No more: 100 engineers around a factory

This is simply a numbers issue. In SupCom 1, T1 engineers are the most efficient source of build power per cost. Thus you get more for less resources by making 1 factory and making 100 engineers.

The solution is glaringly obvious- make factories the most powerful source of BP per cost, meaning the most efficient way to get more units is to simply build more factories. I would suggest making factories actually have exceedingly high build power for relatively little cost. With engineers, you should be paying a lot for the ability to move.

You can use any engineers you have to assist if they aren't doing anything else, but building masses of engineers to assist is strictly inferior to building more factories if the BP/cost dynamic is switched.

I think in supcom you could simply fit more engineers around a factory than in TA. (Unless you count construction planes which can stack) Original Supcom didn't have any flying engineers though, FA added the Kennel (flying construction drones) and the Hive (basicly an immobile build assist tower).

I'd really like to see no limitation on building assist, other than how many construction vehicles or whatever you can physically fit around the building. The whole exponential growth thing really fit with TA ("The Core and the Arm have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy" and when energy -> matter conversion is trivially easy for you how else do you run through an entire galaxy's resources in only 4000 years without insanely fast production capability ) and I think it adds something unique to the gameplay that many other RTS games lack

Let's actually think about the problem you're trying to solve, and the various solutions.

Nobody actually mentioned the problem, so I'll have to guess that you believe that players can build armies "too quickly", or they can build cheesy structures like nukes without waiting the "fair" amount of time.

First of all, when an engineer assists a factory, there is no resource advantage. They spend resources proportional to how quickly they speed up the process. In the end it's only the build time that varies, not the build cost.

The problem with removing or limiting engineer assist is that you merely shift the problem of building more engineers to one of building more factories. It's much easier to manage one factory with tons of engineers assisting it than it is to build several factories and manage their build queues and rally points. So to achieve the same build rate, players will just have to build more factories and micro-manage them much more than they would have done with the engineers. Building more factories is more costly in the short term, but over the long term the initial cost of the factory pales in comparison to the total cost of all the units it produces.

Limiting engineer assist also takes choice away from the player. If someone wants to build anti-aircraft or anti-nukes and they want to build it really fast, with restricted engineer assist they can only build several structures concurrently rather than being able to quickly build one structure at a time. This just changes a low-latency, low-throughput build workflow to to one of high-latency, high-throughput. It would absolutely suck if you scouted the enemy's base and found that they had just started building a nuke, and you knew you couldn't possibly catch up to them with an anti-nuke because your build rate was limited. You could have 20 anti-nukes almost done building as his warhead is on the way to your base.

I think engineer assist gives players the ability to quickly adapt to any strategy, making the game much more dynamic. I understand that it can seem cheesy at times, but the alternatives don't solve the problem, they just make the game more inflexible and tedious.

If a player wants to make something quick, and they have the resources, why shouldn't they be able to direct all of their efforts behind one project?

This might be true for TA, for SupCom it isnt. In SupCom you can tell a factory to copy what some other factory is doing. That way you manage all your factories by just giving commands to one single factory. A very helpful feature.

In SupCom:FA you were not able to support nukes/antinukes because it was kinda ridiculous to support the nukelauncher and make it rapidfire nukes, which was possible in vanilla xD

No limits on engineers pls. If you can afford it you can afford it not a stupid barrier holding you back.

Hmm, good point.

The way I see it though is that it's not a matter of building things too quickly, than being able to build an entire army from a single factory supported by a few advanced resource structures and an army of engineers.

To me, it seems like you need more infrastructure for it to work. I suppose you're risking losing everything from a well performer strike though.

... I dunno

Now that I've thought about it a bit more, a limit/consequence doesn't make any sense. It'd just be more annoying than not having one, so there's no point to it.

NO ARBITRARY DIMINISHING RETURNS please.

instead the solution is glaringly obvious. in early supcom, engie spam was worse than it is now. FA amended that (but imho not enough) by

Giving higher tech facs more buildpower while aswell as increasing buildtime needed for higher tech units. The net result is that higher tech units build just as fast but assisting with t1 engies isn't that efficient.

Factories in SupCom are sixteen times the size of engineers, yet only have four times the build rate, despite not needing to have the systems allowing them to move. Even with assist at 50% strength, engineers were still twice as space efficient, which is clearly undesirable.

you could and i often did, especialy on anti nukes when i was scared, changing build time from 240 seconds to 200 seconds by just stacking a couple of engineers there was very helpfull and helped ease my mind.

also when your economy is running at capacity, addition or subtraction of building units allows for you to skew where your resources are going. you might only be putting out 100 mass per second into things but if you want an air factory to build faster at the cost of the rest of things, use engineers.

I like the idea of engineers because they are a resource the player has to make sure he has enough of and the player has to commit a lot of resources to be able to build what he wants really fast. For me the units don't have to be engineers, they could be drones or construction aircraft but I liked having your build capacity be something the player has to manage.

You did not. In FA, even a T3 engineer only had a build rate of 15. Strategic missile defence has a build rate of 1080. To cut the build time from 240 to 200 would require fifteen engineers, which is significantly more than a couple.

Well okay it did have an effect. But compared to SupCom vanilla it was not much.
In Vanilla you could make a nuke within like 1 or 2 sec if you have enough engineers around the nukelauncher.

I prefer have lot of factories and a big base instead of one factory and 200 engineers around. It's kind of ridiculous, no?

***I like this idea just make it less then optimal to use assist.***

so maybe make factory's reduce the cost of units. so say 1000 metal and 10,000 power makes 10 tanks with your engineer. But from a factory it cost 900 metal and 5,000 power for 10 tanks. If factory's cost the same to build per point of build power as engineers then there the better option if you have the space and time to set them up.

I'm in favor of a good compromise
Firstly, I think it should "feel" right. If you're making a huge army, you should have at least a big base. You should be able to tell what's the player is doing by seeing his base. Oh, I see some tank factory, that mean he has tank.
But the game should remain dynamic, you must be able to quickly make a small group of different units.
I'm against unnatural limitation or complex formula.

Here is a simple idea taken from TA:
When units leave a factory, the factory has to wait before starting to build the next unit.
You could do the same and add a leaving animation wich always take a constant 3 seconds for small units and 5 for bigger ones. ( these numbers are exemples

Like that you can still help the factory, but you can not make more than 20 units/minute with one factory. It remove the stupid effect of a factory throwing 5 units/second.
Plus, it easy to understand: you directly see it and it feel coherent.

I agree that it should be much less than optimal to use engineers. It should only be useful if you really really need that thing right now, and don't care how much it costs. It should be a total waste of resources for regular use. Like double or triple the cost or something.

I think that factories should be more powerful then an amount of engineers of equal cost (say twice as powerful) but that you should be able to use almost any number of engineers (limited only by space) to assist the factory.

I'd support factory buildpower being more cost-efficient than engineer buildpower.

Maybe that should be added to the list as a suggested feature? A few people have mentioned it in this thread.

I agree.