Reclaimation and functional buildings

So anyone who was in on the early days of supcom remembers that you could reclaim buildings partially without reducing functionality. This was true in TA as well, but once supcom came around, at which point multiplayer and competitive play were much more important, this became an exploit, and the fix was that you didn't get resources until the building was complete. This was acceptable, except that the "fix" extended to the landscape, ie, you got resources for rocks, etc in a lump sum at the end.

The purpose of this post is to simply inform/remind (for those who worked on supcom) of this issue.

Personally, I'd like to see buildings return to a wireframe as soon as you start reclaiming it, but the supcom fix is also acceptable. On the other hand, I feel that terrain should always be reclaimed as a continuous stream.

Feel free to discuss alternate methods for reclaimation here.

When you reclaim wreakage you start getting the resources streight away in SupCom

Yes, and you could also reclaim your factories....while they were still building you units. You could reclaim most of the mass of a building without reducing it's ability to build you units. This was a problem, and that's why I was addressing it in my post.

Yeah you can't do it to buildings and recive resources untill you have fully reclaimed it, but you can to wreakage.

Ok, I guess they fixed it, sorry. I guess I just stopped paying attention to it after it wasn't a problem :?

Who could have anticipated that someone would abuse a full strength structure that refunded most of its cost?

Thats alright, but you bring up the question of wheather structuires being reclaimed or damaged should get slower or less efficent?

On unit's it is kinda silly becuse you just replace them but with buildings it is diffrent, advanced buildings like nuke silos cant really be replaced on the fly.

In TA you got all of your reclaim in one chunk once it had finished reclaiming, and in Supcom they switched to a constant flow system which was better. This had the effect of meaning you could reclaim a factory while it was building and get resources, and this was patched around by later requiring all units and buildings to be at zero HP before they could be reclaimed.

I think that the modified SupCom version works fine, I don't think there's any room for improvement really.

Zero-K does this. Once you start reclaiming your own units they stop working and are going through the building phases backwards until they have been completely sucked up.
You can only reclaim your own units though so reclaim can't be used as a weapon in Zero-K.

Another thing that is also relevant to how reclaimation can/should work depends on how repairs will work in PA.

You can only reclaim your own units in Zero-K? That sounds like an arbitrary limitation and those should be avoided as much as possible. SupCom's method makes more sense: you can only reclaim something at zero HP, i.e. once it has become a wreck.

I see no reason why reclaim shouldn't be able to be used offensively. One submarine could kill a commander if he was unable to reclaim it.

Reclaim as a weapon hasn't been that important in SupCom or any other TA-like game I have played. You got the odd engineer fights and sometimes you manage to reclaim a raider when the enemy isn't watching. Even subs can kite commanders in the water in SupCom so it is a question about micro and attention.
It would be cool if you engineers could counter some types of units in PA with their nanolathe without it having to be excessive additional micro but otherwise I don't mind you being unable to reclaim enemy units.

No. Reclaim hasn't been functional in Supcom or any other TA-like game, because the AI failed to treat hostile damaging tools as a weapon. Constructors could still deal their damage, but extra micro was required.

Supcom2 had the strongest incarnation of engineers yet. They had good endurance, free repair, a reclaim gun, and a fairly fast capture beam. They were nasty buggers, but the amount of micro needed to use them was crazy. In particular, it was the theme of the most annoying Supcom 2 mission ever. They were so insanely effective against your own units, that the only winning move was not to play.

I'm not overly familiar with all the technical details of how supcom handles reclaim. How much loss is there in return of initial investment when you reclaim a structure? At some point I imagine it would be better to finish off highly damaged with reclaim units than to repair.

I'm thinking of something like, if you had an experimental unit deep in enemy territory, you could try to 'killsteal' with engineers if it gets close to death.

I both love and hate that mission at the same time.

That was a brilliant mission.