[Discussion Thread] Thoughts on the C:DDA Design Outline

Game Talk The Drawing Board
41

Along the lines of the balked at “race to the airport” idea… Cataclysm is a freeform roguelike, and in that vein, wouldn’t the same principles apply?.. This idea, from a purely coding standpoint, could get horrifically complex, but could work well with the future faction system, should static factions like the government or military exist in some manner (ala, Fallout)

You could race to the airport to try and find sanctuary of sorts, residing there, taking orders from the camp leader, doing quests for ranking members and other survivors, perhaps even working up through the ranks to become the leader yourself.

You could merely treat them as neighbors or trading partners, utilizing them as another resource, trading foods, medicines, ammo, and whatever else you need with them.

Alternatively, you could kill them all for the loot and supplies, or perhaps even assassinate the leader and declare your authority over the rest.

Cataclysm is, at heart, a post-apocalypse survival roguelike… and as such, there’s no reason to assume that people wouldn’t do such things to ‘survive’

42

If they were just ‘there’ then it would detract a lot from the 'total cataclysm’ness of the scenario. Perhaps if they were obviously struggling it would be more attuned to the prevailing vibe… Suppose that they would exile or execute people as their food supplies dwindled. That they would start burning through defenders as their ammunition supplies were exhausted. That over time their armour corrodes into worthlessness and they all sacrifice the shirts off of their backs to repair what they could. Sort of a sense that short of a horde that they couldn’t lure away, or a grove moving in next door, that they could basically survive any trauma, but that their are burning through their proportional supplies much faster than a lone survivor would, and will perish if they exhaust those supplies…

43

I’m totally on board with having quests and even story arcs and such, and interacting with a faction that changes over time and has to manage its resources would be simply AMAZING. the distinction is these would all be a choice rather than imposed on the player.
by default anyway, starting scenarios are also something we’d love to do.

44

Why not simply have options such as static factions/cities/whatever else as a module option that can be loaded in through the “Mods to use” panel that pops up when creating a new world, similar to how we have weapons and content packs currently? The beauty of a game like this is the freedom of choice that can potentially given to the player, so why not capitalize on it?

45
You would have to build the tools to build the tools, and that’s likely to take generations.

I would like to know rationale behind this statement. It seems to bee at odds with what is seen in game.

Let’s look at it from historical point of view. For this statement to be true two conditions must be fulfilled:

  1. This statement is applied to (local) civilization as whole. On personal level it does not work: inventors throughout recorded history create new tools, sometimes far ahead of their time. Example: widespread use of steam engines began in XVIII century. But the first one to create such engine was Hero of Alexandria in I century.

  2. (More important) System, to which this statement is applied, must have no contact with technology more advanced than its own. Otherwise its technological progress would be greatly sped up. For example look at Japan during Meiji Restoration.

Neither of these is true for Cataclysm’s survivor:

  1. He is one person, which means that he is not slowed down by need to mass-implement technology for it to be usable by him.

  2. He is literally surrounded by pre-Cataclysm material culture (including technology).

Some would say that it is implicit that most of the remaining technology is completely destroyed and unusable. To such statement I must answer that it is factually wrong: all that technology is unpowered and severely undersupplied, some of it suffered external damage from local XE037-influenced lifeforms; but I do not see anything indicating that there was any major damaging factors that would affect inorganic entities and inert matter.

XE037 seems to be targeting only animals; fungus-like denizens alter plant life - neither of them (nor other denizens) seems to be interested in destrution of human technology. As for external threats: as most of technology (specifically - different electronics) found even in undefended surface structures are in working order, New England could not be subjected to any kind of technology-destructive influence (like wide area EMP or some side-effect of sub-prime influence).

As it stands now, with

  1. Reliable sources of power avaiable (specifically - from solar-powered vehicles),
  2. Sufficient skill (which can be acquired via books and practice),
  3. Knowledge (which can be acquired via books, surviving consoles, practice and field research)
  4. Supplies (which can be acquired via scavenging and recycling)
    much of technology can be restored to some degree on small (personal) scale.
46

That’s true, but you probably shouldn’t have necroed a 6 month old topic to say it.

47

Shrugs It is still sticked. Also, where else am I supposed to comment on this?

48

Yeah, sticky topics are OK to post in.

More to the issue is lack of maintenance and operating staff: systems that weren’t shut down properly may have damaged themselves when left running. Further, it’s impossible to get the old stuff running on your own (you can’t be everywhere at once) and though there’s a nontrivial amount of survivors projected alive at game start, even with the extreme casualty rate, how many of them survive and can be located/recruited/marshaled to accomplish anything is another question.

(Especially when “Don’t get killed and assimilated by the 99%” is the first priority.)

Zeds tend to destroy vehicles when they bump into 'em; same might go for other infrastructure.

49

Yup. I’ve seen the new working-together zombies destroy whole houses just because there was a car with a running engine on the other side.

50

It is true but only for unstable, self-deteriorating systems, like nuclear fission reactors (and other technology that uses unstable elements) or systems using unstable materials, like most organics (sorry, Jimmy, all those zoo animals are dead… I hope). Other systems, that do not incorporate such elements (and this is absolute majority of human technology of that time), can remain relatively fine for decades if not centuries. And all systems that are used by scientists and military are equipped with emergency breakers - it is pretty much the basics of safety measures. Even your personal computer can be suddenly unpowered, left for 10 years, then powered up - and it will be mostly fine. What can we say, then, about military and scientific equipment, that is meant to have several times greater margin of safety?

But it is possible. You simply need to scale it down to personal level. You cannot run old steelworks industry on your own, sure. But did that stop you from metalworking projects like deathmobile?

For this to be true, two other statements must also be true: that zeds are willing to tear it down and that they are capable to do this.

