The idea is simple. When an engineer runs out of materials, the hammer is actually useless. You cannot “reload” materials. It’s a fixed amount of materials on an engineer’s backpack.
Once you run out of materials, the hammer just stays in the second main weapon slot and you cannot do a thing with it. You cannot change it for a weapon.
My first idea was the feature of letting “change” the hammer for another weapon. But that could lead to accidental loss of the hammer.
So, the idea is that the game itself removes the hammer once the engineer runs out of building supplies.
Sometimes that second main weapon can change a lot in the middle of the battle, and carrying a useless hammer does not help.
I think it is an interesting idea, and from my experience programming shouldn’t be too difficult to implement. It’s just a “delete item” feature with an “if conditional” when the “supplies” reach 0.
I hope you keep it in mind. It’s a little change but with significant value IMO. Details like this are what differentiates the game of the same topic after all.
Many times I play, the engineers built a fortress around really difficult to penetrate or even impossible. Adding “refillable” supplies will lead to frustration because of infinite cannons, sand walls, wires, boxes and boxes of ammo, etcetera. So this eventually creates some kind of Minecraft battlefield.
Imagine Normandy’s beach, already difficult to conquer and now add dozens or thousands of wires and a dozen artillery cannons, a dozen AA guns, and add to the already dozen MG, another dozen…
The most damaging thing is,This answered suggestion of you will ruin the gameplay of other gamemodes.
