Engineers Separate from Building chains

One thing I dislike in other RTS's is when you lose an engineer, the entire chain of things he was working on is lost with him. Would it be a good idea to create the building chain and then assign engineers to it?
To build off of this: Assign an engineer midway through the chain so he can work on something big and all the others can catch up to him.

Well in games like sup com, this would only really be a problem if you had only one engineer on the job which normally people i play with don't do. so you would have about 3 engineers helping to build one thing or have an engineering station zone where you would spam engineering stations to assist with repair and construction around your base, but i do see where your coming from; so perhaps we could have a build queue and if the initial engineer is destroyed, the next closest engineer adds that build queue onto the end of his. If an engineer with a build queue is too far away however, perhaps that is a situation where the build queue won't pass on. so that you don't get a backlog of build queues.

This should not only apply to building chains.
But to nearly every command.

To put it in simpler terms, if units are assisting another unit, and that unit dies, then they will take over said units orders.

This has been discussed before, and several solutions have been presented. (One of the favorites is orders existing as first class entities, meaning they persist independently of the unit that has been ordered.) So the devs probably have something planned.

sylvesterink, Excellent. Couldn't find it mentioned in my shallow scan of the forums, but not naive enough to think that I was the only one thinking about it.

syox, to patrols at least. I can't remember how it worked in SupCom... could you attach unit to an existing patrol or did you have to reissue it over and over for any extra unit you wanted to add. (This is separate from orders you set via the building.)

You could just "add" engineers to the pool by telling them to assist the "main" engineer that is carrying out all the Building queue's.

It was discussed in my thread Flow Field Base Building

With no developer feedback though, we have no idea if they are aware of these suggestions.

and the recent live demo they just gave shows the a-typical select unit + lay down a build queue system that is common to the TA & SUPCOM games. I can't really blame them though, it would be a big risk changing a system that your core audience is already familiar with.

Although Jon did mention that he is willing to look beyond established features such as the mini-map just because its the current convention. If they have a better way of implementing it, then they will go in their own direction. So I haven't gave up all hope just yet.

But if the main engineer dies then isn't the chain lost? Definitely, if you lose all those engineers the chain is lost.

It won't be expansive to replace the lost engineers.

And that's not what the thread is about.

perhaps if have a priority system for construction (which would allocate resources accordingly during a stall) and a builder is set to high priority the building queues would persist such that patrolling engies could take over as if assisting a ghost engineer or new engies could be tacked onto the build queue by right clicking one of the virtual building placements.


i'm not really convinced this is necessary though, it seems like a major investment for what ultimately is tertiary to things like balance, competitive play, diversity of strategy, etc.

Building, attacking and moving are all the same. They're orders.

This idea is discussed in detail here:

Orders as First-Class Entities (OFCEs)