Two suggestions regarding wrecks

how about some units being able to crush the wreckage, others walk over/push/run over it, others ram it until its moved (while taking minor damage maybe?). A short mech might have a hard time passing a wrecked tank, but a large one could walk over it. A scout car could try to ram through a blockade but take damage while doing so. The wrecks mass/weight could impact pushability and crushability. A tank is harder to push/smash than a scout, and a strategic wall of tanks that are alive could make a decent wall when they die.

The nice thing about TA was that wreckage would turn into little bits of shrapnel that could be passed through and still reclaimed.

The megalathe

Wait, microlathe? Millilathe? Hmmm... using SI prefixes outside of their intended use gets pretty complex, doesn't it.

Regarding reclaim options, I'd be happy with one or more of:

1. Flying engineers
2. Combat units with reclaim ability (like the Aeon Harbinger)
3. A building with a medium+ range, automated area reclaim (like the Cybran Recycler)
4. Combat units with the ability to traverse wreckage (either due to size/mass or built-in all terrain mobility)

Any of the above will help mitigate the effects of wreckage, with my personal preference for an addition being 2 or 3.

1 is, I believe, already in the game anyway. In that sense it should be fine, unless playtesting reveals that most games produce megatonnes of wreckage that need dealing with :mrgreen:

The extra mobility will make this option VERY powerful. It can easily usurp the ground variant for a large number of uses, so it will likely need to be restricted. Similar results can be achieved with an engineer + transport.

The lathe is technically a form of weapon. Why not cut out the middle man and just have a nice, fast reclaimer that attacks with the lathe? You don't need heavy firepower to deal with dead husks, it's not like they're going to fight back.

Using standard engineers for reclaim duty will likely fail due to their high cost and slow speed. Flying engineers will be super effective due to their high mobility, despite any cost. The only real way to beat these existing options is to be fast AND cheap.

The UEF engi tower is a good fit for this. Cheap drones are excellent patrol units for taking wreckage and doing repair. No construction power required; in fact it would only interfere with their primary maintenance role.

Any unit that can already travel across rough terrain should have no trouble passing through wreckage. Will a special unit be required? Probably not.

I'm assuming Uber are considering a similar engineer balance mechanic to TA, e.g. aerial engineers construct and reclaim slower (and are more expensive) than their ground based counterparts, to make ground engineers attractive in the face of superior aerial mobility. This is of course assuming that the aerial engineers in the whitebox units are even kept once we hit a playable build, of course.

Sounds like the TA FARK

It can certainly be made to work, especially if you give it all-terrain mobility (spiderlegs or whatever the PA equivalent ends up being). You'd need to balance lathe DPS (i.e. reclaiming live units as a weapon) against unit cost and range but that should be straightforward enough.

Depends on how big the wreckage is. Having gone back to TA over the last couple of weeks, pretty much all wreckage is big enough to kill unit pathing unless you flatten it (deliberately or otherwise) with weapon fire. A big enough field of corpses is equivalent to a wall, and only spiders can traverse it without having to steer around every wreck. SupCom(s) eschewed that for corpses that don't really affect pathing unless they are massive, meaning that all these nice reclaim options (harbinger, recycler) were of far less utility in clearing blockages, as there were no real blockages. Their main use was economical in nature.

If PA implements easy to traverse wreckage it won't be an issue, however having gone back to TA I have to admit I do like wrecks being a significant blockage. You can use them deliberately to turn locations into chokepoints, and it slows down (ground unit) rushes by forcing trailing units to take longer paths around their now-defunct comrades. A deathball of tanks can become a turkey shoot in the right circumstances :mrgreen:

Honestly don't have an opinion on the OP but here's a visual.

Lathe as a weapon - I'm all for this. The most annoying part of the engineer is that he would sit there doing nothing as someone tiny scout pinged away at him. Treating the lathe exactly like a weapon would help a lot.

I'd also make lathes automatically target nearby wrecks as a lowest priority (assuming the engineer has no target of course). This would allow reclaim bots (like the Harbinger) to suck up anything that it walks near, instead of forcing the player to patrol or manually reclaim hulks.

