Auto Repair for units and structures

The entire game duration is a state of combat. The entire map/planets is a warzone. Everything on it is vulnerable to enemy attack, and is only as safe as the player willingly makes it so.

The game shouldn't arbitrarily decide when I've stopped attacking. If I do damage to my opponent's assets but don't strike again for ten minutes, and he either doesn't bother to, or can't shore them up in that time, he should suffer the penalty.

This.

The game doesn't decide, you decide when you've stopped attacking by no longer attacking for 30-90 seconds straight, depending on the damage a structure has taken.

If a player has a very important structure with very little health it will still be vulnerable before it begins autorepair and it would recover HP slowly. Indeed, players will likely still manually repair important structures. What will change is the necessity of patrolling engineers or repair towers to deal with random crash/debris damage.

For the purposes of a game of this scale 30-90 seconds may as well be instant.

The engineering towers from SupCom already filled this role. But they could be destroyed, the drones could be shot down, and they needed resources to repair things. This is far better than just having buildings heal all on their own with no way to counter it in my opinion.

90 seconds + time to regenerate health is definitely not instant.

That depends on how big your planets are and how many of them you have.

No. It depends on how fast units die, how fast you can send reenforcement to a position or how fast you can attack the target again which indirectly might be a result of how big the planet is and how far apart the planets are.

So if two of those three things are directly affected by the size of the playing field, and the third doesn't really apply since it just comes back to the first two anyway... what was your point again?

Bunk. They have nothing to do with the size of the playing field and EVERYTHING to do with the speed of the units.

The playing field could be the smallest planet imaginable or even a small asteroid, but if you move slower than your enemy he'll out run you and thus, start to heal after 90 seconds of running.

Conversely, if I have a unit that can traverse round the circumference of a planet (even the largest ones) in a maximum of 60 seconds, you're NEVER going to regen a single health point because I can get to you, no matter where you are, in less than 90 seconds.

Use your head man.

Bunk. I don't think we are going to see units that move at such mind boggling speeds as it would render teleportation (a confirmed feature) rather pointless.

The main point is that since unit speed is probably not going to scale with map size (If it did then what's the point of larger maps?) then map size does matter when talking about how rapidly you can attack a target.

Didn't address the "slow unit vs fast unit" then, huh?

You seem to not understand a hypothetical scenario. I'll try to remember that.

You seem to not understand that no unit will be fast enough get across a truly large map in the timeframe proposed. So the specific unit speeds, fast or slow, are irrelevant when talking about how long it would take you to attack a stationary target again.

However your point about health regen making kiting OP with regards to fast vs slow units is quite valid.

I think we have both brought up very different but valid points about why health regen would be rather broken if it was powerful enough to actually matter.

Seriously. You think Kiting one or two units around for 90+ seconds for them to regen, thus wasting time that could be spent building 10 more of them from various factories on the planet, is even remotely overpowered?

:roll:

Well since you can (I assume.) issue build orders remotely by assigning your factories to hot key groups just like any other unit I don't why you couldn't do both at the same time.

Why bother? I'm a Macro-Style player. I'll have way more than 10 factories to be paying attention to... and far more than a handful of units.

The only time it'd be useful to me is if I forgot about a group of units. Then I could rediscover them in 5 mins time, fully healed and ready for being thrown towards the meat-grinder.

THAT is the intent of Auto-Repair, rather than micro and kiting.

I suppose you are correct. But if you are making so many units does it really matter that you found the remnants of an old strike force now fully healed? I guess it would depend on how many units you found.

Do you feel that should be part of PA?

Let us recall that it is not a handful of units that autoheal it is every unit. **** adds up yo.

Very true. I am not sure which style I prefer more though. Making more kill bots, or reusing old ones that didn't die the first time. I'll have to check what the tax incentives are for recycling.

1. How fast you can send reenforcement to a position.
Even if the planet is big you can build forward production facilities that cuts the travel time between construction site and the frontline.
Secondly even if your production is centralized far away from the front you are likely to have reenforcement routes as units will arrive in succession to the front and if you lose your strike force it takes as much time to form a new strike force from the reenforcement on a large planet as on a small planet.

2. How fast you can attack a target again is largely dependent on how fast you can create a new strike force but even if you don't have any production of units you might have enough additional units in an area to finish off the enemy units that are nearly dead or you might have artillery that can hit the target continuously.

3. How fast units die is important because if a unit takes minutes to destroy then the relative time it takes to regenerate is smaller. If a raid kills off units quickly it is likely to kill most of the units they reach.
However if units that take a lot of effort to destroy while the regeneration of their health is also much longer it means that they will also remain weaker longer.

It only adds up if many units take a small amount of damage and lives. The more likely scenario if PA is more like TA and SupCom is that most units die while only a few takes damage without dying.