Unit Repair Facility & Staging Grounds

[Lieutenant Lich]

I have a suggestion for a new unit - a unit repair facility. It's a T1 structure that repairs a unit of the same tech that has entered it. The repair cost directly varies with the health lost - a Striker at 150 HP would cost 133 E to repair. The repair cost would be ONLY energy. The building would attract all idle damaged units of the same tech within 0.25km for repairs.

The building can be upgraded once an HQ is online and then it will repair units ONLY of the same tech as it is.

1k HP, repair stuff with the speed of an engy of the same tech.

This is designed to repair units faster (duh) so you can simply repair your units quickly instead of losing your war vets and losing the experience advantage.

Spoiler: show

Make Staging Grounds T1 is my other suggestion

[KeyBlue]

Sounds cool and all, but i don't think it would see much competitive usage.

People usually don't care much about unit hp considering t1 to t3 units. See air staging.
But most importantly, you don't want to have units going back and forth from the frontline to your base.
All units that are not on the frontline are useless.

You also don't want to have half your units go back to base after you won a battle.
They usually need to go raid mexes or guard the resulting reclaim field.


So yeah in theory keeping vets alive for future battles sounds great, but isn't really usefull in a mass production economy like supcoms.

[Iszh]

I suggested to add a t3 air staging facicility like a carrier at land but even this idea was not taken should be times easier to add to the game.

[Lieutenant Lich]

The idea was to make this facility cheap, maybe make it a deployable unit that moves with the army? So it'd follow the battle.

[KeyBlue]

Well I could see a support unit that has a small regen field being usefull.
Maybe something for seraphim? Since they have regen field upgrade for acu and don't have t2 shield or t2 stealth unit.

Having your units topped off while stationary or regening a critical 1 hp so it can stay alive for a shot more.
That could be quite nice in big armies.

[Endranii]

Well I'm all in if sera get's t2 regen unit as other factions have stealth/shield units here while sera is left with the most basic stuff.

[Lieutenant Lich]

I'd make this unit for all factions. It'd attract and repair all units with less than 60% of the original HP and maybe make seraphim station repair stuff a bit faster.

The idea of a deployable repair station comes from C&C where you have this thing that is mobile but can be deployed into a structure. Then this station could travel with the army and when there is a pause after an engagement units would travel back and forth one by one for repairs.

[piratep2r]

I know I'm just a nobody on the forums (and let's be honest, a noob on the battlefield), but I'm with KeyBlue.

There is a game somewhat similar to FAF (but much older) called Warzone2100. It actually had something like the functionality built in. What you could do is set (for each unit!) a HP level for which it would withdraw from battle and head back to the nearest factory for repair. In theory this sounded great, but in practice - in my experience - it was a clusterf*ck.

Here are some of the scenarios that were problematic in WZ2100.

1. Units would takes some hits *and then leave battle*.
2. The repair and return behavior magnified WZ2100's existing pathing problems... which FAF has too. Units leaving the battle or just leaving after the battle would collide with new units coming to the same location. Since it was automatic behavior, it was especially prone to stupid pathfinding.
3. The return *after* repair behavior was really hard to manage. You could have it so that units rallied to a particular "leader" figurehead unit after being repaired, but if that unit died you would have repaired units lost all over the place with no orders. If you *didn't* have a leader unit or structure to rally to, then your repairing structure would be clogged with repaired units piled up after being repaired, just as KeyBlue says - far from the frontlines, doing nothing. If you instead had the repaired units rally to a place/structure, that would send units to their death if you lost your position and the units trickled into the (now) killzone, one at a time.

Now, FAF could mitigate some of these worries (like having a rally point for the repair area), but a lot I think would translate right on over to FAF from Warzone. The problem is that this is some pretty complex behavior that you are hinting at (IMO) since it is for land units in a game where position and micro matter, and pathing is suboptimal.

Really, the simple solution in my opinion is to use engys on patrol or repair drones/hives (which, of course, you know)... or consider a healing aura unit or structure that you can passively stick in a firebase or strongpoint. This, to me, is not as good as what you want, but gets FAF 80% of the way there with like 1% of the work.

[CSI]

I suggested to add a t3 air staging facicility like a carrier at land but even this idea was not taken should be times easier to add to the game.

This does exist in Blackops