Make reclaiming more intuitive

Anachronism_

Attack move and factory attack move have different reclaim radiuses. When engineers reclaim with an attack move order that comes directly from the factory, they reclaim in a much larger radius without moving than they can with a regular attack move order or with manual reclaim. This extra radius makes reclaiming with factory attack move superior to reclaiming with regular attack move and patrol if you can keep the factory attack move order 'alive' (by moving it around the map and not letting your mass storage get close to full). This is because reclaiming in place with a large radius is a lot more efficient than moving around to reclaim with a small radius.

This extra reclaim range provided by a factory attack move order is presumably a bug/exploit that the original developers of fa wouldn't have intended. It makes the game harder for noobs, who generally wouldn't know about its extra range, and would thereby be at a disadvantage. It also steepens the learning curve in an unintuitive way.

This problem is further exacerbated by the unintuitive fact that factory attack move orders generally end when the player's mass storage becomes nearly full. So, if a player accidentally briefly has a full mass bar, it can create a large disadvantage if they were taking advantage of this factory attack move exploit. I've actually seen 1.4k+ players tell their teammates not to gift them mass and actually quit games over being gifted mass by a teammate because it cancelled all of their factory attack move orders. (Once a factory attack move order is cancelled that way, a player would normally replace it with a regular attack move order, which would generally be notably less efficient.)

This is not a desirable situation. I acknowledge that this exploit has been in the game for such a long time that some people think of it as a feature, but it's very unintuitive, it steepens the learning curve, it creates a bizarre situation where players are punished extra for having nearly full mass storage (even when gifted by a teammate), and it puts players who don't know about it at an unfair disadvantage. To give perspective, I imagine that somewhere between 30% and 99% of FAF players don't properly know about the factory attack move exploit or don't even know about it at all (especially the latter). This disparity can easily be observed by looking at the reclaim behavior and quantity in a generic pro setons game (pro setons players are some of the most likely people to know about and exploit factory attack move) vs a generic noob setons game (noobs are generally unlikely to even know about the factory attack move exploit).

I propose that this exploit be fixed by making factory attack move and regular attack move have the same radius/range. This could take the form of:

(1) the factory attack move range being decreased to the regular reclaim range
(2) the regular attack move range being increased to the factory attack move range
(3) both the factory attack move range and the regular attack move range being changed to be the same value that is somewhere in between their current ranges

Personally, I think (1) would be preferable as it would not give attack move/factory attack move an nonsensical reclaim range advantage over patrol and manual reclaim. However, I think any of those 3 solutions would be better than the current situation.

Some additional things that could make reclaiming more intuitive:
(1) make it so attack move orders don't end when a player's mass storage is nearly full - I think it would be more intuitive if the order basically paused its reclaiming (either when the player's storage is nearly full, or when the whole team's storage is nearly full) and then continued once the storage was less full
(2) make it so engineers don't break trees/tree groups when they walk - this would make patrolling a more viable reclaim option (as engineers breaking trees/tree groups is generally considered a disadvantage of patrolling due to the efficiency loss when reclaiming trees that get broken by patrolling engineers) and would also help reduce toxicity (people often get mad at teammates over breaking their trees with engineers on accident)

These solutions would fix an exploit, make reclaiming more intuitive, reduce 'hidden' disadvantages for new players, help reduce toxicity, and help reduce the game's steep learning curve. We're not playing a game of Mao here; we shouldn't keep convoluted and counterintuitive exploits that are basically 'hidden in plain sight'. I imagine there are literally hundreds to thousands of FAF players with hundreds to thousands of games each who don't know about this exploit and or don't know how to use it. This is a ridiculous situation.

Jip

I agree that the situation is unintuitive - streamlining this would be my preference too.

deletethis

I'm not sure it's to be considered an exploit to begin with, and I highly doubt that so many people don't know specifically about it, besides it is even mentioned in the loading tips

which also further mention

.
Therefore it's not really hidden at all: play enough games and, even if you don't learn about it by experience, you'll read the relevant tip.

