Wall repair is expensive.

[Adil]

To me it seems that walls are supposed to be a cheap way of keeping biters away from stuff that requires much more effort and valuable materials to build.
However, the need for repair packs makes this statement not true. Each pack costs quite a bunch of iron and copper and up to a three of those can be used up while repairing a single wall making maintenance a significant drag on resources. Besides, consuming copper and iron while repairing something that is made entirely of stone is just ridiculous.

At some point you'd just be willing to replace damaged walls with new ones, though you'll either have to do that by hand or to put up with constant "repair tools needed" warning from robots.

Ideally there should be different repair packs for different types of entities.
At the very least, number of attacks withstood per repair pack should be increased. For example by giving walls some repair multiplier or by giving them high damage reduction instead of high health.

[FishSandwich]

What version are you running? Repair packs were buffed in 0.10 and it takes 1-2 packs now to repair a red damaged wall which is much better.

[Adil]

I'm playing .9.8
Anyway, 1-2 packs is of course better than 2-3(-4), though I'm still uncomfortable about wasting metal onto wall repairs. After all, it's just a pile of bricks, not complicated machinery that requires specific tools for repair.
I believe there should be alternatives.
Building thick wall and having robots rebuild destroyed parts works, but this prevents you from storing repair packs in the same network that covers the wall and also results in permanent "packs are missing" pop up. Those limitations don't seem very well justified and probably shouldn't be present.

[FishSandwich]

To be honest I always find myself short of stone so would rather use iron and copper(something I always have an abundance of).

[Grunex]

When you have logistic robots, I don't think it's anyhow expensive at that point.

I would personally liked if you could place new walls on top of the damaged ones and those damaged ones should combine health to form new, full health walls.
eg. when you have 2 walls on 50% and you place new wall on top of it, those 2 walls combine their health into 1 new wall.

That would be much faster to repair, so you could continue doing what you love in Factorio. (Unless repairing walls is your thing)

[DerivePi]

...I would personally liked if you could place new walls on top of the damaged ones and those damaged ones should combine health to form new, full health walls.
eg. when you have 2 walls on 50% and you place new wall on top of it, those 2 walls combine their health into 1 new wall.

That would be much faster to repair, so you could continue doing what you love in Factorio. (Unless repairing walls is your thing)

Don't think I'd go for more than 100% health on walls, but I'm on board with repairing by replacement. Sounds like a good fit.

[Adil]

Repairing walls with tools made from stone, reparing walls with walls, it kinda equivalent.
Guess, I myself will slap "not-repairable" flag on them and stick with repair-by-rebuilding.