OpenRA

I'm leaning towards holding the production only. The magic wrench of the engie has gotten itselt into the meta mostly on maps with a few oil derrics, such as my created maps Warwind and Sidestep where after the few oil derrics are captured then engineer is utterly useless and is sacrificed. On maps with 2 or more oil derrics for each player the engi cancel is less viable since by the time the engi is available enough time has passed for everyone to get a significant amount of units out. By mid- and lategame it's likely meaningless even to attempt because players are likely to have multiple fascilities.

So the engi cancellation is more or less an early game dice roll in before the first 3-4 minutes and puts an element of random luck into the game.

If the engineer could get more active roles during the game I'd fully support the fix. E.g. free, slow structure repair and detecting mines.

Same as SoScared, +1 for the last ideas !

To clarify: if a player has more than one of a production facility, does the engineer tap do nothing?

No, at least not currently.

SoScared wrote: ↑If the engineer could get more active roles during the game I'd fully support the fix. E.g. free, slow structure repair and detecting mines.

+1

Submitted ticket at: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/11749

Could we get more opinions on this (forum)?

Maybe an additional idea :

It would be interesting if the engy could have a blocking behaviour on individual facilities.

This could allow effective base capture scenarios, when an army ovewhelms an enemy base and get rids of all enemy units / defences : the enemy will be unable to deploy defences around the Conyard, or get units out from the facilities being captured.

Thus, a squad of 3-4 engineers escorted by army could be able to freeze a base locally, and capturing it efficently.

The way it is currently doesn't make any sense, unless we give the engineer a wizard hat. Seriously though, having the production queue frozen but not cancelled would be far more fair and realistic, and I'm surprised it isn't winning the poll.

As it is right now, there's little reason not to try to suicide an engineer for a chance to disrupt production if you've built one anyways. Canceling a structure and or vehicle that's almost finished can set your opponent back a whole 30 seconds or more, which is huge. Also there has been a number of times where despite the defensive structure going up, my engineer still successfully tapped the con yard/war factory. It depends on which random direction the engineer jumps out of the jeep/apc. You can time the exit between fireballs & pillbox shots, and if the engi jumps out towards the structure, the tap is almost instantaneous.

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My vote is for either: #2, #3, or #5. -- I voted #2 as I think it has the best chance of being supported by the community and hopefully implemented.

#2 has the worst chance of being supported by the developers, because it requires fiddly new logic to be added to the production code that is only used in this rare edge case.

I think the engie should detect the mines as you said, would be funny feature maybe, but he should not be able to walk over the mines that would look strange.
Also not fair if i laid some mines around my nuke to prevent chonoattacks and an engie could just walk over it and capture it and my units catch the mines when trying to shoot him ...

Materianer wrote: ↑I think the engie should detect the mines as you said, would be funny feature maybe, but he should not be able to walk over the mines that would look strange.
Also not fair if i laid some mines around my nuke to prevent chonoattacks and an engie could just walk over it and capture it and my units catch the mines when trying to shoot him ...

I was thinking of having 'walk over/on mines' as a prerequisite for removing it. That would look better than having the engie remove from 1 cell distance.

How often do we really see engineer capping anything, being stopped by mines honestly. Just shoot at the mines, they ofter trigger a chain reaction. Engies also just holds the countdown for superpowers anyway.

Sleipnir wrote: ↑ rare edge case.

It may be rare because only one unit does it however just about every map in the pool has oil to some degree so this rare edge case is actually used in most of the games that end up being broadcasted.

I think there's a lot of misconception here because it can't be countered easily at all. Flametowers are way too slow and with pillboxes it depends on which random direction the engi jumps out of the ranger/APC. Your only safe bet is to build walls around your con yard which costs $400 and that's a significant cost early in the game but the same can't be done for the war factory.

It can easily be a game decider in an evenly matched game (even if you are prepared for it). It doesn't even require you to make an investment on maps with oil which means that it doesn't really make much sense to play maps with oil competively these days.

On top of that it's also a bug and for a good reason, it's obviously broken. Exploiting a bug will often be considered cheating I remember how exploiting the old bug with MAD tanks was banned from tournys. I'd prefer the same for this bug. It doesn't really make any sense to keep this bug with all the randomness and unfairness it adds to the game.

I vote that this bug must be fixed! Those that are saying it is a viable strategy simply enjoy abusing a game mechanic. Halting production would be fine, resetting the timers seems ridiculous. Since it has been mentioned that "halting" would be very involved to implement, please fix it so that building continues like it used to.

I also like the idea of engis acting as a sort of minesweeper, very cool!

lucassss wrote: ↑Christian - Can't the exact same thing can be said about swooping in with aircraft to check if an Ukranian player just produced a Demo truck and blow it up in his base?

It's not comparable at all. An Ukranian player take risks when he build demo trucks, it's his own choice whether he wants to take these risks (build demo trucks). It is however not your own choice whether someone tries to reset your production queue with an engineer (exploit a broken bug to gain an unfair advantage).