Engineer auto-repair nearby units toggle

You need to cover your base with anti-nuke. Or just get your resources spread across the map, so one nuke never hurt you beyond repair.

BTW, I actually very rare got power gen/shield gen damaged, but not destroyed power generators. And I rarely build shields in FA (as I prefer Cybran - their shields are crap anyway).

The most effective way to repair structures is to prevent any damage to them.

No one is such a horrible player that their units never survive a fight, or such a good player that they never take damage. Likewise it's clear that an army at full health is more effective than an army with many units at half health or near death.

I think the reason some of you don't repair your units is because the UI is set up in such a way that giving out commands to have units repaired takes too much time.

If the game offers a way to have your units repaired without needing to give out any additional commands it is something that everyone will benefit from.

In FA, unless you are playing some positional warfare map, most unit battles are made from waves. You hold one wave, but soon it will be the second one. So your forces are always on the frontline - no "back to base" moves. And in most cases frontline is something very unstable, so you can't really expect any structures there - no "auto repair stations". Only option you left with is engineers. But next wave will surely kill them, so you need to constantly keep an eye on them or sacrifice build-power of one factory to produce engineers in a stream.

Alternatively you may just build just another factory and produce new units at cost saved from not making any repairs.

If you really-really do care about auto-repair, only viable suggestion would be self-repair. But it's too much OP.

Strange, I remember that in TA repairing was very important.
Losing your first Heavy Laser Tower was often a turning point in the game.
And they were not placed inside your base but often in an advance position.

One benefit of repair is in games where the units gain experience. For example, one unit with exp gained from 10 kills may be more powerful than a green unit straight from the factory.

Depending on the benefits of experience (could be better accuracy, quicker aiming, faster firing, improved defence/armour/shields, etc) it may be worth the hassle of repairing (especially in early game when you may not have many units) in order to gain a slightly edge later in the game

Don't count on it.
http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=517055#p517055

You'll find a beefy amount of discussion on repair here:
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=35340

In fact, a lot of this discussion on smart engineers has a strong connection to cutting out the middle man and letting units regenerate themselves. But don't tell anyone I said that, it'll start another 20 page flame war! :lol:

You do make some valid points, I barely ever repair, unless it's a critical structure or it's s thing that I just happen to see that needs repairing

But I'm confused as to your stance on the OP, would engineers that can auto-repair your army just after a battle from within the army itself be a good thing? I think having your half-dead army on the opponent's doorstep turned into a full-HP army (regardless of the second army you have behind it), can only be a good thing

No. Repairs from engineering units, which not only represent an investment from the player but also a weak point in the game's unit dynamic, are not the same thing.

I don't see why, seeing as how the game is going to be massively customisable,
players can't select repair patrols etc, if that's what they want, but to those that
prefer to just keep on building, fine, keep on building.

This game ought to be capable of offering entertainment to many different types
of players, and many different ways of waging war.

The problem with repair in the SupCom franchise was the following:


For one, repair was slow and time consuming (bring unit back from the front, micro the repairers, slow repair speeds, pretty ridiculous repair costs for units like the ACU, etc.)

For the other, there was no efficiency penalty applied to units for being in a damaged state, meaning they stayed 100% operational even in a 5% healthy state.


The latter is what, for instance, in late beta resulted in the base reclaim fad, where people whould take 80% of their resources back out of their buildings through partial reclamation, essentially hollowing them out with no efficiency loss. GPG changed reclaim to work differently then, by introducing the 'reclaim first creates a wreck' mechanic.

I would have preferred damaged structures to simply linearly or logarithmically scale down their buildspeed and resource output with damage, and repair speeds to be upped. Damaged units could have had their rate of fire (ground units) and movement speed (air units) decreased, for example, but depending on how they are balanced it's not necessary unless these are high value units, because they usually die in combat anyway and you need that mass to be dealing damage, not tying up engineers back home for repairs. Buildings are a different story!

This would also offset those all-or-nothing moments when youm anage to sneak some damage dealers under a shield every now and then, yet they don't manage to destroy anything. Or early game harrassment where a 1 HP mex still counts as a full mex.


That said, that auto repair suggestion by zidonuke makes a lot of sense because it's cutting out the middle man - simplifying micro in a very sensible way. It'd work well with the reduced efficiency model I suggested (if there was a way to fast-repair, e.g. By turning the structure off)

Stuff like this seems intentional; If you are using the build power of just one engineer to repair everything, obviously it can only go so quickly, you really should be using more engineers.

An insufficient user interface is the only thing preventing engineer repairs from being widely used. That and the 100 percent repair cost. Try playing a game where repairs are cheaper than producing new units and you will find it to be invaluable.