No more: 100 engineers around a factory

If players have a stronger economy, shouldn't we encourage them to build more factory's and combat units?

Isn't the idea that you spend what you get, and if you are going to waste resources due to budding some more economy then shouldn't you plan before hand?

The problem is not that Assisting in FA was flexible, the problem was that it was far and away the best option and arguably too effective. In FA it was less about prioritizing certain projects as much as just choosing what speed they went at.

Mike

Who are we to decided how players should play the game? If we pigeon hole players and limit their options we are restricting the game and IMO it will detract from the game experience.

Encouragement to build more combat units may come in the form of attacking enemy units or it might be that you are encouraged to push a build for nuke defence due to the intel you just gathered on an enemy nuke silo. Either way, you need that element of flexibility to change the focus of your build power - regardless of whether your economy is stronger or weaker than your opponent's. That is the other side of the coin compared to my earlier example of wasting resources due to lack of flexibility but it's all part of the same piece of currency.

What we need to assess is if it was badly implemented in FA, then how can we improve it? Maybe by shortening engineer's build range? I'm not convinced it needs changing at all. Especially not as dramatically as SupCom2 did. It's one of the features that was a constant reminder of how SupCom2 was nothing like SupCom FA.

Not being funny, but isn't that the same thing?

Hmm, not my best wording, I'll try to think of a better was to explain, but its kinda tied to putting more emphasis of more Facs, rather than just 1 of each and assigning all your engies to whichever one you need at that moment.

Mike

@Wolfdogg
I am not saying we should some how restrict a players choices.

But if we allow the type of action in FA to be continued, here in PA then doesn't that diminish the point of factory's?

If players are only going to build engineers to increase their build speed, isn't that a prelude to simply removing factory's altogether?

Why not just cut out the middle man and just allow engineers to build tanks on the floor? What makes a factory so unique that although a engineer can assist it's productions, engineers cannot do it themselves?


My suggestion earlier (You can see on page 23 as it is the first post on the page) is a very organic response to this situation, letting engineers do what they will, but with size and range barriers to prevent assisting getting out of hand(Not to mention making the base a navigation nightmare).

Would that not be a good idea? (Honestly)

Frankly, why not just make factories more interesting than engineers buildpower-per-cost? Then, it would be more efficient to build many factories than many engineers. You could still build more engineers if you need more flexibility, but by doing so you sacrifice buildpower.

Engineering towers should probably be at least as expensive bp-per-cost than factories as well, to prevent the same problem (which would be mitigated by them not being mobile, but made worse by their extended range) ; though obviously they would still need to be better than engineers. This way they could assist factories in range instead of being idle when not assisting constructions, repairing or reclaiming, but there wouldn't be engineering farms anymore than swarms.

Igncom1, I'm not sure about short engineer range, I feel like it would easily clutter and cause frustration. Also, engineering towers need a large range, so it wouldn't work for those (and 'not using engineering towers' would be a very bad solution IMO).
Also if rushing buildings is an acceptable tactic, engineering swarms would still have an acceptable purpose, balanced by their fragility to AoE damage.

I still don't feel like vulnerability to AOE attacks is a properer balancing point, because if the enemy gets into range to do this, then you are already in trouble.

In the same way would the enemy getting TML units close to your factory's.

I am sure however that with UI visualization of builder range that a shorter range for engineers, and a medium range for engineering towers would be applicable. But I do understand how it would be frustrating, like in TA not knowing the building range of you engineers.


Consider it possibly like a 5 by 5 box.

With the factory in the middle, you could fit up to 8 engineers around the factory, and then 16 engineering towers who would also be in range.

While in practical terms you wouldn't, due to space and resource constraints, you still could ramp up a factory's build speed by a considerable margin, without it becoming as wide spread as the engineers in FA.

It is a good balancing point, because it is a lot easier to destroy the engineers than a horde of factories.

Also these arguments, we've had them before, in this thread even. Why do we keep repeating the same things?

This would be against engineering swarms rush-building a structure. The main balancing point against assisting swarms would be that factories are simply more efficient.

If you find the answer, you'll be able to divide by at least half the volume the internet's written content.

Because there is no officially supported conclusion. And only possible officially supported conclusion is game done. So there would be a lot of repeats before alpha stage, and even more - after. Just deal with it.

That isn't a reason, nor is it relevant.

Wooo! Two more pages repeating the same stuff that has been discussed to death already.

Seriously people, if you think you have something new to contribute please read the whole thread first - there is an excellent chance that your 'brilliant idea' was discussed in the first 10 pages of this thread. If by some chance it wasn't, it almost certainly came up in the next 10.

On the off chance you actually have an idea that wasn't raised in this thread there is a very good chance it was discussed in one of the other threads on this topic, search the forum (site:forums.uberent.com in google).

Since someone has probably already raised your suggestion I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the same argument under your username is no more compelling than it was under some other username.

