Auto Repair for units and structures

Raids and small actions can still work, but the units would have to be designed for the function and not to mention focus fire on the target you want, but I don't believe a blob airstrike should just be able to break all defenses and attack a single thing and blow it up, like the commander.

Also I want to state why I'm against this.

If what you were saying was implemented it basically the automatic thing to do on every single structure you build, or else in some small part of the world where you are not looking someone is chomping away at something slowly without you noticing, not the mention peoples first target will be to target the engineer's/repair structures before anything else. It adds too much micro for a game that wants to be more for the macro gameplay.

Maybe the sweet alternative is having a single engineering building with a VERY (base wide sized) repair area. It would consume no energy idle, but consume a bunch depending on how many building it needs to take care of.

If you're sufficiently inattentive that you don't notice when someone blows up your engineers, you deserve to lose. Asking players to notice when their stuff is being blown up isn't micro, it's basic situational awareness.

I'm really going for this idea now, which enables auto repair.

This would work, but it then means that attackers take a loss of dps equal to that of the repairer.

I am not particularly fond of the auto health regen system for bases. As mentioned earlier in the thread it detracts from the value of base raiding because the structures that were damaged (even heavily) will return to full health after a (comparability) short amount of time with no resources lost for the defending player.

I like it better the way it was done in SupCom where you used engies to repair and it cost resources. That way raiding was a considerably more viable and encouraged option instead of turtling in your base and waiting to see who can out eco the other.

Pulling your engeniers of from their patrol to take them out of the battle and trying to assign them to their previous route once the attack is over is awfull lot of micro, given that you need quite a lot of engeniers, not just for repairing but also for claiming all the wrecks your enemy is feeding you with.

It should be possible to construct a working and reliable base without any engenier patrols. If it was for me, i would even vote for automatic wreck harvesting building, just like the Kernel or Hive, but higher range and limited to repairing and claiming. And just like Hive / Kernel autorebuild for the drones. Of course the number of drones should be limited, so if you want to scale with your base, you will need to build several of those towers.

Maybe give the possibility to check which tasks an engenier or similiar units will perform when on patrol or idle? I would like to switch of some tasks, like limiting my Hive to only reclaim and repair, but not wasting any effort on construction. Or even excluding reclaim while under heavy attack when i have enough resources but require aid in construction and i don't want to command every single engenier to a factory manually.

I like the idea of having some kind of repair station that will repair buildings/units in a area.
The repair station should start repairing after some time of units/buildings taking damage, so its not directly reducing attackers dps.

Autorepair is good if it starts after like 30 seconds of no damaged recieved. Also it should be slow. Maybe a fixed amount of hp per second so big units with lots of hp dont get crazy regen after 30 seconds.

Engineers should always be alot faster.

in another suggestion i think it should be done how warzone 2100 did it if they had vetran status they had limited repair and you could research auto repair.

as for the repair rate it was slightly less than what a tank cannon could for dps but easly repaired faster than a heavy machine gun even with full upgrades.

plus there was always upgrades where you could increase the repair rate so that is also another option

Engineers shouldn't be required for basic tasks like repairing the base or reclaiming wrecks. The goal is to REDUCE the need of micromanagment in as many places as possible without creating tactical disadvantages.

Also you don't want to waste your unit cap just for building an army of engineers when a few automated mechanisms or support buildings can perform the same job with less micro. After all an engineer's primary function is to be a construction unit.

As for automatic repair: Fine, but don't overdo it. I just say Galactic Colossos in FA which had a regeneration high enough to outperform every single T3 unit in the game.

I don't like this idea at all. Attrition is an import factor imho, on a tactical level as well as on a strategic level. I am all for reducing Micro Management, but at the very least repairs should not be free. Repairing should be more efficient (less cost, faster) than building the same unit again, but it should not be free. Efficient, constant and free self-repairing was already troublesome with SupCom's Experimentals sometimes (but that also has to do with Veterancy of course).

I'm weary of having auto-repair as I believe it can easily ruin raiding. For units or structures that have a lot of hitpoints and really solid armour, it could take several raids over the course of a long time to actually destroy the structure.

We know for sure that repairing buildings should still cost resources. Your opponent spent a lot of resources damaging and destroying your buildings, it should cost you resources to repair and heal them. However, it also cost your attacker plenty of attention to harm your base, it should cost you some attention to repair it.

