Hawkei wrote:Well the HQ system works perfectly until the HQ gets sniped. As most players prefer to save resources and often don't have inbuilt redundancy to deal with this scenario. The problem exists when I have already upgraded all the available factories down the support factory path and they are incapable of upgrading into a HQ. So it is required to build an engineer (if I don't have one), build a T1 factory, and then take right through the HQ upgrades. What I'd like to do instead is have the option to select the nearest support factory, and tell it to upgrade into it's HQ equivalent.
The penalty in game for loosing a HQ is very high. Such that I am often tempted to have a T3 HQ in addition to the T3 HQ. Simply so that I can recover from the HQ snipe faster.
As for the Build Power upgrade concept. With T2B2, T3B2, and T3B3 factories. The idea is simply to internalise the assisting engineers within the factory as a single unit. Disadvantage is that you are still paying for the Tech every time you build a factory - and this is necessary because every factory is self contained for tech access. But with the BP upgrades it would work out to be mass effective. As every T3B3 factory would be equivalent to having a T3 HQ and 30 T1 engineers assisting it. Saving unit camp, and making games easier on computer resources. Not to mention providing powerful adjacency bonuses as well.
You think of it as a negative, but I think that's the beauty of the HQ system - it should be painful to lose your HQ, and it should be tempting to have a backup in place. Having difficult choices like this is a good thing.
As for builtin engineers, an old idea I had was the ability to "dock" engineers into factories, just like planes can dock into carriers. The engineer assists the factory it's docked into, but also takes some damage if the factory is attacked.
Rather than build power being built into the factory, a modular system like this means to can adjust your buildpower between factories if required.
