I still haven’t seen any discussion of how this will affect bionics.
Unless you’ve got a really good argument and dial it to more of an intermittent thing than straight no-electronics for a third of every season Because JimQuaid Said So, this is “arbitrary and capricious, would not merge”.
No, not a third of each season.
I merely feel this should be a rare, random chance thing, that kinda changes the game temporarily. You know, a random event/obstacle in surviving.
It would merely cause electric vehicles, bionics, riv tech laser weapons, and advanced technology to stop working.
Then when the weather clears everything becomes back to normal.
Still makes no sense for it to disable everything electronic from a flashlight to high-tech laser guns and bionics.
Does it really have to make sense?
Yes, other wise it’s just arbitrary nonsense.
Yes, other wise it’s just arbitrary nonsense.[/quote]
Yeah, that is understandable. But there is already lot of things in this game that only make sense because a lore was added to make it make sense. The same can be done for anything new added to the game. So, why would this not make sense?
Yes. If you want to change how the DDA world works, you’d best have the decency to give a good explanation.
A game mechanic that doesn’t have a reasonable (in-universe) explanation breaks people’s immersion and detracts from DDA. It’s the difference between “oops, JimQuaid came along and turned off all my devices again” and “shit, this weather’s getting freaky–all the lights went out!”
The reason I call it a third of every season is the OP saying 4-5 days of every season; seasons default to 14 days long. So 4 days straight without devices is a pretty huge amount of time in default DDA, and that’s what I presume unless people specify otherwise.
I know a lore for it would need to make sense.
Sorry, I meant more along the lines of, why do we need to come up with the details for every tiny thing such as why it would disable a flashlight. Just in general the ion storm would disable electrical equipment.
It would be cool if we could choose our Cataclysm. From portals from another dimension to EMP pulses from an unknown source taking technology back to medieval times… or both in the same world.
Something like this can be partially implemented by mods, though.
Very much like the poison and radioactive cloud weather conditions that have been proposed, this need ways for players to mitigate and avoid it, otherwise it’s pretty harsh. It seems counterintuitive that disabling stuff gets a stronger reaction than outright killing the player, but it’s frequently the case. Go after the loot at your peril.
regarding motivation, “makes electronics somewhat unreliable” is an ok goal, “force the player to use primitive tools” is not.
Regarding the need for it to make sense, the issue is it’s similar to actual phenomena like EMP and severe solar flares, which will disable electronics* but not electricity**. If you describe something similar to an existing effect, people will be (justifiably) surprised if it doesn’t act like the that effect.
*Microcontrolers, transistors, even some large-scale dumb circuitry.
**flashlights, heating elements, LEDs, batteries, alternators, generators, starters, mechanical sparkplug systems, and specially hardened military circuitry are immune or resistant to EMP and strong radio interference.
Maybe make it only break/damage stuff that is actively being used at the time with a short warning, and if the player keeps driving his electric car break the battery and engine?
I’m thinking a no electrical stuff field effect would be neat in the occasional laboratory.
Instead of (or maybe even in addition to) dealing with dreadful cold, you’d have to bring torches and stuff with you for light.
It was a suggestion of a new game mechanic not a proposal set in stone “This way and no other!”.
The responses so far are “I want something like that” and “Sounds good but not so extreme” and only one person (who read this thread) is disliking it so much that they’re going so far to mod their game if this was implemented.
I thought this game mechanic would add more depth to the survival aspect of the game. If your idea of a post apocalyptical zombie survival game is “I’m gonna gather stuff that is going to turn me into a futuristic cyborg and my ride into a mobile house powered by the sun with no major drawbacks whatsover” then of course this would be stupid addition to the game.
I’m going to compare this to acid rain.
Acid rain sucks.
Say I’m going outside to hunt animals and gather water. 10 map tiles from my home the weather changes to acidic drizzle which is tolerable, but I still haven’t found food. So I keep looking and the weather changes to acid rain. Now I don’t have anything to eat and have combat penalties because of the pain. That really sucks.
But here’s where survival comes into effect. It’s about being prepared for things that suck.
This is where a player can pat themselves on their shoulder because they stockpiled 2 days worth of rations and gathered ressources for crafting before the acid rain hit.
The reason I suggested the event to be a once a season thing and a duration longer than a few minutes was because I wanted to have a noticeable drawback to complete reliance on high tech tools. A 15 minute blackout on electric devices isn’t going to change the way people play the game very much. I said it shouldn’t be regarded as a random weather effect, because having electric tools fail every six hours because of the randomness of the weather would be silly. Rather, it would be an event with a certain minimum and maximum duration and a set cooldown phase in which you wouldn’t have to worry about it.