The amount of attention required to repair a base can be fixed with some of the ideas already suggested:

1. Have a repairing structure with a large radius.
2. Have repair-patrol and assist-patrol commands, or prioritize assist/repair in a fire state
3. Make area commands so you can say "repair all buildings in this rectangle".
4. Let the player pre-empt their repeating build queues with a new queue of engineers when their engineers die.

Taking out a player's engineers is a viable strategy and something that shouldn't be trivial to do. If "retreat zones" from Zero-K are implemented, it will be possible to automatically get your engineers to escape when injured, so they all don't get killed.

I think this idea has come out of repairing being so tedious, especially when your engineers are all killed. We should try building features to make the whole repairing workflow easier before making it completely automatic.

To clarify almost everything there repairs at 5 hp/s if it is undamaged for a minute. Then there are a few units with significantly faster auto repair after as little as 1s out of battle, this is just a nice unit ability.

Why do you think the delay for repair should vary based on HP? To me that looks like unneeded complication. If there is to be general auto repair I'd just apply it after some fixed time of taking no damage. But I am not sure that the idea fits in the first place.

Engineers should be required for such "basic tasks" as repairing and reclaiming. How many engineers you have, where they are and what you tell them to do are important decisions. Telling them to reclaim or repair in an area is hardly micro, it seems to be at the perfect 1:1 correspondence between decisions and mouse clicks.

I also agree with whomever suggested a repair tower unit.

Instead of auto repair being determined by time, thus a passive bonus, I think a slightly more active bonus would make sense.

Repair towers would be constructed in areas where you really want to make sure you don't lose structures if you had managed to fight off the first assault. So definitely around important buildings & economies, and at the front lines by your defensive structures & units.

Repair towers and patrolling engies could work similarly. The engineers have a greater range, and thus maybe a slower repair speed/ or a faster but more costly repair speed.

The repair towers would have a limited range, like a build range, and in that range could be quite efficient at repairing.

Actual unit regeneration means it is even more costly to an attacker if they fail to take out anything important. Not only do they lose their units and give that mass in reclaim, but the structures they almost killed auto regenerate. So by the time they amass more units, or arty, or an air strike of some sort, they can't finish it off. At least with engies and repair towers it could cost a bit, so it is an investment to repair!

NO to auto-repair of structures, the whole point of sending wave after wave at an opponents base is to wear him down. If his structures repair while you're building your new wave, the whole point of your attacks disappears.
You might argue that engineers can also repair their base, but I'm fine with this. This is the other player having the brains to repair his base, not the game repairing it for him.

Repair/assist towers (such as the Hive & Kennel in SCFA) would be fine, since they take resources and room in someone's defensive plans. They also could not repair every building at the same time, they could only repair one at a time.

cobycohodas has it pretty much spot on.

Repair tower sounds like an unneeded unit. As in it has a very specific role that engineers on constant area repair can already do.

I agree with these sentiments.

What would probably be needed is to estimate the closest that two bases will ever start out, take the fastest ground unit and determine how long it would take to get from the enemy base to your own base assuming no obstructions and flat terrain. If the damaged building started at HP 1% when the unit started moving from the enemy base, then I think the building should be to about 75% when the unit arrives at my own base.

I wonder, though, if in attempt to balance the system by adding cost if it would create a micro-problem. Not a small problem, but if someone was doing the micro to just damage but not destroy a lot of my buildings...and I couldn't turn the auto-repair off...then would it be possible for that to create a huge drain on my economy?

Though perhaps at the same time this would help prevent turtling and base-building, in that in order to sustain the auto-repair sequences of the entire base, significant resources will be required. An attack that didn't destroy units but just damaged a lot would still be impacting, and if played right crippling.

I definitely like the idea of not having to manage my own repairs, but my biggest worry would be in the process still being out of control of the player, and enemies finding ways to use that to their advantage.

In SupCom there were also repair/assist towers, these had more HP than an engineer, meaning they would not be destroyed all the time. Also, they could assist factories and construction in the area as well, meaning they were not useless besides repairing.

You can just as easily say free auto repair is a micro problem. It rewards players who micromanage their units to finish off damaged units and avoid wasting shots on units they don't think they can totally destroy. And there's no reason why you can't just push one button to deactivate auto-repair if it's stalling your economy.