How do I get my Engineer Drones to automatically heal Mercenary units?

[goodyosef]

I'm new to the game, and I've noticed that I have to manually order my engineering units to heal my mercenaries, while they will automatically heal my "regular" units if I set them to "Roaming Defender." How do I fix this? It's taking up time and causing me headaches Thanks!

[contingencyplan]

Welcome to the forums!

That has to do with the CTRLs setting "Engineers do not assist large projects." Set that to 0 and that problem will go away.

Just be careful of the setting when you're building large projects (golems, fortresses, etc.), since engineers will start helping there too, turning AI War into a Detroit economy sim. :-P

To avoid that, you can set some control group options to only build if your resources are above a certain mark and add your expensive projects to that control group.

edit: Perhaps it would be a good idea to set the default value to be large enough to handle merc ships or turn it off completely, since the behavior is entirely non-obvious to newer players?

[goodyosef]

 I can't figure out how to do what you said. I went to controls, and found nada that has to do with resources and such. Help?

[Kahuna]

Let me guess.. you pressed ESC and then "View Controls"?

Click the "CTRLS" button near bottom left corner and this will pop up.

[Bognor]

edit: Perhaps it would be a good idea to set the default value to be large enough to handle merc ships or turn it off completely, since the behavior is entirely non-obvious to newer players?

Yeah, I'm sure I've seen this problem many times on these forums, and remember being stumped by it myself for a little while.  I think the first option would be more newbie-friendly, or a few hits on a captured ion cannon could instantly tank an economy.

[goodyosef]

Thanks, everyone. I finally figured out how to do that (and a bunch of other things in CTRL as well, which is nice.) But now I have a new question: What is paralysis? How does it work? I've got a II bomber paralyzed from warping into an area through an Intergalactic Warp Gate, and I don't know why...
Update: Never Mind. I figured it out.

[Kahuna]

Update: Never Mind. I figured it out.

Yep. Always read all tooltips