This came to me while responding to another thread and I want to give it its own thread: I was going to argue that assisting was only usefull up to the point where the time that a unit takes to leave a factory dictates the build time. But then I realised this did not apply to all factories. Only verhicle, ship and (to lesser extend?) bot factory's their units take a while to exit the factory. At sertain point having more assisting makes no difference and building more (assisted) factory's is the only way to produce more units at a time. But air units and Nuke's can leave their factory rather fast so increasing the animation time for air to exit and nuke's to fire can have a great influence on how fast you can spam these units. For example if it takes 30 seconds to fire a nuke, its spam potential is greatly reduced and to compensate you are forced to build more launchers. To visualy show this delay, the nuke could be build in a horizontal position and when completed it can animate to a lauch position when the player set its target. This lauch animation would be a time factor the player has no influence on. Only problem I have with my own idea is that sometimes nukes don't fire when you want to and with a delay this is going to be noticed later as well
I mentioned this somewhere else just a few moments ago. Mine was suggesting that the build start take longer, so it takes 30 seconds for the factory to start pumping nanolathe. This idea looks good too, this delays it's fire time. Either way, as long as nukes take longer to setup it will add un-assistable time, which adds more use in more silos. Also, more silos are already better because of build speed, efficiency, and "spreading your risk" so you don't lose nukes if sniped quite possibly by an enemy nuke, so this just continues that direction. However, a good idea nonetheless. Air facts could use a longer rolloff time. I was saddened when roll-off times were reduced slightly, the idea was sublime to limit assistance but still make assistance to a certain extend favorable.
I think the rolloff time of factories should be reduced increased – mainly advanced factories. That'll increase the effectiveness of having multiple factories rather than assisting just one. Rolloff/cooldown for nukes is a pretty nifty idea as well.
Wait, you mean increased? You mean, take longer to roll off so you need 2 factories to cut down on that rolloff time, right? If you mean reduced, you mean the factory can build a unit quicker after the last, and one factory assisted could pump almost as much as 2. Better. The whole say less to mean faster and say more to mean slower, is a total headache, inverse correlations are a bummer.
Rolloff time for nukes would be... interesting. This would limit your ability to use it against armies since they're more likely to have moved or changed direction if you're trying to lead the target, but it would also make them annoying to use since it takes longer before they fire. I think it'd be better if nukes were just unassistable altogether. Rebalance their cost/build time so that they don't take an absurd amount of time to build unassisted though. I'm all for having lots of nukes, but I don't think you should be able to just pump them out on demand. You should have to strategize and pre-plan your nukes, not toss them up on a whim. This means people would have more launchers and have to spread them out to avoid losing your entire arsenal at once. It would also give your opponent time to react to the nuke threat instead of never seeing it under construction because it was assisted so fast. This adds strategic choices to the game. When do I start building my nuke so that it is ready in time? How many can I safely construct in parallel without hurting the production of my war machine/defenses? I just saw my opponent building a nuke, should I: Try to snipe it? Try to weaken his economy so that he halts production? Try to get an anti-nuke up in time to protect critical assets? In the current game, if you see somebody constructing a nuke, he likely has dozens of fabbers around it, severely limiting your window for a strategic reaction.
Not sure rolloff time for nukes would work, since the launcher is a lot cheaper than the actual nuke. When I'm mass-building nukes, I usually plop down a field of them, then put huge numbers of fabbers on an area patrol over them. If the nukes get rolloff/cooldown, I'd just build more launchers so that when one enters cooldown, the fabbers just go assist another launcher instead. Frankly, if you want to reduce the effect of assisting, it's probably best just to do it directly - by reducing the metal-rate fabbers provide while assisting (leaving their energy consumption unchanged). Without some sort of increased cost to using assist instead of just direct-build, it will always be employed to the maximum possible extent.
the rolloff for nukes would be prep to fire, not delay in fire. also, the launcher could use cost increase anyway (and get one this next update), but moreso the launcher. I mean, there are many reasons facts have perks over assist atm, augment those.
Sometimes a quick nuke launch can save your bacon in dire situations (defensive nuke). Just hide nukes in a silo so they can't be assisted, it will reduce spam and force people to build more launchers. Cut the nuke build time a bit down to compensate.
and increase the metal consumption like a madman. That way it hits your eco in a significant way to have it going, just like the current assist thing does.
People talk about increasing the rolloff time, but doing so would be particularly bad for cheap units like the single-unit air transport (or any other cheap advanced unit that may be added). It's not a good solution IMO for this reason.
well, just like quickbuilding expensive units via assist, if you want more cheap ones faster consider a factory over assisting. if you get 3 factories you get a true x3 to production, instead of 6 fabbers assisting for x2 and 60 STILL for x2. Really, its nicer for the game if production came from 5 factories than a factory swarmed with fabbers.
The nukes as shown in the kickstarter video are perfect for showing you can't assist the nuke. It's hidden inside the silo. The downside is that the opponent can't see the progress of the creation of the nuke. To fix that, adding some kind of a light green-colored loading bar on the building visible by all players would fix that.
lets break it down. There was a thread earlier where someone didn't know assisting. Well, they complained nuke was unuseable, quoting 15 minute build time? If you were to remove assisting, you would need to ramp up the launchers productivity, reduce the cost, or something. Really, that detail in that kickstarter video is tiny, if the swirls are gone why would the exact look of nuke be spot on?
Of course the cost of the nuke and/or the launcher productivity would be changed to get a nuke ready between 2 and 5 minutes. (that fixed building time at 100% efficiency would be decided by tests.) 15 minutes is obviously far too much. I'm not saying to blindly take the design of the nuke launcher of the kickstarter video. It appears that a building not showing the nuclear missile being built is an efficient way to tell the players you can't assist the nuke. I can just edit the kickstarter video screenshot with a screenshot of a TA nuke silo (or from an other game) if it throws you off.
Idk, I was just thinking. Mentioned this on another thread. What if, and follow me here: You increase cost of nuke 2x, you increase production of launcher 2x. Then, the launcher produces at same speed, just with 2x cost and 2x buildspeed to keep build time the same. As an added result, assistance only adds half the time per fabber than it used to. As another added result, trying to build 2 silos and assist them will tank your economy, you couldn't even afford it. Putting every dime of economy in a standard game into nukes, would get you 2 launchers building a nuke each roughly every 2 minutes. You would also use launchers instead of assist too, because it would take a messy amount of fabbers assisting and getting them into that space would be more difficult then "just get another launcher".
