What is the community's take on engineering towers?

Turtling to win is okay, but turtling when you have already lost and just prolong the game for 1 or 2 hours should be avoided.

This, exactly. Very well put, thank you.

Let's use area commands to avoid having to make more specialized units.

How can a rate based economy be confusing? A engineer for instance builds at 5 metal each second how can ppl not understand that? A building costs 1000 metal and 1 engineer is building it so it will take 1000/5 = 200 seconds to finish. This is how it works in zero k.

Now in zero k you dont have buildtimes like in TA. Only metal and energy, buildtime is equal to the metal cost/construction speed per second. But even if you ad buildtimes i dont think its confusing. Then you simply get a engineer that builds at a rate of 5 per second and with some (rather simple elementary school) math the actual metal and energy cost per second is calculated.

I didn't think the rate based economy was confusing either. But believe me, all available data points to it being the most confusing aspect of the game for new players.

Anyway I love the rate based economy and it's a fundamental part of the game. Anything we can do to help people understand it is a good thing.

While i do like engineering towers and voted yes, one issue i've always had with them from a gameplay perspective (also from when i attempted to make a faction with engineering tower based base construction) is that they very easily focus all of your engineering output onto one place which seems to defeat the purpose of having something around to handle attrition damage and minor construction aid (or worse they got stuck on your anti nuke).

What i would like to see is them to have up to a dozen low power engineering guns on them each of which cannot target something that the unit is already targeting. It will help with those two factories you've got while it repairs from where a stray artilery shell landed and a few of your units you managed to salvage from a failed attack. If it works comparatively slowly, good, build more to get the job done faster. If you want drones to speed build something there are construction air craft and i think this difference would really help give engineering towers their own niche.

Perhaps even a great thing if it helps some people with their real life rate based economies..

I see no problem with engineering/nano towers if they are less cost effective than factories (though towers should be more cost effective than mobile engineers). If this means a person can build a smaller base, or have a more effective use of economy, I do not anything wrong with that.

you have a mind that is thinking logical and mathematical. Otherwise you wouldnt be succesfull in the job you have. So have most players of TA and SuPCom. But some havent. and for them its not to understand at all^^

Maybe it's because some people don't play the tutorial or actually look at the numbers, like, there was the plain build cost, the rate of how fast resources were consumed while building it, and (for some) the rate of how fast resources were consumed when it had been built.

It's terribly easy. Once you get what it all means, that is.

Heh maybe its because i study mechanical engineering but i guess its possible for ppl to find it confusing. Maybe its just because iam good at maths, physics etc. so i dont have any problems understanding it.

In zero k you dont have buildtime. The energy cost is the same as the metal cost too. So you got this building that costs 5k metal then it will also cost 5k energy and at the same time it tells you something about how long its gonna take (metal cost/buildspeed per sec). Maybe a idea for PA?

I think it's broader than that and it comes out in a lot of the new idea discussions around here atm.
People get kinda welded on to long-held conventions and have a great deal of difficulty of adjusting laterally to a new concept.
Whether it is better, worse, or of much the same fundamental worth is immaterial. The point is it's different and that can be a struggle for a lot of people.

If you want to get people on-board it requires a bit of patient explanation and support.
Calling them idiots for not getting it only strengthens their resistance and means we have less people to play the game with.

I think the conversation should move lateraly to engineering towers.

Construction towers simply a response to a lack of unit intelligence in Supcom. Your engineers were too stupid to manage repairs, rebuilding, assisting, etc without babysitting, so people made engineer towers because they made things easier to manage.

I suggest that it would be much more intuitive to have a system where engineers are actually smart enough to handle the tasks that engineers should do (building new structures, replacing broken ones, not chasing friendlies needing repair into battle etc), and then have factories able to upgrade themselves to increase build speed, rather than have engineers assist factories.

He's making a lot of sense here. There has to be a really good reason to have another specialized unit that does the same things an engineer can do.

Area commands and maybe even engineer patrol prioirity (prioritize: assist, repair or construct-assist) can help alleviate these problems.

Thats why last page i suggested that instead of just being stationary long range engineers, the towers instead can work on a larger number of things at once. for instance if instead of sup com where engineering towers had 48 build rate, they could work on up to 6 different units or factories at 8 build rate each. this stops them from just being spammed as the most efficient build source or making them get stuck on one unit. instead they will support their entire area over time and help combat attrition.

How do we manage assigning the separate engineering channels?
Surely 6 separate cheaper less-effective individual towers would work better than having to manage some sort of independent targeting mechanism.

I would imagine you don't manage it. If there is a task to do inside the range of the engineering tower, be it a damaged unit or structure or a construction being in progress, it will automatically do that and divide its build power among all the available tasks (may be only up to a certain point).

I don't believe this. Construction towers have a distinct role in that they are less flexible than mobile constructors and more flexible than factories but do not give you access to new units in the way factories can. Mobile engineers can move around a base and at any time move out to do things such expand, reclaim and repair in the field. Construction towers lose the ability to do this and offset it with better BP/cost.

So the channels can't double up? I suppose that would work.
But I don't really like the concept, it seems like an unnecessary complication, one tower with one channel works fine.