Com Repping is OP

So, I just lost a game against someone who didn't build a single combat unit. This confused me because I had bots and all he had was engineers. Surely I'd be able to mop up his engineers and kill his com in no time at all, right? It's not like his units can fire back. Nope. Looking at the stats, an all-in fabber com-rep rush is absolutely the right thing to do if you spawn near an opponent and it's what everyone should be doing.

A Dox costs 180 metal and has 80 hp. A Fabrication Bot costs 180 metal and has 150 hp. A bot player against an engy player trying to just kill build capacity is going to find that actually engineers have almost double the survivability of the Dox, with it taking four seconds for a Dox to bring down one engineer.

But surely your Doxen will just build up if he fires on your com and you'll eventually win the DPS war? Also nope. It only takes one engineer repping to almost completely negate the DPS of a commander, so he can stand still and pop your bots without taking any damage. I don't have the exact figures, but from testing against the AI it looks like at least 90% of a commander's DPS is negated by a single engineer. Effectively, one engineer has 135 DPS, more than triple that of a Dox for the same price by negating damage done to a commander (okay, so the engineer needs power and metal to run, but you don't lose those when the engineer is destroyed, so it doesn't matter in a combat situation).

Ah, but you can focus down the engineers and win! Nope. Units prioritise the commander and giving your bots manual fire orders results in their immediate death because you need to constantly order them to move to avoid being killed.

Despite the Dox being widely regarded as the best T1 land combatant, the actual prize doesn't go to a combat unit at all. The fabrication bot has triple its effective DPS and almost double its HP for the same price. This is an easy fix: Just quadruple the build cost of the commander. The number doesn't actually get used for anything, but means that currently repping a commander is by far the most efficient source of hitpoints in the game (repping Doxen, for example is 20 times less efficient, although that's an extreme example).

And on a more general note, construction bots are actually better raiders than Doxen (the unit currently regarded to be the best raider in the game). They have a better vision radius, the same speed and acceleration, 80% more hitpoints (enough that bombers don't one-shot them), and take down a metal extractor in 20 seconds, while a single bot takes 25. Since reclaim time is based on cost, all buildings with more than 2.7 hp per metal cost (T1 mexxes, T1 factories, storage, walls, T2 air factories and T2 mexxes) are more efficiently destroyed by fabrication bots than by Doxen.

Less practical is that a construction bot can reclaim a commander in one minute and 40 seconds, whereas it takes over five minutes for a single Dox to kill a commander. Obviously this requires the commander to stay still and allow itself to be reclaimed, which is unlikely, but it's another manifestation of the huge HP:metal cost ratio of the commander.

Perhaps it was just me that sucked. I did a test and won three games (1 vs AI, 2 vs people) on size 2 planets with the following build order: Mex, Energy, Mex, Bot factory (3x construction bot), Air factory (1x scout plane), Energy, Mex, Energy. Construction bots assisted the Com, when the enemy was scouted I sent the Com in, had the air factory build bombers on repeat (only called in when their Com retreated out of their base to mop-up when I had clearly won). When my com arrived, I had nothing, they had units. One even had some turrets. Didn't matter. It was the worst case scenario of the enemy spawning on the other side of the planet as well. You could probably pull it off on size 3 planets if you get lucky. You roll over them and take no damage because the 3x assisting bots can tank even a laser tower easily, and laugh off the death nuke of the Com. So yeah, Uber should probably change the balance so T1 combat units are actually better at T1 combat than T1 engineers.

So I will admit I was wrong about one thing. There is a mobile counter to T1 turrets at T1: it's the Commander.

EDIT: Com repping generates 13.5 HP per metal spent, approximately. Building Doxen generates 0.4 HP per metal spent. Building Ants generates 0.56 HP per metal spent. For reference.

The commander can't hit moving bots which negates almost the entirety of your argument.

I think bots might actually prioritise engineers over the commander, at least I have not once had a problem picking off engineers repairing a commander. Certainly if you have say 5 bots + comm vs 5 engys + comm it is trivial to micro around and kill the engineers.

It may be a poweful tactic on very small planets but you leave yourself open to a lot of raiding if you place all of your offense into one really slow unit that can barely hit moving targets.

Also, the engineer doesn't give any extra dps to the field so it really doesn't have an effective dps, it just allows your comm to take more damage and fight more.

I don't really want to sound harsh but it sounds like you got outplayed and then outplayed people who didn't know what to expect.

The entirety of this strategy relies upon the engineers staying alive to repair the commander.

Engies die, the commander dies.

As Jurg said, Commanders are highest priority. Dancing your bots and tanks to avoid the enemy Commander's fire will mean that your units all fire on the enemy Commander.

This is a problem when that commander is being repaired faster than your dps can be applied. There's no dps being applied to the healers, so they're indefinitely safe.

But inversely it could be a problem for players going for a snipe when they keep turning to fire at every last engineer.

So what do?

Actually it doesn't. In the first case I killed every single one of his engineers, but the difference in com HP by this point is already a loss, and a commander can't disengage from another commander.

