Why walls should not be auto-targeted...

I was thinking more of this:

what a mess, painted desert if I am not mistaken. my favorite map ever

Tinfoil robots, balsa wood ships and paper aeroplanes.

Many weapons didn't do any damage to wrecks like the EMGs on the Peewee, Flash and Brawler and like all lasers. Even the blue laser of death on Annihilators, Penetrators and Krogoth couldn't destroy wrecks.

The ships thusfar are bloody papier maché

You make a good point. I would push it to 10% even.

The reason behind this is that there is a certain small threshold of AoE that a weapon must do in order to damage wrecks. 'Small arms' do 0 damage to wrecks (which as previously established, DTs are).

I knew there was a threshold.

Sorry, but this is not true - in both cases below the Jeffy & Flashes were the only ones shooting the Dragon's teeth.
Also, in TA, all weapons, including lasers, had AOE (albeit a small one). Jeffy's laser and EMGs have an AOE of 8.

Jeffy Vs DT:


Flash vs DT (it takes a while):

Looking at the raw numbers, wrecks don't actually have that much max damage(HP) in Total Annihilation. Flash wreckage got 500 damage compared to the max damage of 625.
Peewee got 200 wreck damage compared to 250 max damage.
http://taguide.tauniverse.com/taguide.html
Have you tried using Flash against bigger wrecks?
Try using them against the wreck of a an arm kbot lab and see if they can destroy it faster than they destroy a dragons teeth.( Kbot lab wreck Damage: 2152 Dragons Teeth Max Damage: 3500 )
I can't test it myself right now but I'm pretty sure there is something funky going on under the hood.
Like that lasers and EMGs only occasionally deal damage against wrecks or that they only deal a small % of their damage because of falloff damage.

Dragon's teeth have 3500 HP while being constructed, but switch to the "wreckage" version once completed, which actually has 4000 HP. One of those weird things.
IIRC, the general rule is wrecks have 80% of the HP of the living unit.

What you say about fall-off damage may be true, but when it takes 500 EMG shots normally to kill a DT (8 damage per shot), it's hard to count to see if they are doing full damage . There's certainly nothing in the data files to suggest any differed damage system when it comes to dragon's teeth vs units vs other wreckages.

Well just test it against some different types of wreckages. I remember being annoyed by wreckages when I used Annihilators. This would cause me too reclaim all my Guardians because it was very likely that units killed by Guardians would leave wreckages which would interfere with my blue lasers of death and Annihilators have the damage to onehit almost any unit in TA so if they actually did full damage to wrecks that wouldn't really have been a problem.

I installed Total Annihilation 1.1.
Had some 10 Flashes firing at Dragons tooth for 10 ingame minutes. Nothing happened.
Had them fire at a wreck of an arm Vehicle plant. Nothing happened.
Had 3 Annihilators firing at a Dragons tooth for 10 minutes. Nothing happened.
Changed their firing point abit and suddenly... the Dragons tooth got destroyed.
If anything destroying wrecks with EMGs or lasers would be the exception, not the rule in Total Annihilation.

After doing more testing it does appear that lasers/EMGs appear to do very little or only occasional damage to wreckages. I'm thinking this may have something to do with the way damage falloff works for very low AOE values ( 8 ). I certainly can't find anything in the data files or scripts to suggest any special damage system, and the EMG/lasers can destroy wrecks in some situations. When I get some time I'll mod the EMG weapon to have a higher AOE and see if that alters the outcome.

I agree that walls should not be auto targeted by default, but..

There should be an option to enable auto targeting of walls so that its easy to clear the way with arty or other long range weapons.

I think walls could be fixed if you reduce their health to 25% of what it is now. Make them a small cheap impedance rather than a game ender.

Hyperbole much?

Honestly walls cost too much I think building turrets instead is perhaps more effective.

Even just a little bit of walls built in a spread out dragon teeth pattern can make in the field engagements a total mess early game. They're fine when they're being used for defense but at the moment they're a powerful offensive weapon which is ridiculous. A well placed wall block can end the game.

I don't disagree with the sentiment that walls are currently broken. However don't agree that a single wall is influential enough to end a game.

It mostly applies to close positions. Since all the units are made of paper mache one missed salvo onto a wall can result in your entire army being obliterated by one half its size. Unfortunately in close positions you can only ever make one mistake and it's over.