One solution to the comm rush "problem"

I think comm rushing has its place in the game, but it does seem like a cheap tactic to tank up your commanders and send them barreling into an enemy base with little downside risk.

The main ability that seems to let commanders rush effectively is the healing provided by fabbers. The commander is just a giant shield protecting a few other damage dealers from getting wiped out. What if commanders had an "anti-fabber" that prevented repair in a limited radius. If someone sends a commander into your base then your own commander can prevent it from healing. Rushing would still be possible, but a player's main base would have some protection.

Also - if basic radar could show commanders as special icons it would make initial base rushing a lot more difficult too.

Well then they would just have to deal more damage to your comm first then you couldn't heal your com either

how about we just only CONSIDER the damn FaF solution. instead of trying to make random rules.

In another thread, someone brought up a good point. I don't like the guy, but I will quote him anyway...

Making a commander not an "actively healable" unit in combat is one idea. Generally, I am not even advocating making his repair "difficult", just more than it is now. The numbers in that quote a 8 minute repair time. That is better than the now is. However, if it was where that 8 repair guys undid the damage of 1 leveler, that would be good "middle ground" because you can still overencumber a commander's heal and kill him through it.

Whilst the FAF solution has its place, I like that the PA commander explosion kills everything that isn't a commander. This suits PA's spread-out bases a lot more than FA's concentrated ones.

Perhaps an intermediate solution would be that when a commander dies, everything he built also dies? This would include inherited characteristics, so every unit from every factory he built, and every building one of his fabbers made would also die.

Currently the problem is that in a team game the commander is an expendable unit - let's make him not expendable, and let's properly link commanders to players so that when a com dies the player can't control anything.

Idk, that would be a heafty loss. Might as well make it so any one commander dying ends game for team.

Right now, it is fine if just balanced. Having multiple commanders does make combat more interesting for commanders being more common the fighter. Being juggernaut, we don't need that, but being a fighter sure.

again that's not a solution, that's a game mode that's coming down the line and my take is that if that's how you want to solve it is we do nothing until that game mode is out and then pick up on the matter again.

But that's the way it worked in TA and in SupCom. And people didn't com-bomb as it was too much of a gamble. I don't want to see the option to do it removed by nerfing the commander's explosion like in FA, but equally the importance of the commander as your avatar on the battlefield should not be understated.

The problem now is that a commander shields the forces behind it. You can have 4x the troops and they are essentially worthless if your opponent has enough fabbers to keep repairing. A few base turrets would be enough to stop an early comm rush in its tracks if both sides were unable to repair. If you are in your own base it should be easier to retreat, but the way it works now if you retreat the other commander can just chase you down and take minimal damage.

no they might've taken that gamble if it destroyed the entire enemy base.

but only destroying all the wrecks worth lots of mass and a bunch of t1 and t2 units ....nnnnnnnnnnooooooot quite worth it.

Your proposed solution is also just a random rule. Other people have the right to discuss other ideas.

"other" ideas? https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...icated-to-comm-player-in-teamarmygames.55655/

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/discussion-early-game-commander-rushes.55172/page-4#post-845308

Let's go with a sniper bot, 100 dps instead of the levelers' 25. A basic combat fabber repairs 15 metal/s. So, 15×8 is 120 metal... per 100 dps. That's 12500×(120/100)=15000 metal. If repair rates are 25%, that makes 60000 metal as what the Commander should cost.

What about taking a little page from TA?

The engineers had a deployment animation where they had to remain stationary for a few seconds before nanolathing (most of the time anyway...). Would this not work to prevent/ limit the amount of in-combat repairs by engineers?

Admittedly, I don't think it would be a solution to the current medic unit due to its role, but hey, it's a start.

They did this in spring, called it lineage mode. It was truly awful. I lost a large team game to this as myself and my ally had done a con swap at the start of the game. We had the whole map, he loses his com through bad luck, and as the eco was more efficient for his team I'd used the Faber he gave me to get my eco up so it all went with him. The option wasn't used much by most people for that reason. Imo just make a player spec in a team game if he loses his com.

Here again

It seems a viable solution to correlate repairing time to the actual HP of an unit. The Commander can take quite a lot, therefore it should require a lot of repairing time. Right now restoring your Commander to a brand new status is a breeze.

That is an interesting point. If units could only absorb repairs from a few fabbers at a time then it wouldn't be effective to soak up as much damage as possible.

Personally, I think healing shouldn't cost metal (i.e. you shouldn't be spending metal to heal), because that means that units with a high health to metal ratio (i.e. units with a higher health pool) actually heal faster than units with a low health pool, which shouldn't be the case. I think Healers should have a weapon that fires a healing bomb, with a power related ammo requirement. (I.e. if they use it many many times they simply lose the ability to heal)

Healing spends energy, not metal, but the rate of repair is probably based on metal because units only have a metal cost, not a build time or energy cost.

Or do proper scouting and if you see a commander incoming build 2 pelters and thats that. Early game rush with a few basic fabbers wont keep up with 2-3 pelters coming at the commander at double his range.