Engineers should automatically reclaim where they are and while
they stand.
If an engineer stops he just reclaims in his range, no player commands needed. You can just mix up engis in you army, if your army holds over some reclaim, it gets eaten by the engi.
Just send an engi to a location and he will eat reclaim, no annoying patrol / attack commands needed, but you can ofc. still use it.
If someone don´t want auto-reclaim, you can turn it off.
Yes !!!!, a good and valid argument, not.
Whats wrong with automating of annoying / repetitiv/ brainless tasks ????
Try words not a STUPID youtube Song.
Cuz it's not brainless nor repetitive or annoying?
Like yes, let's make the game as accessible as possible so even brainlets can play it on their phones. What can go wrong lol.
@ghnaf What these gentlemen are trying to say is probably that the attention, or focus if you will, required to give orders to said engineers is actually a core part of the skills needed to be good and that automating it would make the game easier, or less skill-based, or less interesting.
Of course, if they would actually bother to properly reply instead of trolling/flaming, you might have understood that, but that's just how it is when you touch some topics.
I for one would actually like such a feature, even if just to use it on non-competitive modes/singleplayer.
Just in case you weren't aware, you can almost already mix an engineer in your factory queue and move the attack order around as your army goes if you want to reclaim the battle zone—the fact that engineers won't be selected together with your army is helpful in this case (unless you hold shift).
If I remember correctly there was already quite an uproar a long (?) time ago when someone uploaded a mod that would you to select some zones for reclaim, try looking either in these forums or in the old ones if you are interested—the arguments used against it will be a good point of reference.
You guys are so funny, haha.
I thought this is a nice community and you can post a suggestion and get decent answers.
YES, this feature ( it´s not even an feature ) would total destroy FAF. ppl with IQ50 would be automatically progamer and would play like rating 2000.
This game would basically play by itselfe, the player just need to watch the units moving and fighting.
Reclaiming stupid stones is not annoying, nor repetitive nor brainless, so true, especially on huge big scale maps with
many many reclaim.
Company of Heroes 3 gets auto-refill of units, let´s call the developer to prevent this feature, every auto-feature should be banned, so true. Let´s call the past so the developer of command & conquer turns of the auto harvesting, so you have to klick on every tiberium crystal.
@deletethis Sry, my comment was sended after yours.
But nonone can convince me reclaiming is a high skill, it´s just a task like many other task, i don´t want reclaiming dissapear, just make it lttl more pleasent.
A engineer sees a stone, he eats it, not more, and this would destory the FAF feeling??? really???
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
TA4Life: "At the very least we are not slaves to the UI" | http://www.youtube.com/user/dimatularus | http://www.twitch.tv/zlo_rd
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.
