Rebuildable Structures

[Tarvin]

One thing that could be implemented to lesson the blow of loosing a building is to allow for destroyed buildings to be slowly 'rebuilt'. Engineers would repair the terminal which would show a small progress bar. The bar can be decreased by the enemy attacking it to prevent a rebuild and just a single person rebuilding a structure would yield very slow progress. This would incentive teams to rally around destroyed buildings and make rebuilding them a full team effort.

Here is a possible progression.

Enemy launches successful APC rush on a defense structure --> Enemies are eliminated --> Team rallies around the destroyed building and key buildings --> multiple players shift to engineer or technician to rebuild the structure --> the structure becomes active at low health before the next attack wave hits

At most, a destroyed building would have 20-25% of its health when it it Rebuilt and would still need to be repaired fully the normal way. This allows for buildings to be reclaimed but the time required to 'rebuild' a structure doesn't remove the impact of a building being lost. Also, progress toward rebuilding a structure is much more susceptible to being lost than regular building health. This would force a team to drive enemies out before buildings can be rebuilt otherwise just an occasional rocket or artillery shell could erase all rebuilding progress.

For primary buildings all repairs must be done at the Control Terminal. Secondary buildings like Nod Turrets and GDI guard towers could be rebuilt so long as they are not receiving damage and have no special location restrictions.

[SFJake]

Problem is its kind of tedious work. Thats why I prefer ideas that are more time-based.

You do NOT want buildings to grow back in a few minutes, even without pressure. But then you don't want half your team standing in front of a terminal for 5+ minutes. Worse, a destroyed building would still be taking fire to keep from being repaired, instead of the focus being moved away to other buildings. All in all, this idea has a lot of drawbacks.

I'd like to have ways to get building back for Marathon games, but thinking about the right system for it is difficult.

I'd support the general idea for turrets, though.

[Handepsilon]

Personally... I don't think it's such a bad idea, though...

Worse, a destroyed building would still be taking fire to keep from being repaired, instead of the focus being moved away to other buildings

This can be a possible issue. But since the damage is bigger, all it would take is a single artillery to halt/cripple the rebuilding process, theoritically. If I was the rebuilder, I'd stop rebuilding and refocus on cleaning the attack first

[Tarvin]

That was the focus of the idea. Since progress toward rebuilding could be wiped out easily people would have to first defend the base. Progress being slow would force people to make rebuilding a team effort or at least make a single person rebuilding effort take a long time.

If a building could be rebuilt too quickly there would be no motivation to defend them and it would be too difficult for an attacking team to win a match by destroying enemy structures. So in effect, rebuilds would have to take a lot of effort or would destroy the balance of the entire game.

The only hitch is that a coordinated team effort could rebuild a main structure more quickly but then the rest of their base may be undefended while more of the team is using engineers and technicians. It would force a team to strategically balance their focus between base defense and rebuilding efforts if they don't want to get plowed under.