Before Uber puts out the next build... (Possible Exploit)

This won't happen as the cost of the commander has increased not his hp. This can only happen if hp is much higher than cost. Believe the figures of 30k cost and 12500 hp.

Edit: nope I'm wrong, other way around. So yeah 7 bots will be cancelled out by 3. So 40 infinite metal for -10k energy. That seem like a good exchange?

Read my post.

The commander will not give you any profit by reclaiming and repairing him. In fact it's the opposite. No metal lost or gained but significant energy lost.

commander is 1000m. 5 bots at 50 metal persecond will reclaim him to death in 20 seconds. This unit and this unit alone heath is directly related to the mass. 1 repair bot will cancel out 1 reclaim bot for a net loss of 0m and -2000 energy per second. If the reclaiming bots at anytime other number the repair bots he will start to die.

Ne

I don't think so, but I'm kind of confused about it. Not much sleep last night.

I know in alpha you could reclaim and repair, but that was because the cost was considerably less than hp. Not sure if that still how reclaim/repair works. But if it is and the commander now has hp of 12500 and a cost of 30k than I believe what I said before the edit is correct.

When in doubt, boot up the game and test it. Which is what I did to get those numbers.

I'll actually with bobucles on this one. It would make no sense to be rewarded metal for reclaiming a live unit.........

i disagree ... reclaiming wreckage of a unit depending on how hard its hull has been damaged is only a percentage of the full metalamount it is worth
reclaiming a live unit would give 100% of its metal ... this is how it should work imho ... that is why i proposed a offensiv vanguard/inferno- and antiunittypelike reclaimunit in another thread ...
but i don`t know how reclaimtime works is it purely metalbased like repairing or is it also health related? because if both it would take far longer to reclaim hpheavy units and structures

As long as no obscure reclaim/repair combination adds up to more than 100% of a unit's value, it can work out okay. Conservation of mass is a pretty important thing.

It is a bit sad that the wreckage multiplier is so low for PA. 40% isn't much to fight over, especially after overkill and collateral fire breaks it down into rubble. But the big thing is that the living portion(60%) is being used for reclaim calculations. If the wreckage ratio changes, then the power of reclaim damage changes along with it. That's a mess to work with, because fabber combat and wreckage are definitely things that should be tested separately. Maybe a higher wreckage ratio will work better? That can't be tested without mega buffing fabbers at the same time. Yuck.

Hmm. How did other games deal with this?

Supcom dealt with it by screwing over both sides. Reclaim gave nothing and required a unit's full build time to eliminate. A unit at 1HP has the 90% value of its wreckage, yet a repair crew has to pay 100% to bring it back to full. That's just cruel.

TA didn't use metal at all. Constructor repair and reclaim rates were flat HP/sec and used a fixed amount of energy. That's not so great, but it avoids any messy issues. Flat rates favor the smallest and cheapest bots around, but PA is in a good position to translate metal/sec directly into HP/sec. A bot with 10 construction power can deal 10DPS or heal 10HPS. That's not such a bad value to work with. More importantly, it allows wreckage to be tweaked independently of fabber mechanics. It will be very strong with fragile powerful units (artillery,nukes), while being very weak with anything that has extremely absurd HP:cost ratios (walls).

Another option is to use a multiplier of some kind. It could be a multiplier for repair, one for reclaim, or it could be a multiplier for working on any mobile unit at all. That last one not only makes a lathe more lethal against structures, it also changes how well lathes work on construction duty. They can be more effective at base construction (desirable), keeping energy use low(maybe good?), while staying weaker than factories for factory work (definitely desirable). The downside means throwing multipliers into PA. That's kind of a nono, even if a whole flock of issues can be hit with one stone.

my thought was that if a unit was destroyed/wrecked it would give 50% max of its originalmetalcost ...
so i would think the following:
when units gets damaged they lose an amount of metal relative to their hp but not more then 50% until being about to get wrecked ... this would assure that a unit that gets repaired never would have more metal to it then it costs to be build ... you would simply invest more metal and energy torwards maintaining it ...
how should the reclaimingproccess work? assuming fabbers consume only energy while reclaiming they could drain the metal out of a unit while decreasing their hp until it gets into its wreckstage to continue to reclaiming it without potentoinaly being harmed
... theoreticaly what could happen is say a unit that gets repaired while being relcaimed would lead to you constantly stealing metal from your enemy while he is investing it torwards that units maintanance ...
i think that makes sense ... no multiplyers needed ... but just the ammount of capacity and energyconsumtion of how fast a fabber could drain a unit/structure out of its hp and metal ...

is this however what the devs and/or the players want? because i imagine there are/would be problems with reclaiming units faster then they should be ... or too slow? i dont realy know ..

I'm surprised that is not as in TA where metal is gained only at the end of reclaiming (keep some storage to receive 25000 metal in one time ^^)

This is a logic and easy solution to fix it.

Another, if you want to keep a progressive metal flow, is to forbid to reclaim your team commanders.

Anyway for me, repairing cost shall be equal to contruct cost (and metal reclaiming gain)

The only reason it's an issue at all is because a living unit is giving metal for some reason. Paying to fix a unit isn't a problem. The problem is getting refunded from a unit that isn't dead. It is and will always be a can of worms.

Why forbid it? This problem is not unique to Commanders, anything with a high enough value can be a target. The problem is the exploit itself.

