Metal to HP correlation?

I never said that i didnt like the auto-repair feature at all. What i dont like is the idea of auto-repair repairing walls that would cost me far more than it would to build them.

Also, we are looking at more of an 5-10x increase in health. not some small amount.

It all depends on what next patches are going to do about this, the way i see it, these huge metal-hp ratios can also be an achilles heel if your talking about reclaiming enemy's wich should help balancing it all out now we all have combat fabricators. If this is going to be like this, my suggestion would be make an attack-reclaim area command, specificly designed to reclaim enemy's in an area instead of wreckages. Walls are balanced then.

Edit: This attack-reaclaim area command should definitly stop all other commands untill they have no enemy's left to reclaim and then go back to normal mode (wich is patrol-like afaik).

I get your point. But don't you think there is another resource you should take into account? It is functionality. Holkins are more expensive than Pelters but they give you more range and more damage. I'm not an expert on this but if I read your post correctly, they are also harder to repair because out of .17 metal you just get 1HP for a Holkins while you almost get 2HP out of the same amount of metal for the Pelter. So this is the downside of the Holkins. I don't think that has to be equalized for every unit. I think it is a nice thing to have. Metal/HP ratio of a unit can be something like range or DPS or movement speed. Or am I overlooking something important? T1 and T2 radar have different range, so why shouldn't they have a different Metal/HP ratio?

I guess it is a problem as long as repair works the same way as building. If you have a unit with a good Metal/HP ratio, meaning you get 240 HP for 1 Metal, it is only a problem when you repair with the same ratio. If repair is consistent, say every bot can just repair x-Health per second (I guess this is what Gunshin suggested), no matter which structure is repaired, Metal/HP ratio becomes a value to balance out units. You could have a tank with a ratio like a wall, so that it can't be destroyed easily. The downside of this tank could be low speed and low range. And with the fixed Health per second for repair, it could still be destroyed. It just takes long, but that would be the advantage of the unit. With a fixed Metal/HP ratio it would take ages to build such a unit which is another downside and leads to the same balance problems (because you would have to balance this downside by giving the tank another advantage like high DPS or something). So I don't think it is easier to balance.

Doesn't mean I don't see the problem with walls, it is ridiculous, and the no-repair solution seems good too.

Pushing your attribute ratios way out of bounds means you're trying to do something naughty and something hilariously broken is going to inevitably happen.

Yeah, you have the math backward in your first paragraph (it's actually .17 HP for every 1 metal), but it doesn't matter much. DPS and Range of the unit does play a huge role in balancing things out, obviously, but those were not what I was trying to illustrate here, and I think those are obviously going to be considered once a more serious look at unit balancing is taken. So, instead I chose to focus on the not so obvious mechanics of repair/reclaim/build rate. As you point out the one downside of normalizing the HP/metal ratio across all of the units is that the high HP units might take a while to build. However, doesn't it make sense that the more powerful units take longer to build? Also, I did mention that you could adjust the build rate of the vehicle factories, for example, to address that issue. By the way, I think that the unit that you are referring to with high HP and low range already exists (both the Inferno and Vanguard have those characteristics). Also, using HP to base the repair rate on instead only addresses the repair issue, and also would probably be a bit harder to implement. Those are the main reasons that I didn't suggest going down that route, but that could work. Even if the decision was not to fix the HP/metal ratios to the same thing for all units, then the ratios should be adjusted to where they are at least relatively similar from unit to unit. Addressing the commander reclaim issue is easy, since they can just raise the build cost of the commander without affecting much else (because coms aren't actually built).

A direct correlation between Metal cost and HP isn't necessary.

What it is mandatory is that the repairing time is calculated exclusively on the HP of the unit.

So if a wall has 6.000 HP, repairing it would take 10 times longer than repairing an unit with 600 HP. Simple as that. Balancing has to be done previously on the units, not afterward on their repairing time.

I have no idea about how the database/s works on this game, but it may also end up in an improvement in performance.

Turning off auto-stuffs, so that you have to micro them all the time, isn't exactly going to help you.

walls should keep the same amount of health but have limited projectile absorbing capacity.. like a shield but minus the extra damage layer.... wall has 6000 hp to start and can only block against 500 damage.. once that limit has been surpassed the wall only functions as a terrain control.. oh and the wall will have 5500/6000 hp...

I don't like that idea.

I much prefer the walls blocking shots. Id like them to block all shots.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

It would be nice if repair worked against the unit HP, but it doesn't currently. Everything that the fabber currently does is done relative to metal cost of the item (building, repair, reclaim). So, because the devs are always claiming that time to develop things is their biggest challenge, I proposed adjusting the metal values as a means to solve this problem, as opposed to reworking how the mechanic of repair actually worked. Not sure how much effort that would take, but I assumed it would be more. However, I agree that doing that would make more sense, because of the varying ratios of metal to HP from unit to unit.

Turning off the auto-repair is not something that I would ever do myself. I offered up that solution as a response to Gunshin saying that he didn't like the fact that combat fabbers auto-repaired. However, I agree. It is a lot more micro to do that manually, and that's why it's better to leave it on auto.

Another fairly easy solution to keeping combat fabbers from using tons of energy repairing at the wrong time would be to just keep them far enough away from your damaged units.

I agree....all shots but artillery.

Yeah, I meant to clarify, it blocks all shots that physically hit it.

The more I think about this the more I come to the conclusion that repairing time needs to be calculated exclusively upon the total HP of the unit being repaired.

The metal cost has to be taken out of the equation.

In fact when an unit get hit by a shot, the damage applies strictly upon the HP. It doesn't give a pink about the metal cost of the unit being hit.

What you could do is make health and metal two separate things, so the medic units heal health, not metal cost

Yeah, they are two separate things now (as shown by padb).


So, all that Uber would have to do is put in the code for repair to work off of the HP. However, what about reclaiming and building? Just to present the other side of the argument (using walls as an example), if the repair worked against the HP, and the build worked against the metal, then walls would take much longer to repair than to build. So, at that point, why repair them at all? You would probably just build a few more walls around the one being damaged instead. So that might make the repair option obsolete for a great many units in the game. Not sure if that's a good way to go when you think about it from that perspective.

The combat fabber heals at a rate of 1800 health per second for walls, 125 health per second for the commander, 55 health per second for the Vanguard, 12.5 health per second for the Pounder.

In terms of healing, Health and metal cost currently are NOT separate. A combat fabber heals health by spending metal, making its healing rate proportional to the health:metal cost ratio.

True. But is it that really a big problem?

Building a wall from scratch costs 25. Exactly as much as for rebuilding it. Apart that if you want to re-build a wall in the same place of an other, the original wall has to be gone for good: or the enemy destroys it, or you reclaim it.

To both you and your opponent, both options cost time. And time is way more precious than a single wall.

On the other hand, right now if you turtle up and have some repairing bots behind your walls, it may be impossible for your adversary to break through, and this invulnerability costs you like what, 25 metals? This is a big problem.

In fact, right now to break through some Turtle, I have to use a Nuke right outside their gate, for simply intake their line of walls.

And that's very wrong in my opinion, because on the other hand damage is applied with a completely different math.

Damage applies only to HP, disregarding the metal cost of the unit being hit.

That also allows for Commander Rush 'cos a Commander gets repaired insanely fast compared to the damage it can take, specially in the very beginning of a match.