Economy Balance: Repairing and Reclaiming

Of all the issues that supcom had to me this was by far the most egrerious. Essentially what would happen is that because reclaiming units gave you resources, people would almost fully reclaim their factories and put it back into making more units. Likewise the general wisdom is to never repair and always build new, because more guns is better than fewer.

At its core the issue is that unit effectiveness is not tied to health. Units are ineffective until they are fully built, after which they are fully effective until they are completely destroyed.

In supcom this was "fixed" by basically breaking the sim, and decoupling health from build power. Reclaiming units in the latest patches instead decreases their health until all of it is given back in one big surge at the end. This is virtually useless due to the lack of significant storage. Especially as you reclaim larger units. It also gives you the full cost of heavily damaged units etc.

Now I won't propose any particular solution as the end all be all, any change made here would have massive implications to the gameplay as a whole. But I'll at least say the obvious solution is to couple unit health with unit cost, with unit effectiveness. That is, a damaged unit is less combat/production effective than a fully healed one. Tying its useful worth to its cost and its health.

This could have the side effect of making battles more easily snowball toward one side that gets more opening shots in. This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you want out of the game. Is getting the drop on the enemy more important or is good play while in battle more important?

At the same time it would make repairing more than useless, and even essential in certain situations. The relative cost/efficiency/speed could be tuned for initial constructionl, reclaiming and repairing individually to promote one over the other as more or less useful too. A repaired unit could respond better and faster to resources than a newly constructed one or vice versa.

This also opens up the idea as first seen in supcom2, of creating units that are half baked at half the price.

It's an important issue with deep implications to the core of the mechanics whichever way you deal with it. But I don't see it mentioned at all.

That's only true for Stock SupCom, it was quickly patched out.

Mike

The best solution is to simply have repair cost resources equal to the proportion of HP being repaired. Repairing a unit from 50% to 100% will cost half as much as the unit originally cost to construct, gradually over the duration of the repair.

With respect to reclaim- this is a solved problem. Health and build progress should be completely separate variables. A unit or structure under construction that takes damage will have that damage reflected at the end of the construction, and finish in the same amount of time. This also means that a unit will deconstruct into a nanoframe and reverse-construct when reclaimed in the same amount of time, regardless of how damaged it is.

Supcom 2 had you destroy the target unit before you could reclaim resources, and even then the resources that you get back is something like 1/10th of the original.

If you read my post you would know I adressed that.

It's not a solved problem. Health and build progress are intuitively tied, all the flux mechanics reflect this. They are essentially the same. Any solution that isn't an ugly hack will have to respect this aspect of the sim. My goal with this thread is to not just dismiss it like you do, but to find a solution that accomplishes this goal while also not changing the gameplay dramatically. There isn't an easy answer and "it's solved" is certainly not such an answer.

So then basically, you are proposing a system that encourages a slippery slope, and offers no metal from wrecks?

Mike

Umm. In TA you only got the metal from reclaiming something when it was fully dead. And you got it in one lump... I think this is the right way to do it. Reclaiming shouldn't give you anything unless the unit is completely dead. Siphoning off 50% of something's health in metal is dumb.

I didn't say anything like that.

And I don't think this is a good solution at all, as it destroys the build/repair/reclaim equivalence.

It's always good when a thread starts off with wrong information. It shows passion.

Incorrect. This happened in TA, where reclaiming the last HP sucked the entire unit into storage. In supcom, reclaiming a unit causes it to harmlessly die into wreckage.

In PA, reclaim can be a creative way to disable explosive enemies. That's totally worth keeping around, just because.

Nah. Other silly issues were created from the system. A damaged unit would be cheaper to reclaim+rebuild than it was to repair. The problem got even worse with big units. It does not make sense that a unit would demand full cost to repair, AND to have it return its own unit value when it dies. It's double dipping the unit's cost, and made repair awful.

Repair cost should be no higher than the fraction of reclaim you can NEVER get from a unit. A small portion of metal represents the unit's armor, while the wreckage is everything else. In SC(1 or 2), units always gave 80% wreckage at max. Paying 20% for repair (plus full energy) gets the point across. It solves the wreckage issue and ensures there's no other confusing or exploitable problems.

It is correct.

The other issue with repair costing metal is that you are paying metal for zero extra combat effectiveness - the unit will shoot and do damage at 100% effectiveness even if it's 10% damaged.

So I prefer supcom's system - reclaim to destroy, then reclaim the wreck for the metal. Repair for energy cost only, but repair much faster than you build.

Not in the OP's system, units are only as effect as thier health, so a unit with 50% health would only be 50% as combat effective.

Mike

I think reclaiming should just give less Money back depending on the current % health.
While repairing should be more efficient and only cost like half of the Unit cost(%per health)

If memory serves, how reclaiming worked is basically like a constant-DPS weapon at which point the targeted unit would be killed without any notable explosion and THEN the wreck would be vacuumed up for mass.

Zero-K has solved the reclaiming issue much better, and more elegantly than TA or SupCom. It is simply construction in reverse, where any finished unit is obviously at 100% completion. Reclaiming 10% of the unit leaves a 90% complete nanoframe unit or structure. Whether it is damaged or not is irrelevant. The time and buildpower required depend on the build time of the unit or structure.

Reclaiming and repair both worked off of the unit's build power. It unbuilt the unit until it died, or rebuilt the unit until it was full again.

bmb: wrong.
bobucles and rcix: right.

You should go play the game again then. To your credit it does briefly turn into a wreck but the entirety of the wreck is immediately absorbed.

Just tested it. Reclaiming damaged the unit like bobcules described, until the unit is out of health and subsequently converted into a wreck which the reclaimer(s) are automatically ordered to reclaim. You may be thinking of the behavior of a high BP unit reclaiming a low build time unit, wherein it appears the wreck is instantly vaporized because of how quickly reclaiming proceeds.