Bring the survival back with progressive difficulty

Game Talk The Drawing Board
81

Please, no more short-term fixes! Last time I looked at the source code I felt like burning my text editor in a ritualistic fire to cleanse it. Its really quite bad already, although things are improving slowly, very slowly. Problem is at some point you have hotfixes, that build on top of hotfixes, that build on top of quick hacks that were supposed to be temporary only. Trust me, I’ve been there.

When the foundation is good and structured, extending any programming project is quite easy. But when its a mess, well, then its going to stay that way for a long long time (perhaps forever), and every larger change takes far longer then it should.

With that out of the way: Even with NPCs loot really shouldn’t be as common as it is now. Why would they risk attacking you when everything they need is all over the place? There can still be fighting over a can of beans, as long as it is precious enough.

82

Well the amount of supplies we have now is in excess for a lone survivor (proven that you do not increase the zombie spawn factor to 1.5, in which case it remains balanced for more or less the entirety of the starting game, after which any semblance of balance goes out of the window) but it would be clearly just not enough to support a group of 3+ individuals. So we could throw that into the mix and give you reasons to actually want to work in groups instead of alone, (like it just being plainly impossible to specialize in every skill) but that’s veering off topic ill say.

83

Yeah you are right. This topic is basically if increased difficulty over time is fine for most people. So far most seem to agree on the concept.

84

Problems inherent in item decay (however it’s implemented) are why I’d rather focus on ramping up the monster difficulty. The thing is, with a few exceptions, the scenario calls for supplies to be massively available. I don’t really see real food/general supply scarcity being feasable unless we have features allowing the player to coexist with a dozen or more NPCs who are consuming food. Clothing scarcity is a laughable concept, outside of specialized stuff like armor. Construction materials are basically limitless. Ammo is another issue, I could see some amount of ammo scarcity being a real thing, but then again hit up one military bunker and you should probably be set, though it might limit weapon selection. Gasoline scarcity could certainly happen, and would be quite interesting if you ever had convoys or similar.

On the other hand, some of the concepts in here are good just for their flavor component, such as NPC survivors wandering around looting stuff, though something to remember there is that any town that hasn’t been cleared of zombies is going to be closed to looting. I could see the outer suberbs of towns being stripped bare later in the game, but unless we have NPCs taking over the area, you’ll still be able to fight your way into towns to get at good caches.

That brings us to another nice and flavorful (far future) feature, which is if a NPC faction were established near a town, they’d naturally fight their way in and strip it for supplies (you might even be helping), this would be rare-ish, and would be more of a locust-like stripping the whole town rather than simply thinning out the supplies.

85

On the subject of a vision for the game,

This is what we want from increasing difficulty over time at the moment. I’m pretty sure there aren’t going to be as many people opposed to these changes as would be opposed to say, loot disappearing from unexplored areas.

Perhaps the most inherent problem with long term progression as it is is that the game does not threaten you if you stay out of danger. Certainly, there might be more than enough loot, but the game still does not provide an incentive to move away from a self-sufficient base.

Even if all the loot in the world you haven’t explored were to suddenly disappear, if you have the basics of survival, there really isn’t a problem. You’d still be able to survive indefinitely and you’d still be able to go and raid places (not sure why you’d want to without loot). Of course, I get that this is sorta strawman and that nobody’s saying that the world’s loot should disappear suddenly, but the fact remains that nothing comes to threaten the player if they stay away from what could threaten them.

With these changes, which I think are much closer than the NPC rewrite, exploration will be encouraged as the player needs to find and exterminate the threats from the outside in order to stop the world from going to hell. Instead of being able to live in a forest forever with a water supply, perhaps you would realize that you’re sharing this forest with a beehive or a triffid grove, and that you need to figure out where it is so you can exterminate it before it spreads and envelops your base. Perhaps you need to consider raiding a nearby town before the zombies begin to evolve to nastier forms. Perhaps you need to march to a nearby fungal spire and wipe it out before it begins to consume the town you’ve cleared out for a base.

All in all, I think that there shouldn’t be any quick-fixes for too much loot. If you’re tired of loot everywhere, don’t forget that there is a loot spawn density option already implemented, so you can reduce the haul from a shopping market to a single bag of nachoes at the click of a button.

86

Speaking of that spawn loot density option, I gotta say that it’s surprisingly effective at reducing loot.

I broke into a gun nut’s basement and found a total of 20 bullets of differing sizes, as if whoever had used it had gotten the bullets from their vault hastily and left a couple on the shelf.

