Engineer Always-reclaim

I literally just don’t even think it impacts the game at all, unlike the auto reclaim mods where you make a box and it does manual reclaim for you which is strictly superior. This still requires you to send engies to the correct areas but rather than ending with an attack move it just ends with a move order. Engies still go idle if nothing is in their area to reclaim. Not to mention attack move from fac will still be superior to it and it could mean that it’s easier to tell what is a fac attack move engie from a normal attack move engie.

I just don’t think it lowers any tedium in the game nor does it really give a competitive advantage to anyone tbh.

i think it is a brainless tanks. i mean if your engineer is idle you 98% of the time want it to reclaim stuff, and for 2% of the time we can make this behaviour togglable. (engineer should still be shown as idle tho)
1% cases when you don't want to reclaim but want to rebuild
and 1% cases when you don't want to reclaim cause you have full mass bar

So i would agree to this change being added.
i guess it is just slow and old people like me that have no "select idle engineer" hotkey, are jealous to young prodigy pro players that can simply press hotkey and alt+right click in random direction once and get rid of all idle engineers once every minute.

i don't see how game would get played by itself since engineer will not move and there will no be reclaim in it range most of the time (is this how we view this change? i don't want my idle engineers to move, lol)

But there are other things:
Who is gonna code that? check for bugs?
Is it even possible to do that and keep engineer shown as idle with our limited possibilities? (we can't change anything related to game engine)

How much performance impact it is going to create? who is gonna test that?
Should engineer stop reclaiming when storage is full? 80% full?
i mean engineers that we have right now can't stop reclaiming when storage is full. They only stop starting to reclaim new things, but if some engineers started reclaim it will not stop unit they finish even if they waste mass

Yes, i know attacke-move and i use it ofc. It´s just about less clicks in many situations.
On long reclaim areas i would still use attack-move.
All this rage against this engineer behavior ( It´s kind of a behavior of the engi, not a feature), interesting.

Examples
1#: engi stands in your base or somewhere and eats fresh airplane wracks.
2# engi stand behind or inside your army and eats wracks after a fight.
3# send to a cricle reclaim
4# engi will not move to far in enemy territory!

I see situations where this is extremely annoying. Let's say you build a t4 in your base after some air fight happened. The t4 finishes, the 60 engies around the t4 now just go and randomly split up to go hunt down 150 mass wrecks while you were busy microing a fight and you come back to pure chaos organization in your base. Same sort of thing could happen if you have engies waiting to help assist the t3 pgen once your t3 engie is finished from your air fac.

Not to mention some maps have shit trees that are worth nothing so you never go reclaim them. If they exist in your base and you keep any idle engies in base for bp then these engies go off and waste their time on awful trees that provide near zero reclaim and now you need to go and remember to move them back to where you intended them to be.

Seriously though, this will just make it so that you can't find idle engies because they're busy reclaiming single trees in your base on open palms.

Just toggle it off, or this could be by default off, engis should be shown as "idle" i guess.
Yes, i don´t know if this is even possible with the FAF engine, but it´s not that of a big feature.

But this bad-trees is a 0,1% case, cmon. The main thing is, engis don´t move anywhere, this is the goodness of it.
They don´t move, just reclaim in their radius / range! No worry about chaos or something.

Bdw. is there even a hotkey/trick to select idle engis without the com?

@ghnaf said in Engineer auto-reclaim:

But this bad-trees is a 0,1% case, cmon. The main thing is, engis don´t move anywhere, this is the goodness of it.

Then it would actually be way worse than attack move and require way more micro/tedium. You would probably need to move the engie 3-4 times to accomplish the same reclaim an attack move engie would accomplish before going idle. It's just a random supplementary feature but it doesn't really add anything to the game tbh. You will still be attack moving to be efficient.

In my opinion, saying that players can just turn it off if they don't like it is a crutch argument. If it works as you say and all the problems others have raised are worked out, then it gives an advantage, however small, with no drawbacks. Players trying to be as good as possible have no reasonable choice but to enable it, for them it may as well be mandatory.

I think there would need to be a very good reason to implement this besides ease of use. As Zlo has mentioned, aside from the added performance cost of having to check every idle/stationary engineer, something like this is sure to introduce plenty of bugs. Not to mention it would probably be incredibly difficult to develop. Yes it's not a "big feature", but it seriously messes with the way unit orders and reclaim works. Not to mention a feature like this is sure to create a ton of confusion on how it works with a name like "auto reclaim", even if it's a relatively simple feature.

There must be a toggle button because it would eat your building wracks or XP wracks even if you don´t want to.

It would be a huge relief in battle situations and other situations where you want to harvest an area, patrol makes the engis drive weird, they often drive to far away and do stupid stuff. Just harvest the stupid area and stay there damn engineer

Actually the main problem is, this game gives no proper tools to reclaim, it´s ofc. an old game, but reclaim is annoying as fk.

I think i´m a between player, i hate this simcity/gap/astro crater stuff, but don´t like heavy multitasking stuff either, and
this game want me to chose one of them. "Always-reclaim" would be a first relief, but ofc. not "the" super feature.

