Engineers Boosting Factory Production

It's not the factories but the economy - TA had paper-thin T1 metal extractors, and shooting a solar power generator would cause it to turn off briefly. This allowed small raids to put a dent in an oppenents economy without a massive risk. The upshot was metal extractors were cheap and could be replaced easily (but only if constructure units were nearby), and power generators got damage reduction when turned off.

In Sup Com, only outlying mex's can be seriously raided by land forces, and the mexes take a while to kill. This makes it much more of a risk to commit forces to doing so, as this potentially leaves your base exposed to a much larger force.

Factories have a period of idle time where units are walking off the pad. The faster the build, the more often it happens. With infinite build power, a factory can only build as fast as units can walk off the pad.

In supcom, this made a huge difference between land factories and air factories. A land fac took 5+ seconds for units to wander off, while an air factory was nearly instant. That's one of many reasons that air spam became effective.

Firstly, If you read the rest of my post i say exactly that point (not sure why you cut off my post in your quote and restate something i said that you removed).

Secondly, the amount of downtime could only be cut down by having the builders switch between factories they are assisting so they are always contributing their build speed to something. I'll admit that yes, at that stage you get the most efficiency from building out of a handful of factories there of whatever.

Regardless that is all besides the point, discussing the minutia of squeezing out an extra 6% efficiency (not a real value, the real value doesn't really matter) from your end game unit construction. From my modest experience of competitive play I have never seen the difference between spamming efficiency outweigh the need for the type of unit you are going to produce.

I'd rather see a system that not just stacks build power, but something like this:

(forgive my lovely coding)
Factory build speed = 100 = B
50 - (amount of engineers assisting x 10) = A
If A<0
Then
Set A to 0
A + B = C
C = total build speed/capacity.

So you can use 5 engineers to assist a factory, a 6th one would be useless. This way, players are encouraged to build multiple factories at a greater cost, instead of mass-spamming engineers to assist.

Could have just said you can't assist with more than 5 engineers =P

I have no problem with any of this. Let the chips fall I say.

Also, if you went the expensive factories, insane build power route, the player would still ultimately be constrained by his resources.

All these people who want to directly nerf assisting are attacking the symptom and not the problem.

^ LOL That brought back so many memories. My friend and I did an experiment on a map, goal was that he couldnt get a single fighter past my AA screen which was triple layered around my island and I lost that bet when he built on smaller islands around me with the whole engineer orgy going on that looked like some Rocky Horror Picture Show, Nanite Bukkake edition going on.

My suggestion is.

Each factory has an X Amt of production upgrades in which you can place an X amount of engineers. Tier 1 upgrade allows for 2 Tier 1 engineers or 1 Tier 2 so on and so forth.

Before you dive in with your ideas, I suggest giving this a read;

viewtopic.php?f=61&t=35489&start=0

Mike

Well, I generalize economy to include build power. You spend resources to produce things which allow you to spend your metal.

But anyway I know what you mean, raids can attack energy structres. I failed to say 'raiding on bases' is less powerful but that is what I meant. Raids on mexes are mostly unchanged.

In my experience engineers are weak to raiding. If factories are the most efficient source of BP there are a lot less engineers, there is less opportunity to damage unit production. With less targets in a base raiding becomes less powerful.

Not that raiding will be useless. Just that if you keep everything equal and remove engineers from a base there are less targets to raid so raiding is less powerful.

Googlefrog's right, the only thing that small raids can really kill in SC are engineers and power generators, everything else (Mass extractors, factories) have too much HP for a few units to kill within about 10-30 seconds

However, factories with lower HP would just lead to people preferring engineers over more factories ><

I think the high HP of factories might have been a way for GPG to nudge the player towards using them instead of engineers, and it mostly works, the only time we see "the swarm" appear tends to be at the back of Seton's clutch (When the base can rarely be raided) or in naval production (where the factories are quite vulnerable to long range bombardment, and engineers can just run inland)

Just make metal extractor as fragile as in TA. You'll need engineer to rebuild them anyway. I don't see having factories harder raid as a problem.