Airpad rally point?

[wind swan]

Is it possible to set a rally point for the airpad. It would be nice to have aircraft fly to one for repairs and then return to either a rally point or thier previous position.

[wind swan]

Just curious of there has been any additional though on this?

[proud latch]

Bad news,
The air repair pad is on the chopping block. Because:

1. automated repairs aren't wanted in the base game, it is to be left to skill expression. The air repair pad was an antiquated left over from balanced annihilation and before that total annihilation.
2. It has been a maintenance hog with lots of issues because it relies heavily on command queue manipulation. For some reason, it's incredibly difficult to get it to be consistent and reliable.

I remember there was an internal discussion that happened more recently where it might be possible The stance against automated repairs perhaps changing or at least being reconsidered.
It would take somebody stepping up to the plate willing to rework the way that automated repairs work completely for such a feature to stay.

[wind swan]

#2 alone seems like good reason to remove it. Not worth it in there if it's a risk to the larger game.

[hollow edge]

On the other hand, if there is ever a split into t3 air on horizon, airpad can be integrated in t3 airlab, just visually. And units get built on it

[cedar dust]

Both points are completely understandable.

I'm one of the few players who enjoyed using the repair pad mainly with dragons and gunships at 80% retreat setting.
I know it was generally considered a useless building but it did help to harass effectively and I could even use that dragon retreat strategy against 50+ OS player in 1v1 successfully so it was not completely useless.

Do I understand the problem correctly and it's mainly about the automated retreat and not about the repair pad itself?

If that's the case, then wouldn't it be possible to keep the repair pad and the "back to pad" command (or whatever it was called) and just remove the automatic retreat?

This way the nice looking building with the great build power would still be useful and the return to repair command could be used by players manually.

Also, maybe it would be possible to keep the retreat health setting too but it would just work together with the back to pad command, like it would only apply on low health units when that command is given.

And just a note: skill expression is tricky because it always works together with quality of life features.
If the repair pad won't be in game and there won't be a retreat to pad command, then I would just make a custom hotkey with chain to select all air units under a certain health % and skip their first order - if I keep a move command back to my BP in the queue, then I just need to spam this command and I achieve pretty much the same result. So would this be considered skill expression or would just be an unnecessary complication?