We need to find a way to fix engineer spam

[Kryo]

We played a team game yesterday and Funk brought it to my mind again:

on 80% of the team maps I am actually building a fac, and the 4th engineer coming out assissts this fac. This fac will for the rest of the game build engineers. In the beginning they reclaim, which is ok, in the middle game they will help upgrade mex and build pgens fast, and in the late game they will assisst factories and assisst factories and slow down the game.

Reclaim is of course important and has not to be changed. Its a feature of FA that belongs like holes in swiss cheese.
Also building buildings is what they are meant for. Dont change that.

BUT reduce build times of all t2+ units! Maybe 20% and t3 units maybe even 30 %.

Also increase build rate of t2 and t3 engineers. They should not outmatch t1 by cost/buildrate but they should be nearly equal. (because if you dont need a lot of t1 engineers, you will build rather few t2 and t3 which you will need for experimentals)

I do not know who is in Zep's closed balancing team, fact is, we have a lot changes, that could be done and tried out, but nothing's happening

FAF currently still is called beta, why not use this to make balance changes? Better now than later.

[Armmagedon]

I think that better for fix that should be increase a few the build rate of t2 and t3 facts, then could be better upgrade facts that spam engies. Normally ppl take 1 fact and send all engies to 1 fact and reclaim the other spammed t1 facts.
upgrade that t1 facts to t2 should be better that this i think

[thygrrr]

I think that Engineer Spam is also a problem, mostly for Aesthetic reasons (a unit that needs to be spammed), and also for performance reasons.

Really, if you look at your average non-noob base, everyone has DOZENS of engineers there clogging up the pathfinding engines.

T2 and T3 engineers need some serious love and T1 engys need some kind of drawback if massed.

My concept would be:

• T2 Engy gets 3x buildpower, T2 structures get 3x build time cost
• T3 Engy gets 6x buildpower, T3 structures get 6x build time cost

[AdmiralZeech]

Why should T2 and T3 engys have worse BP/mass than T1? Shouldnt they all be the same?

Sure, people sometimes say, "oh, T2/T3 have additional tech, so they need an offsetting disadvantage", but that is presupposing that we want T1 engys to be a viable choice at T3.

But it seems like we dont - we actually prefer higher tech engys to absolutely obsolete lower tech ones.

So lets make all engys equivalently efficient in buildpower/mass and buildpower/buildtime.

[Doompants]

I played in a closed group of friends for years before this, and when I tried jumping into competitive FA here I was amazed at just how much T1 ENG spam the people whupping my ass have. As a closed playgroup, my friends and I used to focus far more on T2 and T3 engineers, and while I now know that it is obviously not as efficient as T1 spam, I'll say we definitely reaped the benefits of less base clutter and higher maneuverability. If it could be balanced, I agree the game would be better off if the higher tiers were more desirable.

Scaling build time/build cost sounds like one good way to do it. Alternately, It would be interesting if part of the energy cost of building things was borne as a small energy cost tagged onto the engineer, much like how stealth and shields cost energy. Would probably take way too much balancing work to be worthwhile, but if engineers had an energy cost while building/repairing (not while while reclaiming) it would certainly make a smaller group of T3 assisting much less energy intensive than a giant swarm of T1 on otherwise equal builds. Like I say though, probably balancing nightmare.

[Kryo]

Why should T2 and T3 engys have worse BP/mass than T1? Shouldnt they all be the same?

Sure, people sometimes say, "oh, T2/T3 have additional tech, so they need an offsetting disadvantage", but that is presupposing that we want T1 engys to be a viable choice at T3.

But it seems like we dont - we actually prefer higher tech engys to absolutely obsolete lower tech ones.

So lets make all engys equivalently efficient in buildpower/mass and buildpower/buildtime.

very good point. After all you invested mass in a factory to get those higher level engineers. You already paid the "blueprints".

[FunkOff]

We played a team game yesterday and Funk brought it to my mind again:

on 80% of the team maps I am actually building a fac, and the 4th engineer coming out assissts this fac.

