Engineers and constructor types.

There have been a fair amount of suggestions on this forum for mine artillery and bombers, but even these sound like band-aids meant to alleviate the annoyances rather than solve them. Simply allowing regular construction units to build mines seems most intuitive.

The suggestion for orders as first-class entities then would probably seal the deal.

I think a lot of people are underestimating how important differences between constructors can be as well as overestimating the power of aircraft constructors. I am speaking from experience here having made such a system work.

Constructors interact with combat units in their normal use so their health is important. A constructor with a lot of health will be better for reclaiming/repairing/constructing on the frontline or for expanding as it is less likely to be sniped.

A speedy constructor is a better expander and allows you to quickly shuffle around BP.

High BP/cost makes for a good base constructor.

These are three important attributes and we haven't even reached movetypes.

The best BP/cost constructor will often be spammed for base construction. To 'solve' this I like construction towers which posses the best BP/cost. They will be used for their BP/cost but have very little flexibility so you will always need mobile constructors.

The mobility of air constructors is just an attribute that can be balanced by downsides. Many times in Zero-K 1v1 I will have access to air and ground constructors and still make a mix of both for different tasks. Air constructors can have very poor BP/cost to make them best used when mobility is important. Additionally they can be hit by AA which makes them very risky to put on a frontline.

I've played a little ZK as well as other Spring mods and I agree with googlefrog.

While many kinds of engineers may be a bit more difficult to balance, this means that different people will have different strategies when it comes to construction/assisting/reclamation. Do you assist your frontline with air engies with high mobility but weak buildpower, or do you use the less mobile but more reliable land engies? Engineering towers may be more efficient, but they're also immobile. What if you need to evacuate your base?

I've always liked the UEF combat engie from SupCom. He had a limited build pool, but was really speedy and could defend himself from the occasional enemy while reclaiming and repairing.

No-one seems to have pointed out yet that FA had a flying engineer too, albeit a rarely used one, for the UEF, obtained via an ACU upgrade. It cost the same as a T2 engineer, but could only build T1 structures, and had the same build speed as a T1 engineer, although its reclaim and capture abilities were very useful due to its mobility. Its health was tiny, and its speed was about twice that of a normal engineer.

Despte its cost and vulnerability, it was amazingly useful to be able to reclaim wreckage and build structures anywhere on the map in small games, to capture outlying enemy mass extractors for example. But this is the sort of degree of balance I would like to see if flying engineers were included: very low health, not as fast as most air units, much more cost/build power ratio, and preferably a contruction palette limited to basic base-building structures. If so, then they would certainly relieve a lot of the management in moving engineers around with transports, although that should still be a used mechanic I believe.

And, unrelatedly, I also liked the T2 UEF combat engineer, with its jamming ability, health, limited build pool etc. although maybe a little AA gun would be better than just a direct fire weapon?

In another pro-multi type engineer argument. Planets and moons and asteroids are going to be vastly different. I seem to remember reading or hearing early in the kickstarter campaign that airless planets and planetoids might affect flying units, since we're also having all water worlds and gas giants, this seems to necessitate multiple engineer types, something flying for gas giants (I have little idea how gas giant combat will work, but I'm sure Uber does), something aquatic or amphibious for water planets, something land based for airless environments.

Also many people are wondering how to make single faction/unit pool interesting. Gating unit types like TA did, through tier 2 factories being built by specific tier 1 engineers, is one way of doing so. Going for air or vehicle or bot changes play style, choices and such. It forms a tech tree rather than just tech tiers. Now whether you're for or against that structure, that could be a pro or a con, but it is a consideration.

If I may interject, there is one consideration of air-cons in a modern RTS that nobody seems to have considered yet.

Air-cons had the issue that their high mobility means that a player could build anywhere. Their high mobility was offset by their low build power, however, this had little impact when players could just build giant swarms of them. I remember the TA days of giant, clipping, circular swarms of T2 air-cons, throwing up Berthas and Intimidators at a frightening pace.

However, I'm hoping that PA air-craft will have collision boxes. As a result, the player won't be able to build an infinite swarm, as new aircraft won't be able to get close enough to help with the construction project. There may well be a de-facto cap on the number of air-cons that can effectively assist a single build.

As a result, any single project relying purely on air-cons will still take a while to build (assuming they still have a low BP). More air-cons could still be used to build multiple structures a bit quicker, however, any one structure would take a while to become operational, meaning they are an easy target without support.

Therefore, as long as air-cons have low build power, a short-ish range, and collision boxes, I don't believe they will be anywhere near as bad in PA as they were in TA.

Lots of good discussion going on here. I think it'd be interesting to see the kind of niches we can come up with for engineers. Zero-K did it pretty well, with its invisible engineers, armed engineers, shielded engineers, floating engineers, flying engineers, etc.

There's probably a bunch of roles that can be filled with things that primarily build stuff, to make each one unique and useful under its own circumstances.

I pretty much agree with this and I would add that there is a certain X factor that people seem to ignore sometimes. I called it giving the game "texture" which basically means just doing things because they are fun. The whole awesome instead of realistic thing. I personally feel the lack of different types of fabbers removes some interesting surface area from the game. Rough it up by adding texture and the game feels different. I have no issue with having swarms of construction aircraft personally. Just remember they cost more and are easier to kill. How many times have you had a bunch of construction aircraft killed rapidly because they are clustered?

I would love to see an experimental engineer. Something with ten nanolathes that could reclaim a whole battlefield in seconds, or one massive nanolathe. I don't know why supcom never did that.

I know the topic of experimentals in PA is a bit iffy and I suppose it could be a naval ship or orbital unit instead, but I love the idea of a monkeylord with a massive nanolathe instead of a maser.

Another thing I want to mention. I hate when certain builders have a needlessly limited build palette over others, like construction ships being limited to building waterborne structures. Many times I want to set up a land factory or claim a metal spot just on the shore.

Agreed. IMO engineers should be differentiated by chassis only, and each chassis can be balanced by having more or less buildpower. They should all be able to build the same things, provided they can get there, and there shouldn't be any tech tiers for the same chassis. (All of Uber's arguments against tech tiers for units with the same functionality can be used against tech tiers for engineers.) Advanced factories should be upgraded from basic factories like in Supcom. I think that's enough texture in terms of engineers, if you add tier 2 engineers with incrementally higher buildpower and a larger palette it just gets messy.