Why are we even playing games! We should be reading SICP!
READING?! Why aren’t you out writing your own book of algorithms and implementing them on a Babbage machine! ARGH!
Roguelike difficulty is hard to gauge because for many storied roguelikes a lot of it disappears with spoilers (nethack) grinding (angband) or both (adom.)
In any case item spawn rate has relatively little to do with the game’s difficulty because with a speed<100 weapon (like your fists, which you start with and can’t drop or lose) combat against the large majority of enemies in the game becomes essentially trivial. Making you loot 15 houses instead of 3 for whatever given item probably isn’t much more dangerous unless you get unlucky with an early hulk/get bitten by dogs until you’re too slow to kite and have no painkilers
And the fact that you can grind up endgame gear by disassembling a ton of flashlights/car parts menas that you usually don’t have to expose yourself to any real risk unless you really want to
For the record I’m fine with this. I like hard games (or dcss at least) but it’s very tough to add difficulty without reducing fun and I think the game is fun right nos
It usually takes me about ten/fifteen lives before I get a good long-term character going. I’m beginning to think, for my own humble viewpoint, that the OP is trolling.
In the spirit of trying to make everybody happy, we’ve got a new worldgen option in the PR queue.
If you want scarcity of items, just turn it down to a decimal value that looks good.
I am surprised that the skill system hasn’t been discussed more in this thread.
As far as I’m concerned, no matter how hard you patch the game up, it is just a matter of grinding your skills up until you make all challenges obsolete. so if we introduce harder monsters, I can just grind my combat skills a bit higher and end up in the same situation. It will just make the game harder where it is currently hardest, the very beginning.
Lower tool spawns? My superior combat skills mean I can just loot 5 houses for that pot or hacksaw instead of finding it in the first house. Again, the only one who suffers is the new character.
Zombie herds? More chance to grind my combat skills
No food? I can turn dirt to a gourmet meal with no cooking skill whatsoever … etc
Now, some people might hate me for this suggestion, but what if we imposed a limit on total skill points. This way you can’t become a master in: Kung Fu, Cooking, Electronics, computer hacking, tailoring, shooting, diplomacy…etc, etc,etc all at the same time.
So you want to be such a great mechanic and build your Death Mobile? Fine, but you’ll have a harder time keeping your clothes intact, and a kevlar vest suddenly becomes one of your prized possessions and not just spare parts.
You’re great at killing zombies? cool, start shooting then to replenish your ever-dwindling supply of medicine and batteries that you can’t just create out of thin air anymore. I hope I made the idea clear.
This allows for more variety in playstyles. Bionics and mutations that fill gaps in your character builds become much more meaningful, and hopefully this will expose the more useless and/or OP skills as “standard builds” start to appear in the forums.
This allows developers and modders to have some idea of how to balance out new (or existing challenges). You want the Zombie Hulk to be scary? balance it around melee/dodge of 10/10 (for example) cause that’s what a pretty proficient fighter is likely to aim for (just throwing numbers out of my ass thin air)
The problem with this approach is, of course, that as it stands some skills will turn out to be superior, while others might be completely useless. However, I think this could help us balance these out by providing more solid feedback.
Just my two bottle caps.
The developers have already mentioned that skill points will eventually be soft-capped at about 10, where raising them up after that point will take exponentially longer and have very little effect.
Mega city + high spawn rate + black road is easy for you? boring? in my experiences i only survived 2 out of 10 times i tried.
Even with op martial artist, be surrounded by hundreds of thousands zombies is certain death. Numbers. That is what make the zombies scary. try to pump up the spawn rate to feel how a real zombie apocalypse would be like.
Someone suggested the gang up bonus for zombies when surrounded. I think is a great idea, no normal person could dodge 8 attacks at the same time.
[size=8pt]As I have said earlier, or maybe it was on chat, zeds should not be the only challenge/difficulty factor.[/size]
Yep. I really think some people should try no-cities mode. The focus on zombies and looting goes way down, and survival becomes much more of a challenge.
Unrealworld mode is a fun change. Jumping for joy when you find the various scattered special places is a fun treat, but it should remain as an option.
Either way, rivet’s pull request is a good step. If people want to adjust the settings one way or another they should.
What about more world gen options and the ability to scale things like ant nests, labs, and such? Play a rugged survival game with few labs or bases to loot, making what you need from sticks and furs while dodging the ever present ant, ect. ect.
Another option could be to organize the JSON’s with headers for the type of item and possibly other things. Think the high end guns are too easy? So a search and remove everything under that heading from the JSON, or even add a world gen config toggle. Play a distant future where the best you can get is flintlocks, and the only clothes you can make is that wierd get up from Zardos.
[quote=“Killer-of-Lawyers, post:98, topic:4220”]Why should the games items and new systems, which are fun for a lot of people, be removed to suit your needs?
