Law of diminishing returns regarding engie spam

[Flynn]

This question has often come up in my mind and I am surprised no one has figured it out, considering the emphasis many pros place on build orders and efficiency.
It would be more appropiate in the "strategy and tactics" forum, but I figure the thread will get more views here, especially since as someone who already knew about that forum (me) thought it had been removed, just because I couldn't find it in the index
When spamming engies on mass to reclaim map features, it occurs to me that at some point the mass you are investing in engineers to reclaim the available mass on the map must exceed what is available, especially since that is ever diminishing as you reclaim a finite resource.
To me though it seems complicated, because the more engineers you spam, the faster you can reclaim the map, however you are investing 52 mass per engie and a rock has about 50 mass in it, but some of them even less. So you've got to factor in how quickly you want to get the reclaim vs how much mass you invest into engineers to reclaim said mass. Also the fact that the resources are diminishing with every reclaim.
I don't know how you would figure it out, But I did go through a phase of only building 10-15 engineers from an "engie spam" factory, because I always invariably forget to take my engie spam factories off infinite build and end up with legions of engineers roaming the map

[nine2]

Just turn off your engy factory after you have reclaimed something like 50% of the mass. (tweaking that % depending on the size of reclaim field).
Those same engies are good for building things later, like heavily assisting a forward t2 factory.
When you screw it up ctrl-k half your engies and reclaim them with the other half.

[ThomasHiatt]

Congrats, you've taken the first steps to actually understanding the game.

[Bennis-]

Thanks Thomas

[Cetea]

Technically, you can never run out of reclaim as long as you're always skirmishing across the map (particularly on smaller maps), so you'll constantly send engineers near the front lines to reclaim newly created wrecks, where they'll sometimes die and need to be replaced. But yes, there is a point where you might have too many engineers (which is much more easily reached on small maps), which is why people might only queue up a specific number of engies from their starting factory on a map like Theta rather than letting it loop forever on engies.