I broke into a house and found so little that I had to plough through another 5 or 6 houses to find the pot I needed.

I actually made a fire drill because I couldn’t find enough lighters to power my two by four fire, and went hunting in order to find some meat to replenish my food supply, which consisted of 2 bags of chips and a can of beans.

I think that my usual 4.0 spawn density may not have been the best idea when combined with low spawn density :\

87

[quote=“dwarfkoala, post:85, topic:4434”]This is what we want from increasing difficulty over time at the moment. I’m pretty sure there aren’t going to be as many people opposed to these changes as would be opposed to say, loot disappearing from unexplored areas.
…
All in all, I think that there shouldn’t be any quick-fixes for too much loot. If you’re tired of loot everywhere, don’t forget that there is a loot spawn density option already implemented, so you can reduce the haul from a shopping market to a single bag of nachoes at the click of a button.[/quote]

No one is saying loot should ‘disappear’ - it doesn’t. It’s not been generated yet. You’re basically going to areas where you thought there was loot on the map (like a gunshop in the centre of town) and you’d get there, and it’d have a chance to be looted/burned out. The loot hasn’t disappeared, because it was never there - it just looked like it was on the overmap. Over time, this would increase, but only very gradually. I just don’t see what the problem is - it’s not like you found a gun and really wanted it but then it disappeared or that the loot you’ve worked hard for is getting stolen, it’d just be like going somewhere and finding that the shop has hardly anything in it - just a bit more dramatic flavour wise.

This would need to be combined with more of an incentive to move around, I can only see this being done with a flat reduction in loot across the board. I know this doesn’t seem realistic, but maybe the lore needs retconning a bit/the same reason why there aren’t hundreds of cars blocking the road - lots of people escaped with their stuff or whatever.

I have to say I dislike the ‘but there’s an option for it!’ argument, we’re talking about the base standard of the game. Yeah, you could mod or option in whatever you want, but it’s what the game is actually like as standard which is the issue.

88

While I can definitely see the roleplay possibilities for loot not spawning, i’m not sure if it would be effective for gameplay.

If we were to consider mainlining a system for this, I would really want it to be more than a straight reduction of potential loot, I’d like to see areas cleared out of zombies or filled with corpses and gore, or stores and buildings with windows smashed and blood on the ground, or so forth. Having the stuff at the bottom of a lab just not spawn because you took your time to explore it should mean that the lab’s been opened and someone’s got to it already, not that all of a sudden 40 map tiles worth of laboratory now spawns with less and less “potential loot” over time.

Also, a key feature of theorhetical NPCs that go looting is that you can go up and kill those NPCs and take the stuff, or take the stuff from their bases or so forth. With a straight “potential loot” reduction over time, that can’t happen and any “potential loot” that doesn’t spawn is lost forever.

I can see the merit of such a system, but I believe that it’ll have to be very, very well fine tuned and sophisticated if it should hit maingame.

The key aspect of the game that this thread is trying to fix is that after you’ve got the basics set up, survival is just incredibly easy, thus a type of progressive difficulty should be implemented in order to challenge the player and have more fun.

I don’t see how reducing loot over time changes that. If you have a pot, some water nearby or a funnel, and a place away from anything threatening, survival is absolutely no problem. Reducing loot, for me at least, would not really make me more inclined to move away from my safe, sustainable shelter. I believe that monster improvements (Outline for Increasing Difficulty Over Time - Dynamic systems and a progessively more dangerous world · Issue #4977 · CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA · GitHub) are the way to change this instead of reducing “potential loot” as a function of time.

When NPCs get in maybe things will be different.

89

Things that will instantly make the game less Unreal World and more Cataclysm:

  1. Evolving zombies, as covered by many people before me
  2. Wandering groups of zombies, NPCs, insects, etc as well as spreaded territories
  3. The very real problem of finite resources, like overhunting and randomly too-murky-to-even-consider-drinking-after-purification rivers.
90

[quote=“kilozombie, post:89, topic:4434”]Things that will instantly make the game less Unreal World and more Cataclysm:

  1. Evolving zombies, as covered by many people before me
  2. Wandering groups of zombies, NPCs, insects, etc as well as spreaded territories
    3. The very real problem of finite resources, like overhunting and randomly too-murky-to-even-consider-drinking-after-purification rivers.[/quote]

I had a screenshot I accidentally deleted, that had me laughing. I stepped out of the evac shelter on like day 3 (after a book-reading binge from a luckily-placed library) … EVERY direction on my “radar” was something like --> North-West: cMopDsocdMB

The “its only been a couple days so theres hardly any looting happening” argument needs to address the wildlife too, lol. “Its only been a couple days, there wouldn’t be 50 animals in a populated area suddenly NOT scared of humans and wild packs of rabid wolves running amok in the city”.

