So... We going to fix reclaiming?

I don't think fabbers are especially fast, though I meant they should be fast at removing trees to build stuff there. The OP has a good point: If you spawn in the middle of a forest and your opponent has a desert you are already at a disadvantage.

Well not faaast, but I think they're at a good speed right now. Anyway fabs can only reclaim as fast as they can fabricate. So to quicken it up fabs would also need to use more metal/s.

Or uuhh.. Statera-

I mean what? :3

Yey WYSIWYG. .... screw it and add a factor. Well or just increase the metal/s of fabbers. And let the energy cost stay the same

I've started having my first Dox or Tanks start immediately firing on the forests as soon as they are built. If you get a good fire going all around your base, by minute 5 or so you should have all the build room you need. Which is stupid and annoying, because it means trees are just a pointless obstacle.

No wonder WYSIWYG get's a bad wrap, this isn't breaking it at all.

Reclaim and build are logically separate and don't need a reason to be the same. WYSIWYG is about internal consistency between units. The only way it could break WYSIWYG is if one basic vehicle fabber had a different factor from another basic vehicle fabber that looked identical.

Maybe it should be called "What You See Once Is Always What You Get", or WYSOIAWYG.

I've seen people state that reclaim clearly is "reverse building", so by that logic it would be wrong to have it work any different than building.
I agree with you, but WYSIWYG is pretty subjective in that sense as well :s

Arguably, you should be able to tell the volume of a nanolathe transaction by looking at its particles. If a fabber is stronger at vacuuming than constructing, and it produces particles reflecting such, then WYSIWYG.

Conversely, if a T1 and T2 fabber produce the same amount of particles despite different build powers, then WYSINWYG.

Not the same WYSIWYG as what Uber talk about. The nanolathe stream is referring to the style matching the affordances of units. The WYSIWYG Uber talk about is that one tank will always act identically to all other tanks of the same kind, always. It doesn't preclude a megabot having weapons no more damaging than a scout, or the visuals not matching the effect, as long you can see it once and it always applies to all units of the same kind.

If one fabber is using its nanolathe and building at a slow rate, and the fabber next to it is using an identical nanolathe and reclaiming at a fast rate, are they behaving identically? No. Can I see why they aren't behaving identically? Still no. Am I comforted by the fact that all T1 vehicle fabbers behave like this while T1 bot fabbers do the opposite? Hardly! I don't care if you can get a quote from Uber saying that's WYSIWYG, because I can't use it.

That is why WYSIWYG gets a bad rap: Because it's dogma, not good reasoning.

If one tank has its barrel aimed in the wrong direction and doesn't fire for the next two seconds, but the tank next to it has its barrel aimed in the right direction and is firing, are they behaving identically? No. But can I see why they aren't behaving identically? Absolutely. That's WYSIWYG I can use.

Why have you treated it as an either/or thing? It's never enough to simply satisfy wysiwyg, you also have to ensure the other design aspects make sense. But you don't need to break wysiwyg in the process, because it's actually only concerned with a very narrow thing, far more narrow than people make out. Does identical nanolathe streams in your example adhere to wysiwyg? Yes. Should you do it that way? Of course not. Do the alternatives break wysiwyg? Also no. How is making a tank act the same as every other tank "bad reasoning"? It's only bad when misapplied to mean that you can ignore all other design principles as long as you've met wysiwyg. It's only one layer of design.

To relate this back, you can have different build and reclaim speeds without breaking wysiwyg. You should *also* make sure the visuals and other design aspects make sense too.

Can I please know the meaning of wysiwyg and whatever other ridiculously long acronyms you guise use?

Attacking foolishly still loses you a lot of metal worth of units needlessly, and puts your opponent ahead in metal investment.

It stands for "what you see is what you get" it's a design philosophy based around the idea that at a single glance, you should be able to tell what something can do, and be able to expect that.

for instance, we don't have any stat upgrades on units, because we want a player at any point in a game, to be able to see a group of Bolos, and instantly gauge the capability of those Bolos, also why they haven't implemented armour values where one unit arbitrarily takes half damage from a certain other unit etc. If my unit does 5 damage per shot, then a unit will take 5 damage when hit, no secret stats.

Some people seem to feel that this philosophy should completely dominate every aspect of the game instead of being a helpful guideline, however.

so use metal in order to reclaim metal??? wot???

Or you could have stat upgrades, so long as the unit design communicates them to the player somehow.
E.g. Rats vs. big rats vs. red fire-breathing rats vs. toxin-drooling rats covered in diamond saws.
(Actually, I think that last one would just beg you to kill it. Sounds like a horrible existence.)

Real question is, why would you want to do that in the first place? It stops being a game about tanks and instead becomes about climbing a tech tree. That doesn't sound like any fu... oh right, planet smashing. Nevermind.

But seriously, am I the only one who routinely forgot to build the engineering bay in Starcraft?

My personal view on this is, that WYSIWYG is only useful, when you specify the context within it should prevail.
For example, the first case that made WYSIWYG popular was a text editor. Here the context here was that you see what will be later printed on paper. This results in a specific guideline how you should display the data within the text editor. If, instead, they had chosen to show what would be written on the hard drive it would be a completely different way to displaying the text, which may have resulted in a completely unusable editor, and never made WYSIWYG popular in the first place.

So What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get is fine as long as you specify clearly in what context it should be applied. The great thing is not this principle in itself, but the context in which you define what it is you should see, and what it is you should get. This is far more important, then just saying, lets use WYSIWYG!

criz.