The setting seems to be the USA. Why isn’t there an average of ten guns per house? I can accept that all the ammo has been spent, but we should have piles of guns. And when there are piles of guns and only pocketfuls of ammo, maybe it’s okay to break a few fighting supernaturally mighty zombies and other fantasy creatures.
I don’t live in America so I may be mistaken. But that sounds like it leans too far into the trope of Americans and guns. Plus the setting is already after things’ve gone down, so might be that the owners of those gun have used them up.
I don’t think it is too far from reality. There isn’t a gun in every house, but there are lots of guns in many houses. Maybe the owners took them when they fled. My character has already found five or six, but I don’t have many bullets unfortunately. Yes, the ammo may have been used up, but guns don’t get used up in quite the same way. Anyway, I was arguing your point. It’s a chunky bit of iron and plastic that can take some hits.
1 Like
Look up the actual demographics, it is more than one gun per person, but not nearly 10.
I’d like to do a lot of polishing on availability and selection of guns and ammo, but I’m skeptical that it will move as far as you seem to think it would toward more guns.
Fair enough, wikipedia claims there are 1.2 guns per person which means that we could potentially find as many guns as zombies.
1 Like
It will mess up your play balance. I’ve already killed 145 because I got a gun pretty early in the run and went on a shooting spree. If I had 145 guns instead of 5 and if every one had even as few as 5 bullets instead of maybe 60 then instead of 300 bullets I would have had 725 and I could have killed 350 NPCs which means I would have possibly had 1000 more bullets… I was dispatching every zombie with about 2 shots. That’s fine, I think the problem is that the zombies move in straight lines and the kiting strategy works too well. Even if there is a stockpile of weapons and ammo in the houses, it’s useless if the player is overwhelmed by more zombies than they can shoot.
In a harsher game, an advanced version of kiting may be needed as the player would need to evade a growing herd of zombies and pick them off a few at a time over a period of days or weeks. The herd would form in response to gunfire and sightings by zombies if they communicate with one another. That may be complicate further if the zombies stray off from the herd when the player gets away and they get bored of hanging around.
This is a zombie and monster game. If I was able to remake it completely then the zombies would be people with all of the intelligence and abilities of a person. They would go about fulfilling their needs for food and water, etc. and rather than coming out to get shot they would take defensive positions and shoot back. In that world the player might start in their own well stocked home or apartment, but eventually they would be forced o go out and confront the world which has turned violent due to some natural disaster (like a mythical mud flood) that destroyed all of the crops. Facing a lack of food, everyone would know that only a few will survive. People would turn to cannibalism and many would decide to view other humans as zombies as a psychological coping mechanism.
There may be that many guns per person, but it is concentrated in the hands of a few people.
Lots of people have no gun. They are expensive and a liability to have around. Especially with kids and stuff. Or you live in a condo/apartment and can only fire this in very few specific places without issues.
Some people might have one gun they never use that has been sitting around unfired for a decade. If it even works.
Some people need guns for jobs. Security guard, cop, drug dealer, armed forces soldier, bodyguard etc.
Then you have sportsmen and enthusiasts. Those people might have a small arsenal which will skew the averages. My uncle was like this. Dude was an avid hunter that went on literal African safaris. When he died, dude had like 20 to 40 different guns along with gunsmithing tools. Even some rare ones and assault rifles. He could have armed a faction camp alone.
And, this is far more prevalent in rural areas where things are spread out and you can go fire the things without having dozens of people stacked around you to actually enjoy your guns.
Also, USA is a huge place with multiple regions. New England tends to have stricter gun control than say the Midwest or the Deep South.
4 Likes
Yes most people seem to think it the same everywhere, and as you said New England most likely wouldn’t have as many guns as other places. But realistically even if the average is 1.2 per person, that doesn’t mean everyone has a gun.
That means a few people have a lot of guns.
But anyway, even if each house had one gun or whatever. At what point do we exchange gameplay for realism. Because it would make CDDA stupidly easy if you just kill zombies, go to the next house for a gun, and kill some more.
Also @je55eah
idk if I’m misreading, but you seem to be arguing both for and against your own points. But making the zombies as intelligent as humans, removes the whole point of them. I feel like that’s what Npc’s are for.
I think it has been said that even with an average of 1 gun per person there would be some houses with loads of guns and some with none. Ammo may also be scarce. This conversation began as a “derail” from a conversation about using longarms as clubs to block and to bludgeon. We haven’t discussed pistolwhipping an enemy yet, but I suppose even the pocket guns could get some love.
What is the point of zombies? I’ve never seen a single monster in real life. Even animals are smarter than these creatures. Shouldn’t they die if they don’t eat or are they just magic? These braindead creatures could exist in a game with more firepower, but it would be better if they triggered one another to follow them so that large hordes would form and it would become much harder to kite them. Violent, cannibalistic, humans would be much more challenging, frightening, and realistic zombies.
Bright nights is supposed to be the fantasy game. Dark days could be a gritty world filled with starving people and it would be a nightmare.