Paying to fix is good. Getting paid from the living is bad. Picking one solution one way and a different solution another way is also bad. I guess TA had the right idea after all.

The final solution is that functionality is not tied to damage. This isn't quite true of a commander because part of the functionality that you want is survivability. Arguably this applies to most combat units. But factories are usually safe and their function is production, which is unaffected. Which is why it works for them.

Here's my first post more simply, I hope.
Hp vs metal changes absolutely nothing.
60% of the total mass is directly related to the hp of the unit.
If the unit cost 100 metal,
Reclaiming 10 metal/s will do ~16.667% (rounded to 15% by game) damage/s to it's health, whether that unit has 100000 hp or 10 hp.
Repairing 10 metal/s will give 10% hp/s whether the unit has 100000 hp or 10.
In game the reclaiming bots effectiveness is rounded down to 1.5 vs the repair bots 1.

The only exception is the commander. Reclaim and repair work at the same rate. 0 metal gain, lots of energy lost.


This thread is null and void. The argument isn't valid. The math nor the game support the alleged compliant. You will always lose resources in end when you reclaim and repair structures. At least with the commander you don't lose metal. Commander is only worth 1000m, and you will kill him if you take that much from him.

In the end it will ALWAYS cost more to repair the damage than what you gained by reclaiming.

Edit. *** if you are complaining about an enemy player reclaiming his factories to 1 hp and getting back almost 60% of his investment, race some units there and watch a single dox blow up buildings as fast as he can shoot.... or a t1 bomber. Hell, the DEBRIS of a scout getting shot down... It also means he can never assist the factory because the assistants will always repair the structure before assisting it's build. Repairing a building from 1% health cost as much and takes as long as a brand new structure. If he wants to take such risk, let him. easy win.

This is how Sup Com used to work very early on. They changed it because reclaiming the starting factory down to a small amount of HP to get a T2 factory up quickly became too powerful a strategy.

Reclaiming a live unit should only damage it, not give metal. This closes any and all exploits or potentially broken strategies.

It doesn't make sense to not give metal if you are causing damage to the structure. Without removing mass from a structure it should not be taking any damage.

you are talking about 350m with reducing the first factory down to 2.8% hp and and wasting 70 000 energy. If reclaiming the factory lets you get t2 faster, you are doing it all wrong. I can get t2 up and running at 4:20 with an economy strong enough to support it's use.

With neither resource being wasted nor in excess I will be out producing anyone wasting the time and energy for such an insignificant amount of metal that wouldn't even pay for the extra pgen required to keep the economy from stalling while doing the reclaiming and reusing the metal........

Yes it does. Getting metal before the unit's death effectively acts a rebate. A structure costs 1K, but you can reclaim 400 back without killing it? Why not make the structure cost 600 to begin with?

Whether or not it adds an element of risk is irrelevant. A structure has an HP value and a cost associated with it. That is how the game was made, and many things depend on it being true. You don't want players screwing around with that.

It's a hack that compromises the integrity of the simulation, the exploit only exists in the first place because the simulation is simplistic and incomplete.

bobucles.
Take a car. Rip the door, the engine hood. Tear part of the frame off.
That is all metal coming off it without compromising it's function. Until you hit something crucial you can gut a vehicle or structure of a lot of it's construction. Doing damage to a vehicle without taking something from it is completely counter intuitive to the reclaim function of a nanolathe.

Bmb
1. It's not a hack. If you believe it to be a hack you ain't playing the game.
2. It makes more sense to function as it currently does with the punishment of the repair bot being understandable for balancing reasons.
3. This isn't an exploit as it does more harm than good to you. Exploiting something implies you are benefiting from what you are doing. Early game economies will suffer, not benefit from trying to reclaim your own structures partially.

The lack of an option to "half bake" your structures ensures this will remain balanced as getting your metal back cost significant energy.

If the devs wanted that to happen, EVERY SINGLE UNIT in the game would complete at 1HP. Then players could "choose" to add health by repairing the rest.

Unfortunately this isn't a shitty game(in theory). HP isn't the full value of a unit's cost, because not every single unit depends on taking damage to function. So this idea completely breaks the moment a unit doesn't care about HP.

I think there's multiple definitions of "hack" in play here. I don't mean a cheat, I mean a workaround that doesn't fundamentally solve the issue.

You are mistaken. The vehicles are manufactured using a nano lathe. The complete structure/unit is built as a whole. Sure you could build units with 1 hp, but building things too frail to fight would be pointless for a race of machines bent on domination through destruction.

To have a unit complete at 1 hp and then be repaired the rest would make you pay 140% of the cost instead of 100%. It's also a fair mechanic since repairs are always more difficult than new construction.

The nano lathe reclaiming a unit works much differently from building the unit. Instead of building the entire finished product all at once, you are simply ripping it apart by grabbing and more or less dissolving whatever you can.

I believe the game has a fair reflection repairing existing structures with damage is considerably more of an investment than building something new. Tearing something apart is always easier than fixing it. Reclaiming bots are 50% more efficient than their repairing counter parts in terms of their effect on a units integrity and hp.

bmb.

I guess agree to disagree. I just can't see how something (I believe to be fair in how it would work) is a problem, especially when it does more damage than good to a player trying to "exploit" it.