This would make running your light units into a pack of fabbers a much more dangerous thing to do. And allow for units to fab on the run - why do we force fabbers to stop and then build? (would help a lot with placing walls!)

+1

Love using SC2 engineers as attack units, and would like to see more lathe action!

The issue here really is the lack of auto-targeting to reclaim live units. I've manually reclaimed live units (mainly enemy engineers trying to cap my buildings, to be fair) in most of the TA inspired games. It's not that the lathe isn't a weapon, but that the game doesn't really treat it as one from a unit AI perspective.

Whether you'd want your engineers to prioritise live targets over repairing damaged buildings / units is another question.

The lathe carries an absurd amount of function. It can do practically anything, but that's sort of why we love it. Unfortunately, this leads to big AI concerns as you have a ton of functions and the AI can't read your mind. It is very easy to pick the wrong action and end up annoying to use, as Supcom2 demonstrated with its engineers on the field. Did you know that SC2 Cybran engis do more damage with their reclaim than they do with the gun? You wouldn't know from the way their AI worked!

A dedicated single function lathe can iron out these issues and get only the ability you want on the field. The unit ends up less capable overall, which means it gets to be cheaper and thus more efficient for the specific role at hand; be it reclaim, repair, capture, or just being more mobile than the rest. That way the omnitool engineers only have to be balanced around their construction use; being slow, expensive, and loaded with utility for any other need. Exactly what you'd expect out of a heavy duty worker unit.

It's not a very hard one though. A simple priority list solves it.

Priority from Highest to lowest:
1. Assigned target (repair, build or reclaim target, depending on target type)
2. Reclaim enemy unit that comes in range
3. Reclaim wreckage that comes in range (stuff bumping into the fab gets dealt with first)
4. Repair units that come in range (this depends on what the cost of repair is going to be - if high cost, then skip this one)
4. If on patrol, seek out enemies within a small radius (1/4 or less of 'normal' range). - possibly not needed, and definitely no 'chase' mechanism. Just enough to prevent 'stop being stupid and move 3 pixels over to reclaim that stupid little scout' moments.
5. If on patrol, seek out reclaimables if storage is available in large radius
6. If on patrol, seek out repairables.

Tbh, I wouldn't be averse to all fabbers having a toggle for each function - it would be nice for example, to have that fabber stay out in the field reclaiming things instead of running into your base to repair a building just because you filled your storage briefly.


Bobucles - I don't believe it's so complicated we need to remove functionality in order to have the AI make good choices. As long as they are consistent and predictable it's fine.

The irritating part of supcom/ta lathes was more the fact that so much of their use needed to be manually controlled.

Personally I'd prefer more distinct roles for construction units.

For example:

- Standard constructor, squishy and expensive.

- Combat engineer, has an offensive nanolathe with increased range, plenty of hp and can build one or two offensive structures. Also reclaims stuff faster to clear a path.

- Repair bot. Repairs with multiple nanolathes around them. Can't build stuff.

- Dissassembler tank. Has a very fast offensive nanolathe and on death explodes in a cloud of nanites, damaging enemies, healing friendlies and perhaps instareclaiming some wrecks around it. (The only unit with an on-death effect that is beneficial.) Also can't build stuff and also can't repair.

- Nanitebomber. Throws a bunch of nanitebombs at the target area, reclaiming all wreckage and dealing some dissassemble damage to enemies, no friendly fire but low damage overall.

- Nanitemine. Explodes in a cloud of nanites. If its damage fully disassembles something, it creates new nanitemines out of the recovered metal. :lol:

(Ok, the last 2 examples were kinda in jest, though imo still cool. :mrgreen: )

This allows uber to design some distinctive units and has the benefit of specialisation and thus increased effect in their intented role.

I don't want a standard constructor to fight a raiding party one on one since this could hurt raiding too much but I want some repair unit to be useful on the front line. Trying to fit unit into a size fits all design imo doesn't work too well.

Also having toggles for everything is kinda too much micro for me and also will make it hard to see what any of my constructing units has for orders at a glance. Having seperate units makes it obvious what it will do and can do.

