Why walls should not be auto-targeted...

you have an enemy ahead of you, you move forward with your little blob of tanks
just before you face the enemy a wall appear to your right hand side
all your tanks move their turrets to the right start firing but keep moving forward
the wall is now getting behind you, turrets are still tracking it.
now the enemy is in range. your tanks now ignore the wall as it has less priority BUT need to rotate their turrets around 100+ degrees and wait for the recoil to start shooting back.
Too late, most of your blob has been picked off

the moral of the story is, Walls should not have any priority. they have to be manually targeted.
if you want to take this further, then they must not even show on radar.

Agreed on all points. No target priority and no radar signature.
They should also not show their health bar.
And they should have a 'threshold HP value' that means you can whittle them down, but also destroy them in a single hit if you have enough damage.

Just like Total Annihilation.

that is a good question. I once had a MASS group of tanks and this guy a long column of walls not protecting anything. hes used this technique to take out 3/4 of my mass army
good tactic *clap clap clap*
i want it to be un auto-turreted

When in doubt do it like Total Annihilation - it will be right most of the time . And I am not kidding.

Whomever designed about 90% of Total Annihilation's mechanics was not just a mere genius... They were in a different league altogether.

Dragon's teeth had normal HP and worked more or less identically to everything else in Total Annihilation (there wasn't any "threshold" or one-hit value). The only way they were different to normal units was that after construction they ceased to belong to the team that built them and became terrain features (just like wreckages).

Other than this, totally agree.

Hmmm... I kinda like the 'threshold HP' idea anyway. It always felt like that was the case in TA. For example I could shoot a DT with an AK all I liked, but I never once saw an AK break a DT... but then again some units in TA had damage values that were off the charts compared to some of the basic infantry.


Oh Also: Remove the ability to 'Repair' walls.

Sounds acceptable to me.

Dragon's teeth had 4000 HP, and the dragon's teeth rubble had 2000 HP. An AK did 30 damage
A Big Bertha did 2000 damage for comparison, so 2 BB shots would turn a DT into rubble.

Huh. Today I learned that the Fortification walls in TA only have 1600 HP (1500 for CORE). The rubble of a Fort wall has more HP than the wall itself

Maybe the plus side is that they are higher?

I like the following statements.

Walls should not be tracked like enemy or show up on radar.

Walls should still belong just so one has self destruct on it still, maybe make wall leave no wreckage.

Walls should be reclaimed with very small economic gain and reclaim in 2 seconds by a single fab bot.

Walls should be repairable, at a slower rate and/or more metal per hp.

These would make them the only legitimate proud functioning community member from the "shields" family

I have also noticed something which is extremely annoying.

I rushed this guy in a ladder game, he built a turret and an "UNFINISHED" wall about 25% done in front of it.
this 25% wall was good enough to absorb all my shots while the turret finished me off.

so:
1) unfinished walls should not function as walls just as factories can not built before their completion.
2) in general, all unfinished buildings should decay in time just as TA does.

this issue was present in other games, like in Company of Heroes. players were spamming unfinished walls all over the map especially at choke points. they were easily destroyed by tanks but would serve as an obstacle for soldiers and jeeps. the eventually fixed it at the end.

Could you repair wreckages in TA? That wouldn't make a whole lot of sense gameplay-wise, but...

I cannot for the life of me think of a play on words involving the words 'nanolathe', 'fabber' or 'engineer'.

Only the Necro could 'repair' wreckage.

Buildings should probably decay but I think it works fine as it is to be honest. I don't see much of an exploit in building unfinished walls.

Actually, I think it might be prudent to make all structures < 5% complete (or some other low figure, while still wireframe) not block shots - this makes thematic sense too, since they are just wireframes. What happened in TA during land fights was getting a construction unit to begin to build a Metal storage (very tall) in front of the army, it would eat the next incoming enemy shot, then this could be repeated to avoid your army being hit.

The other way of preventing this is enabling friendly fire, so your shots don't go through friendly structures, and the metal storage (in the example above) would prevent fire from both sides.

As has been said, go the TA way, walls, when finished building transform itself to wreckages. This prevents most issues with them.

Then you can have walls under construction with less hp if necessary.

speaking of wreckages. why do not we have them in PA for tanks and bots!?
hmmm, may be because we do not have unit cap and plenty of metal spots. the planet would end up being a junk yard where u can not move around, promoting exclusive air war late game. lol

We do have wreckages. They just don't last very long since all the robots of this galaxy are made of tinfoil.

the robots are made of tinfoil, BUT the ships are made of paper. I am sure of it