In times gone, previous games such as TA and Supcom gave you the ability to patrol construction units to repair nearby damaged units. You also had the ability to construct repair/construction towers (Originally as a mod in TA, and then featured in SupCom as a official unit). I propose to take it one step further, by constructing a role on/role off facility for repairing, potentially a squads, company, or even battalions of units. The concept goes; the facility is one long conveyor belt system, with multiple nanolathe arms on either side. If you select (either drag box or squad assignment number), and right click on the facility, the squads of units will move to use the facility, and each individual unit will move on to the conveyor in turn (to a capped maximum). Once at the other end of the facility the unit will jump off the conveyor system and go to its next waypoint (if its on patrol, like aircraft with landing pads, it automatically uses the facility if its in close range and continues with its patrol. If you queued move orders, then the unit will go to its next waypoint). The speed of the conveyor will probably be determined by the amount of energy it can use, the worse damaged unit using the facility and the amount of units using it at the same time. What are your thoughts?
Yah this has come up in different incarnations, personally I like it. But I want to see repair become a more important part of the game. A similar suggestion I heard was idle factories acting as staging facilities (for their respective units), making them multi-role structures, much in the same way engineers are multi-role units. Before anyone tells me how horrible micro-ing repair on your units after a battle is -- I agree, you don't have to imagine a poor implementation of repair though. It could easily be automated much in the same way air staging and spring-style retreat zones are. So if it's automated and you don't have to think about it - what purpose does it provide? Well, you still would have to think about tactical retreat but nevermind that. The purpose would be to reward players who used their units well without the emphasis on individual unit micromanagement that a Veterancy system would have.
I just don't see any appeal to repairing units, never once in SupCom did I even find myself thinking "man if only I could repair units more efficiently". When dealing with armies on the scale you tend to see in these games, having more units is generally better than fewer, and any resources(Metal Energy and TIME) spend on repairs can be better spent(IMO) on doing things like building Eco, building more factories and better unit control result in having more units, I feel this is especially true given the lack of any type of Veterancy in PA where the surviving tanks are not more valuable than new tanks. Even if I have a bunch of half alive tanks, my new ones are available to instantly reinforce them due to the constant nature of thier construction. Once you get into larger battles, there tends to be enough shots flying that tanks will die quickly regardless of their actual health, and when it comes to DPS a tank with 1/100 hp shoots just as well as one with 100/100 hp. Admittedly there are some assumptions being made, but they're really basic stuff so it should be pretty safe. Mike
I guess it depends on whether you've played games with prominent heal/repair and if you enjoyed them. I like that I am rewarded for maintaining as much of my army as possible - as opposed to just reclaiming the wrecks which I will do anyway. Some notable examples of reward for preservation are TA (arm repair bots), Zero-K (cheap repair out of combat), StarCraft (medics), Dawn of War and Company of Heroes (discounted reinforcement and healing).
I would like to see some kind of repair facility in the game. I would prefer it be more like a structure that fairly quickly repairs anything in range, all at once at at minimal cost. Though it should not be able to assist building/construction like the sup-com ones could. Repairing, as long as its mostly automated is very useful for keeping your army large. All that is required for it to be better than simply making new units is that it be cheaper and more time effecive. If the 3 conditions for it are met it wwould have a worthy spot in the game.
Those are differnt types of RTS, just because repair/heal worked for them doesn't mean it should work for ake it any kind of requirement for PA, if anything the reasons I stated support the idea that Repair isn't well suited to PA. It's not about liking or disliking repair/heal on a fundamental level. Mike
Why would repair prevent large scale battles? Zero-K has effective repair and large scale battles, perhaps larger than SupCom. 1) These things aren't mutually exclusive, managing the economy should not preclude you from managing units and neither should prevent you from recuperating forces. Again, you don't need to imagine a poor implementation. 2) Unit control is less important in a system where repair is 100% cost. In such a system all that matters is dealing damage and securing reclaim. The result is binary because margin of victory doesn't matter. I think repair or any other type of recuperation mechanic makes for more interesting battle outcomes - did I route my opponent or did I win a pyhrric victory. This is tangently related but do you not find it silly that it was often more efficient to ctrl+k damaged units and then rebuild them in SupCom? I think we can agree to disagree.
Repair facilities are awful. They work on the assumption that retreating is a good idea. You can easily fix units by bringing a couple of engineers. A dedicated repair unit (like the TA FARK or SC2 Medivac) would also work.
I should clarify my post, I'm advocating for a cheap repair in general. Land staging facilities or retreat zones are a different matter (one of implementation).
