You mean make all ammo rare? Or just rifle ammo? Or are you talking about some new sniper rifle that will have rarer ammo that only it can use?
It’s just my opinion, but I’d really rather not see some kind of new sniper rifle with its own mechanics. I’d much rather see scopes introduced which can be put on a variety of weapons and have their own mechanics which are well balanced. Proper rifles would simply benefit more than, say, assault rifles or .22s, because they are more accurate at longer ranges.
If we are on the same page then no, I don’t like the idea of making ammo more rare. Ammo is already kinda rare. Yeah sometimes you strike a goldmine but you usually don’t have much choice in what you find, and you may not find more of the good stuff for a long time. Feast and famine. Make ammo more rare and you simply may never find it in combination with the weapon that uses it at all, or often enough that you can justify carrying it around.
To some degree the binocular/scope mechanics I described earlier would provide some amount of balance. If you are laying in a field and can’t see behind you, there’s a decent chance your gunfire will attract some attention and you may not realize it until enemies are on top of you. So there is some risk there.
Also I am not sure that picking off zombies from outside a town with impunity is ACTUALLY that bad a thing, the more I think about it. a) Zombies are pretty stupid and picking them off from afar seems like a fair strategy. You see this in zombie games/movies etc. b) You will never be able to get every zombie in a town this way. There will always be buildings and other things blocking line of sight, and zombies in buildings. You can thin the horde but you can’t kill it this way. c) With the right guns/armor and decent skills you can pretty much already walk through a city and kill enormous numbers of zombies. Hell I’ve done it with one guy and an SKS, Savage, and a pistol. Killed what turned out to be almost two hundred zombies in a large town, just walking down the street. It felt badass but I realized what an enormous waste of ammo it was and haven’t done it since. I think sniping from outside of town will be similar; it’s something you could do, but it’s wasteful and while you may find an ammo stockpile once, that doesn’t mean you’re likely to easily find more.
So I’m thinking it’s fine, and if the whole ‘tunnel vision’ effect can be coded in at some point, that on its own could be its own risk.
