Educational Content

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Devs: if you ever find yourself wanting to take a break from fixing NPCs to add more content. Do this to add some educational value to the game to make the world seem more believable:

[size=24pt]Gameplay[/size]

Glue:
Jar of epoxy resin

  • Epoxy resin (50)
    Jar of crosslinker
  • Polymer crosslinker (50)

(Epoxy+crosslinker may replace superglue in recipes.)

Combat skills:
Make all combat skills (incl. throwing) progress only when used on an enemy.

Plants:
Hydroponics bath (includes hydroponics substrate-clay pellets)
Aeroponics table (includes a microscale nozzle)
Irrigation dripper (a pipeline you lay through a field (through plant tiles) to efficiently irrigate crops)

Stylish trait
2% chance to deliver a one-liner on kill à la Mi-go.
Large morale bonuses for wearing dress shoes, one of the bespoke suits, flat cap, smoking a cigar and holding/drinking a glass of scotch whisky.

Tailoring
Flat cap (6 skill)
Bespoke suit (7 skill, takes a long time, doesn’t encumber)
Armored bespoke suit (8 skill, takes a long time) (bullets can’t stop you from looking classy)
Bespoke suit of survival (9 skill, takes a light survivor suit and a long time) (the apocalypse can’t stop you from looking classy)

[size=24pt]Flavor[/size]

Alcohol:
Beer bottle (container)

  • Craft beer (liquid)

Whisky bottle (container)

  • Blended scotch (liq)
  • Single-malt scotch
  • Rare blended
  • Rare single-malt

Cigars: (a property from each of the following two lists)
Wrapper color: (darker wrapper (lower) is more enjoyable but applies more turns of nicotine disease/tick)
Double claro
Claro
Colorado claro
Colorado
Colorado maduro
Maduro
Oscuro
Cigar size: (smaller size (lower) is more enjoyable for gourmands, larger (higher) is more enjoyable for stylish. Larger ones apply more turns of nicotine disease.)
Toro grande
Pyramide
Churchill
Figurado
Torpedo
Corona
Perfecte
Toro
Robusto
Bullet
Petite figurado
Petite
Cigarillo

[size=24pt]Structures:[/size]

Cigar bar (includes a mini-cigar shop)
Cigar shop
Make irish pubs a much more common occurrence. This is new england.
Brownstone buildings (Large population density. Boston style)
Your mom’s house

Supermarket (make it look real)
preserved meats section
cheese section
pastry section
dairy section
deli
non-perishable goods section
soda & snacks section
frozen goods section
liquor & beer section

Create more types of night clubs
Small night club
Large night club
Fancy night club
Run-down night club

Challenge (these have to be sprawled out about a town)
ivy-league university (this is new england so make it look like yale or harvard)
large university (MITish)
small university (make sure it has a nice ice hockey rink)
community college (looks like a regular school)

These would have:
sports fields
dorms
gymnasium
cafeteria
refrigerated above-ground lab buildings (w/ teaching and research labs)
classroom buildings
engineering buildings (with production equipment you can repurpose)
underground science lab
administrative buildings
police station

[size=24pt]Heavy metal:[/size]

City:
Garbage truck (includes a trash compactor for stylish zombie disposal)
Street sweeper (suction hose for sucking up debris and items)
Tow truck (load vehicles in the back)
Asphalt paver (lay asphalt!)
Concrete paver (pour concrete!)

Farming
Combine (tows the following equipment)

  • Plow (for preparing soil for planting)
  • Cultivator (for a secondary tillage to kill weeds and aerate the soil)
  • Planter (for spreading seed)
  • Harvester (Harvests and kills plants)
    Fertilizer spreader (to fertilize plants)

Industrial:
Dump truck (also spawns in city, farming and earth mover spawns)
Forklift (propane and electricity powered varieties to move crates and boxes)

Earth movers:
Compact excavator (for quickly digging a tile at a time. Activate backhoe to deploy outriggers and instantly dig a valid, selected square around the backhoe. Also crush zombies with it)
Tracked excavator (for quickly digging 4 tiles at a time. Activate backhoe to deploy outriggers and instantly dig a valid, selected 2x2 template around the backhoe. Also crush zombies with it)
Bulldozer (for small demolitions)
Large bulldozer (for large demolitions)
Chain trencher (A vehicle with a massive chainsaw on it. It digs a trench through dirt, zombies and pavement)
Backhoe loader (bulldozer and backhoe for small digging and demolitions. Activate backhoe to deploy outriggers and instantly dig a valid, selected square around the backhoe. Also crush zombies with it)

  • Breaker loader (equipped with a massive jackhammer to break holes through concrete)

Zlevels:
Crane
Aerial work platform
Tunnel boring machine

2

We have a thread talking about the content bloat.

3

I am all for the new vehicles.

The universities look like a nice thing, but I rather not have more useless buildings for as long as towns they remain being small 75 building villages. Once we get proper cities I am all for it.

