Engineers repairing tanks

This is my biggest pet peeve since weapon nerfs. Used to be able to lazor people in the face when they got out of their tanks with no chance to E.

 

Hmm.

What if instead of repairing tanks directly (period), engineers had the ability to drop some kind of mini-repair-bay constructable? It could take a while to finish building, so they wouldn't be able to just drop one anywhere they want for their own immediate benefit (certainly not while someone is shooting at them.) And it wouldn't take much damage to kill it, so if you try to use it in combat it just gets blown up. Something flat you have to park your tank on, with a tall spire that can get shot -- or something. Maybe even just a spire like a listening post, which heals tanks nearby -- tall enough that you can't hide it behind a tank.

That would encourage engineers to drop them in useful locations for teammates, and would also make the engineer-tanker strategy more about establishing mini-bases which you (and your teammates) can attack from and retreat to, rather than rushing around like rambo.

 

I like repairing tanks.
It makes me feel useful.

Building a minirepair pad would be dumb.

 

what? it doesn't take 5 seconds to repair a tank unless you are repairing plates, but repairing the tank itself is a bitch. It's not a problem with lts and even if it could be a problem with mediums/heavys, mediums and heavys are pretty evil and destroy infantry because both teams would usually. have mediums/heavys at the same time.

 

Copy/Paste from another thread:

Pickled is 100% correct in stating there is a fundamental flaw. Repairing should never out run damage, it is and should be much easier to destroy something than to build it. The problem is that repairing needs to be either fun or fast because this game is about entertainment and not explicitly realism. I don't see how we could (or should) make it fun, so it should be fast. The compromise I see is that repairing should be fast once the process starts, but taking damage should delay the process from starting. Above is one possible way to do that.

 

Make it so that only a repairpad can repair the hull, engi's only repair armor plates and a CV's hull should not be repairable at all.

Delays are usually an obnoxious balance method, engis will just have to hop in and out to check if they can start repairing, or stand still waiting like mindless zombies around the tank. It also effects teamwork to a degree, as good teamwork between engi's and tanks will be dependent on the crucial damage variable. If you have an engi risking their life to repair his or a teammates tank why make it even more difficult. I know its a problem that you can't outheal a tank, but this translates to buildings as well. Once you add any kind of teamwork to this mixture the effect is multiplied and a magnitude more difficult to deal with. The delay for instance might work on one engi or 2, excluding the effect of the delay itself, but with more engi's the delay is nothing more than a nuisance; which it always will be, even for a single engi.

A gren would always need to deliver the kill shot anyway, unless you intend to remove repairing the delay won't make you bypass it. If lets say he was able to do serious damage to the hull, getting a kill shot the second time around would be much easier.

This is much easier to balance as well, a time delay is a crude way to balance as most of the balance deals with dealing damage and taking damage, not so much the amount of time it takes, this creates more incentive to use teamwork as both are controllable by the players themselves. If instead you make it so that the hull isn't repairable, you can easily tweak and balance this in dozens of different ways by shifting the HP of the individual plates and the HP of the hull and you would have a lot more room for balancing than the delay would.


Another benefit is that it makes repair pads more viable to build. The time delay wouldn't, at max it could increase its current usage rate as there might be more lazy people. But on bigger maps (bigger than crossroads) it's questionable whether even a 10 second delay would take less time than a trip to a repair station. You could never balance the delay based on these factors, as in: balancing the delay on the range between where the battlefield is and where a repair station is placed. While you'd generally want to take this into account, to ensure that the delay is justified in regards with the repair station (and its own 10 second delay).

Keep It Simple Stupid.

 

no it doesnt, this thread is about the fact an engineer can out repair damage done by the enemy in mid combat. When the enemy gets down to your hull its impossible to keep pace with repairing, it generally takes your full calc and then some to repair a hull damaged tank. Armor on the other hand is easily repaired, 1 calc load can probably repair all the hurt armor on your tank on all sides.

basically ARMOR repair atm is extremely fast while HULL repair is extremely slow. Maybe you dont realize there is a difference in speed between the two but there is and it is extreme.

Slowing down armor repair mid combat would dramatically effect how well an engineer can repair mid combat, cause once the enemy gets down to the hull its pointless to try to repair mid combat anymore.

 

This only happens if you're dealing very low amount of damage, like maybe a single grenadier trying to take down a reflective tank. Thats an isolated problem and the proposal to make repairing more annoying, either by lowering its rate substantially or adding a delay, is unjustified.

