Auto-Repair, Better Engineer Patrols, or Neither?

There's a long thread going on discussing the merits and negatives of auto-repairing buildings/units. For a list of arguments, you should probably check the full thread out here.

Anyways, this is just a poll to try and get a vote on regarding the way the community feels about this.

I've posted my opinion in the other thread, and I'll happily repost here, but I don't want to bias this poll in the first post

I vote for auto repair. I don't mind having the details tweaked though (time until start, cost, regen speed, etc). While I don't mind setting patrol routes, IMO it's just pointless busy work.

Patrol routes for me. They are already super easy in just about every RTS game, and require essentially no micro at all, and if they add AoE patrol routes, then this will become even better.

There'll be flying engineers in PA, that alone will make repairing trivial. No need to remove strategies based on attrition by making things auto-repair.

The third option is too vague. Of course everyone will vote for something that says "Improvements", but unless they (or the shortfalls of the current patrol system) are explained, it's not a useful option for the devs.

I'd like to be able to set units to retreat (and seek repairs) when their health is below a certain percentage... especially if the units are set on a patrol route. They should seek out the nearest engineer on repair duty and head towards that area.

The improvements option was deliberately left vague, as it's something for Uber to figure out -- but the improvements option would NOT include auto-repair (something I think best left for certain special units)

Definitely casting my vote for AOE patrol routes. It keeps base maintenance the player's responsibility, without falling apart into the realm of micromanagement in my opinion. As has been mentioned before, auto-repair would effectively reduce the damage caused by weapons, and then why not just have no auto-repair and weaker weapons?

Yes, yes, I know that means that buildings won't be automatically repaired, but I'm not really in love with that idea anyway. Make the player responsible for keeping track of the state of their base, at least to some extent.

I'm more for other methods of repair, like a "repair tower" for example

Mostly because I always forget to keep engineers handy for repairing purposes, which to be honest is probably the problem that started the discussion in the first place: it's a bit of an effort to keep engineers repairing stuff, and we need a different method

Flying engineers would help tho =P

I liked repair towers (used them in TA -- they were modded third-party units), and I'm sure we'll see them either in the base game or [very quickly] in mods.

Non of these, towers.

Autorepair does not work when a builinding/unit is taking damage so it has no effect on that.

Engineers seeking out damaged things, or damaged things calling engineers sounds pretty awesome but in reality it could lead to some really annoying problems.

I can just picture my attack blob calling engineers from my base to die in combat or walk across the map, or even worse - units leaving the battle on their own because "see ya later br3h, out to repair l3wlz." I think TA or Supcom had that mechanic (it's been a while since I played both) of units (air units especially?) leaving combat to repair, and I didn't particularly like it or find it useful.

I'm not saying it couldn't be implemented well (i.e. implement maximum "engineer call range" or something) but generally units moving around the map and doing things on their own is kind of a dangerous area in a RTS game, because it generally results in predictable behavior which can be exploited by a human.

I think that aircraft sometimes dropped out of an attack to go to a nearby airpad for a quick repair at a crucial offensive moment yeah ><

Honestly there's no decent way to repair an army that's in the middle of a battle, I think this is more about repairs that go on at bases, whether an army that's back from partol or defenses that have taken a pounding

I have to vote for improved engineers and my reasoning is fairly simple if maybe not obvious to everyone. Planes are OP.

Huh?

Planes, in addition to their many other advantages, can heal themselves automatically by simply patrolling over their repair stations. No other unit has this advantage. While it is technically possible to patrol constructors with your wave of attacking ground units it is nowhere even close to as convenient or effective as repairs are for aircraft.

I find this to be highly unfair.

We need a good ground based repair unit that can seamlessly support ground attack waves. Maybe it needs more range, maybe it needs an area of effect type heal, I don't know. I just know that what we've got now, is biased towards planes. And that's just not fair.

It still costs res to repair them, and they are of course, far more expensive than land units are. They're only OP against things they're designed to kill, like tanks. They're UP against AA, everything has a weakness, it just happens that aircraft only have 1 right now =P

It's not about the res. It's about the micro. It requires no micro at all to repair all your planes, all the time, quickly and efficiently. Unhappy with how happy they're repairing? no problem, build a couple more landing pads.

Ground units? It costs huge amounts of micro, and no matter how much APM you have you will never be able to repair all you ground units. Unhappy with how inefficient you are at repairing you ground units? CLICK FASTER! building more constructors becomes irrelevant because you simply cannot pull back and repair all your units without a large investment of micro.

Add to this the complexity of managing units on multiple planets at the same time, and the idea of actually manually repairing your ground units because laudable. Automation is going to be very important in keeping PA playable.

You think it's impressive watching Pro SC2 players juggle three pronged attacks on a single map? Try wrapping your head around doing that on ten different planets, all at the same time.

Good luck.

I agree, it'd be very handy to have a unit that automatically repaired units around it, like a support engineer.

But aircraft still can't be repaired in combat, which I think was the point you jumped on =P
Ever seen someone retreating from an air "battle"? Good luck

With drastically improved pathfinding and area commands, this will get a lot better in Planetary Annihilation.

However for maximum effectiveness, the area commands must be constantly updating themselves. That is to say, "watch this rectangle and repair anything inside of it", rather than "take a snapshot of this rectangle and repair anything damaged inside of it at this moment".

The "retreat zone" idea found in Zero-K RTS will also help this process get much easier.

Towers should be covered by support units (3rd option).

Also, engineers should NOT walk out to battle, instead, units on patrol should head back to where engineers are patrolling to be healed. Units sent out to attack should attack until they die (or until they are called back to base, based on whatever commands queued / given to them)

I have mixed feelings on this one. On one hand, I like the idea, units micro themselves away when wounded to marked areas. This is nice and logical, and is easy on the poor fingers of us mere mortals that lack 300+ APM. Given the scale PA is shooting for, automation features like this are attractive to me because if you think it's insane keeping up on a single map in SC2, imagine how much madder it will get with 10 planets worth of conflict to manage.

On the other hand I'm concerned about development time for a feature like this, as well as CPU load on the server machines. Also, if this feature works too well war could get rather comical as it would get quite difficult to actually kill anything.

Generally speaking, your units doing things that you didn't tell them to do is a bad thing. Ofter when i'm raiding a base in SupCom, i am effectively using my units as suicide troops that do enough damage to the opponent's power generation to slow him down or force him to stop building energy-heavy aircraft

Having units run out of a battle to a nearby engineer is not so hot IMO, while having a button to press that sends the unit back to a repair area/having an area you can just send them to to be auto-repaired, sounds good