You will get banned quickly, unfortunately, so I will pass by

This is a bad idea. I am a low APM player and still would never want this in the game.

It would be way better for engies not stopping their Shitf + A move when you get mass near full for 10 segs

If i send shift+A engies and my mass gets near full they stop reclaiming, i start using my mass i get near zero again but the engies need new shift+A order =(
Kinda sucks hard, it also happens for you guys?

It would suck more if you reclaimed mass or energy while you were full on resources therefore wasting resources for no reason. Part of the game is always having the next mass sink idea in the back of your head, if you don't have one then you're going to float mass and get into situations like that. Then, if you know what the next thing you want to make is, it's also easier to gauge the energy you need to make now as various things cost more e per unit of mass and therefore necessitate higher e production.

@kdrafa91 Yes, that sucks for me too.

I´m a relatively new player, so i maybe don´t see all the issues with this feature, but it would be awsome if reclaim woulde be much less annoying,
especially on maps with much scattered mass. You have to manage many engineers all over the map, they stop working or drive crazy etc.
Big reclaim fields after a battle are nicely to reclaim with attack-move, because you can focus on a single spot, thats fine i think.

Yes, the biggest issue is to prevent eating while the storage is full, probably not possible with this engine or to difficult to make.

I think there was/is a mod with a reclaim beacon building, i imagine an engineer is kind a "reclaim beacon" while not moving.

Another issue would be if you lose a key structure in your base, and would want to rebuild it from half HP, but cant because all your base BP immediately slurped it up as reclaim?

You might not want to auto reclaim as this will overflow and waste mass.

Its a bit more micro intensive i guess but you might be better off just using attack moves as standard out of factories in your games?

From a technical perspective:

• We don't have any cycles to spare. This sounds like a feature that would increase the path finding usage / commands being issued to dozens if not hundreds of engineers at a time.
• The game recognizes engineers as idle when their state is idle. Anything else (e.g., moving, reclaiming, etc) will remove them from the UI and you'd never have any idle engineers.

And from a gameplay perspective:

• The mass / reclaim is as hard to navigate for you as it is for your opponent. Being able to navigate it better shows skill - introducing a feature like this would reduce the depth of the game.

They did the same thing to Supreme Commander 2 until there was no depth to be found anymore. And now we thrive more than they ever did .

Why they need path finding? They don´t have to move, just reclaim the current location.
It would be enought to scan every secound or so for some mass on the ground, every frame would be total overkill indeed.

Idle -> 1000ms -> scan for mass ->nothing found ->idle -> ...
Idle -> 1000ms -> scan for mass ->reclaim found-> reclaim -> nothing found -> idle...

The storage overflow and building wracks issues are killing this idea, i know, but i wonder if
this would be relatively easy and possible to implement.

Try using attack move and click where you want the engie to stand, check back on said engie and drag the attack move to a new spot

This isn't really hard to do, and making what your thinking sounds like a lot of work for little gain.

Do you have any devs on board for this?

@ghnaf

Engineers need pathfinding before the reclaim order is issued.
If you don't do that and the reclaim is on a hill or deep valley then the engineer will start
moving around the hill etc to reach the reclaim.

Also your example with Idle -> 1000ms -> scan for mass ->nothing found ->idle -> has the drawback that we
need to run a LUA thread for every engineer to check for reclaim every 10 gameticks.

Maybe another solution could be a mod:

This mod adds auto-reclaim units to your game:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/356/ninja-reclaim-drones-v18-for-all-game-versions
Have in mind this mod can't be converted in a UI style mod, and every player in the same game needs this mod installed.

It shows how a full automated reclaim work and maybe you find someone who is willing to make a mod
that is only moving idle engineers instead of using new units like my mod.

[edit] the reclaim function is the same that is used in the Uveso-AI.

So I don't really have an opinion whether it's a good idea to do this or not, but don't think it matters much anyway because it is pretty easy to attack move some engies instead so this gives very little advantage or help to noobs anyway.

But from a technical perspective, could it be done by just automatically issuing an attack move order directly underneath idle engis? (and maybe have this order time out or only get implemented once a minute or something, so if there is nothing around to reclaim the engi doesn't continuously get new orders?)
You could make the argument it is helpful for some noobs but worse for better players because they want to know when their engis go idle and would be better off disabling the toggleable ability.

But in that case you could have the best of both worlds. It makes life a bit easier for noobs, but doesn't reduce the skill ceiling either. Otherwise, we'd have to accept the argument that attack moving engis AT ALL reduces the skill ceiling of the game and makes it worse, because manual reclaiming requires more clicking...and we all know the faster you click the more skilled you are, right? Sure, but just like including both attack moving engies and manual reclaim is perfectly fine, ADDING a less effective, easy option doesn't remove the skill ceiling. It is perfectly fine to allow some automation of tasks as long as there are also ways to do things more efficiently by micromanaging more.

So I'd say it just comes down to whether or not there is a reasonably easy technical solution that doesn't bog the game down much.