Auto-repair

[zoot]

What do you all think about adding an "auto-repair" feature on workers, perhaps toggled with a button, which causes the worker to automatically begin repairing things in its vicinity when idle, instead of having to be explicitly commanded to do so? - possibly returning to its original position once done.

Especially when bringing siege engines into battle, it seems needlessly annoying that you can't also bring a group of workers to patch up the machines between fights without having to micromanage everything - particularly because siege engines clump together and it's difficult to pick the one most in need of repair in the midst of battle.

Edited September 6, 2012 by zoot

[feneur]

If such a feature is included it should definitely be optional/toggleable, otherwise you'd end up with your units repairing instead of fighting. As long as it's toggleable it's probably a nice feature to have (though it will clutter up the GUI even more ) as you can set a group of your units to auto-repair while the rest are fighting as normal.

[Deiz]

As a stop-gap, I think it would be adequate to have repair function like construction. That is, once a unit finishes its current repair order, try to find another nearby unit that can be repaired.

That'd at least allow you to repair a bunch of siege units with a single click, rather than needing to spread them all out and do each one manually.

[historic_bruno]

If such a feature is included it should definitely be optional/toggleable, otherwise you'd end up with your units repairing instead of fighting. As long as it's toggleable it's probably a nice feature to have (though it will clutter up the GUI even more ) as you can set a group of your units to auto-repair while the rest are fighting as normal.

Autorepair could be given a lower priority than responding to attackers. Not sure how easy that would be given the structure of UnitAI, but at least it's a possibility. The other concern would be if we implemented surprise attacks or gave working citizen soldiers a disadvantage when attacked (to simulate the need to put down shields/weapons when working and take the time to re-arm for combat), then it would definitely need to be an option.

[feneur]

Well, but if I set my units to auto-repair I wouldn't want them to fight instead of repairing the siege engines (which are more valuable and deal more damage than a couple of units, so it would even be worth losing them in return for keeping the siege engines going a while longer).