If the engi just jumps out of his tank right on the spot to outheal the damage being done, I'd question the incapability of the attacker(s) to not kill the tank/engi, instead of the engi's capability to outheal that low amount of damage. Which you say only happens on armor, this couldn't be plain armor, as it's an uphill battle for the engineer, having to get out with every hit. So that means the armor has to be good, and good armor would need a counter, or at least more firepower. That reduces the problem to only happen when you're not dealing enough damage.

Even if the statistics would show that you could outheal railgun damage, healing requires additional circumstances to be viable; like having a safe spot to repair and being able to expose yourself and not being killed by (blast) damage, where you would need extra time to drive somewhere and extra time to heal the damage you took while you were healing etc. Saying that you can out-heal the damage in perfect conditions doesn't really amount to the overall balance required to have it work in the game. This is obviously theoretical because everyone knows railgun will do more damage than you can heal, and standing still to heal will probably mean its a lot easier for rail gun to tear your tank up, let alone that it takes constant repairing to keep up with the damage taken by railgun.

The real problem that I understood from what was being posted is that it takes more time to kill a tank than for an engi to heal it. Which isn't an isolated problem and isn't as situational as the problem you've put forth. It's a completely different issue, the engi can drive away and repair and come back in less than a minute, rinse repeat. Thats very hard to fight. What you've said is easy to battle, get a teammate to help, or use more firepower, or better yet, try hitting the engi instead of the tank.

In fact, this is the reason why it takes more time to repair the hull than it takes to repair the armor. Once the enemy reaches your hull, you're forced to repair it at a slow pace before you can rebuild the armor plates and attack again, increasing their possibilities to get the kill shot. If you want to fix the issues, deal with them the right way, instead of patching up the system, making it more complicated and diluting the purpose of the initial mechanics to a saturated mess of nonsensical features.


Your argument questions the nature of a big part of the game, mobility, infantry vs tanks, class roles and capabilities, tech advancement, tank chassis and armor plates; you're suggesting to fix a symptom by confronting a problem on the surface, the ability to outheal low damage. It's not just unjustified to tackle it this way, the whole problem is questionable as you're not relating it to teamwork, or putting it in any context. Theres absolutely no way to know whether what you suggest will do anything to improve the game. It might fix the isolated problem you mentioned, and probably bring lots of new problems to the game, like making repairing annoying and slowing down tank combat, or making the resource balance even worse as tanks are worth jack etc.

 

dizzyone:

Why not to start with soft changes. Decrease Engi repair rate by 25% and increase repair station repair rate by 25%.
If the script values are working, then this could be done without coding support.

Current values:

Code:

"Repair Station Heal" "25"	 //amount of vehicle health restored per second by the repair station
"Engineer Heal" "1" //amount of vehicle health restored per engineer's repair unit

"Repair Station Repair" "0.25" //percent of one inch of armor repaired per second by the repair station (0.5 = a half inch of armor is repaired per second)
"Engineer Repair" "0.1" //percent of one inch of armor repaired per engineer's repair unit (0.1 = a tenth inch of armor is repaired per engineer repair unit)

Personally I would also like to see that repair rate is higher, when the driver is inside of the tank.

 

Ya dizzyone It seems like you probably don't play the game enough if you don't understand this problem.

Also these are changes in the current SVN for you guys to test out, no anticipated patches with script changes for a few weeks atleast.

Repair station hull repair 15, decreased from 25
Repair station armor repair 1.0, increased from .25
engineer hull repair 2.0, increased from 1.0
engineer armor repair .05, decreased from .1

so engineer overall tank repair time is kept fairly even but his ability to repair in combat is halved, which from testing a little might need to go lower, but more thurough testing is needed. And repair station buff was needed.

 

It's not an isolated problem. Every good driver does this and it's ridiculous. You fight the enemy with the side you get out on facing them... when you're almost out of armor on that side you whip a quick 180, get out under cover from your tank (with no chance of the enemy to kill you outside of your tank), repair that face, and hop back in before the enemy can do anything about it. Because you can repair much faster than they can deal damage, you can do this 2-3 times easily before your opposite face wears down, and by that time you should easily be in the lead. Not only that but the extra time they've spent attacking you is wasted heat while your heat has been dissipating as you are repairing.

