To be honest, the more I’ve messed around on github and seen the commits people are pushing, the more I think it’s pretty much not possible. For everything that gets balanced, someone else seems to be adding something way OTT, completely sci-fi or ridiculously OP.
In short, I’m not going to bother until the devs actually put some constraints on the game world (in terms of both lore and balance), as at the moment it’s pointless.
Buffing special zeds is a good idea.
BTW broken recipes are a problem with game dev speed and not the game itself 
My suggestion for the special Z’s
Buff the shrieking zombies shriek (think it is currently 12) to something a lot louder (80, same as a steel compactor).
Spitting and elec Z’s make the ranged attacks hit you. Not only spawn the special cloud/terrain effects. Make the spitting zombie degrade your weapon on hit. (with a low chance).
Not sure if they already are, but make the crawling zombies harder to hit with ranged weapons (as they are prone).
Fat zombies could get a minor damage resistance.
If you want to improve all Z’s an easy addition would be to give all Z’s surrounding you a free attack (not triggering further free attacks) if you get hit (hit not damaged) by one. Representing it grabbing you. Like this (Warning: Gory) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC6kbCCmC1Q#t=692 (minus the Z shooting the gun).
How about this?
No removing content. No balancing existing items, fixing monsters, etc.
Adding in progressive difficulty increase that can be set by the player through the world gen options menu. The difficulty of monsters could be determined by “danger points” like in IVAN. Harshness of the game though zombie spawns, wildlife spawns, etc. would increase gradually over time, so after a few seasons instead of facing a town full of various zombies and a hulk or two you will be facing a town full of zombie hulks and the nastiest zombies, and then eventually special zombie hulks for the super players who have done everything and want a challenge after a long period of play. Running through the fields eventually you have much more zombie animals and maybe even otherworldly creatures and zombies themselves. The late game will become much more action packed.
And it can all be precisely controlled directly by the player, so it wont scare off people new to the game. And those who don’t like it can just have the difficulty progression be 0. It goes with the DDA “make everyone happy” design style and provides one solution to the issue of the late game being too easy for some of us.
These three things will get the balance back to the point where the game is playable as a game. I'm willing to work on all of those, and it'd be good if a dev (Kevin?) would put their foot down and agree that balance needs to happen, and soon, before the community gets any nastier.The problem is the inherent nature of the game. You cant do this shit. Like you want to get rid of the medieval weapons from the game. I think that's bullshit. Clayton wants to get rid of the fur suit from the game. The furries call it bullshit. Some people want to reduce the weapon names to stuff like "pistol", and the gun nuts think it's bullshit. I want to get rid of the elf eyes from the game, and the devs think it's bullshit.
The game isn’t one guys vision. It’s the collaboration of piles of people with piles of opinions. All of which conflict in a horrible confusing mess. Which is why I say balancing this project is bullshit. Everyone wants to balance the game for themselves. To give the official DDA their personal vision. But that’s not how development works here. That’s not a plausible goal.
It is a plausible goal for a mod, it is a plausible goal for a project with a leader, or a single developer. But the way this game is made you will never be able to agree on anything, just watch this thread prove me right. How much have you accomplished in 6-7 pages of posts? You can’t even agree on where to start!
coughmodmanagercough
Binky is right. Without an “official” line, at least a general one, no one can be sure that his/hers/its idea is within game’s lore or genre or whatever.
What do we know? No magic. That all. Everything else is free-for-all.
The mod manager is all well and good, but if the core sucks, the rest will. It needs a starting point to balance from, and currently it doesn’t have a starting point at all.
I thought, misguidedly, that it would just be a case of stripping out the OP stuff, balancing monsters and making it a bit more coherent, but after looking at the commits and pull requests, this seems impossible as people have such wildly different ideas on the game.