As for “zeds are capable to tear down infractructure”:
Seriously? =) According to lore, whole country lived in expectation of war. Do you imply that several reanimated human bodies is enough to tear down something that is designed to withstand strategic bombardment and (most probably) tactical nukes?

Well, what you are saying of course may be true for civil infrastructure, but this is not an issue - for current civil population this structure is massively redundant, so much of it potentially can be cannibalized to restore other parts of it with little problem.

As for “zeds are willing to tear down infractructure”
Let’s think about zeds motivations. The only motivation they seem to have is to attack the living. So there is important question: what dynamics Cataclysm actualy had?

And judging by state of cities Cataclysm was widespread and instant or near-instant. One moment - everyone is alive. Another moment - everyone is dead. Yet another moment - everyone is zombie. No time window for struggle. It is indicated by comlete absence of any traces of struggle: furniture in intact, firearms are not fired, windows are intact as well (and this indicates that there was no zeds trying to get in or out of buildings).

And as there was no struggle in cities - I see no evidence that there were struggle in labs and military installments: there are no casings around turrets, no broken furniture, no lost or discarded weapons, no broken doors and so on.

And without actual struggle between the living and zeds it does not seem that zeds have any incentive to break apart anything around them, including high-tech equipment.

51

Given the obvious reluctance to go all-in with crafting, it seems reasonable that this matter would most easily be resolved with a crafting extension mod…

In the long-run, it would be nice if your could rebuild civilisation, at least on a small scale, by getting enough survivors together to get a viable community happening, and then proceed to do your best to advance to pre-cata technology with all available haste. I mean, sure, some minor tricks and conveniences will not be recorded in books, and some devices will be very hazardous until the operators are familiar with them, but I really don’t see why a precision metal-lathe, smelter, or computer would require generations to build, especially with a slight touch of game-logic to make things easier than they would be in reality. I mean, yes, the hand-made computer would be very low efficiency and exceedingly large, but once it was built then it would be capable of automatic a device to build a much more conventional one, which would then have the reaction time to make it about as small as you would care to…

52

Actually - no. It would be just fine. As I said, all electronics seems to be intact, so you can easily grab needed parts (motherboard, video card, HDD, RAMs and so on) and assemble modern (for last pre-Cataclysm days) personal computer. You do not have to begin with something like Atlas.

53

Keep the DDA canon in mind when speculating about what’s remaining.

54

Enlightening reading. However biological weaponry and dirty bombs do not destroy technology, they are population-targeted weapons. And labs that survivor encounters certanly do not look like something that has been hit with high explosives.

So it still seems that on these territories humanity failed, technology - not so much.

55

Places that have been nuked/bombed tend to be “crater”, not “science lab”. :wink: Not every lab was nailed. Mundane lack-of-maintenance is what kills most tech in DDA.

56

“Lack-of-maintenance kills most tech” in five days? I find it highly unlikely. It is not like Fallout, where world was a-bombed and decades have passed.

Lack of maintenance can render tech unusable without repairs (but not irrevocably destroyed) if it goes on for like a year in aggresive environment (like machinery in antarctic scientific bases), but five days in temperate underground is not going to do any noticeable harm to it.

Again, even your tabletop computer can be left running for five days and nothing bad would happen to it. It may slow down a bit and require reset, but there will be no permanent damage.

57

[quote=“KA101, post:55, topic:5277”]Places that have been nuked/bombed tend to be “crater”, not “science lab”. :wink: Not every lab was nailed. Mundane lack-of-maintenance is what kills most tech in DDA.[/quote]You mean besides security systems, computer consoles, turrets, tank bots, security bots, manhacks, all lab finale machines, etc? Considering we can already build generators out of spare parts, most anything that uses electricity and wasn’t explicitly destroyed outright should probably be usable.
Considering we can craft manhacks or turrets, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to craft a collection of programmable machines to automatically operate parts of a machine that would manually require a workforce? Sure it would be less productive and safe, but we aren’t looking to put out resources for an entire country ahile remaining OSHA compliant.

58

Labs: backup power, probably the same generator they use at miloutposts

Bots: autonomous power supply, probably should die in a year or two, if not running on plutonium or solar?

Consoles not in labs/milbunkers: let’s see, one in a mine finale, a couple in a hospital (which might well have the same backup generator), and one for an NPC quest, which if given at game start might have had a serious UPS charge or perhaps solar on the roof.

I assure you that we’ve plans to apply “trashed” processing of various sorts in mapgen, so the current situation is not guaranteed to remain as intact as it is now.

59

[quote=“KA101, post:58, topic:5277”]Labs: backup power, probably the same generator they use at miloutposts

Bots: autonomous power supply, probably should die in a year or two, if not running on plutonium or solar?

Consoles not in labs/milbunkers: let’s see, one in a mine finale, a couple in a hospital (which might well have the same backup generator), and one for an NPC quest, which if given at game start might have had a serious UPS charge or perhaps solar on the roof.[/quote]
But the question is not about how powered they are, but about how intact they are. And they are completely intact (even police-bots that were most probaly on surface and completely undefended during Cataclysm, and also actively used and comletely unmaitaned ever since), so why should all other technology be universally broken beyond repair?

But that still would be illogical. Okay, so surface is gripped in riots, dirty-bombed, bio-attacked and all that jazz, but why should laboratiories be wrecked (aside the ones reduced to craters =)?

60

Laboratories were one of the places with the highest portal densities. As noted in the lore (though I’m not sure if it’s in the design outline) there was a rather large surge of nether critters to kick the whole Cataclysm off before most of them eventually melted away/left. This would result in rather trashed labs after a DOOM-esque scenario happened in them.

That said I could totally see programmable machines being salvaged from parts of other robots (though not built from scratch, obviously), but sucha thing seems like a long, long way off code-wise to me.