Auto Repair for units and structures

Just go for repair drones, they are exactly what the game needs without all the balancing trouble generic regeneration causes.

HP equals the mass invested, that rule should never be broken. That means no free repairs, ever!

If it costs mass to repair units, why bother repairing them, instead of building a new one?

Maybe not as much mass as when building a new one, the unit is just damaged, the mass is not lost yet. But it must still cost something if you choose to repair. 10-50% of the original costs would be fair.

Under any sane system, the mass cost will always be considerably less (50%, at most) than the cost of a new unit.

Good points (and I agree). I guess I misunderstood:

How does that make sense for special structures or large speciality structures.

You need to give mass to build systems in the structure then the outer armor.

Repairs should cost something for sure, BUT it should be cheaper than building a new unit or building. That is a major difference SupCom and TA hold. I would think repairs, from a gameplay perspective, should cost 50% of the unit. So that way it would always be more efficient to repair rather than rebuild.

However, I like the idea of large ranged repair towers. These towers could be built in established bases to ensure random debris and the odd arty shell doesn't wear down the base completely. These towers should NOT be allowed to assist factories or construction though. I love the assisting feature in these games, but I would like to see it de-emphasized .

With these towers you could build small "repair bases" for armies consisting of a handful of these towers. You could bring your damaged army back in range of them for quick and easy repairs.

I agree with this one, I kinda hated the whole engineer assisting factories thing in SC. It got to the point where people will just build 1 naval factory and assist it with 100 engineers, instead of building a whole naval shipyard, which I think is a lot cooler and frankly less ridiculous looking =P

My gut instinct is to not use this, since it's just like regenerating health in FPS (another thing I don't like). However, as long as you can ALSO repair with engineers (and at a faster rate) I would be okay with this. It's not game breaking either way.

That is my stance as well; all units should regenerate after, say, 30 seconds or so of no combat, but they should do so very slowly, like 1 HP per second (and considering higher tier untis could have in the tenthousands of HP if I remember correctly...). An Engineer or such should be much, much, much more efficient.

Hmm... Sending land units to land factories, air units to air factories, et cetera, would repair them at a faster rate? Maybe that's an idea as well?

And I'd like to have buildings specifically made to repair units. And collect scrap maybe (or that could be another building, but that might be underpowered / useless then)?

+1 for repair drones but I'd love to see the ability to toggle repair vs repair / assist. To many times in FA my drones that should have been repairing things would all get clumped up assisting an anti-nuke. Maybe even a configurable repair / assist priority. It doesn't even have to be something you do during actual gameplay, but maybe in the menu somewhere.

99% of the time if I threw some drones on a patrol, I'd want them to 1st repair anything 2nd assist new buildings that are going up, 3rd assist factories, and last assist anti-nukes / nukes. If I really want to throw some on a specific task (such as assisting a factory) I can have them guard it instead of using a patrol.

Let's not have specific units like repair and/or assist drones, engineering stations, and support commanders. They're really just different types of engineers that were only created to reduce traffic james and micro problems.

If we can just have smarter engineers and better UI features like area commands it will make the game less micro-intensive without making it more complex by adding units with intersecting sets of almost identical abilities.

That's fine too, the drones I was thinking of were like SupCom's Kennel which was nice since SupCom didn't have construction aircraft. TA did and didn't need drones. I like the planes because they don't get in the way of ground units and are generally faster so they cover more ground in a shorter time frame. As long as whatever I'm using for the patrol is somewhat quick, doesn't clog paths for other units (like my army getting out of my base, or builders putting down new buildings) and I can prioritize how they choose their target I'd be happy.

I also totally agree on the need for area commands.

The problem with planes was that due to their maneuverability they built stuff REALLY slowly, drones didn't have this problem because they didn't have the ability to build mexes all accross the map.
I think different types of engineers is a good idea because I like units like drones that take up no space and build fast but only in your base.

In Supreme Commander there was no need to repair units and buildings as they had regen right away. This could be speed up using your acu or engineers, but was by no mean necessary to do. I think using auto-regen for all units like this is fine. Also veterancy made their regen go up. (Especially for units with more health)

If you're referring to SC1, no they didn't no unit except the commander regenerated HP unless it was a veteran unit, which was a fairly rare thing

What if autorepairs could be toggled on and off, but while auto-repairs are occuring, whatever benefit that building provides (construction, defense boost) goes away until the repairs are complete? Of course there would still be units to provide manual repairs so the building can continue functioning.

When it comes to dishing out abilities, they should only go to units that absolutely NEED it. This is especially true for persistent effects, which demand constant system resources and potential bandwidth. On a game planning obscene scale, every bit counts.

Who needs self repair?
Commander: 100% must have. Can't live without it.
Structures: Very handy, helps defense and aircraft rain is less annoying.
Engineers: Fairly handy, especially since they otherwise can't repair themselves.

The problem with self repair on combat units, is that it only feeds into overkill. Weak armies don't live long enough to use it, and oversized armies get a free heal after killing everything. Neither scenario is good.

I would like to see weapons and effects that can cause buildings to degenerate like the water on acid worlds, and things like fires.

This might be a good thing for high resource worlds.


As for auto-regenerating stuff, I feel that only units that are equipped with nano-lathes like engineers and factory's should have access to it, for logical and gameplay reasons.

There's nothing about logic or gameplay that demands anything have auto repair.

God- this whole thread contains nothing but bad.