No more: 100 engineers around a factory

Try reading my posts - to people who are actually capable of making a vaguely reasonably argument, who listen to what I say and respond with something that's even moderately sensible I am very respectful. You on the other hand fail to understand the most basic of arguments. Your posts started bad and got worse - and your replies have been a textbook example of failure to understand. So while I'm sure this will offend you: you are an idiot. Your arguments are incoherent. Your ideas make no sense. Please shut up and **** off.

You mean it's ok to have factories be more efficient than engis? Otherwise I don't understand your comment.

Anyway, why wouldn't you be able to change your production focus quickly without engiswarms if factories are more powerful? You just build the factory, the factory builds the units. What more flexibility do you want?

A factory is not necessarily more efficient with engineers assisting it. The cost of the engineers must be included as well as the extra buildpower.

Better for what? Flexibility makes a unit better but if you have too much flexibility you lose strategic choice. Just make the best all rounder unit for all situations.

Again removes choice. There would be little diversity between games because everyone would have access to all unit types fairly soon.

It basically depends on this question; "Do you want your level of construction flexibility to be a strategic choice?". The people who do not want to do so side with either con spam or factory spam. The people who want flexibility to be a strategic choice are stuck in the middle arguing from both directions which is always hard.

Yup, but if you don't make factories more efficient, then every game will end with few factories surrounded by ever-increasing engiswarms, which is what we're trying to avoid.

Higher BP and efficiency engis or construction towers just delay the problem.

Efficient factories remove that problem without removing the ability to quickly focus on another unit class.

I'm all for that and against either engi- or factory spam. However, you will always end up with the most efficient thing end-game, which has always been engispam. The only way to remove that is make factories better. In order to not end up with factory spam, you have to give them decent output.

The only thing I do not like about mass engineer is that it dump down the scouting and the intellingence gathering.
The players must try to read the plan of their ennemies. And at the same time, try to hide their.
You see one tank factory, one air, one boat factory and tons of engineer. What can you infer ? Nothing.
While it's good for the fun casual part of the game, I think it's bad for the strategic part of the game.

Uh, I'm kinda going out on a limb here, but maybe you could notice which of those factories the engineers are assisting? Or perhaps which one has teched up? Or maybe even both!

I'm missing the connection of how people building 10 factories instead of 3 (one of each) changes how quickly you have access to all unit types, which then means less diversity because players have more options? Could you please clarify this

Very useful when he can change their assignation is less than 3 seconds.
Reading the plan of your ennemi does not mean reading what he does, but what does he want to do. It's a very important part of any good strategic game.

With only two tiers it's going to be less of an issue, anyway.
People only massively assisted T3/T4 in SC/SCFA.

As long is the upgrade to t2 is cheap enough (in resources, it can take as long as it likes), then it's all good.

Engineers as flexible buildforce need to be more expensive than the same amount of stationary buildpower in a factory (be it the factory itself or an upgrade thereof).

Early in the game, when flexiblity is of utmost importance, you will find yourself assisting factories with engineers more even though they are a bit more expensive than getting more factories or upgrading the factory.

Later in the game, when the value of engineer flexibility is slowly decreasing (and the value of space conservation and safety increases), eventually you will upgrade your factories or build more factories instead (upgrades are better; and as I suggested I'd like to have at least 20, if not 100 or unlimited build power upgrades for factories at a lower cost than a flexible mobile engineer would cost).

Nano turrets (aka build assist towers aka engineering hubs). They can have the best BP/cost with none of the advantages of either factories or engineers. Sure late game you spam them near factories but you will always need engineers in the field and for construction.

If factories have the best BP/cost then their construction will normally occur throughout the game as you require more BP. As an added bonus the extra factories you produce can also increase your unit diversity.

On the other hand if there is some other optimal way to increase BP/cost you will not necessarily add more factories. Gaining access to more unit types would be a more important decision because it costs more than increasing your BP through other means.

I have oversimplified this a little. Extra factories with the best BP/cost ratio does lock you in to certain ratios of units which is a choice. So for 2 land factories vs 1 air and 1 land is important. But I have found that unit diversity is usually worthwhile even if you cannot produce many of a single type of unit.

I'd rather like to see the engineering towers as part of the factories. They might be able to assist / repair nearby units, but really, they should focus most of their build power on their own factory.

You don't have to reserve like 100 nodes to attach Nanolathe emitters to, just configure the particle emitters so they emit more / shinier particles along with adding more emitters to get a good, intuitive way to understand just how upgraded a certain factory is.

Wow erastos that was a long response that was completely rubbish.

You seriously want to compare dps values of bricks vs some kind of cooked up value that engineers can create???

What, you think that my post about building defensive LINES means to try build defences under the feet of the attacking forces?