First here’s a (hopefully) better explanation for the event and a better name for it:
There is a dimensional rift going through the solar system like wall. It intersects the earth’s orbit twice a year. It’s not a static phenomenom, sometimes the intervall of intersection is short:
sometimes it’s longer:
(excuse the MS Paint quality; the blue circle is supposed to be earth orbit around the sun)
kinda like the Nexus from Star Trek VII only more permanent.
Before every intersection the player will get a warning like “The sky is looking very strange…” or something along those lines.
24 hours or so after that warning Purple Sky will be in effect. The sky will be colored purple, the dimensional rift emits strange radiation so that electric devices won’t work, bionics that require power can’t be used (so bionic armor will still be effective), shockers and turrets will be disabled or at least have the “stunned” condition for the duration of the event.
After X amount of days of Purple Sky the event will end and there will be a grace period before the dimensional rift intersects with the world again. That could be half a season, a full season or so of no danger of this event. Maybe even have a set period after game start during which this cannot happen. If it already happened twice this year you won’t need to worry about your equipment failing until the start of next year. After a Purple Sky event is the time to bust out that power armor and charge rifle and go kick some zombie butt.
It would be an event you can prepare for. You have a fire phobia? Use them hotplates to can and vacuum pack food before the Purple Skies hit. Allergic to charcoal? Forge your stuff ahead of time.
This is a suggestion open for suggestion. If you can think of more plus sides to this event - for example special enemies that spawn during Purple Skies with valuable loot who will die (or vanish) automatically once the event is over (of course you have to kill them yourself if you want the loot) - just add them here. Maybe even have a massive discharge at the end of Purple Skies that will refill all the batteries to full.
This isn’t a “Take it as it is or leave it” proposal. The values aren’t set in stone. Suggest a duration or frequency of the event.
I think what we need is actual weather. Something you can see on the overmap. Cloud cover, thunderstorms, fog, high winds, acid rain, dustclouds, radioactive dustclouds, acid fog (can’t breathe unless inside or face covered), and ion storms.
I think this is a list of weather effects we could have. Arrows depict weather conditions that may naturally segue into each other.
Clear - regular sunlight.
Sunny - intense sunlight.
Cloudy - weak sunlight.
->Drizzle - light rain
–>Rain - regular rain
–>Heavy Clouds - dark sky.
—>Downpour - heavy rain, sewers flooded.
—>Thunderstorm - dark sky, occasional rumbles of thunder sending hearing-guided critters in a random off-map direction.
---->Lightning storm - dark sky, occasional flashes of light revealing everything as daylight for 1 turn, followed by rolling thunder confusing hearing-guided critters.
---->Ion Storm - dark sky, frequent weaker flashes of light with constant low rumble of thunder, any and all electric devices cannot be used.
->Acidic drizzle - light damage to bodyparts not covered by clothing.
–>Acid rain - moderate damage to bodyparts not covered by clothing, damage to non-resistant clothing.
—>Acidic downpour - severe damage unless fully covered by watertight clothing, damage to non-resistant clothing, sewers flooded with acid.
High winds - projectiles suffer more spread. Lightweight items outside may be randomly moved.
->Dust storm - limited visibility, chance to be blinded and take permanent eye damage if outside without eyewear.
–>Radioactive duststorm - limited visibility, chance to be blinded and take permanent eye damage if outside without eyewear, heavy irradiation outside.
Fog - limited visibility
->Acid fog - limited visibility, damage to open skin equivalent to acid drizzle, pain and damage to torso(lungs) if mouth not covered.
–>Radioactive fog - limited visibility, heavy irradiation if outside.
These things should all roam the overmap as procedurally generated fields, appearing, disappearing, and changing randomly (with an underlying system of course), for instance have a list of things a given weather area can do every update tick (which can be once every 10 turns, or every 100) - increase intensity, decrease intensity, move as a whole by one overmap tile, move some of its components by one overmap tile (all according to some wind variables), etc, etc. We already have the roaming hordes - reuse the principle and make the debug “show hordes” command into an overmap “describe weather” command, and I think this could work quite well.
[quote=“JimQuaid, post:33, topic:5561”]It was a suggestion of a new game mechanic not a proposal set in stone “This way and no other!”.
The responses so far are “I want something like that” and “Sounds good but not so extreme” and only one person (who read this thread) is disliking it so much that they’re going so far to mod their game if this was implemented.
I thought this game mechanic would add more depth to the survival aspect of the game. If your idea of a post apocalyptical zombie survival game is “I’m gonna gather stuff that is going to turn me into a futuristic cyborg and my ride into a mobile house powered by the sun with no major drawbacks whatsover” then of course this would be stupid addition to the game.
