No more: 100 engineers around a factory

1. Allow engineers to assist build with factories.
2. Make factories have a sufficiently high build power (or give engineers less relative build power) so that the mass/build power ratio is more favorable towards building factories than it is
3. Good players will realize it is more beneficial to just build more factories (even high level factories) than building so many engineers to assist a single factory, so we will see very little engie spam
4. We will still have the option to rush build stuff if we have a bunch of engineers but want to build something in a hurry.

Problem solved. Honestly, I kinda wish they would do that in SupCom FA. I hate having to rely on engie swarms for proper build power

I would say no factory assisting at all, just have to build more factories.

It did get a bit silly, and having to build factories instead would force you to plan ahead, instead of building 1 of each type and a billion engineers that could help pump stuff out as needed

The argument against assist production doesn't take into account space available to build.

Examples: Your planet just got wacked with a asteroid, but not enought to be a complete kill. You have less terrain to work with and it was your base that got hit, not the enemies base. Your base was bigger, but now you have less space to work with. I'd love to say you can micro your way out of this sticky spot, but realistically if you were fighting it out till the guy got a big rock to hit you with, i'm going to go with no.

You are invading another players planet and he hasn't noticed you. While the other player has a large force on planet, you want to mass up a force to fight him off while getting a proper level of production set up. Assisting with engineers allows you to do this while maintaining a relatively small footprint.

Essentially, assisting is necessary. Space is largely a premium. However, I always do get a kick out of TA games when you fly one Hawk/vamp past their production bays, and the 5 Flakkers they have sitting near the production bays take out 20-30 construction aircraft in an effort to hit your one hawk/vamp.

As I said though, make it economically not the ideal route to go with spamming engies and make factories more efficient in terms of build power, and engie spam will go away, not because it is impossible, but because it is impractical.

Allowing engie assist would be helpful in emergency circumstances, but not a good practice in general.

Exactly, I think you should have to choose what you put in that space instead of only needing 1 of every factory. Although having engineers made far less easily spammable would also counter this problem =)

Engies assisting a factory could attach to the building directly (as visible modules or something) to avoid huge amounts of clutter on the ground around the factory while keeping the ability to quickly reassign buildpower. Forcing people to build dozens of factories to use all the metal income they have won't be much prettier than engie swarms.

Assist allows making factories expensive so a player can't just plonk down factories for air/sea/land units nilly-willy and will have to decide which path to pursue first and when to branch out. It also provides opponents with a clear target to strike if they want to cripple your production capabilities, it's no fun to wreck a base that's pretty much a huge amorphous pile of buildings where the factories could be scattered who-knows-where (you know, the kind of junkyards that TA's AI used to build).

Also the attached engineers could act as additional armor layers on the factory so attacks that don't manage to bring a factory down can still impact the factory's output while a major production center won't be destroyed just by a few raiders.

Nano turrets / Hives / Kennels are the way to go. Faster build times and no extra engineers sitting around blocking my factories. Construction planes also work.

Blocking should be far less of an issue with PA, we have confirmation of advanced pathfinding (that was literally the first thing I asked Neutrino about on reddit when the kickstarter went up).

Engineer swarms are essential to allow you to react rapidly. If your buildpower is all locked up in factories when you discover a new threat you can't counter you're dead. If a good chunk of your buildpower is in engineers you can at least try to refocus. You're still in a bad situation, but you have something you can try rather than just sitting around waiting to die.

For a concrete example - say you scout and discover they're building strategic artillery and you have no way to kill it, can't break their lines with land troops, it's out of range of your longest range weapons, and you've been building gunships rather than bombers which would never survive their AA long enough to kill the thing. With factory only buildpower you get to watch as it shells you back to the stone age. With buildpower in an engineer swarm you can send all your engineers to the air factory and build strategic bombers. Maybe you'll be able to produce enough for a strike before the artillery levels your base, maybe not, either way it's more interesting.

The more I think about this gameplay concept, the less I like it.

You're basically positing that you SHOULD be able to react near-instantly to any threat the enemy may pose to you.

This means that the ONLY strategic goal that matters is going to be economic power. You don't need to scout, because you can build a counter as soon as the enemy attacks.

Which is silly, because the entire beginning of the game is all about the opposite - scouting the enemy, finding out what he's doing, devising attacks he can't counter.

No wonder the late game gameplay model is purely a slug fest. Why bother with strategy when an economic grind is the only way to win?

Yeah really not what I said at all. Note the phrase 'you have something you can try'. It is far from guaranteed to work. You scout, you discover they're building/have built something new and dangerous - you are immediately behind because they have already started building this threat.

If you manage to scout it early enough that you have time to build a counter, then you're fine. Well, probably not fine but still in the game. If you wait until the Monkeylord is wandering into your base you're doomed. You should have a window of opportunity to counter new and unexpected threats, not be locked completely out of the game because you didn't build enough of the right kind of infrastructure before your opponent even started building the new threat. You know, kinda how it works in TA/supcom.

