The issues with manual reclaim

The current manual reclaim situation is undesirable:

1. 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.
2. When used improperly, it's arguably a noob trap.
3. Many people find it annoying/frustrating to do, especially when low-value reclaim is densely mixed with high-value reclaim.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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:

1. 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.
2. It could be restricted to only give manual reclaim orders to reclaim that is above a certain value threshold (ie: only >35 mass).
3. 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).
4. 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.

No

source: the last thread

do NOT change core mechanics. It doesn't matter if it's a noobtrap or not

Manual reclaim thread: electric boogaloo 2.

Skill issue

Me

Maybe the previous 15 reclaim threads can give you a hint on the outcome of this one

I wish engies had aoe on their reclaim so 1000000000 shit trees wouldn't block the stuff I wanted.

this is the usual situation of bad controls, and with the expected usual excuse of "but there is nothing better to do ingame so its ok" from pros, imo if there is nothing better to do in the game at start than manually clicking rocks, then that's the game itself being bad in beginning in general, outsourcing gameplay to osu simulator doesn't fix the early gameplay, it just makes it annoying to those that don't enjoy clickspamming miningame and gives advantage to those who are good at it (but not necessarily at the game itself) over them, and like said in the op, additional advantage to those who memorized the map reclaim positions and optimal reclaim paths to then execute at start of the game like a recital of memorized text paragraph, there is zero excuse for bad controls that manual reclaim is

anyways for the solution, is it possible to get engineers to retarget reclaim beam automatically (from attack move) as fast as they do when given reclaim order queue manually? ik it would likely ruin the sim speed but it would close the gap between the 2 a bit without any major changes, at least make the engineer consider the next reclaim target while it is reclaiming the current target so it can retarget as soon as it is done without standing there and looking around for almost a full second between auto-reclaims while the manually queued one speedruns the reclaim for no apparent reason

@Mach it is the time that the engine waits before scanning for new targets. It is similar to the weapon check interval, but in this case there's no value in the blueprint to tweak it.

In general I'm in favor of features that would make the game feel more modern. But this particular example is just not what this engine is made for. To quote myself:

• https://forum.faforever.com/topic/3846/reclaim-brush/28

This already exist it is a SIM mode