I’m going to compare this to acid rain.
Acid rain sucks.
Say I’m going outside to hunt animals and gather water. 10 map tiles from my home the weather changes to acidic drizzle which is tolerable, but I still haven’t found food. So I keep looking and the weather changes to acid rain. Now I don’t have anything to eat and have combat penalties because of the pain. That really sucks.
But here’s where survival comes into effect. It’s about being prepared for things that suck.
This is where a player can pat themselves on their shoulder because they stockpiled 2 days worth of rations and gathered ressources for crafting before the acid rain hit.
The reason I suggested the event to be a once a season thing and a duration longer than a few minutes was because I wanted to have a noticeable drawback to complete reliance on high tech tools. A 15 minute blackout on electric devices isn’t going to change the way people play the game very much. I said it shouldn’t be regarded as a random weather effect, because having electric tools fail every six hours because of the randomness of the weather would be silly. Rather, it would be an event with a certain minimum and maximum duration and a set cooldown phase in which you wouldn’t have to worry about it.
First here’s a (hopefully) better explanation for the event and a better name for it:
There is a dimensional rift going through the solar system like wall. It intersects the earth’s orbit twice a year. It’s not a static phenomenom, sometimes the intervall of intersection is short:
sometimes it’s longer:
(excuse the MS Paint quality; the blue circle is supposed to be earth orbit around the sun)
kinda like the Nexus from Star Trek VII only more permanent.
Before every intersection the player will get a warning like “The sky is looking very strange…” or something along those lines.
24 hours or so after that warning Purple Sky will be in effect. The sky will be colored purple, the dimensional rift emits strange radiation so that electric devices won’t work, bionics that require power can’t be used (so bionic armor will still be effective), shockers and turrets will be disabled or at least have the “stunned” condition for the duration of the event.
After X amount of days of Purple Sky the event will end and there will be a grace period before the dimensional rift intersects with the world again. That could be half a season, a full season or so of no danger of this event. Maybe even have a set period after game start during which this cannot happen. If it already happened twice this year you won’t need to worry about your equipment failing until the start of next year. After a Purple Sky event is the time to bust out that power armor and charge rifle and go kick some zombie butt.
It would be an event you can prepare for. You have a fire phobia? Use them hotplates to can and vacuum pack food before the Purple Skies hit. Allergic to charcoal? Forge your stuff ahead of time.
This is a suggestion open for suggestion. If you can think of more plus sides to this event - for example special enemies that spawn during Purple Skies with valuable loot who will die (or vanish) automatically once the event is over (of course you have to kill them yourself if you want the loot) - just add them here. Maybe even have a massive discharge at the end of Purple Skies that will refill all the batteries to full.
This isn’t a “Take it as it is or leave it” proposal. The values aren’t set in stone. Suggest a duration or frequency of the event.[/quote]
This about sums my thoughts up to.
There seems to be a lot of discussion in this thread about the relative merits of the effect lasting either a week or ~15 minutes, with not a lot of talk about periods of time in between.
This idea could be great, but a week is way too long, and 15 minutes is way too short.
In my mind this idea would work best for between 24 and 48 hours. Long enough to be inconvenient for those overreliant on high tech, not nearly long enough to kill you if you’re remotely prepared for such an event.
I think I mentioned somewhere about 2 -3 days at the very most. : P Anyway thats what I feel might be good.
Perhaps have a mob make the effect? So it is a nuisance alone a terror when with a group of other mobs?
How about you let me play the way I want to and you play the way you want to? I run around in steel and cloth and barely use anything high tech, but I don’t sit around and whine that other people use their fancy equipment and don’t have to fall back to my way of play. People don’t use wood spears anymore for a good reason. They SHOULD be worse. Know why you’d use them in this game? Cheapness and reliability. When more of a weapon damage system is in place, repairing the high tech stuff will start to consume a lot of resources and time, and may not be possible if you can’t find the junk, whereas if your wooden spear breaks you can make a dozen more and continue about your day. That’s how it should work. Cheapness and reliability vs. rareness and expense, not by forcing everyone to adopt your style of play with arbitrary unavoidable weather because you don’t like technology and want company.
On the other hand tech disrupting fields in some labs or around certain nether portals is much more interesting, and much less tenuous. Nobody is making you turn into Ugg the caveman because that’s the way they like to play, but you’re given an incentive to go primitive for a while if you want that loot.
Why don’t we have a weather condition that disables your limbs, you can’t do anything except stand there and wait if your caught out in it, because no reason [essentially what this suggestion amounts too]
What would inadequate say about this thread if he was still around.