"I do like the idea of more “annoying” robots, and it is appropriate given the general lack of infrastructure and maintenance. Familiar with the nurse bots?
But yeah bots that try to impound your vehicle could be great. I can imagine coming back to a car with boots on the steerable wheels. Paying off citations also gives players a way to use all the cash they can collect (other than buying gas… I guess?)
Off topic I suppose."
Moved from the Kevlar Hulk discussion.
How feasible would it be to have functioning street cleaners that have the AI unit act as an NPC that drives the vehicle around. Providing a hazard for post apocalyptic drivers and cleaning up zombie guts and clothing so you get less of the roach effect in huge massacres in the street.
More domestic robots for silly and tedious jobs. Not aftershock, but realistic. Think roombas and traffic cams. Such as:
-The robot described in the quote that boots and impounds vehicles.
-a robot that offers walks for dogs.
-a robot that shouts at trespassers on school playgrounds.
-a construction site robot. Will only attack if forced into melee combat. Will attempt to hit to get away. Probably with a random tool. Could be a shovel, could be a circular saw.
None of these are active combatants, just annoying and good sources of robotic parts and possibly useful tools.
What else do you guys think? Should be fairly basic to fit in the base game. This is to replace occupational zombies so we don’t have mega-zombie technician, because that’s not how the blob evolution works (in my understanding).
More advanced robots than we have in the modern day should be as per the design document very expensive. I could definitely see them being in places where the rich would be like high-end houses, private-resorts and mansions:
-Bot that delivers and can make different drinks/cocktails in resorts.
-Bouncer version of police bots that fires rubber bullets and only uses tazer in melee and kick you out of resorts and clubs.
-Watch bod that alerts the bouncer bots if you come unto the terrain unauthorized.
I would also imagine some robots for industrial purposes although I can’t think of any specifically that would still work after the cataclysm besides the cleaning and security bots that you might also find elsewhere.
What is certainly missing are robots that we have in real life but should be more widespread and cheaper in the DDA world:
-Commercial Drone: Can have a camera attachment on it for remote scouting or an explosive or sound maker on it. Is remote controlled.
-Automated lawnmower: Still mows the lawn of houses is programmed not to leave its tile and doesn’t fight, flight or do anything except take hits and draws attention. Same for Roombas but they stay inside the house instead of outside.
-Delivery drone: Can be found rooming the streets after the wider network shut down and still has medicine or fresh food inside it that it keeps preserved. The loot inside can either be bought with a cash card or can be taken by force by murdering the bot. Is fairly robust with decent bash and cut armour and HP, will make sound when attacked and might spawn police bots if not taken out quickly enough. Might also be found in the back of restaurants, fast food places, pizza parlours and pharmacies.
I’m busily trying to remove most bots from mainline, it’s ideally supposed to feel like the cataclysm happened to our world.
Edit: the ones closer to the two world would be ok, but they’d run out of power pretty quickly…
I see. Well my point isn’t to add more unnecessary things. This was all spurred as a discussion to remove occupational zombie evolutions. Things like the kevlar zombie make no sense.
It’s an attempt to try and prevent occupational zombies becoming a line of evolution. I don’t understand how a guy wearing a kevlar vest becomes fully encased in kevlar and then a hulking brutish version of that.
How does it make sense, exactly? Because kevlar isn’t a phenotype alteration.
The occupational robots are to prevent such things as zombie grocery bagger and zombie dogwalker. They fill gaps that someone may want to fill with an occupational zombie that fits better in the game lore. Already, I believe we have too many occupational zombies.
The actual answer to that is and has always been to give zombies actual inventories, so they can follow their normal evolution pathways while holding onto whatever equipment still fits them from their life. That’s not too far away now. Regardless of if you add robots or not there will always have been thematically equipped zombies in particular places and they should still have their thematic loot.
I literally just finished discussing how Kevlar zombies work in the other thread.