Repairing & Rearming
Overview
Damaged units and structures can be repaired, this guide shows you how...Repairing Structures
If you can build structures, you can repair them with the same units you used to build them, a construction truck or cyborg combat engineer:
Tip: Trucks are much faster at both building and repairing than their cyborg Engineer counterparts.
To repair a building, select the droids and then hover your mouse over the damaged building until you see the spanner cursor appear:
When you see the spanner, click the building and the droids will start repairing it. The more droids you use, the faster the repairs will be.
If a building gets damaged and there are idle construction trucks or cyborg engineers nearby, they'll automatically start repairing it for you!
Repairing Droids
To repair droids, you'll need to research the mobile repair turret and, afterwards, ideally also research the repair facility.
There's a number of upgrades available, such as a heavy repair turret and several repair facility upgrades, that will make repairs much faster.
Tip: In the early stages of the game, repairing damaged units will increase your chances of success, because you can end up with far more units than your opponent.
Mechanics & Repair droids
As soon as you've researched the mobile repair turret you'll be able to build cyborg mechanics at your cyborg factories:
Tip: Cyborg mechanics (shown above) are the cheapest unit in the game and thus make ideal "scouts" to search the map and enemy bases.
You can also use the droid design tool to put a repair turret on to vehicles and then build repair droids:
Once you have some repair droids or mechanics, select them and then click on a damaged unit to get them to repair it.
If there are damaged units nearby, idle repair droids or mechanics will automatically move towards them and start repairing them for you.
Just like repairing buildings, repair droids (especially if they have a heavy repair turret) are much faster at doing repairs than their cyborg mechanic counterparts.
Repair facilities
Repair facilities are better than mechanics and repair droids because they don't count towards your droid limit (which means you can build more attack droids). You can usually build 5 repair facilities when using normal game settings.
Tip: You don't have to build them in your base, they can be anywhere on the map, so maybe try building some closer to where battles are happening to reduce the amount of travel your droids need to do?
If there are several damaged units, and not enough nearby repair facilities for them, they'll form a queue at the nearest facility. As soon as one droid gets repaired, the next in line will move to the facility and start getting repaired.
There are lots of upgrades that you can research for repair facilities to make them work faster, so if you see big queues of droids waiting for repairs it's time to invest more in repair tech.
There are, however, some additional major befits to using repair facilities...
First, you can set their rally point (the green triangle near the repair station) — you can drag it to a new location on the map and droids will automatically go to the rally point after being repaired at the station, returning them to the battle field with full health!
Second, and perhaps most importantly, you can make your droids automatically go and get repaired, at the nearest repair facility. To do this, right click on a droid, and you'll see these options:
By default, your droids will fight until they are killed. But you can tell them to go and get repairs when they are heavily damaged or half (medium) damaged and they'll automatically withdraw from the battle to get repaired.
You can right-click on factories and set defaults for all future droids that they produce.
Tip: You can set factory defaults even while they're still being built.
Life before repair turrets / facilities
In the very early stages of the game, you won't have repair droids, mechanics or repair facilities, so there's no way to repair your droids.
If you've got them set to retreat for repairs on high or medium damage, and nowhere to repair them, they'll just retreat to your HQ and wait there until you tell them to do something else.
Tip: Instead of having loads of damaged droids sitting around your HQ, consider recycling them – you'll get 50% of their cost back, and can use that credit to build new and often more advanced droids.
Repairing & Rearming VTOLs
If you have repair droids (see previous section) you can land a VTOL on the ground near one and they should start repairing it. However, they won't rearm it's weapons so it won't be able to attack anything afterwards.
In order to rearm your VTOLs, and repair them faster, you need rearming pads - they become available for research immediately after you've researched VTOL factory.
Build the rearming pads like you would any other building, they can be anywhere on the map and you can usually build up to 50 of them with normal game settings.
Unlike repair facilities, rearming pads don't have a rally point (green triangle). Instead, your VTOLs will continue their last mission after rearming and continue to do so until their mission is complete.
Just like repair facilities, there's a number of rearming pad upgrades that you can research to make repairs and rearming a lot faster. These upgrades are really important as they increase the rate at which you can send your VTOLs back to the battlefield and that makes a huge difference in the game.
Tip: Remember that while your VTOLs are rearming, they can be attacked with normal weapons like artillery and missiles, so it's usually best to build rearming pads out of harms way!
Repairing cyborg and super transports
Auto-repair: Repair everything!
Later in the game, you'll be able to research a hugely useful technology: Auto-repair!
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Like it's name suggests, it will automatically repair stuff - both buildings, droids and even transporters, wherever they are on the map!
In the case of droids, auto-repair only works when they are stationary and not attacking anything. So, if they're on the move, or attacking stuff, they won't get repaired until they stop!
Unfortunately, auto-repair is much slower than other methods of repair, but because it's happening all the time it still greatly increases the life of your structures and droids.
Tip: You can still use the other methods of repair in addition to auto-repair, to speed up repairs for specific droids or structures.
For developers
If you're developing Warzone scripts, here's some useful links:
- DORDER_RETREAT – tell units to retreat (read before using!)
- DORDER_RTB – a more logical version of DORDER_RETREAT!
- DORDER_RTR – tell a droid to go and get repairs
- DORDER_RTR_SPECIFIED – tell a droid to get repairs at specific facility / pad
- DORDER_REPAIR – tell a truck/engineer to repair a building
- Working with Repairs & Rearming – detailed information about the actions droids go through during repairs