Repair units balance

As a former combat medic, I personally love the idea of repair being more viable.

Repairing battleships should totally be viable. But I think what would be best on big ticket items (like ships) would be a mechanic that does not have efficiency or viability stuck at one point. Whether to keep your ships at the front with Frontline repairs, a safer forward base with repair, or bringing them back to be reclaimed should be a situationally informed decision. I have further ideas but keeping it on repair, we could use this to put in some factional differences. Perhaps something about cybran makes it better for them to cannibalize, (can mantis reclaim) making mantis reclaim more meaningful. While UEF can be repaired more easily (33% cost?), Making sparkles vital. And Aeon just suck or something IDK. Give them a prayer ability that shuts them down and does an auto repair for some mass cost idk. We can finally use the CGs kneel animation.

You must deceive the enemy, sometimes your allies, but you must always deceive yourself!

@thewheelie What do you mean in the lacking manpower?

Today: units have HP which is expensive and slow to repair (exceptions: high regen from upgrades and vet, air staging), and some units have shields which are free to repair.

Can we take inspiration from various other games and have both "core HP" and "armour", where only armour is fast and cheap to repair, and where "core HP" may affect a unit's performance?

I'm not sure how viable this is to implement on SupCom, but IMO it would be a much better incentive system for keeping units alive than the veterancy system.

In this case Valki has an interesting idea to reduce the mass cost and increase energy cost of repair. Another thing to consider would be adjusting the speed of repair to make it superior to ctrl-k and recycling the mass in. Even if it's not more mass or energy efficient, to get a t4 healthy and ready to fight very quickly again could sometimes be useful.

To go in a bit different direction, if we were willing to consider adding anything to the game, a land repair facility could be an option (similar to air staging). Anyone remember this from Red Alert? Not sure what would be appropriate mass/energy costs or speed of repair, but it could be interesting. I expect this might be difficult to implement, given the massive difference in unit sizes from t1 to t4s...but maybe just a very large building that can accomodate one t4, or 2-3 t3 units at once, 4-6 t2, or 10 t1 tanks at once? or various tech levels of repair facilities that have different capacities (similar to transports).

Repair does need some kind of buff though.

@thewheelie is this the official response of the team?

No

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Another thing to consider is that making repair more efficient will just add to the defender's advantage already present. Defenders will be able to get the reclaim from the dead unit and repair their own units easier. So most likely any increase in repair efficiency would need to be balanced with that in mind as well.

@Sheikah that can be traded-off against the reclaim value of wrecks. IMO it may be a little high (on land)?

There is this weird mismatch where repairing land units is basically never feasible but repairing air units is....free???

I think the free air unit repair is actually detrimental for the game because it enforces that however wins a single air engagement gets all his units healed, making a comeback even harder and once again making T3 air dominant above all.

You wouldn't repair air units if it was done by engies either, reason it is feasible is air staging.

@sheikah attackers also can have bonuses from it

for now the attacking player have a longer delay in supply (his factories is far away), so it's quite hard to hold captured territory

but if for example t2 com can pretty fast repair all damaged units it will be easier to hold this territory and then attack once again

also attacker's units might already have veterancy so when they will be full hp - they will be stronger than equal enemy army, that's really intresting

Overall, nothing changes: do not fight the battle you cannot win

But a win in battle will be more rewarding (because your survived army will be stronger than before, after repair)

@sheikah Repair is already used by defenders on firebases - I see repair most often used to repair a T2 PD that is under attack.

@sheikah said in Repair units balance:

Another thing to consider is that making repair more efficient will just add to the defender's advantage already present. Defenders will be able to get the reclaim from the dead unit and repair their own units easier. So most likely any increase in repair efficiency would need to be balanced with that in mind as well.

Repair is already used by defenders on firebases - I see repair most often used to repair a T2 PD that is under attack.

Buffing or expanding the mechanic might see attackers start using it too.