In my experience, the quadruped commander doesn't have the same problems with hitting moving bots as the other ones because its shots come from the centre of its model, not from its gun, and I was definitely needing to manually target the Com. It may be possible to get them to auto-target the engineers, but only if you approach from an angle where the engineers come into range first, which takes long enough that you've probably lost because it involves wheeling around in a big circle and coming in from behind. Anyway, the Com not being able to hit moving bots is a bug, so even if this isn't an issue now, it will definitely become an issue when targeting is fixed.

It wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for several things, targeting priority being one of them. There are several fixes that don't involve changing target priorities. One being that the death nuke is a slap on the wrist, so even a little bit of healing is enough to tip the balance in a com rush. The other is that inexplicably, Fabrication Bots have more HP than fabrication vehicles despite being cheaper, and more HP than Doxen despite being the same speed and the same price. Also the Uber cannon range is really short. Upping it would mean you could reliably kill all of the assisting engineers (whose AI makes them clump together) in one shot, making it clearly a worse tactic than skirmishing with bots. Or just raising the cost of the Com so that it's not 20 times cheaper and faster to repair than other units.

Engeniers repair acu here works like Supreeme commander 2 ,its the same,
On Supreeme commander 2 you send commander with 2 eng and even iff it takes damage ,engeniers repair that damage,same has PA.

That is not true. They target whatever is closest. Proof:

This might be true, but if you position your Dox so that enemy engineers stand in between your Dox and the commander which is, as Zaphod said, trivial shots will hit fabbers instead and you win.

Fair enough. Can't deny the evidence provided.

All you need to do is have your doxes strafe around and go around in circles around the commander. The commander can't hit the doxes and you take out the fabricators. Now your opponent has over extended his commander and doesn't have an economy and you win.

Just keep your bots moving.

Edit: as far as the bots prioritizing the commander, if you move the bots and have the bots circle around behind the commander, the bots can be move out of range to shoot at the fabricators, or just have the fabricators inbetween the commander and the attacking doxes. Your doxes will aim at the commander, but hit the fabricators.

Sorry to say this, but you Have been outplayed by a more experienced player. Also don't forget that your commander can build AND fight at the same time. Surprise the enemy with a missile turret and ubercharge his fabbers.

Bear in mind this tactic has been used since the very earliest stages of alpha and has never been considered OP. It's strong and it's useful, but it is very easy to counter and kill those engineers.

Well that defiantly not true, as only one engineer can repair a target in SupCom2, and the repiar speed isn't even close to the DPS of a few tanks.

*definitely

Not defiantly. It's been annoying me for weeks now. lol.

Having done a couple more tests, it seems like it's hilariously easy to win on 3 mex starts or less, but if your opponent gets a 5 mex start it's still very difficult to counter this strat. One guy did pretty much everything right, and I deliberately employed the strategy in the dumbest way possible and still got a draw. Both of us got 5-mex starts but I didn't even bother capping my other two mexxes or using all my eco, and didn't attempt to replace the engineers I was losing. He played pretty much perfectly. He had turrets, focussed down the engineers, retreated to more turrets when he came under attack and tried to flank with his bots. So yeah, a good player doing everything right with a really good spawn against someone who wastes 50% of his mass and whose tactics amount to "attack order on enemy Com, go AFK" is still a draw. I think he had something like 20 bots* over the course of the game and three rocket turrets (and half a dozen engineers who weren't being given assist orders). I literally had three engineers and a trickle of non-micro'd T1 from an unassisted factory that was energy stalling whenever the engineers were actively repairing. He lost all but three of his bots, all his engineers and all his turrets (and a random T1 mex and a T1 radar).

*Implying he actually knew how to use his 5-mex start, since this game was about three minutes long.

If engineer assist on a Com can force a draw against a good player with a good start whose only mistake wasn't using engineer assist on his own Com even when you play like a complete moron and simulate a bad start, it's probably OP for something that's supposed to be a periphery tactic. They're fabricators, not combat medics and the current rate of healing is just too good for an extra feature of a general purpose unit.

Actually, someone tried exactly this against me in two of my tests. It failed. Missile turrets are even worse than bots in this situation because they can't move to engage the engineers and only have 40 dps. A commander takes ten seconds to build one, but only 3.5 seconds to destroy one, so it's unlikely they'll even get finished, and engineer assisting the turrets is another losing move because they put HP onto turrets much slower than they put HP on a com, so you're only putting yourself further behind, as turrets do nothing while they're under construction.

My bad, I tend to use a spell checker and often I can't really tell the difference.

Welcome to 'cheese'.
Just keep using it until most can stop it or most are doing it.

It's not 100% related but are turrets unable to target commanders?
I played a game against AI earlier and the enemy turrets seemed to completely ignore my commander.

That does indeed sound extremely pathological. I haven't seen it, but the way you describe it sounds quite feasible.

I suspect that once we add a weapon that splashes or which deals very high single target damage this entire strategy immediately dies. Riot control units, heavy artillery, anti-heavy, missile gunship, etc. etc. are currently all missing, so you don't really have the tools to fight this yet.