Mobile repair unit

[Kellzz]

Cant improve on perfection....

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Antoine de St.-Exupery




All this talk about repairs, but do we know how it will actually work out in the field?

Repair beams and ray guns just seem silly. A mid sized 60 ton mech to make the repairs seems cumbersome. The mech being large and slow. Though i could see it yanking off the bad leg, putting in a termporary joint or what have you in place and jamming it back into place (with the approprate welds made)

Perhaps repairs could be made into a mini-game of sorts. A window pops up and you solve the puzzle of where the part goes, and make the welds. (operation anyone?) Of course, what the player sees and what the game is actually doing would be 2 different things but the player does not need to know. All they know is that they made a field repair and had fun doing it the game only caring that the player took X time to do so.
X time being the time that the mech is unable to take action. So the faster the repair, the faster the mech can get to moving.


Or are we looking at the generic approach?
Select weapon: Welder.
Point device at damage mech and press fire. Hold button down untill repair is complete.
Pointing the welder at any point of the mech results in success. (magic repair beam approach)

[Hamilton]

Repairs for fighting machines will be limited to repair facilities and dropships.  Field repairs will not be avaiable at initial launch, as well as there being no units or technology for doing so.

Damaged units will need to disengage from combat operations and move/pick up to a repair facility.  Once there, the repairs would be simplistic as repairs are only conducted by crews (ie: NPC's).  Repairs by players is not allowed at game start.  So in this regards, a player is present with a UI Repair Checklist, listing items that need repairs, their cost and time estimated.  The player makes the selections and ok's the plan.

That is the core (barebones) method of repairing.  Once that is rolling, then repairs will be expanded to players and then to the field. As to how that will be done, I don't know about as a mini-game.  Mini-games will become repeative and perhaps boring or frustrating.  But then again, seeing a blue beam or a twisting wrench repairing a Mech to full capability is a cop-out...

[Kellzz]

I don't see how a mini game would be anymore boring than standing around with the blue beam of insta heal. Or the repetitive smashing of number keys to heal someone. Tetris has been around for over 20 years, and Bejeweled has over 6 billion hours logged (as of 2000).
As far as frustrating, well you are dealing with massive metal death machines. And you said it yourself, the magic beam or twisting wrench is a cop-out.


Im thinking you cant have it both ways.

[Helphyre]

I agree with most that there needs to be some sort of field repair. At first the stations and drop ships may be the way to go. But what might be an interesing use of skills is to allow players to stop and exit there mech to climb to damaged portions and repair them. Since there are already plans to have some play modes that operate outside of the mech most of the coding should already be in place. It would only make sense that a player having the skill to fix the mech and the time should be able to do some minor field repairs, but this should be limited to the functioning of part not nessecarly repairing the armor.
Also heaven help you if you are attached while outside of the mech. Just a risk players will need to take. Finally I think it is only going with the storyline that the genoma units should have some degree of self repair on their mechs. This tends to go hand in hand with bio-armor, just make it minor and slow and balance it against by lowering some other ability and you should have a unique corporation for players to join.

[SoulMiner]

the idea of a battleField salvaging crew or guild that works hard on recovering damaged technology and mech's for monitary gain sounds like a winer for me this just disapearing off the field after months of work building them sounds like a money sink or time sink.