Auto Repair for units and structures

In that case then what is the point of making all units auto heal? Most units in SupCom gained auto heal with a level or two of veterancy. But it didn't really affect the gameplay much even if you had a whole bunch of them. So, what was the point?

You missed including what I were responding to:

It doesn't matter why SupCom did it.
In isolation I can't tell if regeneration on all units in PA will be good gameplay. Games have played well with it and well without it.
Personally I would be interesting in seeing units decay when they take lots of damage but that's just my opinion and I haven't really seen it on a large scale in an RTS.

To sum up why regeneration IMO can be a good mechanic:
1. It diversifies units. Units can have either no, slow or fast regeneration of health.
2. Units with regeneration will get more staying power. They can take a little damage, dish out some damage and retreat to regenerate their health.
3. This gives player incentive to fight smaller battles with fewer casualties in order to be able to utilize the regeneration to their advantage.
4. It decreases micro for repairing units. Although with patrols or area repair commands this could be fairly easy though.

This is a good point. More diversification of units is good.

This feels a little micro-y to me. And if you don't micro the units couldn't you just get the same net effect by giving them a bit more HP? That being said, I like this idea since it plays into unit diversification. Even though PA is a macro game rewarding some amount of micro is a good idea.

It does decrease it. And while that's good it is only good to a point. Players should have to devote some attention to repairing the damage done by raids if the other guy had to devote some attention to making the raid happen. Ideally both players should have to devote about the same amount of attention but I think this can be done if things are balanced properly.

Well at first player will devote attention to the raid when it is happening. After its' done you still gotta rebuild lost buildings and reclaim wrecks but yeah, ordering repairs on damaged structures as well shouldn't be hard.

Decreasing repair micro is a pretty weak argument. A few patrolling workers or even dedicated healbots will take care of that with little fuss, and it scales to be exactly as good as you're willing to pay for.

Of course, things are a bit different if the patrol bots are too busy sucking up wreckage to bother tending to battle wounds, but that just means more wreckage! It's win/win for the little traitors. :roll:

This is deciding for me; it's deciding attacks can't break for more than 90 seconds.

Sieges can last a long time and have lengthy lulls.

I'm not sure you've been playing the same Total Annihilation I have.

Considering the HP to Damage ratio of that game leans quite heavily towards Damage, I'm not sure which Total Annihilation you have been playing.
Things like the Annihilator kill in a single hit, Metal Extractors and Wind Turbines are made of tissue paper and Peewees AKs and even Adv. Tanks died by the handful to artillery like the Big Bertha.

Unless of course, all you built were Bulldogs and Sumos. Those things tanked like a champ. But I'd argue that only 5% of the total unit count is not representative of the whole.

Not exactly micro, it will encourage tactical retreat though. 'Oh a lot of my units are damaged/red I better pull that group back and reengage with my fresh army'. Those damaged units can then flash presence where you don't want the enemy attacking and live to fight another day.

It encourages some basic battlefield management that makes RTS an interesting genre.

The Total Annihilation I've known and played allows for continuous front combat to last entire games where you're constantly racing to shore up your own line while softening your opponent's; where an entire offensive can be spent on just whittling away the health of one entrenched Heavy Laser Tower or Plasma Battery. I remember being fond of Total Annihilation precicely because it was an RTS game where combat wasn't determined in seconds, and with binary win/loss outcomes.

In Balanced Annihilation 1 vs 1 matches, you'd be surprised at how hard it is to finish off the opponent's extractors and windmills with basic units.

And congratulations - you picked the Annihilator and Big Bertha -two of the most high end, front-loaded guns of the entire game- as examples to hopefully showcase that all combat is deterministic.

You whittled away the Heavy Laser tower with how many instagibbed Peewees?

I'm not saying that TA wasn't about long offensives that could take minutes to get any advantage to either side. What I am saying is that many units died like flies to effect that advantage.

You're looking at the battle from only one side.

Don't use Balanced Annihilation as an example by the way. Never played it so I don't care how much tougher they made Mexes. In OTA they are less structurally integral than a wet paper bag.

I will tell you right away this has a single outcome: people learning the hard way that no, unit X does not in fact regenerate. Right up there with variable resource costs in unintuitive **** that will bite you in the ***.

You can make simple rules like that bot regenerate health when they are stationary and not firing while ships and commanders always regenerate health whilst tanks and airplanes never regenerate health for example.

Also if both a super large ship and a smaller ship regenerate health at 10HP/second the big ship effectively has a less effective regeneration as it takes much longer for a heavily damaged big ship to regenerate back to full health.

Hi there i just saw the topic,I didn't go true everything,no time,my suggestion is th gave to engineers the possibility to repair buildings in a designated zone like a garde stands but for fixing building in the zone designed,hope you came with some ideas with that,if someone didn't already suggest it
See ya

Auto Repair
Buildings: No
Units: No
Commander: Possebly, it's a very important unit. (But not nessesary.)
Orbital: No (only by Orbital engineer?)

Engineers:
Area Command: Permanently Repair Area.
Self repair: No

Repair tower: (yes please)
Self repair: Yes
T2
Small range (maybe, about the same as the bot atk range?)
Requires power to be active.
Repair costs power and metal.
Delay, about 30 sec of no damage (I guess)
Repair rate: about 1% of max hp
Basicly the building is inferior to an engineer. But if you want something with more HP that doesn't die so easily. Or as a better defence against raids/haras.

Examples repair times Repair tower:
Example 1: HP left 75% unit or building. Time till full HP 55sec.
Example 2: HP left 50% unit or building.Time till full HP 120sec.
Example 3: HP left 25% unit or building.Time till full HP 145sec.


With area repair command and maybe a repair tower you have enough ways to repair your units.
I'd rather not have passive regen as a standard. Maybe we can get a poll on this going?

Total Annihilation was about your massive line of vehicle AA probing their massive line of turret AA for a weakness, and if you found one proceeding to pour through and wreck their economy. Meanwhile you'd have artillery duals with waves of tier 1 bombers suiciding to try and take out the artillery, taking advantage of lag to do so. If that didn't decide the game then the nukes would start to fly.

Meanwhile the other 95% of the unit count was never built.

If you want to look at auto-repair then look to the Kohan series which did it really well.

Hell no. HPregen in RTS is to much. I am sick of it in FPS. Engineers can repair and that enough.

Fabbers auto repairing as a combat behaviour is, in my opinion, all good. I see no difference between that and assisting factories in terms of combat behaviour. It makes sense.

Even idle fabbers find something to occupy their time by assisting nearby projects, would be good.

On the subject of fabbers, I think there should be a hotkey to cycle through all your fabbers, not just idle ones. I have issues with idle advanced air fabbers.

Idle assisting should be avoided because it can screw your economy. Idle repairing, or reclaiming where metal is low, are things that should occur.

No auto repair!!!! But easier perhaps totally independent repair order could be something like drawing a circle of patrol points or a radius option. Just independent order from patrol. As someone said auto repair discourages raiding .....ooooo or perhaps even a repair unit that is fully automated and automatically seeks your injured buildings and units around a certain rally points.....

I always liked the aircraft repair pad with the repair turret upgrade in TA. Repair should be an order in itself no reclaiming no build assist just simply repair...