No more: 100 engineers around a factory

I prefer to have free choice in the matter.

The is only a choice when the two options are equally balanced.
Which is not the case in TA nor in Supcom.
That's the reason we are arguing about the problem now.

To me if you have a 100 engineers it turns into a mobs wars type of game instead of making a solid infrastructure of a base with defenses/offenses and actually strategy (RT"S") instead of must mass spawning mobs.

Just my 2 cents.

How would you get 100 engineers without a solid infrastructure and some defenses?

This is a bad idea, it makes it difficult to calculate the build time of large batches of units because you have to know what unit is next in the build queue. There should be absolutely no delay between building units.

Also, any engineers assigned to assist a factory should not turn away and have to turn back to continue assisting. This also ensures that it's easy to calculate exactly how long it takes things to build regardless of how many engineers are assisting or the state of the build queue.

This is a constant factor that can easily be overcome for the most part by building just a couple of more factories. It adds a lot of complexity to the game for little benefit.

Personally, I liked the TA 'delay'... it makes sense. You can't build a new robot into an existing one.

The "delay" in TA is only if the constructed unit blocked the space the new unit was in. If you built small fast units with plenty of space (like the scout boats), or aircraft the delay is only a fraction of a second.

Yep, and I think that was reasonable.

Apart from that, overall, I think a 1 to 2 second delay per factory still makes sense. You can still pump out 30 - 60 units per minute if you have a TON of engineers around, but if you want to be able to print out an army, you'll need either extra time and preparation, or you'll need to have a couple extra factories.

As cool as watching the unit be constructed is, don't you guys think it's a waste of computer resources that would be better spent on units busy walking around and blowing stuff up?

We don't really need to have open-topped factories so we can see the half-finished unit inside. A black box factory that the completed unit just drives out of would be 100% fine with me. And it doesn't preclude assisting in any way.

If nanotowers or factories are more cost effective for stacking build power, people won't build 100 engineers anyway.

The computing resources consumed are minor, and attacking a factory with an under-construction unit to destroy it before it can contribute is a valid tactic that you'd remove, so black box factories would probably subtract from the game.

Being able to watch a unit as it's constructed was also one of TA's many small but cool features. They would go from frame to green silhouette to completed unit as you watched, and then the process would repeat....

Strictly necessary, no. But cool enough that I want to see it.

As for the thread's topic, as long as building factories is a more efficient use of your resources than assisting with engineers, you should be able to assist as much as you'd like, with no restrictions but space.

All else being equal, it allows the situation of spamming units and of instant constructions. Is this situation really a problem? Perhaps yes in traditional rtses. In general, I would say no.

In a traditional rts, the 'team' or 'player', being just one or a few actual humans, has a severe shortage of multitasking capacity. Thus, while it is usually strategically optimal to have your units in smaller groups doing many tasks, there is too much* overhead to execute that plan through the game's ui. Hence the preference to do tasks serially, but with lots of speed or focus.

This is part of a larger inherent problem with certain game genres. You wish to let players act like they are a group of people, but players do not have the capability to effectively act like a group of people such as an army or government in real time. I do not have a solution and I admit that solving this once and for all is much harder than simply patching gameplay issues as they appear.

* I know there are high level rts players that can push enough apms to start focusing on strategy, but the majority of us cannot and that's no fun.

Units have to be visible while they're constructed! It is good to use non-abstracted (such as health bars or icons) ways of viewing things whenever possible. Visible units under construction provides a lot of information when glanced at.

If factories have cheaper BP than constructors then expect most players to use every unit type all the time. This is simple, if your cheapest way to spend more resources is to add another factory then why not add a factory of a type you don't already have.

If constructors are close to or better than factories then they will be the main source of BP. They are a lot more flexible, you can spend them all on a single project or send some out to expand or reclaim.

A mid range option is nano towers. These have to be cheaper than constructors because they only provide factory and base construction flexibility, their flexibility greatly depends on their range.

I forget if supcomm did this, I request that a unit's build power be visible on it's tooltip so people are better able to make choices.

I agree that we want information to be visible and clear, but considering strategic zoom, we want that information to be available without looking from a high level of zoom.

Regarding the unit diversity resulting from cheap factories- that is a valid point. However, ideally the map is sufficiently large that simply having one factory of any particular type does not open up what it builds for use everywhere on the map, without transporting them long distance. You would need one factory of each type in each theatre to get that level of unit diversity everywhere. In Zero-K, due to the scale of maps and generally high unit speeds (ZK plays fast), having one factory of any particular type creates a presence on the entire map. Up the scale sufficiently and this doesn't necessarily hold.

Nanotowers, or a stationary build power source by any other name, should be cheaper than mobile BP by the same logic that factories should.

As long as the economy boils down to how much resources you have flowing in and out stacked engineers should be fine. I'd be up for getting rid of mass fabricators and that ridiculous experimental resource producer the Aeon had.

FA mass fabs were fine. The aeon experimental resource generator was ridiculous.

Supreme Commander 2 had diminishing returns for factory assist by engineers by the way. However, Supreme Commander 2 also had no flow economy, so it worked differently all together.

Engineer assist is one of the staples of the series and I'd hate to see it go.

Maybe some kind of diminishing returns, but removing the ability to assist entirely is no good.

well I liked to see when more than one engineer helped to build buildings or even units in TA, but maybe it should be whether less effective or more difficult.