That goes into auto-repair territory. Generally, autorepair is a poor idea as it represents a free and largely unpredictable influx of resources. You can't really control where damage happens, not at this scale. Leave regen to the cawadooty games. There's nothing wrong with having a small repair tax. The only issues we saw happened in Supcom, where repairing a unit was often more expensive than reclaiming and rebuilding it (or it was totally free in the case of Air staging facilities). Make sure that a unit's repair tax is consistent, and obey conservation of mass! It would be pretty of stupid to have a unit's wreckage return 90% of its mass yet cost more than 10% for repair...
i have to say that i kind of like repair facilities too. well, sure i was using them mostly in the command and conquer series where you have a lot less units, but there's another probably less known game that had cool repair facilities. the game is dark reign, an old RTS from 1997. units had a lot of settings, such as pursue range or stuff like that, but they had also a "damage tolerance" setting that was really cool. basically, if you had a repair facility and a unit that took more damage than its damage tolerance allows, as soon as it had free time it would go back to your base on its own, get repaired in the repair facility, and then come back to resume its patrol or whatever it was doing. of course the game was not perfect, and it sometimes resulted in units apparently deserting during a fight to get repaired which could be annoying, but the system of having units going to the repair pad on their own and then coming back was something i always admired, and i'd love to see it in PA. one of the key aspect is that reparing units should be better than making new ones. obviously we could make it through a lower ressource requirement, i think that's a good idea but repairing a unit should not exceed the amount of metal that would be lost if it was destroyed. for example when a unit blows up, the carcass has 90% of the mass required to build it (or less ? i feel 90% is a lot), or let's say 70% for the sake of the exemple. so i extract the following rule : -unit with 0% hp (destroyed) has 70% of its mass -unit with 100% hp (new) has 100% of its mass so if we draw a line between those two points, logically : -unit with 50% hp has 85% of its mass, repairs cost 15% of initial price -unit with 10% hp has 73% of its mass, repairs cost 27% of initial price -unit with 80% hp has 94% of its mass, repairs cost 6% of initial price and so on and so on, that would already be "more efficient" than ctrl-K-ing your units, since that would make you lose the metal percentage above 70%, but the difference would maybe barely be sensible. but the issue i that PA is a game about having LOTS of units, so repairs would only be interesting if we also play on the time required to make those repairs. rather than scaling the time with HP as it is with metal, i suggest making the repairs very fast, like one or two seconds (okay, i have no idea how long it takes to build an unit, but it should be as short as possible). it could be made as some kind of production line as someone previously proposed. Damaged units would get in through the entrance, go on some kind of conveiyor belt, and by the time they get out at the other side the repairs are over and the unit returns at its post without even stopping, whatever their hp % was. (after all, the frame of the unit is here, and internal structure mostly intact: 'just need to replace armor pieces, weld them, and go !) this way you can repair many units in a very short time (ie, well shorter than reclaim then rebuild) and more cost efficiently, without even having to do more than building the structure since your units would go there on their own (can be toggled on/off i guess, or else send the entire group in the repair factory manually after a battle) i also dare thinking this wouldn't take a very long time to program either. however refining the "auto repair and return" would be more tricky as it would require to make units avoid "danger zones" such as ennemy bases. :roll:
Repairs via nanotowers and engineers set to patrol would be perfect, since they're simple to set up and scale well. A dedicated FARK-like repair unit better able to keep up with attack groups would be neat too.
With all this nanotechnology, nanolathing, that sort of thing, do you honestly believe they wouldn't have some type of nanobots inside a unit to repair if it was damaged? Seriously, this is not a big deal. It doesn't have to be stupidly fast, nor does it have to cost anything at all. The unit doesn't have anything blown off. You're not shooting the arms off a Peewee MK II. It's not happening. There's no need for anything more than the energy required to run the nanobots which I seriously doubt will be anything even close to -1. I think that repair SHOULD play a function, perhaps not in a way that demands people to retreat, but something more flexible. Extremely slow self-repair might not repair the unit fully (even from like half hp) unless it doesn't see battle for several minutes, but it would give fixes from slight bumps to dings and scratches. The only thing I can see this causing a problem with would be the light weaponry on scouts, but if their weaponry is THAT weak, is it truly worth trying to attack something with that kind of miniscule damage? Their weaponry shouldn't be that weak to begin with if they're already the BEST scouts. It should definitely outdo regen. If anything, here's an idea. Engineers can have a repair field around them when repairing other units, so the nanobots that would be healing the Engineer would be repairing other units instead? I think auto-regen can have a place, but if it's too strong, then it definitely shouldn't be there at all.
