A few little suggestions to complicate the game

Game Talk The Drawing Board
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[quote=“Inadequate, post:44, topic:4438”]The different tactics suggested were: walk backwards while hitting them whenever they get too close, walk around picking up stones and tossing them at zombies, grind melee on rats before you actually fight anything. The first two require even less thought when moving around than kiting them over bushes, and the last one is barely worth considering.

And the exploit/strategy/tactic issue is really a semantic one, and doesn’t belong here.[/quote]

Those are admittedly terrible suggestions, but I think that the ‘walking backwards whilst hitting them’ still gets you hit a bit, so isn’t a ‘no-brainer’. Throwing stones shouldn’t damage them at all pretty much (if it does, it really shouldnt), and avoiding grinding is nearly impossible in any RPG.

I’d suggest that the removal of bushes, in line with a more gradual urban build up would mean you’d get a better skill slope - you can handle one or two zombies on your own even with no melee skill and it just means that you can’t run in and, using an exploit, own everything.

The exploit/strategy/tactic issue DOES belong here, as saying it’s a tactic makes it sound as though it’s a meaningful choice, whilst saying it’s a strategy makes it sound as though it’s something you would plan towards. This is neither, it’s an exploit, and exploits are inherently bad gameplay design. It isn’t to do with difficulty, it’s to do with bad gameplay mechanics.

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Bush kiting is not an exploit in the pejorative sense of the word, as that would imply that you are utilizing bugs or bending mechanics to your advantage in ways that were not intended by the game developers. Annd the fact that bush kiting was never labeled as a bug by any of the game developers demonstrates that.

Now I will repeat what already proposed as it apparently got ignored

What I could see is every attack you do towards a bush having a (lets say 1 in 3) random chance of damaging the bush in a similar way as a smash, that would actually make sense and make it impossible to clear complete towns with a single bush but will still give you an advantage when luring tough monsters into it.

63

Sometimes the bush feels like an exploit however, because the AI makes things run into bushes that really should know better (e.g. wolves, perhaps some mutated zombies). But thats really just the AIs fault.

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Whenever you purposely kite a monster into something that will make them unable to hit, that is most definitely an exploit.

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Their not unable to hit they are just slowed down. The player is effected by bushes and slowing tiles so is that a bug too?

66

I missed that, and it sounds like a good idea if we’re adamant we don’t want to get rid of the penalty. Possibly if it could be combined with a lot less bushes in general (as there are loads) then I can’t see that being a problem. I’d say give them a 1 in 3 chance of destroying it completely, so you’d know that within a few hits it’d disintegrate. That more make zombies avoid them, but that might make them seem to clever.

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I don’t think anyone has argued for getting rid of the penalty, just reducing it.

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With the smashing thing, simply making it where misses have a chance of triggering a smash on the terrain square sounds like a good idea. Sounds fun anyway, “Your swing at the zombie goes wide and smashes the table!”.

Regarding bush slowdown, it’s pretty extreme, and could stand to be reduced a bit. Apparently testing indicates that you can get off 2+ attacks on a “bushed” enemy even with the penalty reduced as proposed with NO chance of retaliation, and another 2 if you then back up and hit it again as it’s leaving the bush.

Also yea, non-zombies should be doing at least minimal pathing to avoid extreme slowdown like that.

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hitting them while backing up

Why not? It’s not like a successful character will need to do it very long. You could also just avoid fighting slow, dim-witted zeds until you’re ready.

grinding skills on rats

Spend points on skills. Don’t like that? Get a few extra points to spend on skills. Wait, does that then make the game ‘too easy’…?

alternative

Windows. Wrecked cars. Avoiding combat until you have some equipment. Spending points on an easier start.

balanced around

Judging from this and a few other things (most importantly the addition of numerous things upon which to thinly spread your trait points) I’d say this game could use better balancing. Good thing that’s what we’re discussing!

Fighting desperately to survive on day one, dodging between zombies, running from bizarre new threats… that’s how a person should act in the first stages of a Cataclysm. Whistling and snapping their fingers at a zombie from behind a plant is not. The fact that you can kite zombies into bushes, automatically get them tangled, and hit them without retaliation isn’t an exploit, just patently stupid.