While a smart AI can probably make good decisions most of the time, a dedicated unit will do what you want 100% of the time. That's a much easier situation to deal with. It's also nice because it keeps squishy, expensive engis off the front line.

It's not really about removing functions. It's about using some of those functions to create new units. The engi and Comm still get to do everything, but now there are extra units that excel at the more subtle lathe tasks. For starters, it helps to reveal just how important and valuable each individual function is. It also allows each option to be taken beyond acceptable limits for engineers. You can't have a constructor that is fast, and lethal, and long reach, and flying, and cheap, after all. Something's gotta give.

Some of this happened in Supcom2, in the form of the recycler and loyalty gun. Both tools took a specific lathe function and cranked it up to 11, with debatable results. A similar approach can help bring out the full gameplay potential of the lathe in PA.

My "perfect" solution would be to be able to define this per unit, but that's either a lot of engine/UI work (toggles or a modifiable priority list for each unit), or allowing the default unit behaviour to be rescripted, and scripts assigned per unit (e.g. attack engineer script vs repair engineer script). Again, a lot of work, just with scripting and unit behaviour instead of custom UI for the unit.

Preferentially, I'd want to be able to select a couple of engineers as base repairers, a couple as wandering reclaimers, and some as offensive reclaimers, and vary or reassign between funtions based on the current situation.

Worst case (and one I have no problem with) would be to get off my backside and create 2 custom units, a combat reclaimer (with auto-attack behaviour) and a repair only unit, and just mod them into the game myself. That would give me the basic functionality I want and should be perfectly doable given the stated goals for PA, without Uber needing to spend time and resource implementing it themselves. I'd just need to learn how to 3D model :mrgreen:

After skimming through the thread, I think many of you are setting yourselves up for disappointment. Because you are suggesting solutions that fit your schema, things that make sense physically. While, to quote Mavor, game play and readability are king. The solution they will use will probably have something to do with balance.

Wrecks are an integral part of the game. They serve as a sort of subtle game ender. Assuming energy and engineers are cheap, production is limited to the metal output of the map.
This governs the progression of the game. While metal output from extractors is some sort of constant that has a maximum, wrecks are a game accelerator. You can reach a point in the game were all the metal spots are claimed and yet there is enough wreckage to sustain insane construction.

What about a millipede-type unit, used to push debris/wrecks out of the way? In nature they bulldoze their way through the undergrowth, it could be cool to have a unit like that to shove stuff about on the battlefield. Also as some units aren't going to be able to go through forests, it could be used to bulldoze trees.

This thread reminds me of the city-biome thread, and brings up the question of how solid wrecks and ruins are going to be. I mean if you have a bulldozer unit squishing units, could you potentially create hills of junk? It'd certainly be cool to have ruins become part of a dynamic battlefield, instead of just being mass to reclaim.

Edit: Also, it might make sense for tanks to roll over and crush wreckage, but will bots do this, or have to clamber over it? And what's the blast radius? I like pretty explosions and its always a bit weird that wreckage in TA style games just results in a blob of metal, instead of going all over the place.

Also what's happening with ship wreckage? Are they just going to disappear into the sea-floor?

i like the idea of bots being able to squeeze through wreckage fields.

it gives them a nice point of distinction.

on of the things that bugged me about SupCom was the fact that the wreckage was 'transparent' to pathing, and never (i think) blocked the way.

The number of times that wreckage filled choke points saved my arse in TA games, or at least allowed me to TRY for a come back...

I think we would be foolish to try and sidestep it altogether.
i think it's a very important tactical point that needs to be taken into account.

but in later games, it can be just irritating.

My suggestion is a T2 wreckage clearer for assaults:
average speed, tough, clears or crushes wreckage for assaults.
after all, we are told that T2 units are not 'better' but more specialized.
this would be specialized.

R

Out of curiosity, can I get a source on this?

viewtopic.php?p=506162#p506162

Mike

It doesn't always have that way. T2 units are basically "Everything too complex or totally broken at T1". Big units and special units tend to fit in that category.