Would be a bit frustrating, instead of trying to destroy the enemies base you will be constantly hunting engineers as they can build **** anywhere. engineer hunt lol

I feel like engineering assisting factories should stay as it represents a conscious decision on the part of the commander. Having multiple engineers assisting a factory should speed up the factory's production by a non-trivial amount. However, it shouldn't be more cost efficient, in the long term, to have 1 factory assisted by numerous engineers than having multiple factories (like supcom).

If you have loads of engineers that can almost infinitely speed up building anything, players can switch strategies extremely fast. With just 1 land, air and naval factory and 100 engineers assisting you can react to your opponents moves within seconds.

I would prefer a real strategy game where thinking is more important than fast klicking. Poor strategic decisions should lead to loosing a match. For example if your opponent completely neglegts air, he shouldn't be able to just quickly build a single air factory, send over his 100 engineers, start pumping out aircraft and building a meaningfull airforce out of nothing in a very short time.

A game where intelligent long-term strategies can be completely countered in 2 or 3 minutes is not a strategy game in my opinion.

(My apologies if this has already been mentioned, this thread is quite long ).

True, but I do love the fact that having engineers around your factories sped it up, but it wasn't really too overpowered since 100 Engineers would've needed one hell of an economy to sustain them pumping out units. It still is a Strategic move to 'invest' in 100 engineers when the time and resources to build them could've meant upgrading your factory early on or adding a Tactical missile launcher to your commander. My opinion stands at I want to be able to have at least five engineers 'assisting' my factories and building queues (one of the reasons I hated Supreme Commander 2 was the fact that you couldn't assist factories with more than 1 engineer[Apart from small maps in comparison to FA]) and I guess you could balance this by making the engineers volatile while they are assisting in pouring industrial chemicals (ubergoo?) onto a factory to make a unit therefore making it extremely easy for your opponent to kill that factory and those 100 Engineers. But I do see where you come from where I have played matches with friends exploiting the use of Engineering stations to be able to build an experimental in 30 second, and an army of megabits coming towards you is not the best omen for victory...

However, adaptivity is one of the core aspects of good strategic play. Developing a system whereby you can quickly shift between multiple strategies, whilst knowing when and where to do so is what good strategy is all about.

The issue I think people are trying to get at is that is that if the engineers are more efficient than the factories, then such adaptivity is a global optimum solution. It's a no-brainer decision to have lots of engineers assisting a single factory. As soon as you have learnt this trick, you are up to scratch on productivity and there are no interesting choices to make on how you set up your production, only how you deploy it.

A far more interesting option is to have factories be more efficient at producing units than engineers, per unit of metal spent. Thus, if you want to squeeze every last drop out of your economy in terms of speedy production of units, build more factories. If you want to remain agile and adaptable, build more engineers, and suffer what amounts to a small economic penalty. By adding in a small, but meaningful choice, the production side of things becomes more interesting.

Well, I would say that you can quickly shift tactics but adapting your strategy should take time. "Quickly shift" and "strategy" don't come together easily for me, since I understand strategy as planning ahead and thinking in advance.

In my opinion calling most of the existing RTS games Real-Time-Tactics games would be more appropriate.


Instead of completely prohibiting assisting you can of course limit the maximum number of assisting engineers, either by a hard coded limit like max X enineers or by diminishing efficiency:

All assisting engineers would draw the same amount of energy/mass as the 1. enineer. But the 2. would only speed up the completion time by 50%, the 3. by 25%, the 4. by another 12.5% and so on ... (of course the numbers for the percentage-reduction are just meant as an example).


But in general I hope that Uber does not only decrease the level of micro in battles, but also in economy / base building, since while I like both I enjoy fighting a bit more than building.

I'm sure many people has already said this, but I wan't to give my five cents on it anyhow and come with a little example.

As long as the engineers are less cost effective at applying metal than the factories are, then it's up to the player if it's a good idea to have engineers assisting.

Example:

Let's say you want to build two units that cost 50 metal each.
That's 100 metal.
A factory applies 10 metal/s for 5 energy/s.
An engineer applies 10 metal/s for 10 energy/s.

There will be three options:

• Letting one factory do it alone will take 10 seconds and therefore cost 50 energy.
• Letting one factory be assisted by one engineer will take 5 seconds and cost 75 energy.
• Letting two factories build one each will take 5 seconds and cost 50 energy.

In general cases, it will be better just to build more factories, but if a player has the energy for it and maybe not room or time to build more factories, then the player can choose to assist the factory with the help of engineers. I can see several cases where the player want's to choose the assisting-engineer-way.

• Maybe early in game, the player has lots of energy due to being close to a geothermal vent.
• When making a sneak invade attack on another planets planet, maybe the player don't want to build a large base, but instead just build a small sneak force.
• When building a real expensive unit and the build time is important, than several assisting engineers would be the way to go.

To sum it up
Yes, let the player have as many engineers as possible assisting a factory, as long as it's more expensive than just building another factory.

Guys.. any "hard limit" for no apparent reason is wrong!! In the end it there is already some sort of limit, the speed a finished unit clears the factory. So no.. NO HARD LIMITS IN THE GAME!