Auto repair should be removed

[aGorm]

Actuylly, i have to say i agree with SavageBT. Self repair just takes away part of the stragie, (ie, having points to pull back hurt units to where patrolling units repare them, plus... surly airpads become obsoleat with this...)

aGorm

[PauloMorfeo]

and somebody says it should be removed from krogs because they are invincible that way, but it seems they aren't so invincible, 10 nuclear bombs at same time at it makes their job.
[/i]

Ten nuclears dont kill a krog.
Niether 15 nuclears with 10 shots each (150 nuclear shots).
maybe 170 180...

Actually, in XTA, the Krogoth has 127551 hit points. Each nuclear strike does 2500 points of damage (in OTA, it was something like 5000 with exception for comanders, with 2500).
That ends up with 51 nukes dealing 127.500 points of damage. Leaving the Krogoth with 551 Hit Points.

If 51 nukes does not leave a Krogoth very near to his destruction, then there must be something wrong with damage calculations...

[PauloMorfeo]

... Self repair just takes away part of the stragie, (ie, having points to pull back hurt units to where patrolling units repare them, plus... surly airpads become obsoleat with this...)
...

First, retreating the army and waiting for it to repair, is very boring.
And auto heal doesn't takes any strategy at all. You can still do the retreat in order to wait for the auto heal to kick in. The only diference is that you don't have to move a constructor into there.

About air-pads, they won't become useless if they heal faster than auto-heal. I supose this is what happens. But they indeed become somewhat useless and less valueable...

[Delta]

Actuylly, i have to say i agree with SavageBT. Self repair just takes away part of the stragie, (ie, having points to pull back hurt units to where patrolling units repare them, plus... surly airpads become obsoleat with this...)

aGorm

Resting will only give a slow health recovery, so if you whant your units in mint condition within 10-15 minutes you have to heal them or let them use the airpad.

[SavageBT]

Hmmm. I guess a patrolling construction plane won't heal itself, leaving pads fairly useful.

Actually if its REALLY slow, like an hour at +1 game speed i don't care - means you don't lose your base to stray shots/etc. Perhaps faster on vet. units, this would make sense... Correct me if this is already the case.

[Sean Mirrsen]

It may be alright for OTA, but for example my Drones have fast aircraft that fire weak lasers. It just so happens that the enemy starts self-repairing while manuevering, thus making things more complicated. I say Absolutely No to integrated self-repair, except on chosen units. Special 'heal zone' units could be made, but no more than that.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Building a self sustaining/repairing defensive point was a fine art in TA, please dont take this away. Micromanagement is not always the enemy, it separates the good players from the indifferent. If you can't manage the game go play war3.
Sorry, that was harsh and there's nothing wrong with war3, but TA has always been an enthusiast's game - not a mainstream 'hold my hand while i learn to play' rts. If you want to play with 500 units accept losses or learn to manage them.

Okay, I'll bite.

Micromanagement doesn't seperate the better players from the worse players, it seperates the faster clickers from the slower clickers; hence Warcraft 3, which you seemed to use in the entirely wrong context. Warcraft 3 is a bad game because it is not about strategic decisions, but rather about who can click the fastest. Its due to a number of reasons, but mostly because of the research and spell system.

This system does not make the strategy of building a defensive post redundant, as I said in my last post. The autorepair function doesn't absolve previous strategies, it merely does away with some annoying micromanagement issues, making the game more intuitive, so that players can concentrate on real strategy rather than babysitting units.
A defensive post won't become invincible all of a sudden because of the autorepair (remember that I did advocate an increase in autorepair times). Equally, a defensive position under regular attack will still succumb. However, a defensive position attacked by a raiding force early in the game and lightly damaged, will have repaired itself if the battle ever swings its way again later in the game. Also, if you are building defenses under fire, your inner ring of defenses will heal themselves automatically (so that you don't have to bother), so that if your outer defenses ever fail, your inner ones won't be caught off-hand because of their earlier encounters.

It doesn't stop OTA tactics, which I have always strove to protect, but it does remove some of the OTA hassle when it comes to base maintenance. I mean, we've got robots that can clean floors and sinks these days; one would think that in a future where the robots are what needs maintenance, they would have other robots to do that! (god knows who maintains the maintenance robots... Monkeys I s'pose... )

[SavageBT]

Point taken. I guess my main problem is the speed at which they repair now... Sorry repeating myself now.
I still vote no but i guess i could learn to live with it as long as it doesn't change strategies too much.

And yeah War 3 was a bad example.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Ok, how about mods where you do NOT want your units to self-repair AT ALL? If anything, it should be left as a global switch for a race, AND a game-global switch in the settings. Thus, if players want, they can have their units repair themselves, but only the races meant to be able to self-repair should be self-repairing. For example, the EDF race doesn't use nanolathing technology by design, so having its vehicles and buildings, and especially infantry repair themselves wouldn't only be odd - it'd be outright cheating, for there is no way to repair the infantry units out in the field. It's not a micromanagement issue, putting a pair of air cons on patrol to repair the damage isn't much micromanagement, and limiting the feature so it isn't noticeable will render it useless, while still causing the mentioned problems with mods.

[SinbadEV]

are they robot monkeys? I say we implement a new standard unit for both races that can only repair a patrolled area... we can call them Monkeys and they can be produced at any factory (flying ones, hover ones, level 1 and 2 kbot/vehicle ones, amphibiouse ones, subs, boats... one for each sub-sub-class of units) and they would swarm around repairing stuff, but die really really easy... I think it would look cool... resource hogs I'm sure... but still cool... oh, and auto-repair should be mod, unit, game, and player specified... depending on circumstances...

[Warlord Zsinj]

*sticks his tongue out at Sinbad*

Sean, being from the modding end of TA myself, I think everything should be up for grabs at this end. Of course you should be able to change it around for mods. Of course races should be able to take it off at will.

But as I stressed in a number of different posts, for the Vanilla OTA release, I think autorepair should remain, albeit at a slower rate.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Can somebody clarify what is Vanilla OTA?

[SinbadEV]

Vanilla usually means plain old boring version... no bells and whisles...

Basically a "Vanilla OTA" would mean that it's essencially the orriginal game with a better game engine, no high traject, no-auto-repair... basically only what was there in the orriginal

[mongus]

I dot think, Vanilla Spring should be, at any point, Vanilla OTA.
A mod for that, would be nice though.

[Warlord Zsinj]

I'm sorry, I should have clarified that, it is very ambiguous in the context. Sorry Sean.

I was referring to the basic OTA mod for Spring that most people play.

A "vanilla" version doesn't mean no bells or whistles, it just means the normal version that everyone plays.
(comes from: vanilla is the default ice cream flavour)

For example, everyone who plays OTA online plays with a standard version, being the 3.1 patch, and usually the 500 unit limit patch. This can be considered TA's "vanilla version".