Commanders Idea.

I don't like the idea of buff auras, they have been discussed before. I've got 3 main problems with them; balance, blobbing and scaling.

Firstly the balance of units is non linear and could become extremely silly. Make some skimishers faster and you might get to the point where nothing hits them. Give Crabe health regen and with the armour bonus it may be impossible to kill. Give something Damage or HP and the 1 shot kill relationships break down for long reload things like Banisher. In short it would be impossible to balance.

Blobbing means that players would just maintain a single army. If commanders provide a decent local boost any army without one is at a large disadvantage. People could even gather all their commanders together in a teamgame for an unstoppable multibuff army. Teamgames already have only 1 army per player a lot of the time and there is little enough reason to split up. I don't think people need more reasons to stack all their units in one spot.

The fact that you only get one commander messes with the scalability of the game. By scalability I mean the ability for the game to be played on larger maps with more things going on. If you wanted to attack on 2 fronts but needed a commander for each you would not be able to. With any other unit to attack on twice as many fronts with the same composition simply requires twice the unit production.

Those points stem from me wanting a game with many options and scalability of those options. If you have one commander that is very important for fighting the strategic space is reduced. I know the commander is already a single unit so it does have some of the side effects mentioned above. But it was my aim to make the roles the commander could fill not too divergent from the rest of the unit's roles. This way it would not dominate the game with a far out unit role that no other posses.

I dislike both potential implementations of repair aura.

The THIS implementation was useless and broke consistency. What it did was repair all units around the commander at a proportional rate such that exactly the same job could be done by 48bp. The consistency broken was combat repair penalty and the very repair system itself. Why go to all the effort to add another special rule that will pop up rarely when you could just get BP modules and have very good repair in a way entirely consistent with the rest of the game?

The other way has massive blobbing issues, I mean the way that repairs all units around the commander equally.

Teleport and statis field have a problem with scalability. If you want to try something that involves teleporting 2 units? Then you can't just pay more and make 2 teleporters.

We cannot put cost on just repair but it could be repair & build aura :)