If I had 30 bricks of mass stored up, I'd be able slap down 30 bricks worth of defences, mop up your 30 bricks with the inherent advantage stationary defences give you, and then be 25 bricks ahead because I just reclaimed your (now dead) army.

Late game bases are BIG.

Oh, and I forgot to add that I wouldn't actually have 30 bricks of mass stored up, I'd have 30 bricks of mass put into economic units, so that when you attack, I can fund my defences and be ahead of you economically by the end of the attack.

But more land factories does not impact the diversity of land units, and I don't think by the point in the game where Engi-Swarms come about that the cost of an a single type of factory is much of a barrier. I think you'll have similar choices at the building low number of factories stage of the game if engies are better bp/cost. Do I build a land and an air factor or a land and X more engies? It's the same thing in both cases, do I want diversity(i.e. air and land?) or do I want production. After a certain point in the game, this becomes a minor issue at best because the cost of a factory and/or the X engies relative to your economy size is small.

Even if the factories are better BP/cost in the early game engies still are important, they can be assigned to assist anything(not a minor thing), are mobile, and have a smaller per unit cost. So having a pile of engies is still useful in that they are units, not buildings.

I'm not a fan of the tower assit being the optimal because it just replaces the engi swarm with tower spam, it does not create diversity of play that I feel marginally better factories does. Each should have their own advantages

Before BP and cost:

Factories- new units (only 1st)
Engies - new buildings (only 1st), mobile, can assist any, repair
towers - automatic, can assist any, repair

We have 2 ways to balance them, per item cost and BP per cost, to maintain diversity I would propose

Cost BP/cost
Factories- 3 1
Engies - 1 3
towers - 2 2

And now you make choices based on how much you can invest right now in infrastructure, how flexible do you want to be, and how fast you want to make individual units. And I think players making economy choices as part of their strategy and point in the game hads to the strategic nature of the game.

I hate to be the one to break it to you pawz, but everything you say is wrong.

On the one hand you insist that you can instabuild unlimited defences under fire, but when called on it with actual numbers you say 'oh of course that wouldn't work'. The thing you have been complaining about about is reacting instantly to counter any offence without bothering to scout or prepare and that's blatantly obviously impossible.

30 bricks worth of mass is is an insane amount of storage (anyone who is even vaguely competent at TA/supcom knows you should always be stalling metal/mass) and even if you were playing horribly and did have that much stored up it would take >1 minute to build that much stuff with with 100 engineers building at 100% capacity. 100 engineers are monumentally unwieldy. They are not actually able to build at anywhere near their theoretical capacity on anything but a single massively expensive target (even then I'm not sure it's actually possible, but I don't care enough to test it so let's assume it is). So no, you wouldn't 'slap down 30 bricks worth of defences' - you'd queue up a few things, watch your defences and engineers die horribly as demonstrated in my last post, and then all the rest of your stuff would die in a fire.

And by the way - if you spend all your resources on your economy on even an ultra-turtle map like seton's any vaguely competent opponent will kill you long before the late game. If you're not spending about as much as they are on combat units you'll find they push your troops back until you start losing resource structures. Once that happens even on seton's it's a slow spiral towards death.

And you know what? You've yet again tried to argue the 'let's assume everything is in pawz' favour' section of my post and completely ignored the rest of it. Once again - if you have the economy to drop a defence that can foil 30 bricks, the attack you'll actually be facing is 24 monkeylords. Your opponent gets the same scale of economy you do!

Despite his overly aggressive tone, he's right (although the FAF community correctly re-balanced MLs to cost more, so you'll actually only be against 18).

Unless you're building Ravagers assisted by Kennels, you're not going to be able to throw up a firebase unless you know they're coming far in advance (which I suppose is possible).

Even then, that kind of reactionary play is not advised.

Your first paragraph ("BP efficiency becomes irrelevant") contradicts the rest of your post ("this is how BP efficiency should be"). What exactly is your argument?

I like the idea of having a couple of nanotowers, but like menchfrest says, changing engiswarms to nanotowerhives isn't much better. That's why I like the idea of concentrating build power in factories so much.

I wouldn't mind making them equal, though. I'm curious to see how people will fit more factories to spread vulnerability or fewer with a bunch of towers to conserve space in their strategy.

While it is certainly true that a given composition of factories locks your unit ratios, it is also true that you can always build additional factories which solves the problem. They're not that costly.

The first paragraph the point was that late game the BP cost (Efficiency is the wrong word) does not matter to unit diversity. The second paragraph has to do with early game how even non optimal BP sources can be useful. I don't think those contradict at all if you include the context of the point.

My argument was that all BP sources should have a role to fill. By making everything useful we give players choice in how to match their economy to their play style and what phase of the game they are in.