Call this not a vote for making the early game harder, but a vote for excising a ridiculous strategy. Most of my more-or-less six point characters die to boredom or updates, not by failing to kite zombies into bushes well enough.

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The thing about running away from zombies: It doesn’t work. They’re as fast or faster than you, so the only option is to use a bush or window.

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There are only a few zombies you cant outrun. Namely the dogs, the skeleton (for some reason…) and the screamer. Might be a couple more.

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I really like that idea.

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There are only a few zombies you cant outrun. Namely the dogs, the skeleton (for some reason…) and the screamer. Might be a couple more.[/quote]

But getting hit a couple of times by dogs makes you slower than normal zombies, and therefore dooms you.

Trust me, I’ve failed too many town runs in the early game.

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There are only a few zombies you cant outrun. Namely the dogs, the skeleton (for some reason…) and the screamer. Might be a couple more.[/quote]

But getting hit a couple of times by dogs makes you slower than normal zombies, and therefore dooms you.

Trust me, I’ve failed too many town runs in the early game.[/quote]

Yeah, Pain effects really should be considered too. FWIW I’ve kited zeds and kept running in some of my latest test-runs. You don’t stop to kill it when there’re 4-5 others about.

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Splitting bushes into “large bush” and “small bush” would help too.

Large bushes would be few and far between in the “civilized wild” (aka the fields outside a city), more common in forests (to simulate ground cover) and THE bushes that are chosen to be landscaping/topiary around homes and businesses. Big thick shrubs that you would normally walk around in real life.

Small bushes would be, well, small. You can step on them/through them without too much issue. Some slow-down, but not the “I’m trapped in a shrubbery” thing we have now.

Hell, you could even make a 3rd “giant bush” that blocks line-of-sight for big gardens or those old folks at the end of the street that made a huge hedge-wall/maze to keep out Lookie-Lous.

As for the main discussion, the “you smashed the ____” is actually a nice idea for pretty much ALL things where you’re smacking a zombie on top of something. Nice. I could very easily see missing a zombie and smashing the fender of my car, or the tabletop it is crawling over (in addition to crushing a chunk of shrub).

… and, frankly, when a “strategy” (used very loosely) becomes THE ONLY strategy in a game, something is wrong. When an action is so profoundly and perfectly successful that everyone does it, it obviously needs a rebalance.

Things like … if zombie dogs run you down and the ONLY way to win is through shrub-warfare … then maybe they would need to be rebalanced afterwards too. Balancing things is a big process, and usually fixing one glaring error shows you several more… it ripples, and you adjust things as you go. In the end the whole game is tighter and more fun (or Fun!).

-> … and another strategy I just thought of to use instead of shrubs. Pits. Dig a pit, then it makes sense if crap falls in it and can’t get out while you wack it. Plus, it requires you actually setting a trap scenario, instead of just literally waiting next to a hedge for an hour while an impossibly large pile of corpses fills the square.

76

Whoa.
I think that Dominae just made one of the best ideas i’ve heard in absolutely ages.

It’s always been a question whether a bush is a car-stopping monster of a shrub or a petty little potted plant-sized shrimp. Splitting bushes might be a great way to fix this. leave large bushes the way they are now and convert field bushes into small bushes?

I’m also advocating giant bushes for forests, triffid groves, and mansions.

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I sort of like the idea of a split between big and small bushes (as in, having big bushes in gardens/mansions as you said is a great idea), although from a gameplay perspective, it’s pretty much just the same as the current bushes and trees really isn’t it?

If you had small, medium (which current to normal bushes) and big bushes, you’d just get a slightly revised version of the same exploit (walk around a bit till you find a garden with medium sized bushes and use that), unless they were quite rare/special to mansions. Most of the places you’re fighting Zombies at in early game (where it’s most useful) are semi-rural places on the outskirts with lots of bushes/gardens, so I imagine we’d just get back to a similar situation.

I’d prefer to just keep bushes having hardly any penalty and destroyed quickly for simplicities sake - as Andre mentioned, there’s loads of ways around it, yeah it takes a bit of learning, but so does ‘oh I can use bushes to win’.

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I’d like to see the land slowly retaking civilization, vines creeping all over, plants and grass growing freely in the cities and beyond.