The current manual reclaim situation is undesirable:
- When used properly, it gives additional artificial advantage to those with higher apm on top of the advantage they already get from high apm otherwise. Even if it's only from clicking during the first minutes of the game, that can result in large butterfly effects.
- When used improperly, it's arguably a noob trap.
- Many people find it annoying/frustrating to do, especially when low-value reclaim is densely mixed with high-value reclaim.
- It contributes to bo-based advantage and perception of bo-based advantage, which is one of the leading reasons people stated they don't play ladder in this thread.
- Feeling like you have to do it or are at a disadvantage contributes to ladder being more stressful/intense, which is one of the leading reasons people stated they don't play ladder in this thread.
- While attack move is a viable alternative for many situations, there are many others where it's an inferior substitute that doesn't resolve the problem. Notably, if there is enough high-value reclaim mixed in with a lot of low-value reclaim, attack move gets the high-value reclaim much more slowly, while manual reclaim is more annoying/frustrating/sweaty/stressful/apm-consuming/etc.
I think this situation should be improved. I am open to different ideas for how that could be accomplished. For example, if someone knows a reasonable way to sufficiently adjust how engineers act when using patrol/attack move, there might be a solution there, but I am not aware of that being a realistic option atm. So, if you have a good idea, feel free to share it.
If no one has a better idea, I think we should add a reclaim brush, as I think that would improve the situation. Some details about how the brush could work:
- It could be represented with a circle when being used, where the brush would give manual reclaim orders within the areas it's used on.
- It could be restricted to only give manual reclaim orders to reclaim that is above a certain value threshold (ie: only >35 mass).
- There could be different hotkeys that enable you to use the brush with different threshold levels (ie: there could be 1 for >10 mass, 1 for >100 mass, 1 for tree groups, etc).
- There could a cap on the processing cost per unit time, a cap on the max number of extant orders that could be queued with the reclaim brush, and a small enough brush size to avoid technical issues.
PS: Many additional points and counterpoints regarding adding a reclaim brush were previously made here.