Prebuilt engis

What if the player gets 2-3 engis from the start.

After building the factory everybody is building at least 3 engis or more, prebuilt
engies could speed up the slow first minutes, balance would be untouched.

Any cons?

Then you can't raid with labs or bombers so the game sucks. Also radically changes the starting build order for every map in the game.

Balance would absolutely be touched. Slow first few minutes seem to be a thing I see a fair bit of other rts players complain about where supcom gets brought up and it can be bad from a casting perspective. Would be nice to have some tournaments or events that would experiment with various prebuilt possibilities to see how it impacts games.

Maybe a prebuilt air fac on 20x20s can help reduce the impact of early air fight RNG etc.

Could always have solved 20x20 air cancer if you were given a civilian transport to capture or something. Instead, mappers never tried it and just put hostile anti-air in your base or something.

Hasn't there been a prebuilt base option since forevere?

Everyone forgot that it exists, except for phantom players which use it religiously for whatever reason.

Or we could just increase the speed at which the 1st factory is built to almost instantaneous. That would not change anything.

@Melanol
that would be cool. ( you should get littl more mass/E in this case )

The idea is, you get less initial resources ( 3* engi costs )
You can´t spam instant tanks or so with the first factory just because you got 3 "free" engis.
Raid would be the same in this case.

Only question is, is there any tactic where you build less then 3 engis after your first fac.

First factory would be fast, then you could send your engis to hydro or build pgens/mex or whatever
and play like usual.

I will try this prebuilt feature then, but i need to figure out how to set less initial mass/E.

I'd be in favour of 3 free engies from match start.

The time your first factory is building is when you get to look at the map and think about your build order. Everyone already thinks build orders are complicated or something so they need every second they can get.

@ghnaf said in Prebuilt engis:

@Melanol
You can´t spam instant tanks or so with the first factory just because you got 3 "free" engis.
Raid would be the same in this case.

I would disagree. There are a plenty of peoplen spamming labs as first units from fac.

Plus it would make first bomber way better because your 3 engies can go pick up all the E you'd need

FAF Website Developer

Who knows Chess 960? You kill "build orders" by "randomly" rotating the initial state.
Same could be done here. All parties start with an equal but random set of 0 up to X (maybe 3 or 5) units. The units are from a predefined pool (engi, scout, t1 tank, t1 aa)

"Nerds have a really complicated relationship with change: Change is awesome when WE'RE the ones doing it. As soon as change is coming from outside of us it becomes untrustworthy and it threatens what we think of is the familiar."
– Benno Rice

I don't think you want to kill build orders though. People have a hard enough time figuring out how to play the game already when they can just use the same generic build order on almost every map. It's so bad that the majority of the playerbase just plays the same map with the same predefined roles and build orders over and over.