I think that you’re still relatively new to the CDDA universe right? Because arguing that zombies shouldn’t exist in CDDA earth because they’re unrealistic seems a bit on the uninformed side of things, or a bit mislead as to what the game is supposed to be.
1 Like
It seemed to me that we were talking about what the game could be.
That’s basically changing the setting of the game tho. You did compare Bright Nights and Dark Days in the assumption, at least from how I understand it, that zombies should only exist in Bright Nights due to that being the more fantasy-esque one. So from that I thought you meant that zombies shouldn’t really be part of the game since their unrealistic.
Without much spoilers though, the existence of zombies is bourne from an unnatural cause, which is the same cause as to why there are insects bigger than what should be at all possible in reality.
If you do want a setting without zombies tho you could enable some blacklisting mods, or wait for the Mythos mod to finish which has a different set of enemies in it.
Unnatural causes are by definition unrealistic. All of that weird stuff could go if the zombies became humans corrupted by starvation and fear.
That’s already a niche the ferals fulfill. Zombies are actually reanimated corpses, that means you already run into tons of problem if somehow its retconned that they’re merely crazed hungry people. A lot of these zombies are either dead ferals or were killed by ferals during the riots.
If you wanna continue arguing about the unrealism of zombies then I suggest you make a different topic, lest this gets moved into a derail topic again.
That’s some ironic advise. The game already forked into a bright nights/dark days. If the developers double down on their differences then you get two distinct games. That’s a win for you and everybody. Why be a stick in the mud about the old game? Why even come here to criticize my right to make suggestions? I supported your idea, but I don’t mind if you disagree with me. Tell me the reason though, because your argument so far is that that is just not how it is now and that I don’t know enough about the game. If that was a valid argument then nothing would ever change.
Its just that the idea of making them into hungry crazies doesn’t seem to solve how unrealistic they are anyways. Since if they are hungry and scared they’ll be mostly at each other’s throat, and it sounds like realistically they’d merely be scavengers that would not really be attacking you on sight like the zombies are in this setting.
I can’t really think of justifications for them to only gun for the normal ones outside of something unnatural, which then makes them still unrealistic in the end.
And then there’s the part where you have to pulp corpses to ensure they don’t rise up again. If they aren’t dead but merely maddened people driven by hunger, then why can they rise up again as long as their physical form isn’t tenderized enough? Is that then gonna say that the blob can revive people? Why are they always hungry when revived? If their hunger can be satieted then what happens then? If not then why the hell not?
In the end though I do feel ashamed on my conduct earlier. So sorry for that. But I have said what I thought about your suggestion, and maybe you have some further elaboration for your idea so if you want to then go ahead.
Yeah. I would prefer if the game dropped all of that stuff and make them act like people. I thought I explained this in multiple posts, but sure I will elaborate about this derail some. If they were people, then approaching and raiding houses would likely be met with gunfire, traps, and other defenses. Some would attack on sight. Some would hide. Many would form gangs to rob and kill anyone not in their gang. They would be plagued by internal conflict.
Pulping corpses, resurrection, blobs, rapid healing, those things can go.
If people can be satiated then they would likely be less hostile. That would actually be pretty interesting in the case of living people “zombies” or even in the case of magical zombies. Well fed zombies might even fall asleep. Starved zombies ought to die. Imagine if you could distract the magical type of zombies with a trail of meat or if you have living “zombies” and you are paying taxes to dangerous gangs or supporting your own gang and the people in your territory. That would make for a lot of dynamic interactions.
Wait so they’re still zombies? That’s even less realistic it sounds like. Plus that sounds like it’ll have more gunfights, and I kinda dislike the gunfights in its current state to be frank.
Also are they gonna function like monsters or are they NPCs? Because if they are the latter then it’ll be a long time before this can even become a viable thing considering the current state of NPC AI.
Sounds like an overhaul mod rather than a direction DDA should head to honestly. It might even be possible right now if you pick the No Hope mod and the other mod that blacklists other monsters besides animals.
Another thing, if all the unnatural stuff is removed then what is the setting of this apocalyptic world? Is it another aftermath of a World War X thing?
by “zombies” I was referring to people. If they are zombies then there is no such thing as realistic. I haven’t encountered a gunfight in the game yet, but I am a fan of the original x-com and I was hoping it would play that way.
Aren’t monsters NPCs? Monsters and NPCs need AI improvements.
We have differing opinions.
I suggested somewhere that it might be a situation where all of the farms failed for a few years. Maybe it was a brief ice age or a mud flood or something else.
Oh its nothing like X-Com at all, but I badly wish it was.
By NPC I meant the ones you can interact with and is basically like you minus the human intelligence. Monster AI and NPC AIs functions differently, and the latter tanks process quite a bit, and they’ll have to exist in at least the double digits to make your world interesting.
Like I said, I think you are still a bit uninformed as to what DDA is and why BN exists as a fork.
So climate change++ then eh?