Reprogrammer Unit - Converts Units to your side.

T2 Unit, somewhat expensive, weak, and destroyed easily but moves fairly fast - however it can convert a unit to your side.

This is the kind of unit that might be suggested someone who has never seriously considered what it would play like. Or played with such units.

Weaponized capture units are just weird, wonky, un-fun units. The experimental capture gun in SupCom 2 was a disaster, like most things in that game. Even the Dominatrix in Zero-K which gives some quite serious limitations, like a lengthy cooldown in between captures, increasing capture difficulty by target build time, and the availability of inexpensive chaff troops that don't matter as much when they flip sides, and it still plays badly.

Think about how capture works. In the middle of a battle, one of your units is instantly killed, and you can no longer get any use out of it. That would be bad enough. But not only is the unit effectively destroyed as far as you are concerned, it then starts fighting for the other side. Your army got smaller, and the enemy's army got larger in an instant.

By never exposing the capturer to more than it can handle, it is possible to mitigate most downsides of capture units. Any unit the enemy sends to destroy your capture unit, you just capture. And you will prioritize what you capture based on what will do the most harm to the enemy, both by unit type and position. Even the ability to instantly kill a single enemy would be incredibly powerful. As would the ability to create a unit so easily. Combining both in the same unit, which uses such a function as its main weapon is just not good.

Stealing an enemy's units is just not an interesting mechanic. It's pathological, easily exploited, and contrary to the importance of deploying an army intelligently. The existence of even one capturer wrecks gameplay by forcing the player to either remove it from the equation immediately, or be killed by their own units, which is an impossibly efficient exchange for the other side. It should not be possible, and if it were to be made possible, the expense and limitations that should be imposed would mean it would make more sense to do something else.

It's just a terrible idea.

Also consider that there won't be Factions like we've seen in SupCom or Starcraft, so there isn't any reason to capture enemy units, anything he can build so can you.

Mike

I believe the the game is too macro to be capturing units. Everything is just destroyed so quickly so you're not going to waste time capturing small single units. Also with what KNight said, everyone has the same units. I remember in TA I would always try to capture a Core construction to get their technology, to later build a krogoth. You can probably build that unit faster than you can capture it.

Kill unit, reclaim wreckage, build anything you want.

Captured.

For the TLDR crowd:
Capture kills are double kills. The enemy loses one unit, and you gain one unit. This makes capture FAR more deadly than standard combat units.

Supposedly, with enough capture power you can end a battle with more units than you began with. That's no good.

I'm sorry but I hate capture units. I don't remember which game it was that I encountered them for the first time, but I definitely hated them.

Capture of structures wouldn't hurt except for the redundancy and, as stated above, the "double kill" aspect.

Capturing planets is more fun, really.

Here you can see the single most frustrating map I have ever played in any game ever. In it the enemy did nothing but built engineers and sent them to capture your forces. It was just plain awful.

Capture ability is something I hope I don't have to witness in a game ever again.

Earth 2150 did it pretty well I thought. Before you could capture a unit, you first had to stun disable a unit. Units had a tendency to recover from being stunned, and I think you could repair their stunnedness.

The capture units were completely separate from the stunning units. And there were quite a few units that would kill other units very soon after they stunned them, so it was quite difficult to capture units

Well that's the problem as far as I see it. Either you make it weak enough that it is practically useless or you make it so strong that it becomes really hard to counter. I have yet to see a working middle ground.

Wololoo, anyone?

I'm also opposed to this idea for the reasons already stated.

Well...

I never mucked around with the unit AI much. You could write a script so the units would not kill stunned units.


The weapons that disabled were energy weapons. So they were defensible with shields.

Shielding your units was more expensive than not giving them shields.

So it kind of balanced out in the end. You could severely punish them for not shielding their units... but then the other player could cheaply see them off because energy weapons were very powerful against unshielded units.

It just would not work very well in PA because the system isn't set up well to accommodate it.

Why not just just snatch away metalspots intead of detroying them why not go and capture his proxy t1 factories and using against him
While he was distracted.... while not viable for units like tanks and stuff this would be a viable thing to do with some structures if fabbers just use energy while capturing ... it may not neccesary matter all the time but could be useful earlygame when not to many units are around
Usualy what you would want to capture would be recources and or production .... eventualy strategic targets like for example gates ....

Previous thread on the subject:https://forums.uberent.com/threads/capturing-units.52006/

Sounds very micro-heavy. Not something I would prefer.
One of the biggest problems with capture in PA is that the counter is to self-destruct the unit before it is captured. Tedious micro that I'd rather do without.

I liked that map. I'd send my engineers to capture their engineers while they're still peaceful, then build tons of turrets. The engineers could never capture quickly enough to defeat three turrets.

I actually remember that as being the map I enjoyed in the Supcom 2 campaign the most.
It made you look at the game a different way and adjust your play.

That was singleplayer though, and I don't think we need it in PA.

Agreed strongly.

I actually liked that mission the most in the Sup2 campaign.

Huh, to each on his own I suppose. However would you like to see similar behavior in PA? I'm quite certain most engineer functions are going to be automated with the area commands and the supposed capture function would likely be so as well. That could mean that potentially every game would see similar engineer attacks that you can see in that one map in sc2 single player, since factory move commands can be combined with other commands.

Besides the current builders already have a similar function. They can reclaim undefended enemy metal extractors and place their own afterwards. If engineers would consider enemy structures as wreckage, they would do this automatically.

The only difference between having a capture ability and having the engineers reclaim and rebuild is that capturing would be faster and affect troops as well. Why should it be faster? If it's not faster, then what's the point of having it?

If such a behaviour is present in PA, it would have to be in conjunction with a unit which disables units it attacks, there would have to be a way to defend against that disabling. ..

Of course, engineers can already reclaim units to death. But it takes a substantial amount of micro.