Noob question - engineers not repairing.

[Catma]

I found one other post that seemed to address this issue. My problem doesn't seem to be any of these things.

"As for the engineers not repairing - had the ship you wanted them to repair been damaged within the last 3 seconds?"

nope.

"Do you have sufficient resources to enact repairs? Does the unit state 'Can't be repaired' in its tooltip? Some simply can't, such as fortresses."

nope, I can repair if I manually click on the unit.

"If you want them to repair a specific ship, I recommend ordering them to repair that ship explicitly. If placed in attack-move mode, they may teleport away to focus on repairing another ship first."

That's fine, but they aren't repairing any ships, or helping in construction, or doing anything.

I'm pretty sure I'm issuing the order correctly. I've tried with and without auto-FRD, hold V and right-click within repair range, hold X and right-click within repair range. I don't know what's going on.

I've attached a save. Thanks in advance!

[x4000]

It might be the max amount of resources that you're allowing engineers to spend per second is too low.  The default is something like 1000/s, IIRC, but you can raise that in the CTRLS menu.  That's one of the few textbox controls in that screen, so it's easy to spot.  That's there to prevent the engineers from absolutely gutting your economy every time a bunch of turrets die and are about to get rebuilt, or similar; but you can tune that up to taste.

Almost always when that question comes up, that's what the answer is; it's kind of confusing either way we do it, unfortunately, but I figure that the question "why isn't my engineer helping?" is better than "why is my economy always terrible?" And that's more what we used to get before adding this feature.

Hope that helps!

[Catma]

Yep, that got it. Good design decision.

I saw the "do not assist large projects", but didn't connect it to the value box below it. I honestly didn't know what to make of it - there was no checkbox, the spacing was off, there's no mouse-over popup (on the text, though there is on the value box)... I thought maybe it was an error in the menu.

Maybe it could be renamed "maximum repair/assist value:" or something like that. Or maybe it could have an on-by-default checkbox, prompting closer investigation. In any case the text option and value box should be more visibly related in the menu. It's weird to have a list of checkbox options in a row and then the one value box.

Thanks for the quick reply!

[x4000]

That's a great polish idea, actually -- would be great to throw that in mantis if you don't mind.

Glad that did it, and thanks for your support!

[Catma]

Absolutely use it! Raw or modified, credit or no credit, as long as it increases intuitiveness and awesomeness! Now to find two more good suggestions