So … for #3 … what about a simple system where wildlife has a hidden “density” integer for an area (say, a 3x3 overview-map-square block to simulate a larger “ecosystem” and a large hunting area). As the player (or NPCs, or zombies) kill the animals, it subtracts from that number … the lower the number, the less things spawn. The number can creep back up over time if fuzzy things aren’t being murdered regularly.

Forested areas would get higher density numbers. Cities would get LOW numbers (though stray dogs and cats should show up in cities still), which should stop the wolf-packs and bear groups roaming the supermarket thing we have now somewhat.

In theory, I’m imagining -> Player raids first town, heads to a cabin they see in nearby forest (high density) next to a highway (very low density) a couple map screens away.

This cabin area has a wildlife-density of, say, 10 … because its lightly wooded and the highway being in range of the calculation takes a BIG chunk out of the density number (this isn’t a deep in the mountains survivalist camp, its probably some rich family’s “summer cabin”). There are no triffids or anything crazy there either to screw up the wildlife calculations in this random example.

  1. Player sets up camp and some traps. A few little woodland critters die (opossums, squirrels, etc).
  • Density drops from 10 to 8. Animals spawn mostly as usual.
  1. Player gets attacked by pack of wolves who wandered in from nearby (maybe one of the to-be-implemented “packs/mobs” that roam the map? Awesome.) Player kills a moose for wandering too close, too.
  • Density drops to 4. FAR less things spawn.
  1. Player hunts for the next few days … they have a food dehydrator up and running and want to stockpile. They kill off anything they see.
  • Density drops to 0. Nothing else spawns for a while, as animals are all wiped out, and slowly the density needs to build back up.

… AND THEN …

  1. Player finds a couple more things loose in the wild, maybe a Moose wandered in. They kill it, not realizing what they’ve done (Cue dramatic music).
  • Density drops to -2. Negative? … yeah … zombie animal spawn just kicked into high gear. So much dead animal life that some of it is bound to come back, and its only living target is that bastard in the cabin making all that noise.

Now, the player is forced to go a little further to hunt, which is what hunters actually do. They don’t just stand on their porch and club an infinite supply of food to death every morning as they can now, which is terribly unrealistic.

Boom … survivalists get to venture out into further areas for food. Strategically they can purposefully NOT hunt in their immediate base-area too, if they want to preserve the wildlife there for say, winter, or to make sure they don’t trigger extra Zombears. … or … maybe … since the (wishful thinking alert) to-be-implemented roaming zombie (and NPC - in the far future) hordes are attracted to living animal deliciousness, the smart player regularly thins out their animals around them so as to not end up assaulted by a roaming-horde sensing all that wildlife but doesn’t kill so much as to kick ZoMooses into high spawn territory.

91

I wish farming was better fleshed out, so there’d be a reasonable alternative to hunting.

92

A farming update would be pretty good to have, actually. Though … I think people underestimate how long it takes to “farm”. Plant-to-harvest of say, corn, is usually 60-100 days, depending on the type planted and environmental factors (and the Northeast US isn’t a year-round farming zone due to seasonal changes). Even throwing in some Sci-Fi “this is the future so this goop makes stuff grow faster” you’re still not sustaining yourself on farming easily.

Growing fields of stuff, harvesting it all (by hand?), canning or dehydrating it … all that … would be cool, but its a very long process game-day wise. Would be fun to have, though, so people could actually build a farm to survive YEARS in game on I guess.

Then you get into the “is it a rogue-like where you’re supposed to die and start over alot like DCSS, or a simulation where 1 character lives forever danger-free” debate I guess. Feels like two different games to me.

93

Well, the game does need more stuff to do in your base, right now it’s mostly reading skill books and processing meat into jerky/smoked meat/dehydrated meat. Although it would be neat if you had superfertile land at triffid bases/fungal beds, so you could grow plants/giant tasty mushrooms much quicker there if you can clear out those areas and defend it. Taming wild animals to maintain a stable breeding pool and eggs/milk would be a neat mechanic to have, too.

And there’s no reason a farm needs to be danger-free, once you have roaming hordes it may be more stressful defending a plot of land and your animals compared to being a traveling hunter who can jump into a mobile base and drive away at any point.