I personally would just consider this a game mechanic like any other.

Interested to see what others would say.

I can't take you seriously when you say that this will reduce toxicity.

ThomasHiatt

Removing factory attack move would greatly increase toxicity because hundreds of existing players would get very mad about it and complain about it.

ZLO

maybe let engineers to not break trees and remove factory attack move bug?

Rowey

the Factory Attack move has been around for so long now id just call is a Feature at this point not a bug as it so well know by people I would not even call it a bug

JaggedAppliance

I can sum up my thoughts in a single phrase. Leave it alone.

arma473

@penguin_ said in Make reclaiming more intuitive:

(1) the factory attack move range being decreased to the regular reclaim range
(2) the regular attack move range being increased to the factory attack move range
(3) both the factory attack move range and the regular attack move range being changed to be the same value that is somewhere in between their current ranges

The problem is, FAM is due to an engine bug based on "guard range." Since we can't edit the source code, only the LUA files, we would have to reduce the "guard range" to make the change proposed for (1) and (3). I don't know exactly how the engine uses "guard range" in other situations (such as an engineer on patrol or an engineer with a ground assist order). My guess is that reducing guard range would change the engineer's behavior in ways that actually make FAM even better than having engineers on patrol.

For the change at (2), you would have to increase the engineer's build range I think. If you change the build range, that would allow reclaiming at much longer distances, people would be able to reclaim enemy structures from silly distances. Imagine an engineer reclaiming enemy wall sections from a range farther than the range of light arty. You could scoop the mass out of the middle of setons from far away. You could capture structures from a much longer distance. It would be weird.

If it's possible, my suggestion for a fix would be to eliminate the delay between switching targets when an engineer is reclaiming. This would allow an engineer on patrol or attack-move to scoop up small wrecks (broken trees, etc.) just as fast as big wrecks. It solves the "broken trees kill my eco" problem and it solves the "I don't want to spend APM on manual reclaim" problem.

arma473

@penguin_ said in Make reclaiming more intuitive:

(1) make it so attack move orders don't end when a player's mass storage is nearly full - I think it would be more intuitive if the order basically paused its reclaiming (either when the player's storage is nearly full, or when the whole team's storage is nearly full) and then continued once the storage was less full

It would be very nice if the game took into account whether teammates' mass storages were full when deciding whether to keep scooping. I would not mind overflowing mass to my team in that situation and as a side benefit, I would be less likely to lose FAM orders.

How many times do we see a match on Setons where one person has like tens of thousands of mass in storage and a teammate has 0, and then the engineers of Mr. Moneybags stop scooping because his storage is full

Edit: This would also protect air players on Setons from losing reclaim orders because a "helpful" teammate gives them mass.

FtXCommando

I don’t want my engies funding unreliable players, if a person wants to keep his engies working while floating a billion mass then he should transfer it himself.

Resistance

why would you change reclaim?
is there something wrong with the reclaim or i just don't get the idea of where are we heading.
The current meta is about gathering resources, who gathers more resources-wins, pretty easy, high ranked players are mostly "high ranked" 80% because they know how valuable it is, afterall that's what makes those guys better, automatization, ui mods and now reclaim will just lead to a point where you won't be able to tell who's good at the game and who's just mimicking patterns.
IMO, those will just make the game not fun, there is no need to think, no need to keep on progressing, no need to do basically anything in order to win, the game will just go down to a very-very raw form of chess where 1-2 moves will just kill the game
I see no need in working towards reclaim as it's a core part of the game that should be changed only if everything else work properly and as we all know there're a bunch of other stuff that could use some work.

MrBeast

@rezy-noob Thats a first words when u borned is so greatfull!

FtXCommando

Hard to say if reclaim is working fine, one of the more hotly contested things is messing with the reclaim value for higher tier units to stop high level games from devolving into who does the first bad t3 attack that donates 10k mass. Or rather who makes a t3 army that gets immediately washered and becomes a 10k mass donation.

Offtopic for this thread tho