Wreck hp could be buffed

Looking at the new balance changes to wrecks, I think the balance team might like an idea I've had for awhile.

Essentially, wreck value is too high and wreck hp is too low. Generally, in t1 land battles, most wrecks are destroyed by T1 artillery firing and damaging them when attempting to shoot nearby units. This results in only a tiny proportion of wrecks being reclaimed.
However, this also means the individual varation is quite high. In some battles, you'll get lucky and have most of the reclaim, but in others there won't be any left at all.

Amusingly, this has always been why naval wrecks were OP: They sink to the bottom of the ocean where stray bullets cannot damage them, so that mass is never simply destroyed.

The solution to this is obvious: buff wreck hp and nerf wreck value.

I think, on average, wrecks spawn with twice as much hp as the unit had when it was alive. Increasing this to 5x or 10x will greatly reduce how much wrecks are destroyed by incidental fire (and make it harder to kill them on purpose). Obviously, this should be paired with a reduction in default wreck value from 81 percent to maybe 30 or 40 percent, as more wrecks will survive longer.

And of course, nerfs to wreck value can change the calculation of rebuild value, and how some maps with many wrecks are played.

I like the idea.
Though I'd be mostly for this in the sense that it excludes certain units.

Wrecks' HP is a portion of a unit or structure's HP, and seeing how some T3 and T4 units have large or massive amounts of HP,
their wrecks do too.

I can see this being useful for T1 and T2 units and structures, though.

~ Stryker

@comradestryker All wrecks start with more hp that the unit had while alive. Often, however, they take damage. T3 power generators in a grid will do this, which is why sever grid damage usually wont leave very many wrecks, as the death weapons of nearby generators and fabricators destroy them.

It's also worth nothing that overkill damages also is transferred to the wreck. A t1 unit killed by a TML wont leave a wreck as the overkill damage kills the unit and the wreck in the same shot.

Lastly, remember that damage wrecks also lose value. A wreck that loses half It's hp also loses half the mass value.

I think it makes sense, from a physics and lore perspective, that wrecks have much higher hp that units, as their entropy is much higher. They are more like a mountain - which is basically the same even if its parts are rearranged - than like a complex machine which can only function if all the parts are arranged in a specific, planned way.

Is that even true? I thought wrecks had the same hp as the unit.

Wrecks by default had 81% of the unit's hp and 81% of unit's resources

Fatboy wreck needs special HP buff, as it disappears too fast for a tasty experimental.

Yes, more rules within rules so that new players have even more stupid and unintuitive rules to learn...

The wreck HP should never be higher than the units HP. It just doesn't make sense at all. Not to mention wrecks being relatively easy to destroy is just good for the game health imo.

Micro focused on killing wrecks on enemy side whether with bombers, nukes, tmls, destroyers should be encouraged not discouraged. It’s another game consideration to take into account that requires knowing if you will win the field soon or not and if it’s the highest priority target.

It makes sense that wrecks would have higher hp than when they were a unit, it’s basically a slag heap of dense melted metal whereas the unit’s mass is arranged in a more intricate specific way

However, gameplay should take precedence over realism. Wrecks currently have 81% of unit hp. Maybe it would make sense to slightly buff it to 100% of units stock HP, discounting veterancy

Yes. That's why materials don't lose their properties when exposed to fire.
Surely the bunch of blown up tank is gonna be as structurally cohesive as perfectly built death machine.
And I'm certain that melted scrap surely is as useful as pristine material needed for building new stuff.

Like why are you people trying to buff one of the already OP part of this game even more? Do we really wanna push the game even harder into defensive snoozefest?

@ftxcommando I agree completely. I think wrecks with low hp (81% as Tagada says) make gameplay worse as wrecks are usually destroyed by mistake. It also increases "luck" by increasing the variation between fights in how much wreck survives.

Doubling wreck health (to 1.6x) helps reduce this variation.

@FunkOff I'm not sure of the reclaim mechanics. Would this change mean engineers take longer to grab the mass? If so, I like the idea, for two reasons: it would make the mass income more smooth and it would afford more time to destroy inaccessible wrecks or kill reclaiming engineers. Both of these are good changes for lower rated players I think.

No it does not.

@xiaomao got it, thanks for clarifying.