Instead of Engineers assisting factories why not let factories boost each other? The same way shipyards work in Galactic Civilizations III. Cutting of sectors would really stall the others teams production etc.
How would factories assisting each other result in a different outcome than having them each build their own unit at their production rate in parallel? Being able to pump out units from exactly one factory extremely rapidly sounds like a set of serious glitches waiting to happen without any real benefit.
I think Ashes should instead expect players to build a very large number of factories, and have factories build relatively slowly and in parallel. You increase production by building more factories.
The build setup for a large number of factories building in parallel might look like 30 units rolling off the pad every 60 seconds rather than building very rapidly from one factory, with new units popping out every few seconds.
You would reduce the engineer micro by not needing to assist factories manually. Galactic Civilizations III had a penalty the further factories was apart. right now you could build 10 engineers and have them pump out units from one factory anyways so don't see how this adds anything different to the game.
This is a similar to what Command and Conquer did. You essentially set a primary factory on production and the others "assist it" allowing the factory to build faster depending on how many you had. Of course with C&C you could only have a single building of a certain type building at any given time. I don't really know how I feel about factories assisting each other while building, but I could see it becoming extremely overpowered if not balanced out. Maybe only the factories not producing could help out, and it would cost extra resources like the engineers?
A good example that I'd love to see used is the Supreme Commander approach:
- You can order a factory to assist another (typically, order all your ground factories to assist one that you've picked as "primary")
- Give that Primary factory rally points, and queue all production on that factory. In a supcom game that will often be a mix of a few dozen units on infinite loop.
- All non-primary factories will simply pick the next thing in the primary factory's build queue when idle, take it off the queue and build that, then sending it to the primary rally point/patrol route/group/etc.
In effect you have a large number of factories all working in parallel, but without the player having to micromanage. A similar effect could be reached by use of unit groups if the game distributes build orders among selected factories (I haven't yet tested), but the single-queue approach is one I've always liked more.
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