bit of damage before they flip.
Normally I get about 12 damage to all the ennead from Cryo-Bot before flip time, after that I tend to get less, but still add in a decent chunk of damage.
Scrap Metal is huge for unity, and not to be underrated is the sheer volume of equip cards she can throw out to protect other player's equipment.
Would you please expound on how you play AZ differently vs. Omnitron? I assume you're talking about the fact that Omnitron can so easily destroy equipment and ongoing, as well as making Subzero Atmosphere dangerous.
Well he not only destroys your equipment but hurts you for it. You keep your build more minimalist, holding onto search and recovery cards because you will need them and so on.
With Unity and the Ennead Flash Forge, Robot Reclamation and Scrap Metal become incredibly important cards. Volatile parts becomes a pretty good damage option while Raptor Bot becomes very situational and most of the time is not worth playing.
Changes like that are similar to changing how you would play AZ or Bunker vs. Omnitron, since you prioritize certain cards and abandon your "get out all the cards" strategy.
I have never gotten Unity to gel, although to be fair, once you've failed to get her going a few times in a row it becomes increasingly tough to want to field her in the first place so I haven't done so all that often. It just seems like she's especially reliant on the quality of her early draws, and has every bit as much of a setup curve as heroes like Absolute Zero with the compounding issues of having to combo into bot plays and not having a character card power that's useful by itself. I'm sure she's awesome if you can surmount that, but I haven't been so lucky.
She is rather dependent on card draw, certainly. Getting Swift Bot out will help with that, at least. Or play with someone who can get you extra draw (Tachyon, the Adept, etc). Unity seems to have two possible starting options - one is that you start with all equipment or all bots and so can't get anything out, while the other is that you have bots and the means to get them out and can actually start getting set up from the first turn which makes it more likely you'll end up utterly destroying whatever villain you're up against :D.
If you want a good game with Unity, play her alongside TLT and the Adept, with the latter using Alacritous Subdominant and/or Inventive Preparation from as early in the game as possible :D.
Omnitron-X can also help Unity, assuming you can talk him into using his innate power on YOU rather than himself.
But, yeah, without outside help she can be difficult to get going if you have unlucky draws (and you will have these sometimes). If you're fighting a villain that targets lowest hit point hero targets, it feels like an even more uphill battle; in those cases I just take the attitude that it's better for the bots to take the hit than my teammates and treat them as decoys.
Another form of outside help that may be non-obvious: Unity can destroy ANY piece of Equipment, not just ones that she owns. While it would be impolite to do so without asking first, once your team is aware of this possibility, they may well inform you that they have an extra copy of some card in their hand, so they don't mind if you turn the current one into a Mechanical Golem.
My favorite example of this is turning HUD Goggles into a Swift Bot :-)
Am I right in thinking that several of Cosmic's shields on Stealth Bot would almost win any game ever that doesn't have a villain dealing irreducible damage?