Capturing and Disabling units and buildings.

Hi Machines,

I was just pondering how in TA it was possible to capture just about any unit/building with an engineer. Generally the capture would take about as long as it would to normally build the item.

I don't think capturing should be put on PA Fabricators, though a unit that could specifically capture other units or buildings (for a limited amount of time..?) would be interesting. Imagine being able to capture 2 or three turrets in a bank of 20! Make the unit have to be in melee range to be able to capture, and make the unit a wreck after a successful capture (transfers its consciousness to the other machine)

Another specialty is disabling...how about a unit that attaches/tethers itself to an enemy unit or building/turret that overrides control protocols and renders the entity inactive (suppresses consciousness) for the duration of the tether (until the tethering unit is destroyed, or moved by the owner)

Anyway what do you guys think?

Nayzablade

I always liked the capture feature on TA, however it wasn't very useful in multiplayer. It added depth to the single player game and allowed you access to both factions tech once you capture an engineer or factory. In this game there are no factions unfortunately, so capture as a method to gain tech is not required. If capturing takes as long as building a unit, you are much better off just building the unit. A specialty unit for capture only would be interesting if it was cheaper than fabbers. It would be useful to turn mex that are left undefended but that is about it.

Agreed with mredge73. Capturing is fine for small scale RTS, PA battles are so huge that wasting 5min of player attention to capture structures is pointless. In Supcom: Forged Alliance hunt for enemy fabber was worth it all because of other faction tech. But even with that it was a bit more on not worth the effort side, unless you played in team and one member had time to focus only on capturing fabbers. Also in multiplayer no human is dumb enough to send unguarded fabber far from base and let it escape after capturing. So that thing was only usable against AI.