Let pio/engie autorepair?

Edit: it doesn't look like I can edit the topic title. If so, I would have changed it to:
'Disrupted repairs: Let pio/engie autorepair?'

One thing about repair as it is atm, is rather annoying.

Lets say you order your engineers to repair a damaged vehicle and then you turn your attention elsewhere. Only to return later to discover that somehow the vehicle moved 1 mm. or the engineers ended up standing in a position where they couldn't repair (something about how crews split up - aka ending up on two sides ofa wire). In either case, you find that repair failed.

Whatever the reason for the breaks in repair, I don't think it adds anything to the game to have to babysit repairs. I guess everyone would rather see their micro spent at good fighting than let randomly disrupted repairs be one of the deciding factors of the game.

So why not let idle (and not in combat) engies automatically repair a vehicle if it is within some proximity of it? I mean: idle engie+damaged vehicle near=no question what should be done. So why not automate it a bit?

Engineers and pios follow vehicles that move to repair them until they are fully repaired. The thing that could use fixing is engineers/pios stacking up around vehicles and only 1 model in the squad is actually repairing.

I feel like good management of your pios/engineers is part of the skillset of the game - if the repair failed, you didn't control the units properly. The micro requirements aren't so high that we have to make it easier with more auto-behaviours. It's good to have things to improve on. Use S to make sure the vehicle has stopped and isn't pushing the repair units out of the way - happens a lot with damaged engine vehicles.

Agree with the problem, not with the solution. I think that, once you order a repair action to occur, the game needs to make sure that the pio/engy will carry that order until the end (repair finished / dead / told otherwise).

But autorepair, IMHO, takes micro away from the game, as you could just build a bunch of pios/engies and let them sit around the tanks.

I feel like good management of your pios/engineers is part of the skillset of the game - if the repair failed, you didn't control the units properly. The micro requirements aren't so high that we have to make it easier with more auto-behaviours. It's good to have things to improve on. Use S to make sure the vehicle has stopped and isn't pushing the repair units out of the way - happens a lot with damaged engine vehicles.

This topic is basically about that units should do as ordered the first time. It shouldn't be necessary to give the same order 2 or more times.

And I think you're confusing micro with lack of unit control.

For a game to have the best link between victory and players' abilities, micromanagement should reward players who react best to the designed and intended mechanisms in the game.

I'm pretty sure that disrupted repairing is not an intended feature and thus micro management to offset it is really a sidetrack. It does not contribute to the ideal link between best player and victory. It is more kind of 'noise' in that equation.

Just as tanks that bump into corners of a branch and change heading. Or mortars that don't fire beacuse one of its crew is milling around and can't find a proper prepared position. It is also 'noise' because it hits a player in random.

And pressing 'S' does not help btw. This problem occurs AFTER the vehicle has been stopped. It is caused by the relocation when other units pass. Or if a target comes into range, plus a number of other reasons.

I think it will be hard to deal with this glitch because it is so situational and has roots in how unit AI works in general.

That's why I suggested auto repair as a simple solution. The code was in COH1, so I suppose it would be possible.

But nm if there is another solution that is more agreeable.

As for the function that lets pios/engies follow a moving vehicle and keep repairing it tokenly, I would actually prefer to see that removed. It will increase micro, but will purify the repair situation: repair only takes place when pios/engies are stopped.

So if there's any fairness in this forum, the micro manaiacs amongst you should at least applaude the latter suggestion.

Are people really going to argue that putting in a auto-repair option would ruin the game by removing micro? You guys know that even Starcraft has this option put in, and that player base worships APM and micro-intensive stuff more than any other.

I don't really feel too strongly about this either way, but I honestly think it would be a nice addition if you could toggle pios/engis to auto-repair nearby units. Even better would be if you could toggle a unit to auto-reinforce (which I think I heard was already implemented in DoW?).

Micro maniacs? CoH2 is not a very APM/micro intensive game compared to others to start with so making sure your engineers are doing what you want them to do doesn't take much effort. I haven't really noticed a bug where they stop repairing for some reason - if it's there I'd be happy to see it fixed though.