Rethinking the Build Mechanic - Engineer Swarms

Is everyone happy with the idea of swarms of engineers building projects, clustered around factories, that sort of thing?

I do like the intuitiveness of the engineer assisting concept (build faster = more engineers) but I wonder if there's a more elegant solution to projecting build power than a big swarm of the most efficient (highest mass:buildpower ratio) engineer.

Late game construction can get kind of crazy when you can create an economy that has an 'insta-build', game-end option available.

I had the idea that it might be useful to disable factory build assisting, and replace it with a system that allowed you to permanently 'upgrade' a factory's build time by sacrificing an engineer. This would give the same effect as setting an engineer to assist the factory, but would have the benefit of removing base clutter, and committing your build time resource to a single location. You could even make factories have the 'uncovered roach' effect - engineers inside the factory scuttle around when their factory gets blown up.

No more: 100 engineers around a factory
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=35489

dammit, I searched for 'engineer swarm'. Why didn't you post 'engineer swarm' in there? lol.

Here's an idea from Technic/Minecraft. The machines had slots for "overclocking upgrades". There were a fixed number of slots, and when you placed an upgrade in the machine, it went something like 1.2x faster but used 1.4x more resources, or something like that. It traded efficiency for speed. And there was a maximum amount you could upgrade.

So what if factories had modular upgrade slots in them, where you could actually remove the upgrades and place them in another factory if you wanted. An upgrade could be a physical object you build in a factory, and even move around perhaps with an engineer. If you want a specific factory to go faster, you move your upgrade modules there, and it goes significantly faster with a reduced efficiency. Then, you get a similar effect to moving around mobs of engineers because you can transfer "build power" from one factory to another, but instead of making dozens of engineers to hover around one factory, you build say, 6 or 7 upgrade modules and slap them in the factory. Then if you want to move them to another factory you can do that too. Each factory could have a maximum number of upgrade slots so that you never get that "insta-build" effect in the late game that happened in TA/Supcom.

Fixed for you.

That thread

A) Doesn't deal with the question posted by the thread author at all, and
B) Doesn't ever go into alternatives other than 'don't assist' or 'change build power'.

So, I'd like to discuss in this thread, whether or not there are ELEGANT SOLUTIONS to the messy clutter of a base full of factories being assisted by engineers.

My suggestion is that engineers can 'dock' into a factory and become a permanent fixture that requires the factory to be destroyed before you can 'recover' the engineers. This prevents both cluttering a base, and having a base full of 'insta-rebuild-everything' engineers.

Recon's suggestion is to make 'upgrade modules' which increase resource cost for the benefit of faster building, although I find his solution to be one that adds a lot of micro and possibility of confusion (which factory has upgrades? Where should I build this unit in a hurry? Where should I build if I'm not in a hurry?)

Any other ideas?

I'm happy with it.

I like the idea. I'm very pro insta-build factories but it can be hard to find/move units through the swarm, but I would tent to having the engineers destroyed if the factory goes.

Gear everything so that's it more economical to build a second factory than to run one factory faster.

Same goes for building things. Parallelism is a good thing!

Yes, I'd like to see this. Or have engineers slot into factories (permanently) but with a maximum of 2-3 slots. Either way I think building more factories should be more efficient/necessary to increase unit production rate.

If you're going to permanently slot in engineers, then you may as well have the factory build itself an upgrade.

After all, the factory is probably going to produce the engineer that slots back into it. Why increase micromanagement by building units to gobble back up?

I like the mechanic of engineer swarms and I would want to see it in PA, however I do agree that it does look a little messy and create clutter in your base.

There's a few ways you could deal with this, you could have a simple AI behaviour dictating the way in which engineers move when they are told to assist a factory. For example they all stack up in an orderly way that doesn't create the traditional fluster cluck of engineers around the factory. This would have the draw back of meaning that there would be a slight delay of movement between when you told the engineer to assist and when it actually got around to doing it, this could be annoying when you're trying to rush production on something in order to save your ***.

Another way which would look awesome would be for the engineer to transform into an additional part of the factory and attach itself to the factory. This would again face the problem of delay and it wouldn't work with say twenty off engineers. Perhaps a combination of these methods?

You could also make the engineers hover around the factory shooting their beams into it, that would mean that as many engineers as you like could assist and it wouldn't clutter the ground space for your base, though it could create some problems with line of sight.

Good point. Upgrades would be fine, at equal efficiency to building a new factory, but only 1-3 upgrades per factory, so if you want to produce yet more of those units at good efficiency, you have to build a new factory.

I'd prefer that system to factory assist.

The key difference between a factory upgrade and engineer assist though is you can reassign the engineer assist as priorities change.

I think engineer are well balance until midgame. They are fragile and a target of choice for raider. It give incensitive to build a second factory just for the additional HP.
But once into mid/late game, there is no more risks to have engineer and they become the only logical choice. They are no more balanced in comparaison to factories.

edit: For the moment I don't have ideas on how to keep that balance even in late game.
But ihmo, it would be a clean solution.

It wouldn't be permanent then, would it? ;P

Factories are simpler if they are uniform, and engineers are simpler if they are discrete from factories.

That said, the idea of having factories construct additional lathes or whatever is interesting. Although it does create the issue of adding a details to factories, rather than have "this is a factory of type X" be all the information you would need about it.

What might be better is if we suppose a factory is a fixed-size block, and each block is identical. However, each block can use its production to create an adjacent block just like it, sprawling out across the map. Instead of adding speed by constructing a self-assist upgrade, a factory can build another block right next to itself, adding another production line. This also makes the factory-complex larger in size.

No real reason why a "factory" only has to build one thing at a time. A factory entity might have tons of production lines running simultaneously.

Actually if we aren't getting shields groups of Engies make great bomber targets, compared to taking out factories they are a much easier target, same kinda goes with artillery.

Mike

While I've used engineer-assist in TA constantly, it never really made any sense to me. If the engineer is capable of doing what the facility is doing, then whats the facility doing then? Couldn't 3 or 4 engineers freely construct units out of nothing?

Look at a modern day assembly line. You can't just "speed it up" by stepping in the line and handing things to the robots, or delivering materials, etc. The assembly line is built with only the assembly line in mind. If an external source can speed up an assembly line, that means the line isn't fully operational to begin with.

Why not have engineers capable of constructing buildings, assisting other engineers in the construction of said buildings, but not able to assist facilities? This not only greatly reduces the need for engineer swarms, it also encourages more facilities, which in turn require more territory to be defended.

This is how experimentals are built in SupCom

Nope, but that gave me a pretty hilarious image of what would happen if you tried. However, in TA it sorta makes sense. Everything is built by nanolathe, assume the factory has the blueprints for the unit you are building and then sprays nano-bots/nanites/whatever they are on to that wire-frame. The only limiting factor is how many of those nanites you can spray onto the wire-frame at once. If you add more from a construction unit it will go faster, the factory's blueprint is telling them how to assemble.