I think that adding so many variations of cigarettes and alcohol is a terrible idea. But it can work if its done in the same way as flyer work, which is one item definition a lot of possible descriptions

4

Never mind content bloat, this is going to cause massive inventory bloat. Unless as Candlebury said, it’s added into the description rather than new item types. The vehicles do interest me, however.

Not necessarily a bad idea, but really not a good time for implementing Yet More Stuff. My two cents though, I’m not a dev.

5

All of the YES. Learning things is good.

6

I agree with the description bit. Also can’t believe nobody commented on the crown jewel suggestion.

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:5904”]Stylish trait
2% chance to deliver a one-liner on kill à la Mi-go.
Large morale bonuses for wearing dress shoes, one of the bespoke suits, flat cap, smoking a cigar and holding/drinking a glass of scotch whisky.[/quote]
Stylish instantly becomes the best point you can spend.

7

I’m not even going to get into it with most of this (mostly just ‘meh’, a lot of work for not much gain), but there’s one thing that I must contest.

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:5904”]Combat skills:
Make all combat skills (incl. throwing) progress only when used on an enemy.[/quote]

No. No. No. No.
That’s not realistic or educational at all.

Do you have any idea how long any self-respecting warrior of any sort, from any era, spends attacking a whole lot of nothing?
Their entire lives.
That’s called ‘training’.

What’s worse? It may as well be a fact that missing a single day of training will set you back a week or more. If you don’t use it, you lose it (like the skill decay system). When you can’t be killing any and everybody to hone your skills and you can’t afford a training dummy, nothing is the best substitute.

Seriously, I have no idea how many years I’ve spent throwing knives at the ground in an attempt to hone my technique, or merely not lose what I have. I can’t even begin to tell you the number of rounds of ammunition that I’ve fired into a dirt bank (thousands, millions maybe?). And the side of a hill works wonderfully well for an archery target when you don’t have a hay bale (assuming that you’re fine with breaking your arrows).

I’m not kidding. Any intelligent person who intends to gamble in combat with their lives as the pot will most certainly spend a whole lot of their available time attacking a whole lot of nothing, either to learn or to retain. Those who live for combat spend their entire lives doing such. All for the 3 seconds it takes to make use of it.

Our survivors have a lot of ground to make up to compete with the horde (unless they are a blackbelt practicing Zui Quan), so shadow boxing is hardly the worst thing that they can be doing.
You would do the same if pushed into the same circumstances that our survivors our in. Assuming you’re not on a drug or alcohol binge; which, honestly, no one could really blame you for given the world that CataDDA takes place in. In that case you may be - ooooooh~ pwetty wainbow!

8

Bloat, bloat, shiny cars and really?

That said, I like the cars and buildings, think the combat skill only on baddies is silly, and when the hell can we get those farming tools? We also need the megafarms you see about New England, as the current one is tiny.

9

@Deadman: just to reassure, I completely agree, honing your skills is about practice, and only getting better when fighting an enemy is a gross game-ism.
For further thoughts, necrothread! http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=3728.0

10

While a large number of weapons and skills don’t require a live target, things like knife fighting, sword fighting, and unarmed combat you couldn’t possibly reach an extremely high level of skill without having somebody to spar or fight against, things like deflecting, blocking, disarming, throws, etc are nearly impossible to practice on your own. On the other hand when you’re throwing things, firing guns, or using a bow an arrow, you can refine your aim without needing a live target at all.
Predicting movement is another thing entirely, but that’d fall more under NPC interaction than common gameplay as of the recent versions; zombies and animals aren’t particularly hard to predict.

Basically your point is great up to a certain level of skill with certain kinds of weapons, which means my counter-argument is mostly an edge-case, but I thought I’d bring it up anyways.

11

While you do have a point that you’re not going to reach the uppermost pinnacle of fighting skill training by yourself, I totally disagree that any of the things you mentioned cannot be practiced to a great degree of proficiency without a sparring partner. The hard part is learning HOW to practice in the first place, which was my point about “insight” in the other thread.

At the higher levels, you still need to practice systematically, it’s less complicated than melee-oriented martial arts, but if you just keep trying to get “better” without understanding how it works, you’re going to hit a wall.

This circles back to my concept, practice for skill, fight for insight. Alternately learn a systematic art and get a head-start on the isight part. Pretty far out though :confused:

12

[quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:5904”]Stylish trait
2% chance to deliver a one-liner on kill à la Mi-go.[/quote]
This really stands out to me, haha. Definitely include this.

13

[quote=“Birdie, post:12, topic:5904”][quote=“JohnieRWilkins, post:1, topic:5904”]Stylish trait
2% chance to deliver a one-liner on kill à la Mi-go.[/quote]
This really stands out to me, haha. Definitely include this.[/quote]

Might conflict with the player’s concept of the char’s personality. Add extra confusion if you breach a Threshold. IMO, best left to the player: either manually say your own one-liner IRL, or make it JSON and include specific directions for editing it in the Help.