Repair mass cost

[Wesmania]

Nobody ever repairs land units right now since it costs as much as making a unit from scratch, and it's much cheaper to kill and rebuild them. What if we reduced repair mass cost to make it more economical? If we reduced it to 30% or 35% (keeping build time and e requirements the same), it would become worth it to repair a vetted exp or high tier unit, or repair a badly damaged economy unit. That would also increase impact veterancy has, allowing badly damaged units to go back into combat - at the same time, killing and rebuilding a unit would still be somewhat more efficient mass-wise.

[Farmsletje]

a 25% cost reduction is planned.

[keyser]

it's already in current game, just wasn't mentioned in last patch note. oopsie.
https://github.com/FAForever/fa/commit/ ... 578c702663

[Wesmania]

25% feels pretty tame to me, but I guess we'll see if it encourages more repair. It also seems to reduce energy cost for some reason.

[armacham01]

25% sounds like a big boost. Repairing units already gives the advantage that the unit has 100% of the firepower. And we are already motivated to try to hold the location of a fight, afterwards, in order to scoop the mass. If you add to that, that the surviving units can be repaired at a discount, even just 25%, that's significant.

Does this include land experimentals? Maybe it shouldn't. Given how strong experimentals are already.

If you have a monkeylord at half health, you may want to ctrl-k and scoop it. But with this, it would only cost 37.5% the price of a full monkeylord to repair it back to full health. Especially if you want to keep your front line strong (instead of having zero experimentals at the front while you work on making a new one) the repair option looks better & better.

Since air units are so fragile, can we make the cost to repair an ahwassa/soul ripper at only 50% of the build price? Right now it seems very fatalistic in terms of: once they start taking damage, that's it. You just have to accept that they are dying. Meanwhile ASFs can get some air staging.

And if we get rid of the air factory from the czar, can we make the czar landable so it can be repaired? How often do people even use the factory ability of the czar, outside of phantom games? I saw some discussion of czar getting a shield so it could actually be used for something other than suicide attacks or base defense. Take away the factory and make it landable/repairable would fit with the shield ability.

Also, does this include buildings? We already have a 50% cost reduction for rebuilding on a wreck. Add to that 25% cost reduction for making repairs and that makes the t2 ACU push/PD creep stronger I think. Not sure that we want to make this tactic stronger.

[Farmsletje]

You vastly underestimate the amount of effort it takes to properly make use of repair. I highly doubt it will see an increase in usage but because it's hard to estimate the impact we decided to only make it 25% for now. Also considering ctrl k old units + rebuilding them while reclaiming their wreckages makes you only have to pay 20% of the masscost in comparison to 75% of repair.

[Little Miss Murder]

Can we have extra abilities that will make using this boost easier? For example, patrolling mantis don't repair, but it sounds like something really useful to have now.

[Farmsletje]

You can do it already with a general assist command. It only seems pretty buggy with half of the units not responding to the command.

Nvm it's because the mantis will turn the way of the assist command and they can only repair units infront of them. It does work however if you give every single one of them an assist command

[MrTBSC]

why not just give any unit with a constructionsuit the option to toggle autorepair units when it doesn´t have any specific order to execute?
don´t idle engineers autorepair units anyway?

[Little Miss Murder]

Only if they're patrolling afaik?

On that note, can we give hives the ability to construct things commensurate with their tier? Kennels can do this, why not hives? Considering the fact that they have a limited range, it can't be oh pee, can it?