Without non-factory buildpower you're essentially creating a game of chance - if I pick rock and you pick paper I'm doomed.

I'm not basing my argument on what you're saying, I'm basing it on the entire premise of the TA / Supcom / FA set of games, ALL of which have large masses of engineers which make the economic power of your forces have a disproportionate impact on the outcome of the game. Namely, if you have a much larger economy than your enemy, you will win because no matter what he does, you can counter it with an instabuild blob of engineers.

Being 'behind' the enemy is hardly relevant when they have to attack you - it's not hard to slow the enemy down enough to bring your economic forces to bear on the problem, and it's always farther for him to travel to the conflict than it is to you, when you're the defender.


And honestly, to say that 'not being able to instantly build a counter to what the enemy has = pure chance gameplay' completely ignores the fact that this is EXACTLY what happens in the early game, where you DON'T have enough build power to instantly counter the enemy.

I don't believe anyone said instantly. It's not a fair assessment of the stage of the game you're talking about. No one is arguing you should be able to counter anything instantly. There's no point discussing this if you're gonna counter arguments no one is making.

Sorry for translating 'react rapidly' to 'building things instantly'. Considering the context (late game Supcom) I don't think I'm off base at all. In case it's unclear, 'instantly' encompasses all the situations where build time would otherwise be a concern.

Large engineer swarms allow you to instantly build (AKA ignore the build time of) anything, given a large enough size of swarm. The deadliest force on the battlefield can be a group of engineers well supplied with resources.

So you're saying you don't like TA/supcom? PA may not be the game you are looking for. If you have a much larger economy than your opponent the vast majority of the time you should win. Just like you should win if you have a much larger army. Or a huge tech advantage. If you play much better, you should be the winner!

You keep going on about how you can counter 'instantly'. It doesn't work that way. Yes, late game engineers let you practically instantly build any normal unit. But one normal unit is not going to help against any kind of late game threat. If the threat is a nuke, you need anti-nukes and missiles - neither of which can ever be instabuilt. If it's an experimental you need your own experimental or an large force of conventional units - again, impossible to instabuild. If it's massive artillery you need precision strike capability within range of it, now if you're really, really lucky that might mean a bunch of TMLs which you can build damn quickly. Except that those TMLs have to be in range of his artillery, not in the middle of your base with your engineers, and what late game base doesn't have TMD? More realistically you might build a wing of strategic bombers - again, impossible to build instantly.

It's entirely relevant because a wide range of late game threats have incredibly short time-to-win once complete. See; any experimental artillery, nukes, the seraphim experimental bomber, teleporting SCUs, hell even just a plain old massive squadron of strategic bombers doesn't exactly take long to reach its target.

Once again, you need to have a window in which if you scout the threat early enough, you can build a counter, without the ability to focus build power you simply can't do that. Without that window there's no point scouting, you might as well just build something, throw it in their general direction, and roll the dice.

Firstly, see above, there's nothing instant about it.

As for the random gameplay, there is approximately one case where that's even close to true - bomber first on a small map. Even that can be scouted and countered as long as the bomber first player isn't a micro god. Early game threats are not typically existential threats, they're threats to your economy. Economic damage is bad but you can come back from it. Blowing up your commander or your whole base the way late game threats do? Not so much.

For me that title goes to a UEF Commander assisted by a swarm of Rover engineering drones.

The alternative in this case is being unable to respond to a threat. There is no way to build enough to instantly counter a monkeylord entering your base, but you can with sufficient warning. How long that warning should be I think needs to be determined from gameplay, but what I'm certain of is that it should be possible to counter threats given you know of them in advance. The amount in advance would depend on the type of attack, how hard it is to spot, cost of attack, etc

Except they really don't. The scale of the threat you are trying to counter grows as the game goes on, this means that the wall clock time to build something that can actually counter it stays relatively consistent.

I'm going to agree with zordon here on this one, but not directly through the route he's taking on this. Engineer swarms don't happen in a vacuum. It's got it's place in the build order and given the time investment the other player clearly has the option at doing the same thing.

Now, I can see if you like to play turtle warfare how this would be problematic, as you never ever really pressure the enemy base without "safe" attacks, i.e. Air/arty/reliance on special/experimental type units.

However, for the vast majority of people that are excited about this very "slug fest" of a meta game play that paws was referring to, I'd say it's not only necessary but awesomely enhances a players chance at reaching that stage of the game and or surviving it when they do.

TLDR: what erastos said.

For me, I liked the Idea behind the diminishing returns system used in SupCom2.(KEEP READING) Such a system lets you boost production without it spiraling out of control.

Say you could only have 10 engineers assist a factory normally, then every engineer past the first 10 only assist with something smallish percentage of their build power, like 10 or 20%.

It's arbitrary as hell thought, but that does mean its pretty easy to explain/remember...

Mike

What people often didn't realise about supcom/fa was that the factories had diminishing returns for them too. The time it took to start and unload the unit construction was fixed. You could approach this time but never construct faster than it.