If you've had this happen to you, or you've used it against other people, you just know how absurd this kind of advantage is, and it's an easy fix to get rid of it. All you have to do is balance out the time spent repairing the hull with the time spent repairing the armor. The net amount of time that an engineer spends repairing his tank will be relatively identical, but combat repairing wouldn't be viable any longer if there wasn't such a vast difference between hull repair speed and armor repair speed.

 

I took those into account(last post). Lowering the repair speed isn't the worst thing you could do, the delay would be far worse.

It's isolated not because of how regular its being done, but because of its implications, which generally just mean he's hiding and you don't have enough firepower to stop him.

I've said what I wanted to say, I think it's unjustified, I don't enjoy repairing at all and I don't think you should deal with it this way as the problem you describe is far too situational to try and fix by nerfing a general ability.

If the small change somehow magically seems to fix this problem, without really making repairing take too long, than its great I guess; I was trying to give an opinion against the delay, which will just annoy. I'd prefer to see the hull not being repairable as it adds more depth to tank combat and ties in the repair station, but that could go hand in hand with a small nerf to repair speed.

I understood the problem, I explained it in detail, unless you want to point out holes in my explanation, making assumptions that are not direct arguments to mine is completely pointless.

I never implied you can always battle the problem you described, I know enough situations where you can't do much about it, but I generally don't fight the enemy in a way that I know will be pointless, I'd just ignore em and go somewhere else. That does not mean the problem isn't combat able, having a teammate to help, using more firepower ( getting a tank counts as more firepower too), or focusing on hitting the engi (perhaps by moving real close if its possible) still apply. Those are very generic ways to combat the problem, I can't see how you would be able to disagree with those.

 

I played yesterday shadows and i rushed an apc and shot
one mortar shell and 5 rpgs on the front. One engi at the
back of the tank repaird it. Was enough to stop me from
killing it. I asked the other team what armor they have on
that apc and it was seriously just one engineer. It feels
akward and REALLY frustraiting if even in commander maps
one engi can outrepair 2-3 grens.

EDIT: I suggested some weeks ago to make it so tanks
can only be repaird if the heat bar is empty. It might make
it alot harder to quickly jump out of the tank and repair one side.

 

Sorry for the nercopost but just my 2 cents.

1) Have engy's have to "repair" vechile heat before they can start repairing armor or hull. That way, if they hop out to repair their tank, if you keep pelting them with rounds, the heat will build up (while still damaging the enemy tank) and they will have to compensate to get the heat down and then repair the tank. Obviously, some tweaking would have to be done on which weapons cause more heat and how much the engy's can actually "cool down" in time, so I don't know if this is really doable based on the amount of work would be need to put in.

2) As in Project Reality, make certain areas of the tanks/vechiles accessable through certain doors or hatches. Which means for some tanks, if the hatch is on top of the tank, then the player would have to literally jump on top of the tank to get in it. Which would make when to get out of the tank very important as getting back in might be a bit hard under a fire fight. Although this game isnt based on reality, it would be quite fun to know you need to get to the back of the apc where the door is at to actually get in it. But alas, I know this would be way too much work for what its intended to do, so I really dont see this happening either.

Just a few more ideas to get everyone thinking some more.

 

Red Cell, you bring up an interesting alternative. I agree with Dizzy's post on how armor and the like should be repaired by various methods, but Red's idea might actually be crazy enough to work. Think about it, someone's gunning at you in your tank, and you're shooting back. You hop out and have to basically spend a few seconds extra to dissipate the heat THEN repair the armor. In that time the enemy would probably be able to tip what would normally be a losing battle for him into a winning battle.

Granted it would take a LOT of tweaking worldwide to get the stats for everything adjusted but it is a viable alternative to dizzy's idea.

 

I like the heat idea...that's quite cool actually. Er...pun unintended.

 

how about engineers repair same rate.. BUT they require materials from an armory. maybe enough mats at once to repair 6 plates?? one can also differentiate depending on the type of armor used. plain = 10. reflective = 4. absorbant = 6. reactive = 8 regen = 7. or something along that lines. although... if i was an engineer driving a tank and i only had enough mats to repair one tank.. id repair my tank and not my buddy's tank haha. my o my what a tough pickle of a problem to solve.

oh hell how about only needing mats to repair your own tank, but repairing friendly tanks = get materials to repair ur own tank.. id say repair 1 tank fully = 1 plate material for u to use.

X_X