Construction bonus on destroyed buildings
Hopefully most of you are aware of this feature, but if you’re not, learning about it is really going to help you. Once a building is destroyed, it leaves behind a husk. One thing you can do is reclaim the husk for the resources. But what is often a better idea is to rebuild that exact same building on the exact same spot. When you do this, the new building actually starts at 50% complete, so it only takes half the resources and half the time to rebuild a building versus building it from scratch. Obviously this is a huge bonus, especially with expensive buildings. It’s also a great way to speedily rebuild your defenses, especially under fire. A building that starts off from scratch can easily be taken out by incoming fire; but one that is being constructed by multiple engineers that starts off at 50% health has a good chance of actually being completed.
One important implication of the rebuilding husks feature that many people don’t realize occurs when you are playing the same faction as your opponent (realistically, in ranked games, this means you’re both playing Aeon). You can rebuild on top of your enemy’s husks in this situation, and steal the construction bonus away from them and give it to your own buildings. It’s very easy to grab firebases in this manner. One especially devious application of this method is to deny resources to your opponent during an attack. Let’s say you have a large attack going and you’ve destroyed a good number of buildings (especially defenses), but you don’t have the momentum to crush your opponent completely, so as soon as your attack is over, he can just immediately rebuild.
Not so fast! Send along an engineer, or better yet, an SCU. Here’s what you do. Rather than trying to reclaim the enemy’s husks, which takes a bit of time, just start rebuilding each one, but only for a millisecond. It takes a little bit of micromanagement, but you can complete a cycle of build, cancel, build, cancel, etc., in less than a second. This is essentially free for you, because you’re only constructing each building for the tiniest amount of time, but here’s what it gains for you. You get a bunch of half-completed buildings that draw the enemy’s fire, and even better, when those half-completed buildings are destroyed, they don’t leave husks around. Thus, starting the re-construction of enemy buildings is the fastest way to trash lots of resources that would have been easily available to them. Start with the high value targets. All it takes is 0.5 seconds with an SCU to junk 65,000 enemy mass by restarting construction of something like a T3 artillery or a nuke launcher.
April 20th, 2007 at 12:09 am
Hmmm… Very interesting, I did not know this. Is this currently being used in high ranked games? Or is this something you have just found out?
April 20th, 2007 at 1:08 am
To be honest, I haven’t seen it used in high-ranked games. It’s something I just came up with myself during some sandbox testing. It is a little bit micro, but the benefits are undeniable. I would look out for the best players to start incorporating it into their toolbox of tricks soon.
April 20th, 2007 at 2:12 am
I think a better aplication is rebuilding over pd you captured near the enemy frontline. This is especially usefull if you manage to take out an early t2 pd.
PS: I think the removal of all the water maps decreased the amount of Aeons in ranked games.
April 20th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Cyde Weys – Do you know if this works for on Teched up factories? I.E. when you lose a T3 Factory, you go to rebuild the T1, do you get the mass bonus? This would give an advantage to, say, Aeon on that one 10×10 winter naval map that I can’t remember the name of and can’t check while I’m at work.
The Hyper Viper
April 20th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Viperion: I do not believe that teched-up factories can be rebuilt. I think if you try to rebuild a factory on top of them, the engineer has to reclaim the husk first. I”m not in the position to try it right now though because I just installed GNU/Linux on my desktop (dual-boot) and I have a whole lot more configuration stuff to do.
April 20th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
It most commonly occurs when rebuilding a mex on a mass location. Those are built so fast most people probably don’t notice, but if a mex there previously was destroyed leaving a wreck than the new one will be built even faster.
I’m not entirely sure I like this feature, as it seems to be micro-management heavy. However, it kind of brings back a bit of the “resurrection bots” feature from TA and TA:Spring.
April 20th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Engineer: Well, the caveat with mexes is that you have to rebuild the same tech level of mex (and faction) as the husk that is there, and it’s nearly impossible to figure out the tech level just by looking at the husk, so you’d pretty much have to remember which extractor used to be on there. If you don’t match up exactly the right faction and tech level, your engineer will reclaim first before building, and you won’t get a construction bonus.
April 20th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
“If you don’t match up exactly the right faction and tech level, your engineer will reclaim first before building, and you won’t get a construction bonus.” Reclaiming generally gives 80% of a unit or building’s mass cost, so its not a huge loss, just trading more time used for less mass cost.
April 20th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
On the subject of reclaiming, does anyone else miss the “area” reclaiming feature from TA:Spring? Basically you could drag a circular area and your engineers would reclaim all items in that area. In my opinion it was much easier to use than the “patrol” feature and much more effective as well, though of course it would be nice to have both as an option. It would also be really easy to implement, just allow the player to click and drag a box/circle when on the “reclaim” command.
April 20th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Ah, never new about this, thanks for the info.