The combat fabrication bot is one of the most interesting yet hardest to use units. It is effectively a moble healer, but it is riddeled with issues. I will take a look at the issues I find most pronounced. And give some ideas how to fix them. High Build power - boon and bane: On the one hand the high build power (equivalent to a T2 engineer) is a boon for repairing. On the other hand, it is a bane for economy. Instead of one combat fabricators output you could build 3-4 T1 factories. The T1 factories will continously give you unit HP (if form of new units) at continous cost. The combat fabricator only does something if there are damage units around. But you have to account for a bulk of his Build Power anyway in your eco, or it will be more hindering then helpfull when repairing. So you have to choose between 1-2 factories on one hand, or 1 Combat Fabricator on the other hand. Unless reinforcements are really hard to get it is just so much easier to have more factories. Ideas: Maybe give it a repair multiplier - it heals for more metal worth then it uses up? Maybe let it also work as storage, so it can easier compensate for it's high peak time demands? Maybe give him a personal storage "like mana" and cap how much metal he can drain for the eco to refresh it? (i.e. 60 BP, 6k metal storage, can only drain 15/seconds from economy; that way at tops it costs your 15 Metal per while in use but continued use can let it run dry). This is not a flesh wound: Another big issue is that this is a bot unit. If there is one thing you can say about bot units it is: Everything can one-shoot them. They and air units are the least units that could use healing, simply because they won't survive long enough to be even targetted. If there is one unit type that could really use him, it is the Vehicles. For them it would actually make sense to have a few combat fabricators mixed in. But doing so requires an extra factory and mostly it is just easier to go all/mostly bot then anyway. or build a factory more. Building a factory for only one unit type is not worth the metal. Also as bot it is just too fragile. Ideas: Maybe make this a vehicle instead of a bot, with durabiltiy closer to the flame tank? That way the one group that has need for it (Vehicles) can have them without needing an extra factory and it could be more durable. To fast for medics: PA is fast paced. A fast paced game with high casualty numbers is about the worst game for a medic. For a mod that reduces total unit count he has a purpose (because there reinforcements will be far in between). But the stock game just is too fast for him to have much of an effect for his cost. Ideas: None really. Maybe make it an option for mods insted of a core unit? Maybe those just disapear once the other two issues are solved.
These are great ideas in my opinion. I've thought switching the combat fabber to the vehicle factory (a fast jeep or something of the sort) and perhaps giving it an area repair (slower of course than its current repair rate) would help make it easier to use. The cost for it would have to be tweaked however so it won't make armies unstoppable.
You forgot to mention that the combat-fabber uses no power at all, also it has great range. Though i also think it should not require the total cost of the whole unit if the unit gets damaged over time equivalent to it´s total health, but less.
the heavy econ draw is what metal storage is for. I also don't see the problem with them being a bot. They can be used very effectively for emergency defense bolstering (very good at repairing turrets) which makes good use of their speed. I go bot factory first, followed later by a bunch of vehicle factories, which gives me easy access to everything I need for a good deathball. Although I actually find them rather ineffective in the vanilla game in big deathballs because their range is not good enough to heal infernos at the front most of the time, making them rather useless, especially considering how bloody expensive they are (hence the changes in the Anti-Popcorn mod)
It never occured to me to use them in defense like that. Since normal fabber cycles are rare (you usually have them busy elswhere) and defenses are generally harder to replace then units and high HP this could actually be the one area where they excell.
OP, these are good ideas. I like the way you've thought about this unit, and I find your approach persuasive. That said, I'd like to add the following points: 1. The combat fabber does have some use in the game at present: Infernos and vanguards particularly have enough HP to make it worth mixing in a small number of repair bots in. They are also solid at keeping defences alive, as nixtempestas points out. 2. I'm not sure about the whole 'mines' thing. It's a great idea in principle, but the present difficulties with clearing them (they can't be shot, only reclaimed - but the area reclaim command doesn't target them). Mines also fall foul of the central problem of all defences: usually it's better to invest the resources in mobile units that can both defend and attack. 3. It doesn't bother me so much that the combat fabber is a bot; I think it fits quite well in the bot factory ethos of raiding and support units. But the fact that it does have bot HP does feel more like a problem. If it had more HP - perhaps as much as a Bolo - it would jump in usefulness and cost-effectiveness quite quickly without becoming necessarily stupidly OP. The only other way around the low HP issue for me would be for damage taken by the combat fabber to be reassigned to nearby combat units, so that its HP is linked with its group of nearby combat units (a bit like the Spirit Link ability for Orcs in Warcraft 3). A bit of a left-field suggestion but not totally crazy? 4. It also works ok as a reclaim bot. It can be useful for clearing chunks of forest so you can build more factories on terra-style planets.
