Hi, I just bought the Alpha (a few days before beta, I know ). To set the context of my impressions, I'm an old player, mainly a FPS player, and while I played a bit RTS in the 90s, I never played TA. Nor did I play Vanilla SupCom. But I was a very active FA player (7 different accounts, most of them in Top50 ladder 1v1). I did try SupCom 2 and throw it away. Anyway, so I'm back in the RTS genre with great hope for PA. After 2 games (what an experience!), I have one concern: engineer assisting Commander in combat (repairing it). It looks like it's as powerful as it was with SC2. For 1v1, on small maps, or in FFA, this is, imho, a total game-breaker: just rush the opponent Com with an army of engy assisting your Com. I quit SC2 for that mainly. Are the devs considering changing that? In FA an engy repairing a Com was sooo slow and consumed so many ressources that he was useless. I think it's better that way. Am I having a wrong impression? Comments? My first game (FFA 5 players) just turned for me like that: Com vs Com with engy repairing. :/ Otherwise, for an alpha, I like it and it looks like promising. Of course, there's still a lot of work to be done. Cheers.
I agree that repair on commanders isnt a good idea, SupCom had it's own problems though. Sometimes engies would repair the commander in it and drain all energy by doing so. Maybe just disallow repair on the commander completely. A bit of regeneration would be nice on it instead.
The resource cost in Supcom completely broke how repair was used. It was universally better to ctrl-k and rebuild everything that got hurt. Repairing the Comm was a death sentence, so awful that it was better off not being in the game at all. Comm repair depends on the Commander having a high combat power, which it does due to its long range laser. Nerf the laser and repair spam becomes less of an issue. Another option is to have repairing use 50-100% of the fabber's energy. It's not that expensive, but it's just enough to hurt early game repair spam. This can be further boosted by making the Comm more reliant on his d-gun, and keeping the d-gun expensive to use. The double energy cost should be enough to kill the comm rushing strategy. In TA, every repair attempt cost a lot of time as the worker had to unpack and repack their lathe. This factor made repairing in the middle of battle nearly hopeless, as a moving unit would be impossible to target. A similar result can be accomplished in PA by having the worker stop to "scan" the unit before initiating repairs. A dedicated repair unit can overcome this limitation to be viable with mobile forces.
If the enemy rushes you with a commander+engineers, couldn't you easily multiprong around the commander and kill off all of his engineers?
You mean a flank maneuver? Flanking depends on being able to outrange the Commander, which most T1 things don't. But yes, there's a lot of nuance for both sides to succeed. Alternatively, the Comm's lathe speed and starting egg can play a huge role in preventing Comm rushes. A faster lathe allows players to build faster than enemies can approach, and a stronger start means that the defender ultimately has more stuff.
I don't think taking away repairing the commander is a good idea. Repairing the commander should probably have an increased resource cost and/or have repairing take longer. That'll help balance things – particularly for early commander rushing. In the meantime, force fire against the engineers, and try building laser defense turrets. Those things do a bunch of damage on commanders.
Can't we just fix it by applying large metal/health ratio to commander? His repairs will either be slow or expensive.
Why should the Commander have special repair rules? The power of repair applies to the whole game, not just one unit. I already mentioned half a dozen ways to address the comm's repair power. The most important and typically effective solution is to do nothing. Let the metagame resolve itself, as someone will inevitably find the way to beat the enemy strategy.
Maybe there could be a specific building, that has a huge pad, that the commander could be repaired on, unable to do anything while being repaired. I think it was like that with units in Red alert or was it C&C. I think that is one way to balance and keep Commander Repairing. you shouldn always just remove stuff because thats the easiest way to deal with a problem.
This. ...mostly. Dissalowing repair entirely sounds like what Nanolathe called "arbitraty", it's not reasonable, what I find crazy O.O ....eye-goglelingly crazy is how freakin efficient it is. you have your com health back up in a snap. and it costs nothing! in SupComFA you have to cut your nuke production to do it, I'm serious, especially with recent com repair nerfs! also obviously is the fact they can repair at an unlimited range. (which all of our knights in white armour in the tourneys under the gentleman's rules exploit vigorously btw.) to me this is a bug that requires the most prompt of fixes. We're heading into alpha now aren't we?
I would prefer health regen on the commander with a less effective repair that is useful but not as essential as it is currently. Please detail what method you use to exploit this bug with consistent repeatability.
It's highly discouraged but it happens on a pretty random basis and it costs a lot of time to make sure that it is not happening at all.
agree: Slow regen and slow repair speed for Commander. If you have 3 minutes of non combat you should be able to repair the commander for few ressources.
It's probably a good idea to fix the game breaking bugs first, before stating that something is OP and needs to be fixed. Since there are so many ways to address commander repair without screwing up repair, I have to disagree. It was obvious from day 1 that Commander problems should be addressed directly by the Commander. It is bad form to alter mechanics that affect everything else.
how would it alter other mechanics? ok, the mass/energy rate of engineers is fixed, correct. well then just change the "build time" it will be quite expensive probably and take long, but afterall, its the most important unit^^
well the current repair rate has to be based on something, probably resource cost of the unit. Increase that for the commander tenfold, so repairing it makes no sense until lategame. For early game give it an automatic regeneration instead.
you set a group of engies on assist on your commander, you do this quite near the frey, and as your commander is moving into the frey, upon the first bit of damage the engies stand still and jet away and will continue to do so at an unlimited range, any new engie added or restarted will have to walk up to the commander but the ones in the initial group will not. if commander reaches full health the engies will walk up to the commander.
I just played a game where like 6 or so engies correctly followed the commander while repairing. Was still kind of bad looking how the commander profited from it, but it wasnt buggy.
