Separating HP from Metal

Personally I think Combat fabbers should not cost economy once you've built them.

They just regenerate health on a target.

Rate of regeneration is somehow capped, or diminishing returns, or something.


I.e. Combat fabbers recharge other things health. And that's all they do.

Instant eco cheat. Reclaim a unit whilst repairing for infinite metal.

Instant eco cheat would not work.

Think about it logically.

You reclaim the unit. You take METAL (not health points) out of the unit.
You repair the unit. You add health points to it.

What happens when it runs out of metal?

That's the point I'm trying to make. Separate the metal and health components.

I am thinking about it logically, are you? Separating metal/health wasn't part of your point, and doesn't make sense anyway. In this scenario you can reclaim a % of the metal put into a unit, essentially reducing the cost of a unit at the expense of micro.

I think Combat fabbers should not cost economy once you've built them.
They just regenerate health on a target.
Notice how in my post, I have separated economy and health?


Not if you include the atrophy rate - you start reclaiming it (fabbing it), you reclaim 90% of the metal, then don't touch it for x amount of time, and suddenly it atrophies away back to a wreck.


The reason infernos are so good to repair is because they have such a high health to metal ratio, i.e. fabbers can inflict a large rate of repair. If you removed that by making the repair rate the same for each unit, you wouldn't have a problem with repairing infernos.

However, that would have the side-effect of making mass-Comm-repair viable again. Not sure if that would be a problem with the current state of balance.

Mass comm repair was viable because the rate of healing, per fabber, was 83 health per second. That came from the metal cost of the unit. Currently it's 5 health per second per fabber or so.

Problem fixed by separating rate of repair from metal cost.

Correct. Build power and combat fabbers are the issue.

Notice how my solution fixes the problem of them having build power?

I'm perfectly on topic, thank you VERY much

I have extracted these posts from https://forums.uberent.com/threads/about-build-power-and-combat-fabbers.59483 to form a new thread to properly discuss this topic, without derailing the other one.
If you want to discuss why this is not a solution to the other topic, you can also ask here.

How do you "repair" wreckage?

He's thinking it with metal and health connected. If it were connected than reclaiming whilst repairing gives you infinite metal, but how he really works from what he suggested was that reclaiming would take away metal but not health; once they run out of metal they die but they can still take an equal amount of shots to die if they weren't reclaimed to death. Basically if they lose half their metal amount they won't take any less hits than if they had full metal count and the same goes for the opposite.

I.e. medics in RTS games work in two ways.

1) You spend economy to build them. Then you spend economy to keep them repairing stuff.

2) you spend economy to build them. Then they heal stuff, without requiring resources to do so.

Essentially yes, squishypon3 gets it right.

So if you did damage to the metal bar, that would not affect the health bar.

Fabbers would repair metal and atrophy of metal..

Combat fabbers would repair health and damage to health.

So with reclaiming, we should make sure you can't get any metal back until the unit is dead and a wreak.

But id really like to have more units use power, or personal recharge bars (The ammo system) to function.

Agreed, a whole bunch of units in TA both created energy as well as used it. Like the transport for example, it created one energy whilst idle and used one energy whilst under use, this means that they balance eachother to use no energy when they're in use, but when left alone they could give you a negligible boost in economy. It may have been small but it was just something clever that I find made the game feel more polished.

Units with solar panels attached could be kinda cool when they power stuff while idle.

ugh, why does/should it cost eco to repair and reclaim things? once the unit is a wreck, then you can take its mass, (and just make up that units are built with anti-stealing capabilities, well until they are dead lol)
and spending power to reclaim and repair is odd, you already spent the eco on that unit and your supposedly making it more efficient by repairing it/good management skills

Because every other game did it this way.

Sorta.

In TA it only cost power to repair.

And power is really cheap, really really cheap.

So what if I reclaim it to 50%? Does the unit still continue to run at full efficiency and remain at full health?
There should be some drawback from reclaiming your own units once they are built because otherwise that will promote boring micro where you reclaim your own units for metal.
In SupCom this made people reclaim their factories down to 10% just so they could get most of the metal back even though this put the factories at low health. It were patched so that reclaim wouldn't give resources but only reduce the health of the target.

Why is this a problem? Couldn't it just be considered a feature?

I agree with Godde, even if you get just a portion of the metal, especially if healing is free, people use reclaim on their own units to get metal and then repair them for free. This is weird, how can a fightingmachine perform just as good if you just take out half of the metal that was needed to build it. Its like you need 100 metal for 1 ultimate fighting robot. But once you got it, there is a lot of features on it that you really don't need, just reclaim that metal out of your robot and repair the armor and it will do fine.