Auto Repair for units and structures

I think the point is that Built-in Regen reducing raiding to having binary Win/Lose conditions. If the raid doesn't kill anything the target just regens back to max HP, if the raid destroys it's target, basically making raids all or nothing.

And that's not good gameplay and essentially reduces the effectiveness of Raiding as a tactic overall.

Mike

Maybe in a forward installment or firebase in which case your repair tower is functioning the exact same as a shield does in SupCom or Zero-K.

Where you produce your units and gather resources is different from where you are constantly engaging the enemy. An autoregen like what the OP described is specific to structures being out of combat and as such would not apply to firebases. I didn't think this had to be clarified.

That really depends on how many targets there are and how fragile they are.
If you are just raiding to destroy 1 target then it is very binary if you destroy it or not.
However if there are several targets you might kill some while others are left alive.
Units in Zero-K starts to regenerate health slowly after about 1 minute if they don't take any further damage.
Of course repairing is cheap in Zero-K where repairs only costs a third of the original energy cost and a minute is quite a long timespan in Zero-K while heavy units regaining health very slowly doesn't make much difference.
Repairing is still very important in Zero-K.

It's still fairly binary because the only time any real 'damage' is done is if something is destroyed, if something is now destroyed it doesn't matter because it will eventually reach full health again with no action on the owning player's part. Without regen the target stays where it is health wise unless the player spends time/resources into repair in(either directly or indirectly) which helps break raiding out of that Binary Success/Fail framework.

Mike

Resources and production by definition can't be out of combat because that is what players must always target to prevent their opponent from getting ahead. A well balanced game will have rich interaction between combat and economy.

As for not wanting to repair outlying extractors or radars... that's simply the risk of spreading your assets thin - you have to analyse where you think it's worth spending on support infrastructure.

Combat refers to explicitly taking damage or dealing damage. MEXs don't deal damage so they are only in combat while they are being attacked. In the OP:

If your structure has 90% of its hp in tact it will be considered out of combat after 30 seconds of not taking or dealing damage, and so on and so forth.

I think the OP specifically chose longer time values to abate any concern that constant harassment would not amount to major damage.

What other effects do we have that makes raiding less binary?

1. Tying up defenders
When you are defending you usually have to send out more troops than the harassing units to deal with them. If you send 1 harassing unit you can chose to brake off if you see that your raider will be killed. On the other hand intercepting an incoming unit usually requires more effort from the defender if he relies on mobile units. This means that the defender cannot use those units to harass you in turn.
2. Forcing the enemy to make defense.
Even if you fail to do damage you might have forced the enemy to make defense which doesn't help that player to harass you or gain map control.
3. Closing solar collectors.
In TA and ZK solar collectors close when they take damage. That is instant economic damage even though you don't destroy them.
4. Reclaim.
You might have destroyed buildings for more than your raiders cost but counting with the wreckage left you might actually have lost more metal than the enemy in the raid. Of course if you took out valuable targets that gives you an advantage currently it might still be considered a good raid.

Really I don't think raiding is that binary with or without health regeneration.

BTW I don't care if units regenerate health or not. Both work.

What if the purpose of my raid is to distract my opponent?

Anyone know what the French used to do to captured English longbowmen during war? They'd cut off their fingers and send them back to their own people. This had a two-fold effect; one less archer to shoot your own Frenchmen, and another less soldier to look after the poor archer who can't look after himself now (try eating a meal without using fingers).

Imagine how silly it would be if people re-grew fingers (notwithstanding the wilful suspension of disbelief for having engineers/doctors repair missing fingers).


You might say that needing to repair your stuff is micromanagement, but I think you'd be wrong. I consider micromanagement to be controlling your units to a high degree of precision. When you got attacked, you didn't do anything; your total APM for being attacked is zero. Repairing things after requires a couple of clicks and a few engineers - if you consider that micromanagement then surely telling a factory to build tanks and rally them somewhere is just as much micromanagement.

It would probabaly be micromanagement if unit health effected performance as repairs would be top priority. as would prioritising repairs. however telling 5 construction planes to patrol an area is not micro.

If area commands make the cut it could be a single repair command with no faffing about with patrols.

I'd also like to note a supcom game I just had exemplifies why this is a terrible idea. We had both worn each others economies out and I was shelling his base with T3 mobile arty. They were destroyed by bombers but because the damage was permanent and he was more interested in attacking me I was able to come back with another batch of units and finish the job easily. If he had spent his resources repairing and rebuilding then it would not have been so easy. With regen health he would have been able to do both.

Supcom2 had a nice 'painting' tool that was used for the attack command.

And that could be nice for other applications like repairing.

All it did was string up a long string of attack commands, it was far from useful for an actual attack or anything, A-Move Orders were much better.

Mike

Not always, sometimes selecting a small area for attack is much better then having fighter bombers attempt to attack every target that they see on the way.

So I disagree.

There's no particular advantage to painting over just giving individual orders except that its easier to use with a gamepad.

In fact you get far more flexibility with individual orders as you can target high risk units first like antiair. It was a dirty clumsy hack.

Look instead to Homeworld 2 the second most awesomest RTS ever after supcom itself. The units are cleverly able to spread out their damage and engage what they are strong against and cover each other from attacks. What used to take aeons of micro is now a single bandbox attack order away.

Additionally you could simply work around the attack move issue by first giving a formation move and then an attack move right before they reach the intended target. They will spread out their attacks in a more dumb fashion but much better than painting still. And they will stay cohesive which increases survivability and damage potential. Painting involes massive overkill.

Way to go, you've magically come up with a certain context in which you are "right" but neglected to mention before hand!

Fact is, that attacking 100 Targets one at a time is not as good as an A-Move would be.

If you need to travel before starting to attack just add in s move waypoint, it's not going to be more effort than it is to 'paint' 100 targets.

Mike

Yes. So what? If regen is in the game you have to take that into when you execute your strategy. Just because you played a game where you think you would have lost because the enemy would have been able to take advantage of autoregen more than you did doesn't mean it is a bad mechanic.
Anyway I agree that it wouldn't make sense to have auto repair in SupCom where repairing is so expensive.
TA, BA, ZK, TA:Kingdoms still plays good with them.

That said.
Here is another system I could support:
If a unit has more than 50% health it regenerates health. If it has less than 50% it decays and will die unless repaired.

That just splits damage into none whatsoever or certain death. Pointless.

You can repair the unit when it is below 50%. Did you miss that?
Also this says nothing about how fast the repair rate is.
The timewindow for how long a unit remains vulnerable because it was damaged can still be really long even if it didn't go under 50%.

26 pages already... tl;dr.

However... From the bits I did read...

Buildings: have something with a massive repair area... But make it so that it only repairs one building at a time (like the engineering towers in SupCom: FA), but remove the "assisting build" function so it only repairs. This was suggested in the early pages, I agree, and think it's the best way out.
Units: have a specialised repair unit (this was done quite successfully in the older C&C games). In Red Alert, for example, if you wanted your tanks to be autorepaired, you sent a VERY squishy mechanic out in an APC with your team, deployed him after a raid and he fixed up your tanks. Similarly with infrantry, you sent a medic out to keep them 'topped up'. RA2, you could put an engineer in an IFV and it became a repair vehicle to sort out damaged tanks.

I just got this image of a ghetto gunship, except instead of peewees it had lvl1 repair bots repairing, reclaiming and assisting things.