94

I assume things like farming and keeping animals are going to make a lot more sense far in the future when NPC companions are rebuilt and expanded on.

Eg. Take over a farm, fortify it, get a couple NPCs to defend it, farm it and keep animals while you go out to collect stuff.

Of course loners with mobile bases would remain viable as they are now.

95

Timescales in Cata are compressed anyway. An entire season is 14 days by default or something. If a season is three months, then fourteen days = 90 days in default Cata. So if a crop was finished every 16 days or so that would be perfectly reasonable as a system.

Of course, whether or not food would grow over the winter months is another story. I’m not sure whether I’d handwave that or let people use common sense.

96

Maybe if you had a well-lighted and insulated base, you could grow a few things indoors in pots?

Or maybe you take over an ice lab and splice antifreeze into seeds.

97

I agree on this, but I also think that the player should always have options when it comes to survival. If all resources for survival in the world are limited and non-renewable, that pretty much puts a limited lifespan on the player, even if they do everything right. If you overhunt, you should be able to move to another place to find food or farm for your food. If your river gets tainted, there should always be some way to get water. A funnel for rainwater, perhaps, or at least finding another untainted river.

Cataclysm is not a static world, and really, such a world should have the basics for survival in replenishing supply, even if it may not be easy to get it. Moving your base to another forest when your regular animals run out or protecting your crops from raider NPCs are scenarios i’m envisioning here. Instead of how it is now where animals walk to your front door endlessly and ask to be eaten, or a theorhetical scenario where there’s a limited amount of food in the world and once you run out, you’re screwed.

Really, I don’t want to wake up one cataclysm morning and discover that every river in the world’s tainted and every animal is now an inedible zombie, and the only option is to die when my stockpile of food runs out. The game at its current state should not impose an ineffable, unpassable time limit upon the player as a function of time. I’m ok with things getting harder, but the world becoming unsurvivable over time is a bad idea.

I’ve been playing a lot of Ur-Quan Masters since I got introduced to it on IRC, and a key feature of that game is that the universe’s resources are limited, and you’re on a time limit. Eventually, the game becomes unwinnable if you dawdle, and you need to move from star to star in order to find new planets to mine for resources in the time you have. Ur-Quan masters has a well-developed plot. You are trying to accomplish actual goals before the time limit approaches, and the sense of urgency helps a whole lot once you realize there’s a time limit.

Cataclysm, on the other hand has no real game-ending goal. There’s no “You won the game!” page or final confrontation that you can win. To give the player a world that becomes unsurvivable regardless of player action in such an open-world game as this is an awful idea. If the player has to find new and inventive ways to survive, that’s good. If the player has to deal with threats that get worse over time, that’s good too. But if the world becomes unsurvivable no matter how many fungaloids you murder, how many towns you purge, how many times you march to the nether and close the portals, how much incredibly advanced equipment you craft and how many challenges you take on and win, that’s bad.

98

Cataclysm is not a static world, and really, such a world should have the basics for survival in replenishing supply, even if it may not be easy to get it. Moving your base to another forest when your regular animals run out or protecting your crops from raider NPCs are scenarios i’m envisioning here. Instead of how it is now where animals walk to your front door endlessly and ask to be eaten, or a theorhetical scenario where there’s a limited amount of food in the world and once you run out, you’re screwed.[/quote]

Which is why I had tossed into my imagined rambling, regarding the animal density integer: "The number can creep back up over time if fuzzy things aren’t being murdered regularly. " (Guess I didn’t explain my random thoughts enough lol)

Giving mother nature a rest slowly replenishes the animals available.

In the “omg I just dropped to -2 and zombie mooses are everywhere” scenario … the player would clear the zombies, thereby restoring balance to “Density: 0” … and over the next week or so, the number would creep back up again. Whatever speed seemed fair … 1/2 a point per day? Whatever is balanced so a player could pick off a couple animals a day to eat, and not horribly plunge the forest into a wasteland in an afternoon. So say, if reduce to zero density … in a week you’re finding small game again … in a couple weeks bigger game is regular.

99

Alright, that makes a lot more sense.

100

I’m still not sure if having the zombie animals triggered by animal deaths in the vicinity is the best idea. Animals tend to murder each other constantly, walk into landmines, and stand in acid rain puddles until they die. Plus, once you’ve got breeding implemented, which the devs have mentioned they’d like to do, it doesn’t make sense for your rat farm to trigger a wave of zombie wolves rampaging around.

And that’s not considering things like anthills/triffid groves where you can harvest meat/plant marrow indefinitely.