Make repair cheaper

The obvious problem with making repair more feasible (in terms of mass/energy cost, or build time) is that it makes it easier to snowball a win. So allowing cheap repairs on units might cause balance problems.

As long as it takes a lot of BP to repair a building, allowing the repairs to be cheap shouldn't cause balance problems.

Repair building: cheap but slow
Repair unit: fast but expensive

@STlNG it doesn't work like this, it depends on build time of a unit

Better repair speeds would add a lot of value to Mantis/Harbingers as well as kennels and Hives.

At the moment you can ctrl-K and get 81% of the mass cost back and I almost never see people doing that (especially with T1-T3 units) so I doubt a cost reduction to repair costs is something to be worried about. E.g. mantis and harb build power is terrible so even if repair was free you'd probably be better off using them to attack. It'll also take apm so I suspect it'll mostly be expensive units like percies, navy and experimentals that are worth the effort outside of niche cases currently where repairing can be useful.

To think of it, why do we still have 2 different upgrade mechanics to begin with?

Factories and cybran shields use mechanic that was invented in FAF that takes total cost of next stage and applies a discount according to current cost of building. This allowed to get rid of such things as cheap rebuild and veterancy not taking full unit cost into account. For example currently Cybran ED5 shield costs 4.26k mass, but each stage costs 160m->300(460-160)m->800(1260-460)->1200(2460-1260)m->1000(4260-1260m). You dont build new structure from scratch, you just add more parts to existing structure so it is logical it costs less to upgrade rather than building new.

Other factions' shields and mexes use old upgrade mechanic that uses full price of unit every time you start an upgrade. This ofc allows you to exploit self-destruction of t2 mex to reclaim 800 mass and build t3 mex. With new upgrade mechanic upgrade would cost 4600 mass and building from scratch would cost 4600+900+36=5536, making self-destruct almost never efficient.

I remember talking about it to JaggedAppliance years ago. He said its weird to have two different mechanics. Years passed, nothing changed.

I guess its easier to ignore the problem than solving it.

As for repair itself it would make sense if it didn't use mass for repair at all, but used more power instead. This would give alternative to just reclaim your damaged units and also add an option to use power overflow if it happened. Although would not let you quick-repair some expensive structures like nuke or game ender.

buff repairing acus

@arma473 said in Make repair cheaper:

The obvious problem with making repair more feasible (in terms of mass/energy cost, or build time) is that it makes it easier to snowball a win. So allowing cheap repairs on units might cause balance problems.

Isn't this the exact point of veterency?

Personally I'd rather the value in keeping a T4 alive be in that it can be repaired instead of the current status where repair is useless while veterency is very powerful (even though not quite as much as it used to be).

Repair will essentially never meet the return potential of current veterancy because by the time any critical unit (except air units) get back to base and repair, it’s too late to use them for anything worthwhile again. It requires you to build a forward bp facility which would likely cost a ton of mass and add additional cost to a t4 push since nobody wants 3 hives to repair an ml to full hp in 10 seconds similar to how air staging works in cost/value.

How about costing only energy instead of mass to repair? there's usually an overflow of energy in most cases.

@ftxcommando said in Make repair cheaper:

Repair will essentially never meet the return potential of current veterancy because by the time any critical unit (except air units) get back to base and repair, it’s too late to use them for anything worthwhile again. It requires you to build a forward bp facility which would likely cost a ton of mass and add additional cost to a t4 push since nobody wants 3 hives to repair an ml to full hp in 10 seconds similar to how air staging works in cost/value.

With perhaps three exceptions:

• Ahwassa
• ACUs (depending on cost)
• T4 bots used defensively (but only if build power requirements are reduced massively from the current state)

@cyborg16 On maps like sentons it would absolutley be worth it to pull low HP battleships / battlecruisers back for repair. It would raise the skill ceiling for lategame naval fights higher.

Make repair cheaper and make engineering stations automatically repair units nearby is my suggestion

No. What if I don't want them to go on about repairing every shitty thing in the vicinity?
Though I'm still about making it at least a little bit cheaper.

Air Staging requires energy to repair aircraft with no cost on mass.
If you stall energy, air staging does not repair your aircraft.

Why can't the same be true for other types of repairs? A heavy(ier) cost with energy but with little to no cost in mass with repairing?
Obvious exceptions would be with experimentals and maybe economical buildings, but using a lot of E to repair structures like factories and standard units should be okay like so.

This could also give energy a tad bit more utility since it already tends to be overflowed when repairs matter most.
Yes, repairing should cost mass, too, but maybe not as much as it currently does.

Repair time is on a similar story, as it should definitely be shortened, too. Makes certain repairs like ACUs kind of awkward.
Now, I'm not saying you should make ACU repairing absurd, either - just a little faster.
At the moment, does repairing an ACU even help? 100 Hives seem to make no difference whilst still drawing resources.

~ Stryker

Because then 20 hives with an ml is impenetrable