Capturing other units

I never played Supreme Commander 2. From what I can tell, that game had all sorts of problems.

Your percieved double benefit to capturing is from inputting the outcome without also the prior cost. Capturing could easily be made to take twice as long as reclaiming. The time cost of one capture then is worth two reclaims. In Forged Alliance, capturing takes longer than reclaiming- and I regularly weight the time of both against each other during engineer fights and commander incursions around my opponent's structures. Furthermore, it's not even true that the benefit to capturing is two fold - capturing means you're not banking the resources of that unit's worth which could go to other useful things; or leaving wreckage from just destroying it which then can be reclaimed.

Regardless, I still don't see it as a problem. Capturing is a risky move that leaves the performing unit extremely vulnerable. If you can't even muster a single defence tower to permenantly thwart capturing units, you deserve to pay the price.

I still say flying units that can capture will be OP in some way. Maybe if capture was not stacked it would be ok but if it was a swarm of flying builders could decimate a base.

Looking at it I guess it would be ok to let them capture but perhaps at a slower rate than other builders.

Yeah. That's the other thing. Partial reclaim is possible. Partial damage is possible. Partial capture is not. So while it's twice as good when it does work, it's completely ineffective when it doesn't. It's quite binary.

It'll be pretty tricky to make capture a useful mechanic, and not much more than a neat gimmick.

That really is not a problem. In Forged Alliance, capturing is not a problem.

capturing is really only a major issue when you are stealing tech or neutral buildings.

It's not really a problem, per se. However, it makes a very tenuous tipping point between super effective and worthless.