DCSS works well, because it revolves around a small group of developers who develop it with a coherent vision. Anyone can submit other stuff, but that needs to be rigorously tested and gone through on the development forum. I sincerely wish this could be the case here, rather than people just saying ‘I want to make a 8-barreled shotgun that shoots fire, here it is’ and it gets pulled in.
The ONLY hope is if the core developers decide to make some boundaries which everyone can stick too. Please, for the sake of DDA, do this!
It’s not like people are flying completely blind. There’s an IRC channel, which the devs sometimes frequent, there’s this forum, there’s content that’s already in the game, and if something doesn’t fit in the game’s lore you can always have it as a mod instead of a commit. I’m not saying a design document or a set of guidelines for content wouldn’t be nice or helpful, but it’s not like it’s completely pivotal to the design of the game.
Also using DCSS is a weird example because it’s pretty obvious that DCSS is about as far from Cataclysm DDA in approach and execution as you can get
You do realize that most of the stuff in right now will be shoved in to mod packs (what we are calling them its more like features that you want) and you could turn on what you want or not. This means DR type weapons might be on pack, while rivtech and other future guns might be in another.
Been suggested already by Kevin, and I wholeheartedly second this. I guess the mod manager feature will be polished and used more after 0.A rolls in.
I think the main problem here is a purely nominal one.
In my opinion, if the devs had called this mutation group “Apex” or something like that, something that sounds science-y and not mystical, this argument wouldn’t be happening.
As far as the unbalanced items and such, I’ve been reading a lot of people voicing similar opinions to this, and it would seem that the game will be moving in a more balanced direction in general as time goes on and the content becomes more refined and pointed.
It might help to think of the game as a beta.
After all, you are posting/reading in a forum stream called, "The Drawing Board"
If the devs thought the game was perfect, there wouldn’t be a line for this in the forum.
I kinda like the crazy whacky OP stuff. I’ll concede that the cutting weapons seem to be unstoppable, but isn’t that the zombie trope?
And it’s not like a nailbat is any less unstoppable once your bashing skill gets higher. I (5% of a real guy’s vote since I’m a newbie dork) support adjusting enemies rather than removing the stuff. So many zombie movies involve ridiculous assumptions and/or ridiculous weapons/tools/cars, but it’s for fun. And it is. I’m having a blast still after 3 weeks of basically nothing but Cata. And I didn’t enjoy it so much before, because I could never get very far. Hell, I support even MORE wierd stuff… steampunk power armor, dirigibles with coal powered props, chronoslipped roman legionaires, it’s all for fun.
[quote=“Stelknecht, post:112, topic:4901”]I kinda like the crazy whacky OP stuff. I’ll concede that the cutting weapons seem to be unstoppable, but isn’t that the zombie trope?
And it’s not like a nailbat is any less unstoppable once your bashing skill gets higher. I (5% of a real guy’s vote since I’m a newbie dork) support adjusting enemies rather than removing the stuff. So many zombie movies involve ridiculous assumptions and/or ridiculous weapons/tools/cars, but it’s for fun. And it is. I’m having a blast still after 3 weeks of basically nothing but Cata. And I didn’t enjoy it so much before, because I could never get very far. Hell, I support even MORE wierd stuff… steampunk power armor, dirigibles with coal powered props, chronoslipped roman legionaires, it’s all for fun.[/quote]
The reason I picked up cataclysm in the first place was that it was advertised as being so much more than a zombie apocalypse. I guess that put me under the impression that this was a full on sci fi apocalypse; with aliens, zombies, mutants, Lovecraftian horrors, and more. It also put me under the impression that weapons, vehicles, powers, armor, and tools would continue to be more varied, abundant, and unique.
That’s what I thought this game was.
Not a zombie apocalypse
A science fiction apocalypse
But I’m getting the idea that I’m mistaken.
[quote=“ZombieTermite, post:113, topic:4901”][quote=“Stelknecht, post:112, topic:4901”]I kinda like the crazy whacky OP stuff. I’ll concede that the cutting weapons seem to be unstoppable, but isn’t that the zombie trope?
