Make mason interesting!

Ever since welders have more buildpower, hitpoints, and guns to boot, mason's role as the durable builder has been completely lost. Moreover, its limited movetype and speed makes it even somewhat inferior to other constructor types.

Put shortly, mason is the most bland and boring of all the constructors. The rest have at least one perk each, while several even have a couple (welder with his megahp and guns; clam with both amph and rez capabilities, even rector which can both cloak self and jam radar). Mason has none of that, so i'm proposing it gets some!

Namely, how about allowing it to reclaim/construct/repair/etc ... while on the move?

IMO, that would make it a nice unique unit, while at the same time fit perfectly with the car factory theme of rolling-death-on-wheels: imagine a couple of these doing the repairs while inside a ravager-blob that's doing the destruction!

It could be fastest. And if I m right is cheapest.

that's just how light vehicles are.. bland, simple and effective. I cant realistically see the spring engine allowing nano on the move, and that wouldn't be so useful anyway.

lol, idea: Upon death it deploys a clutch of claw mines.

>how light vehicles are.. bland, simple and effective
I might differ on this reading. Most other cars do have rather unique perks:

Scorcher - only unit with heatray that is not a strider/megaporc
Wolverine - SHOOTS MINES.
Dominatrix - i mean, dominatrix. how is that bland and simple? :D
Merl - is in no way bland, simple, or effective. And nothing like other artillery.

Ravager and Leveler do seem pretty simple, but not anymore than other assaults and riots. And then, ravager definitely can do what other assaults can't due to it's speed.

>I cant realistically see the spring engine allowing nano on the move, and that wouldn't be so useful anyway.
I'm willing to bet i can make it work like that :P And i can imagine a whole lot of cases where that would be useful - basically making mason a much better support unit, like addition of shield did to Convict.

Give the mason the ABILITY to deploy a single Claw mines? While it's being chased by a glaive from behind, you could deploy a Claw mine that would either damage it or miss it.

Of course, the Mason mine would obey the same 30-second lifetime as the Wolverine's claw mines.

crabes are a bit persistent, but you can work them down over time with wolverines...

but AA def is poor, thats true.

Most cons don't have an open-close animation anymore... I think the only ones that still have one are the Mason and the ship right?

Obvious power is obvious:

Make them armored when closed.

Clam is required for sea res, which is otherwise just on the commander. It was put there very intentionally.

Arty is the general answer to Crabes if you have no anti-heavy, but wolverines are so fragile and reverse so poorly (must face target, turn slowly, etc) that the crabe can easily walk up and 1-shot them.

I think mason -is- the only one with doors. Armor while closed is not actually a bad idea, but we're getting power creep here, where cons are just getting more and more powerful... I honestly think they're too strong at the moment.

nah, I think jumpers need the weaker con.. jumping is easily the most powerful ability used in the hands of someone with the micro to use it optimally.

It's faster than the other bots and builds at 9, though at the same ratio BP it would cost 210, not 240.

Either way I think BP is PRECISELY the thing we should nerf. One thing i find so frustrating about the start of the game is you MUST walk your com, because you run out of metal too fast if you assist. If you make a con as -well- (to expand or assist), it makes this even worse- you stall, even while expanding, and then when you finally get into positive income you have this huge glut that comes in all at once. In older CA and BA, you could assist your factory for much longer and by the time your expansion economy kicked in, you were just running out of starting metal- this might be partly due to facplop (you had a while for your mexes to store up metal while you finished the factory), but before 1-1-1 factory construction was very fast anyway. Another big problem is that static-defenses go up way too fast and you can naked expand very quickly.

I've floated the idea of lowering BP by 1/6th (so things build at 5/7.5/10 instead of 6/9/12) for some time now and still think it's probably a good idea.