Engineer auto-repair nearby units toggle

Maybe this goes without saying. I hope it does. But I thought I'd bring it up to be sure.

I would like the engineer AI to repair nearby damaged units without being told to. That's all.

And you would be able to disable it if you're tight on resources.

certainly i think there should be guard area and repair in area abilities, if Uber added Retreat zones i would hope would also encourage engineers to autoheal anything in the area. maybe its just zero-k (i haven't played TA) but it would be really nice if i could set caretakers to ignore helping factories or assist in constructions so they can focus on healing my units and reclaiming wreckage.

All those things are great, but they can be a hassle. Sometimes I just want to leave an engineer with my army and let it repair automatically without using area heal.

Theres a simple way to do it:
All enginners are set to auto-repair/auto-reclaim by default. Those buttons on the "Orders" Tab are marked in any color. To turn the 'auto' on/off you need to click with the right button on the mouse or clicking by holding CTRL.

I believe its very useful when you have a large amount of enginners and is busy with an insane war rolling on.
o/

Done in Supcom2.

The AI had a really nasty habit of stopping to pick up the trash(reclaim), rather than tend to the army.

"Autocast" on-field repairs are not the only way. Dune 2 has a cute system, where if you own a Repair Facility and a Carryall, it will automatically transport all badly damaged vehicles to repair facility and repair them. I even prefer this system to autocast healing in futuristic disguise. Dune 2 way is more organic, is more dramatic (will it save the tank in time?!)
Unfortunately, Carryalls in Dune 2 don't transport repaired units back.

Why not just build new units? It seems useless to me as I never had to repair anything other than power generators and other important buildings. :|

Pretty much this, PA will be a game with units numbering in the hundreds, maybe thousands eventually, why should I care about 10-20 units that are damaged when I can replace in them in a minute or 2?

Mike

Because it's more economical to repair rather than to buy a new one.

Planned obsolescence is a fact. Don't fall for this crap. The Light Bulb Conspiracy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A1UeV5mC_w

Time is money. To repair you are wasting your time/attention to save resources. In most games it means that you are losing much more "money" than saving. Never repaired anything in SupCom. Maybe few turrets in rare cases, but if you need to repair a turret to survive you are screwed anyway.

If you are repairing units then that implies you are either shooting out of your base (probably about to die) or you are dragging units out of the fight back to somewhere safe enough to be repaired, if not back to your base itself. Forget the raw resources, this is a waste of your army and it's time.

You never repaired a power/shield generator?

Engineers tend to be slow, expensive, and not very effective at shooting things. They'd be terrible for helping out a fast army. But if the army is a lumbering deathball, why not? Repair support is a great way to keep an army mobile, and make a heavy push even more devastating. When they're not fixing things, engineers can build front line defenses, capture enemy stuff, and reclaim wreckage.

A few select units can even have a special trait of being super easy to repair or reclaim, making them great with a mobile engineering team.

Supcom repairs also had a bogus full repair cost of 100% resources. Even assisting a shield bubble cost 100% mass, a feature that made practically no sense. Better to spam shields, which regenerated for FREE, and not get hurt in the first place.

In Totala, repair cost a little bit of energy and worked at a fixed HP/sec rate. In supcom2, repair was free, fast, and had a cap of one engineer per target. In PA, repair could do fine if it cost energy (even 100% energy, but little to no metal), and had a decent enough speed.

This is not yet proven. All that's been stated is the engine technology will be extremely scalable. Scalable unit count =/= massive scale in typical balanced games.

In the Balanced Annihilation matches I've played, repairs are actually pretty crucial for keeping your standing units from dying, and you from losing the game.

But if you think about it how can it not be true? If you get more planets, you need to compensate with the ability to build more units.

Also this will happen regardless of anything on Uber's part, my current rig runs FA 4-5x times better than the rig I had back in 2007, i can play with 7 Sorian AIxes on a 10km map without dipping into a negative game speed for at least an hour, I'll also naturally have BlackOps running as well. As the average Computer gets better people will be able to do more in the game.

Also Uber has actually said that to be one of their goals.

Mike

Uber have also implied the capabiliy of matches holding up to 40 players, and this being tailored towards larger end planet chains/systems, probably to handle the increased overhead as a result.

Engine scalability is not the same as gameplay optimized balanced play. After all these years that computer power has progressed since Supreme Commander has been out, I can log into FA Forever today and find 40+ kilometre maps remaining as unplayed as ever.

The point is I don't think the exact scale for typical unit battles should be hastily asserted when discussing which game functions won't work until the first testers get their hands on the product and can tear apart the balance dynamic. (Or if the precieved issue doesn't in fact have to do with balance and user interface rather than scale.)

Speaking for myself, I used the auto-repair capability a lot in TA (especially with aircraft construction bots) because I could set a couple of them on patrol paths around (for example) remote resource-bases to the rear, and not to have to worry about manually coordinating their repairs.

Likewise, when using ground troops (not my preferred form of attack), I'd usually have a number of engies floating above performing repairs - it helped absorb the damage from defensive artillery etc whilst the furball was rolling towards the opposing base. Didn't help much once it arrived, but it did help to ensure it arrived in good health.

edit: as for the drain on time and attention - what drain? Thats the whole point of making it automatic. Sure, you have to remember to send some engies along with the units (or send an engie out to the base that just fought off the attack if there aren't any left) - but you don't have to spend time & attention ordering it to repair each unit / building.

No. In most cases if your shield generator exhausted it's destroyed second later. If it's not - no need to repair it. Same with power. Why I should repair something that is working well even in damaged condition? If it got damaged, I will spend resources required for it's repair on another turret to prevent any further damage.

Sounds like a risky strategy. You're leaving potential dormant nukes at low health in your base that could suddenly detonate from a stray projectile. At least, from what I remember powerplants could go up with quite a bang.

The strategy to prevent all risk is kill the enemy before he kills you

PA doesnt have shields, its likely that power generators wont go nuclear and/or encourages players to build safely rather than all the power concentrated in a small portion of the base.