No Assisting

This would only add hidden multipliers (or non-hidden ones, but multipliers nonetheless) that would make the game more complex to understand. We need simplicity, and the way assisting worked in TA and SupCom was just that. Every engineer you add costs an equal amount of resources and generates the same amount of build power.

What could help reduce the engineer swarms is making the factories cheaper to build than engineers with regard to their build power. As in, engineers should provide less build power per mass unit needed to construct them.

A linear increase in build speed gives diminishing returns on time. Isn't that good enough?

A factory is custom tailored to the mass production of some archetype of units. It's a specialist. An engineer is made to build everything and be mobile. They are generalists. So it stands to reason that a factory should have MORE build power than an engineer! The important thing is that cost:build power has to be balanced properly.

TA did this pretty well. Engies were painfully slow to build, fairly expensive, and caused pathing issues in large numbers. Assisting was good, but another factory was often easier to get. Perfectly cromulent.

If you want to see assisting screwed up, just look at Supcom. They botched it up big time. It is a classic case of "did not do the research" in game design. A T1 factory costs 300 mass for 20 build power. A T3 factory costs 3000 mass for 60 build power. Engineers cost 50-450 mass to get 5-15 build power. Well hurk de fricking derp. T1 engies were the best builders by an order of magnitude. What did you think was going to happen?

Bingo. Engies sacrifice raw build power for mobility and versatility. That's all you need to make assisting work.

That would sound good to me.

As for flying engineers, how would we do that? Could they use a much greater amount of power to build things, requiring players to have a good power economy to run them?

They simply can't build as fast so you have to use more of them. It's a classic flexibility vs. power type balance. They are great for building stuff in hard to reach areas and it's also easier for them to get to their target on a crowded battlefield.

Anyway there is no way this game isn't going to have assisting. Assisting is a key mechanic for this kind of economy. I think I've been pretty upfront about the kind of game we are making here and we simply aren't even considering changes to the fundmamental design that are as large as removing things like assisting.

TA, imho, had Construction Planes balanced nicely. Long build time, fragile, reasonably cheap, and very mobile but it had a reduced power nanolathe. The introduction of the fark did cause a pretty glaring imbalance vs the core and I wish they had a counterpart for core assisting when that happened.

It makes the singular faction concept better in that regard for balance. It would be cool to have custom made slightly varied models of the same units so you can visually differentiate your army in games. Another interesting idea is cross mod transfer (similar to fps games autodownload of a map/mod when you connect to a server) enabling people to show unique visual upgrades/custom modifications. Set parameters for each unit so it cant step too far outside the hitbox bounds and allow people to disable the mod if they so choose. It shouldn't affect gameplay at all and should add to the aesthetics. But I guess I should make a suggestion thread by itself about that.

Can't build as fast... costs more to build... either way pretty much gets the same point across. IMO the latter is much more preferable since TA aircraft had some retarded build times.

Given the game's scale, air engineers would likely be better suited to establishing bases in orbit, on local asteroids, etc. That level of utility is not easily compared with classic ground engies, which can do the same thing as their flying brother by simply using a transport(Ghetto gunship with engies, anyone?). "Space" engies, as they were, should have a speed and cost to reflect the enhanced role, and be less viable for singular planet use. Which is okay by me, at least. I'm not so sure we need to relive the days of 200 aircraft hovering over a Krogoth Gantry. Fun as it may have been, it was pretty laggy too.

Space engineers.

Engineer satellites?

Satellite platforms?

Modular satellites? (Because you know, its hard to build off of thin...space.)