In a recent setons game, I played one of the sides and had not less than 4 factories spamming T1 engineers for most of the game. Needing that much build power is insane. Also, here are some numbers to consider in regards to how much it costs to use tech:

Hypothetical situation:
20 mass/sec on direct fire units
1 T1 tank every 2.8 seconds, need 0.2 build power per mass cost, so that's 100 build power to use your mass, or 5 factories, costing 1200 mass in build power, you need 60 mass in build power per mass income to build units
40 mass/sec on direct fire units
1 T2 tanks every 5 seconds, need 0.225 build power per mass cost, so that's 180 build power to use your mass, or 1 factory + 28 engineers, costing an additional 800 mass (the T2 factory) and 1456 mass (for the engineers) 2256 total, or 3600 for just T2 factories
80 mass/sec on direct fire units, you need 86.4 mass in build power per mass income to build units
1 T3 bot every 6 seconds, need 0.2 build power per mass cost, so that's 400 build power to use your mass, or 1 factory + 68 engineers,
costing an additional 3150 mass (the t3 factory) and 2080 (for the engineers) 5230 total, or 21000 mass for just T3 factories
you need to spend 108.575 mass in build power per mass income to build units

As you can see, as you increase in tech, your ability to build units, per mass invested, greatly decreases. This is also one of the reasons that experimentals are so powerful: Their build time is SO much tinier than other units compared to their cost, and they don't even require a factory, so pumping out XPs requires only a tiny investment in build power, whereas pumping units requires an ENORMOUS investment.

I think the solution is what I proposed before: Undoing the change that was INTENDED to fix engineer spam, but in actuality only made it worse.

[FunkOff]

• T2 Engy gets 3x buildpower, T2 structures get 3x build time cost
• T3 Engy gets 6x buildpower, T3 structures get 6x build time cost

This wouldn't solve the problem, at least not by itself. It can help address the issues of T1 engineer spam, but it will do nothing to make a rediciulous investment in engineers necessary.

The fact of the matter is, higher tech engineers require higher tech to build, and higher tech costs money, so even if you make T2 engineers have the same build power/cost ratio tech 1 engineers do, you are still paying more mass per build power because you used higher tech factories to make those engineers. Further, from a strategic standpoint, even if T2 engineers were MORE efficient at building than T1 engineers, it still wouldn't solve the problem due to asset utilization: If you have 4 land facs and you upgrade 1 to spam T2, if you let your other three T1 factories sit there idle, you are wasting the resources you put into them, and if you need tech 2 tanks, it's a waste of a tech 2 factory to build things that arn't tanks, so you'd still use T1 factories to spam engies to help the T2 factory build more tanks. (You could flip it and use the T2 factory to build T2 engies and the T1 factories to build T1 tanks, but that would be even more of a waste.)

[Kryo]

• T2 Engy gets 3x buildpower, T2 structures get 3x build time cost
• T3 Engy gets 6x buildpower, T3 structures get 6x build time cost

This wouldn't solve the problem, at least not by itself. It can help address the issues of T1 engineer spam, but it will do nothing to make a rediciulous investment in engineers necessary.

The fact of the matter is, higher tech engineers require higher tech to build, and higher tech costs money, so even if you make T2 engineers have the same build power/cost ratio tech 1 engineers do, you are still paying more mass per build power because you used higher tech factories to make those engineers. Further, from a strategic standpoint, even if T2 engineers were MORE efficient at building than T1 engineers, it still wouldn't solve the problem due to asset utilization: If you have 4 land facs and you upgrade 1 to spam T2, if you let your other three T1 factories sit there idle, you are wasting the resources you put into them, and if you need tech 2 tanks, it's a waste of a tech 2 factory to build things that arn't tanks, so you'd still use T1 factories to spam engies to help the T2 factory build more tanks. (You could flip it and use the T2 factory to build T2 engies and the T1 factories to build T1 tanks, but that would be even more of a waste.)

so what exactly is your suggestion? revert something? But what exactly? I dont remember what was changed

[TheStrategist]

I think the solution is what I proposed before: Undoing the change that was INTENDED to fix engineer spam, but in actuality only made it worse.

What change is this?

And I definitely agree that T1 engie spam is just inelegant and should be nerfed.