This is the second part of my musings about the upcoming engy update. The first section can be found here.
Oh, and this might be as good a time as any to mention that I’m quite sure any thought or idea I’ve come up with will most likely have been presented someplace else before (most likely in the swamps some call the Steam Forums). Feel free to sue me for plagiarism ... 
Mobile Engineer
One of the biggest problems for an
engineer are fast moving maps, like A/D maps and even more 5-CP-maps.
Especially on the 5-CP-maps it’s difficult enough for an engy to get his
buildings up, but it becomes very risky to destroy these buildings and
move forward. Consequently engies either play it save (once set up they
simply don’t move) or try to keep up and often enough struggle, perhaps
even to a degree which makes them useless.
The idea has been
floating around for a long time to make buildings mobile, so an engy
could relocate them without having them to rebuild from scratch. There
would be a thousand different ways to implement this. Obviously you
would have to walk the fine line of applying some cost to the movement,
but this cost has to be low enough that it makes sense to take it into
account rather than simply resigning to rebuild the buildings. That cost
could come in speed (when moving a building the engy moves very slow)
or function (moving downgrades the building to a previous level). And of
course a building would be inactive while being moved.
I’m not sure
if such an concept is feasible without threatening the overall balance
of the game. It would certainly require extensive playtesting and a
careful adjusting of a number of parameters.
I was having an
alternative idea for that problem: When an engy destroys a building he’s
close to it could have a similar effect than the overhealing of a
medic: The engy gains a large amount of metal which slowly dissipates
back to normal. Any building or upgrading would first use the
overstocked metal, leaving the standard amount for last. That way an
engy could destroy a building and rebuild it quite fast as long as he
does it quickly. That would enable him to move buildings without too
much loss over short distances [1]. I admit I’m struggling with a proper trade-off
(always important to balance the class, but also so such an improved
version would not simply replace the old one). Any weakening of
buildings (e.g. only lvl2) would be counterproductive for offensive
engineering, and along that line you also can’t make the engy any
weaker. The only halfway satisfying solution I came up with was that the
destruction of a building initiates a procedure which turns all
remaining buildings (of that engineer) inactive until the metal-pool has
reached its standard level [2]. So if an engy had built all four
buildings and was moving a sentry forward the TP and dispenser would
deactivate until the „over-metal“ had been dissipated. (Yeah, that would
be quite a challenge to explain this in gameworld terms )
One
suggestion I’ve read when discussing the Valve blog was to further
reward the cooperation of engineers. But then again even now two engies
can build and upgrade a building in a very short amount of time, and
further cooperation might be hard to balance.
----------------------
Let’s
close with a few more specific ideas, ranging from stupid (just to
prove that Valve holds no monopoly on stupid ideas) over weird to
perhaps useful.
Stupid:
• Paintball Gun. You shoot color
pallets and can mark spies. See, that’s one of those ideas which
appears to be interesting for approximately 5.7 seconds before it falls
apart because it’s either too complicated or impractical.
• Ray gun:
Effects the spy’s cloak in a similar way than Jarate? More practical,
but utterly boring.
Weird:
• Disruptor Guitar. Our engy
is a guitar player, as we all know (see: Meet the Engy). Perhaps the engy should
have a heavily modified electrical guitar (2nd weapon replacement) which
he carries on his back and, when selected, he swings around on the
strap. Hitting the strings would emit a sound of a frequency which would
interfere with a spy’s cloak and disguise (which in gameworld theory, I
would speculate, are both energy fields with different effects). Let’s
say both, cloak and disguise, would flicker for a few seconds, but would
not be disabled (e.g. a sentry would not lock onto the spy). But since
the guitar runs on batteries which are drained by using it the engy
would either have to run back to the respawn to replace the batteries or
reload them on a dispenser (which takes some time), or it would
recharge by itself like Jarate does. Also when the engy carries the
guitar on his back a spy can still backstab him, but takes damage from
the currency.
Useful(?):
• Rail Gun. Primary weapon
replacement I remember the engy in TF(C) carried a railgun. Sounds
awesome, but was quite mediocre, not even up to the level of the TF2
pistol. But a revised railgun could still be an interesting thing. Much
more powerful (50-75), no or minor damage fall-off , but a longer
recharge time (2-3 seconds) to balance it.
• Nailgun (okay, that’s
more carpentry, perhaps a bolt gun?), with a huge damage fall-off,
making it only useful for close-to-medium range
Awesome:
•
Portal gun as teleporter replacement 
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