I mean, it’s not like all those new items aren’t in the JSON. You can open them up yourself with notepad++ and delete them. I find that it’s sickening that we have to make doing any bit of technical work to the file structures easy for you newbies? To be fair, the JSON’s go to far as making the files easy for the likes of you to access. You don’t need to mess with the source. Do you know why it’s called programming? Because it is an esoteric skill from the dawn of computing, and therefore it must remain the same forever.
Now I must write a long op about how everything should be done in COBOL. I bet you’re going to ask that they add a menu that lets you individually edit various spawns next too, you goddamn lazy coder![/quote]
What the hell are you even going on about? So, instead of trying to balance the game, us people who think it’s too easy should have to change the JSON files (to what end exactly, I have no idea) every time there is a new version? Curse those who play experimental builds, aye?
We cant just edit the JSON files and make the game harder. It doesn’t work like that. Thank you for your suggestion (?) or whatever it was.
No, not trolling.
[quote=“Pageman, post:108, topic:4220”]Mega city + high spawn rate + black road is easy for you? boring? in my experiences i only survived 2 out of 10 times i tried.
Even with op martial artist, be surrounded by hundreds of thousands zombies is certain death. Numbers. That is what make the zombies scary. try to pump up the spawn rate to feel how a real zombie apocalypse would be like.
Someone suggested the gang up bonus for zombies when surrounded. I think is a great idea, no normal person could dodge 8 attacks at the same time. [/quote]
We shouldn’t have to crank up spawns just for a challenge. How is doubling, tripling or even quadrupling the amount of zombies supposed to make the game any more enjoyable or harder? They don’t present a challenge by themselves, even the “hard” zombies like Brutes and Hulks, so we have to multiply the amount of them? That doesn’t make sense. Woo! for the option to adjust zombie spawns to our tastes, but it doesn’t change anything.
[hr]
And since someone did bring it up, the skills system is pretty damned…silly. I mean, look at all the people just blatantly power leveling them…
But, alas, I don’t want anyone to get butt hurt from another opinion/statement.
I don’t see what’s so hard to understand about his statement. You think ___ is overpowered? Look it up in the .json and delete it, and it doesn’t exist in your game. The entire point of the .json is that it makes it fairly easy for any one player to modify his own game to his liking, and will be even easier when the mod manager is merged in, without making a fuss for other people.
Your original three suggestions were: turn item spawns down, take out the weapons you don’t like and take out the mechanics you don’t like. The first one was catered for, the second and third are done exactly by deleting them from the files if you don’t like them. I don’t know how you can go ‘you can’t just delete stuff from the files and make the game harder’ when that’s exactly what you’ve been calling for since the very beginning. If you admit that those won’t actually improve the game experience, why were you calling for that in the first place?
Couldnt we just get another option (like the spawn size) that is used to toggle item spawns? Ramping it up would give you stuff dropping out your ass, and going under 1 would give you extremely small amounts of stuff.
The OP weapons are a factor, yes. But I was calling more for controlling the direction CDDA moves in new content wise. If just any person can contribute weapons, and the only requirement be that they are functional, then there is something wrong. Balance. Balance.
Balance.
Balance.
Balance.
Balance.
Balance.
Understand?
And I don’t plan on editing the json files ever single time I download a new experimental. No thank you. I know very well that I have that option and that they were made for exactly that reason, but using, “you have the power!” as an excuse to not balance the game is kind of silly.
Really? New content-wise, all I see is people calling for nerfs to weapons and adding in more complicated mechanics for the sake of complexity. And if you really wanted to help balance out the game, you could contribute as well. Mess around with the weapon values, make your own balanced set of weapons, put in your own request and make a compelling case for ClaytonDDA. If the people who add in fun stuff like the generators put in the effort to make sure their mechanic keeps up with all the new experimentals, surely you can put in the same amount of effort to change those values and make an objective case for your tweaks. As it stands, you simply don’t have much actual evidence to go on.
100Rads: Actually, an item spawn rate option was submitted a few pages earlier. Should be going into an experimental soon.
I’ve contributed; actually, odds are, you’ve probably used my weapon mods before or one of my weapons (M14 is the only thing I can remember, though haha)
There is a loot spawn factor going in, so I think we all can stop bitching complaining about others’ opinions for now.
Yes, I suppose that would be for the best. At least one practical mechanic arose out of this mess.
The man who started a thread called DDA is too damned easy now wants us to stop complaining, and does so without any irony. The internet is a gift to mankind.
Anyways, if you don’t like feature creep, take it out yourself. If you can bitch that it’s not true to the spirit of a game from the fucking 80’s then I can bitch about people whining that editing a bunch of text files is too hard. I bet you use a fucking mouse now. Might as well be a win robot you plug into your USB port, and don’t get me started on USB ports. You should use serial ports, you ungrateful kid.
Killer-of-Lawyers, please, learn how to read before you puke a reply on to the thread. Thanks, yo.
And you shouldn’t call people a “kid” if you have no idea how old they are; it shows how much of a fucktard you are.