Rethinking the Build Mechanic - Engineer Swarms

Make the engineer fragile, a bit explosive and with a higher build time.
People can still mass them, but they have to protect them either because a good raid can cripple their economy.
So you could choose to play safe and build a lot of factories, take a bet and make mass engi, or just make a bit of both.

It seems that there will be no shield, which is good in that regard.

If you think Tetris is nontrivial when all you have are rectangles, your spatial reasoning is significantly lacking. I'm not suggesting bloody L-shaped units, I thought that much would be obvious.

So you're saying "Why have one UI element that can do six things when you can have six that do one?" Screen space is not free, citizen.

What about an engineering assist structure like the cybrans had in FA?

versatile, upgradeable structure, can be given more build power than an engineer via upgrades, can switch which factory it is assisting as required, can auto repair/reclaim around the base as well.

Here we go again...

Sorry vshah, through no fault of yours, this thread is treading the same old ground covered elsewhere which I tried to head off at the start.
But no, the OP's idea is a beautiful and unique snowflake so why on earth would we want to merge it with something extremely similar to avoid repeats!?

I think the OP is saying that engineers live in a factory and assist from the inside instead of assisting by taking up space around it.

I personally liked the swarms of construction aircraft. I personally took advantage of the oversight in Forged Alliance where you could individually select the UEF Rovers from the Engineering stations and have them assist things outside the range of their towers for massive insta-build (and subsequent economic collapse ). They were somewhat balanced in that one AOE missile explosion could take nearly the whole swarm out. And then doing stupid things like reclaiming large enemy combat units with a swarm in TA was equally gratifying (although not strategically sound).

The problems seem to comes when having a bunch of ground-bound engineers assisting, since they collectively clog the base around the factory. I didn't consider this too bad of a thing since it was a trade-off between a less clogged base and faster build. One solution, then is aircraft.

A couple of ideas to ease the pain on some of the issues would be:
1) have easy ways to select all engineers that are assisting a factory
2) possibly have engineers assisting factories get special exemption from selection of all engineers unless you execute the command twice
3) have engineers remember to leave a path for newly constructed units
4) have engineers always keep their nanolathes ready when assisting (assuming there is more in the factory's build queue) to avoid inefficiency with factory assist
5) show the effective build rate of a factory with all currently assisting engineers when you select/hover the factory

I can't really offer a solution, but I can say that one of the defining characteristics of TA/SupCom from other RTSs was the use of space in a simulated physics way (bullet physics, units colliding, unit movement acceleration, sloped terrain, etc.). Seems to me that solving a spatial problem by removing it entirely might make it a bit less TA-ish, IMO.

Just my two cents.