Why is reclaiming consuming energy?

Reclaiming is one of the fastest ways to remove high-health enemy structures, provided you are skilled enough to get a combat fabber to the enemy T2 factory or teleporter.

I am okay with all of these.

I also don't know why combat fabbers cost energy now. They probably shouldn't. That was always great, and we only had a single update where they didn't cost ridiculous metal value and had no energy cost.

Actually, with the above, I am not sure about the wreckage costing the value of the unit after being killed, because that is a full return. If it takes damage to lose value, then it will lose some value just by reclaiming it to destroy it, meaning you won't get a full return on an accidental build or something.

Trees should grant energy (enough to make a "net gain" from a fabber reclaiming it). Rocks should grant metal.

I am not sure about reclaiming CSG. Wouldn't that mean, crevices and mountains someone depended on for defence, would be removable? Idk if that should be allowed.

Wreckages of destroyed units should have whatever fraction of their living value, but living units should grant metal too at their current health per metal ratio. THERE NEEDS TO POSSIBLY BE A MULTIPLIER LIKE WRECKAGE HAS IN THE ENGINE, but using 1:1 as it does now is good for vanilla and taking loans on commanders seems like a worthy strategy that isn't 100% used so it should stay. That part isn't broken.

The only, ONLY broken part of wreckage, is it's use, and it's pathing. Pathing is so much better without wreckage, when a unit is destroyed it should leave wreckage that is flat rubble in a decal shape of the destroyed unit instead, including tanks bots and structures. Then units can drive over top of them. Same with ships, the wreckage should be ship shaped but in fragments flat along the water surface that ships can swim through, and subs as wrecks on seafloor.

As far as usage, make idle fabbers and combat fabbers autoreclaim anything in range, when power would be positive even from their drain, and metal is negative, which admittedly any good player's economy is for most of a game. That way, players benefit from wreckage and having fabbers, without having to babysit.

I don't think it is broken. It just seems many players don't like the idea that fights create temporary blockades in the form of dozens of wrecks. Pathfinding mostly deals fine with wrecks (if you enable them) as it is: They massively slow down movement and force players to not constantly attack from the same direction. Logically it makes sense that a field of 50 mostly "intact" tank wrecks are blocking armies from going forward. Since the gameplay results of that are maybe not wanted using the "overkill turns it into small easy to walk over rubble"-concept seems like a good solution. The number that decides how much overkill turns it into rubble will be a nice factor to balance out how much of "pathblocking" wrecks usually do.

Yes, it is the fastest way. But is it right to do it? E.g. teleporters have this signifikant mass to HP ratio with the intention of not being that easy to destroy. So if you can just counter teleporters by spreading combat fabbers (and micro managing the reclaim command), you have somewhat broken the mechanic in your favor.

It somewhat is in vanilla. With fast paper units, the sudden blockage which occurs with wreckages feels counter-intuitive. Making them pushable made things actually worse since they would inevitably block off bottlenecks. Slowing units down is one thing, but stopping them dead doesn't feel right.

Don't you think that might be just because most players aren't even aware of that strategy? It can also be used to get a huge discount on unit cannons (yes!) and catalysts (yes...), as soon as you have the energy.

the reason fabbers are using energy for reclaim is the same reason they use it for fabricating ... if it werent for relaiming then they would be heavily abuseable which they are not meant to be ... so imo taking away the requirement of energy for fabbers is out of question ... lowering it to allow more frontline reclaiming (for when unitwrecks are in again) is more feasable ..
same with combatfabbers they are not meant to be a offensive unit on their own they are there for supporting your frontlinetroops ... if combatfabbers could autoreclaim enemies ( especialy for nothing then) what are infernos then good for?

If you really want to keep the energy cost on reclaiming you need to massively reduce the energy cost on everyhting or massively increase the energy income. Energy still is a very limiting factor. Having a possibility to get more metal and paying energy for it will stay unused. If energy were cheap and metal were to limit players heavily then requiring a little extra energy for reclaiming might actually not be that bad. But that would nee drastic changes to the economy balance. Probably in the ballpark of cutting all energy costs in half.

I thought combat fabbers were made only to reclaim and repair for free.
Now we have two fabbers who can reclaim except the regular fabber doesn't have the flag to repair while moving.

i wouldn't mind those to auto reclaim wrecks and stuff but not enemy units .. that would make them too powerfull ...

something i generally disagree with is adjusting the energyrequirement per metal fabbricated imo that takes away resourcemangement and make things too easy .. fabbers and factories should use full energy no matter the fabricationrate

Technically, there is no difference between manual and auto reclaim.

Oh, and please let us not escalate this the same way as with the Dox dodging where the stats where only change once client hacks were about to happen.

Why do you think it's the same? You are not spending metal when reclaiming, you are harvesting it.

What it would make abusable (actually: is abusable with the 0 energy cost of the combat fabber), is reclaiming live enemy units. That's why the OP also includes the question whether that's actually a legit option, or if it's broken by design.

PS:
3 fabbers lathing + 2 fabbers reclaiming = structure completed at -80% reduced metal cost, at only +66% energy. Ok, also -80% HP, but doesn't matter with structures like Catalyst or Unit Canon. Just to express in numbers how broken reclaiming of own live structures is....

Metal is quite often less valuable then energy.
-80% hp on super expensive units like that... well if they are far away from enemy attacks. Otherwise a few t1 bombers will snipe them and you will have just lost a lot.

except the obvious micro

no idea what you are talking about ...

they are the same in making the fabber being active ... and it being active should make it require energy simple as that ... or have you seen a vacuum with blowerfunction that doesn´t need power for bot functions (just for reference) ..

exactly that and i would like combatfabbers either see require energy aswell or them not being able to reclaim enemy units like they do not assist in building friendly fabbers ...

so why can fabbers or tanks or whatever even move without using energy?

You must admit, it makes sense. presumably the energy costs are the movement of nanites, no?

yepp this question had to come of course ...

why is it ok to have fabbers use energy on fabricating but not on reclaiming?
they both are prozzesses to convert metal from raw metal to objects and vice versa ...

you do know very well that we use the energyfactor as a means to limit spamming every unit and defenseturret there is ... otherwise why have energy at all in the game like grey goo does ...

It still is totally arbitrary what requires energy and what does not. gameplay > realism.

of course it´s abitrary but the mainpoint of this is ballance and consistency ...
to me having fabbers being able to reclaim for nothing is both OP and inconsistent to them having to use energy to fabricate ...

Building stuff costs energy, gathering of resources is free (consistent with how mex do not need energy to function).
Not only consistent in itself, but also consistent with previous games.

reclaiming enemies =/= gathering resources ...
and mexxes are not mobile fabricators they are fixed extractors ...

Reclaiming enemies is a weird edge case I am quite willing to discuss about.
It could be classified as "damaging enemy units". There are a lot of examples of units that can do that without having to pay energy for it. Like dox or tanks.

I'm fine with it costing *some* energy for Combat Fabs to reclaim and repair, the problem I think Colin is trying to point out is that in the past these costs typically meant it was just never worth it to use them if it did cost money. We've only just seen them be used at all in the game after more than half a year of them being in. It doesn't mean they can't cost something, but so far we haven't found the right amount that keeps them worth using. It seems almost certain that this value will have to be decided by gameplay and not realism/logic because the latter is just going to end up in them not being used. These are clearly difficult units to balance properly.