And it’s not like a nailbat is any less unstoppable once your bashing skill gets higher. I (5% of a real guy’s vote since I’m a newbie dork) support adjusting enemies rather than removing the stuff. So many zombie movies involve ridiculous assumptions and/or ridiculous weapons/tools/cars, but it’s for fun. And it is. I’m having a blast still after 3 weeks of basically nothing but Cata. And I didn’t enjoy it so much before, because I could never get very far. Hell, I support even MORE wierd stuff… steampunk power armor, dirigibles with coal powered props, chronoslipped roman legionaires, it’s all for fun.[/quote]
The reason I picked up cataclysm in the first place was that it was advertised as being so much more than a zombie apocalypse. I guess that put me under the impression that this was a full on sci fi apocalypse; with aliens, zombies, mutants, Lovecraftian horrors, and more. It also put me under the impression that weapons, vehicles, powers, armor, and tools would continue to be more varied, abundant, and unique.
That’s what I thought this game was.
Not a zombie apocalypse
A science fiction apocalypse
But I’m getting the idea that I’m mistaken.[/quote]the sarcasm is strong in this one.
[quote=“HunterAlpha1, post:114, topic:4901”][quote=“ZombieTermite, post:113, topic:4901”][quote=“Stelknecht, post:112, topic:4901”]I kinda like the crazy whacky OP stuff. I’ll concede that the cutting weapons seem to be unstoppable, but isn’t that the zombie trope?
And it’s not like a nailbat is any less unstoppable once your bashing skill gets higher. I (5% of a real guy’s vote since I’m a newbie dork) support adjusting enemies rather than removing the stuff. So many zombie movies involve ridiculous assumptions and/or ridiculous weapons/tools/cars, but it’s for fun. And it is. I’m having a blast still after 3 weeks of basically nothing but Cata. And I didn’t enjoy it so much before, because I could never get very far. Hell, I support even MORE wierd stuff… steampunk power armor, dirigibles with coal powered props, chronoslipped roman legionaires, it’s all for fun.[/quote]
The reason I picked up cataclysm in the first place was that it was advertised as being so much more than a zombie apocalypse. I guess that put me under the impression that this was a full on sci fi apocalypse; with aliens, zombies, mutants, Lovecraftian horrors, and more. It also put me under the impression that weapons, vehicles, powers, armor, and tools would continue to be more varied, abundant, and unique.
That’s what I thought this game was.
Not a zombie apocalypse
A science fiction apocalypse
But I’m getting the idea that I’m mistaken.[/quote]the sarcasm is strong in this one.[/quote]
I’m trying to see where I was being sarcastic.
Maybe I’m far worse at communication than I thought which would not surprise me.
I’m not kidding I thought it was a full on scifi apocalypse.
Sad part is that ZombieTermite’s right. It is a full-on SF apocalypse.
We’ve had a googledoc under construction for some time now. Unfortunately, GlyphGryph’s not had the time to participate as much as he ideally would; he’s the central lorekeeper, IIRC.
Well generally it’s a B-movie apocalypse in a sci-fi setting.
Also, I’m so retired from being the core lorekeeper right now. My only remaining duties are organizing fulfillment of kickstarter rewards and funding the bounties once they’ve been decided.
Full on sci-fi apocalypse or not, there needs to be some sort of rules or it’s just (as it is now) chaos. It started (at the very beginning of DDA) very differently from where it is now in terms of tone and theme, and it’s fine if it’s changed, I just think it’s impossible to get any balancing or coherence down without an actual statement of what the game is actually supposed to be.
But the beauty of Cataclysm DDA is the chaos
(no I don’t mean the unstable features and bugs)
You want a realistic new england but, "The world as you knew it is gone and in its place, a twisted mockery of all that was once familiar. "
Here is how I see this thread playing out with eachother:
