No more: 100 engineers around a factory

I hope that PA will disabled this stupidity: the race's engineers with 150 engineer helping a factory.
I create a poll to know if people like that SupCom fact or not.

In Total Annihilation, it was even more stupid when your engineer was blocking the factory exit. You had to put wall around the engineer to avoid that.

While the idea of engineers helping factories was a good idea, in supcom there should have been some sort of limit to it, say 5 or so(or even limit them to normal factories not experimental), to ensure that it didnt become a situation where you would spam engineers then set them all onto a experimental factory for example.

TA was better than SC on this due to flying engineers.

Balancing the right number of engineers vs the time lost when a unit exits the factory was kinda fun I thought.

200 Construction aircraft in TA, build anything nearly instantly. It is a little ridiculous.

I'm curious if people want factory assists at all. Personally, I don't mind, but I've heard opinions both for and against.

I'd definitely support diminishing returns for this.

Hmm, yeah. At most the build speeds of factories could be limited to 4x normal with assistance...?

Could there be a more accurate poll?

It was best like it was in TA. <3 flying engineers that support any kind of construction without limitation.

Spamming Support Commanders and having each assist the Quantum Gateway resulting in exponential amounts of Support Commanders is something I hope to be able to do again in PA.

Or taking 50 SCUs and building an air factory, near instantly levelling it to tech 3 and spamming air units.

I want to be able to do this stuff, I do not want to run into some arbitrary "Only 5 assists allowed" rule. It should be epic, and assisting without limits allows you to make large armies fast without having to build 100 factories.

Best choice? Limit it only by how they did it in TA (space limitations). Plus having a bunch of planes help make units super fast is awesome, and it doesn't come without it's cost (like someone said before, you lose out while the unit created left the construction plant. If you did that on super powerful units, like the krogoth, your resources would come down to a crawl (seeing as how much energy/metal per second was used depended on the cost of the unit/structure being built). It always seemed fine to be. The only problem I had was the one the op stated, having you construction units constantly block the exit, even if you only had one there (not counting lanes of course).

It should just be more viable to build another factory than assisting one factory with 100 engineers.

Why make a game with limitations? The best thing about supreme commander and TA was all of the choices you have...If I take the time to make my economy so perfect that I can afford to spam unit after unit then I should have the ability to do so.

The engineer not sitting still/getting in the way was a pain, but that is why you would spend the extra resources to make construction aircraft.

I support this.

Actually, I think it would be best to go with the diminishing (spelling?) returns idea. I liked building everything ultra-fast, but think about it.

We have a HUGE planet (well, multiples, but...). Land control should matter; one base and some outposts around mass deposits, and maybe a forward base near one too could be so much better. If this assisting isn't so efficient, you'd need to build multiple factories. Which need defences. Which takes space.

Bam, huge bases, large swathes of the map covered, more options for assaults, more strategy.

Or, when you send stuff to a different planet. Send a thousand engineers, and you have a hundred Monkeylords in no time with assists. Seems a bit silly; you should build up a base and take control of the planet, I think. Occupy the lands with factories.

I like supporting factories but only to a certain point. I would like it more to build more factories than support one factory like crazy. 100 t1 engies in FA around an airfac just looks ridiculous... also for the reasons of balancing, in FA you got Kennel Stations and so on, but at least in PA everything will be the same...so it is not that bad, but having one single factory and one hundred engies...

Really, I'm not sure how SupCom did it, but it was easy to stack construction units onto construction plants in TA, people still built lots of buildings. In fact, the whole map was covered in them, no matter how big the map got. Instead of imposing artificial limits, how about finding out where SupCom went wrong from TA's method.

i would support up to 100 engineers... AKA each adds Added speed=engineerspeed%*(1-(# of engineers*0.01)

The reason why it is more efficient to put t1 engines on t3 factories is simple: if you want to have more buildpower on t3-unit-production you either need to build more t3 factories or you need to assist an existing one. I dont know the numbers anymore, but the buildpower/price factor of t3 factories is just bad compared to what you get with t1 engie-spam. Thats why on t1 people just spammed factories while on t2 or t3 they spammed t1 engies to support a single t3 factory.
so instead of randomly limiting how much you can support factories we just need to balance the buildpower/price ratio of factories and engies.

I cant think of a way to balance this out with the concept of SupCom, since there teching worked like this:

-> make t1 factory
-> tech up t1 factor to t2.

so every t2 factory that you want to build starts out as a t1 factory.
since the step from t1 to t2 has to be rather expensive to make it a risk to tech up early you cant just decrease the price of the t1->t2 tech. Increasing the buildpower of t2 factories isnt a good idea either, since this might easily hurt the t1/t2 balance.

A concept -inspired by TA-that might introduce the need to spam t2 factories could look like this:

-> make t1 factory
-> build a special kind of engineer -special is important here: this cannot be the same kind of engineer you make to build mex and stuff-
-> that special engineer can build t2 factories.

this way we can tweak the initial cost of going t2 without affecting the buildpower/price ratio of t2 factories, since the price of the special engineer could be high and the price of the t2 factory low.

since it might just be stupid to have 2 types of engineers on t1 it might look better to give normal t1 engineers the possibility to be upgraded instead.

it just boils down to: decouple the price of making t2 factories from the price to initially "research" t2.

...this is ofc all only about t2 unitproduction, for expensive buildings and stuff like that we still need a ton of engineers and thats fine with me, so I still say it is okay to have huge swarms of engineers^^

There's a lesser-played Spring game called NOTA that doesn't allow factory assists at all.

Might be worth playing to see how that works. Factories become a kind of resource, end up spamming quite a few. Plays quite well but maybe a little slow paced.

I don't mind it either way personally, but it would take a long time to build an experimental without assist.

Seconded.

There's a cost (or should be) associated with every economic action/decision in games like this. If you want to build an army of engineers, go ahead ... but you're not gonna be able to build as many defensive or offensive units while you're busy pumping out engineers.

If you don't like people to have that many engineers, put a unit cap on engineers for your game, not for mine.

I support engineers speeding up production to some extent, but what I don't like is T2 engineers building faster (and you could say the same about T2 factories producing faster). I hope they can find a way to make it so there's only one tier of engineer units. Maybe you could upgrade T1 factories into T2 ones, and T1 engineers could build all structures after you upgrade your commander or something.