Fixing clothing mechanics (Gamebalance,goofyness,etc)

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Currently there’s a default hardcoded limit of two identical clothing items worn. This works as intended for some cases, IE holsters on each leg, or two backpacks on one shoulder each. Other cases it makes no sense and starts to break the game. IE wearing 6 pairs of cargo pants (2xPlain, 2xArmy,2xShorts) and being able to access the pockets on all of them, or somehow shouldering 8 backpacks from plain, leather, rucksacks, and two duffel bags levitating behind those not to mention whatever modified “survivor” style other thing levitating above those as well. It used to work OK back in vanilla cataclysm, but now it has issues.

What this boils down to is:
-The current system cannot cope with extensive variety of identical purpose (and multi-purpose) clothing items
-This breaks the game (carrying capacity, armor, etc)
-Game balance suffers (Namely feeding into the game being too trivial)
-Game is a bit too trivial, where there could be more hard decisions for the player, but aren’t

[size=12pt]Foremost there’s a myriad of minor tweaks to be had:[/size]

+Buff encumbrance penalties to legs and feet. They were nerfed in DDA past to the point of triviality and sprinting in clownshoes with 8 layers of denim on. You may think I’m exaggerating too much (or not enough), but the point is the movement penalties at the least are too forgiving.

+Armor values, coverage, and encumbrance needs to be re-evaluated. This is standard buffs/nerfs across the board to try and address the “best item, 9000 useless items” issues. Case in point: Footwear. The widely available zero encumbrance invalidates all other footwear in the game steeltoe boots (Twice the protection of leather boots for being leather boots with a toeguard that might only sometimes help. Actually a lot of people who use workboots will tell you to avoid steeltoe entirely because they can backfire). A lot of the footwear encumbrance seems to have been set before the [FITS] tag needed to be taken into consideration too. Then there’s things like armor “sets” which correspond to being rewards of different skills, IE tailoring sets (leather through chitin) and fabrication sets (survivor,historical, etc), which need some more tweaks so there’s less skipping straight to end-all end-game armor in a day or two and more balanced choices if harder progression can’t be enforced.

[size=12pt]Then there’s some actual additions to the game that need to be made:[/size]

+Additional “meta” clothing flags for limiting number of items worn, IE [SHOULDER], [SHOULDERS], [LOWER_TORSO], [SLUNG], [OUTER], [MASK]. These are separate from the existing body-part tags used for encumbrance. No more than two single-shoulder items and the second one has an increased encumbrance penalty (a loaded bag swinging on each shoulder is a bitch, and the extra space should cost more). Ultra-HUGE stuff like duffels take both shoulders (More storage/encumbrance efficient than two backpacks, but no lower encumbrance option like with 2 backpacks). Lower torso items are fannypack/belt style, no more than two with one front and one back IE utility belts and leather pouches. Slung items are upper torso, one left one right. “Outer” items do no block storage of clothing layered beneath it IE a holster or sling or fannypack. “Mask” items you can only wear one of, IE gasmasks, filtermasks(which is just the lower half of a gasmask), hockey+armormasks can’t fit over each other like they’re freaking stacking plastic chairs.

+Blocked or limited storage for inner-layered clothing items. Only the outermost pants pockets, trenchcoat pockets, etc count normally. Therefore wearing platemail over your fragile trenchcoat reduces your carrying capacity. I consider this change possibly more important than the above meta clothing tags. Maybe the storage reduction is based on the coverage % of the item layered over it. IE an armor set that covers 95% of your body reduces storage space of the clothing below it by 95% but utility vest only partially blocks 60% of an underlying trenchcoat. Maybe we do it simpler and all items layered below a non [OUTER] flagged item are completely blocked.

+Another player clothing modification like (Fits) but for optimizing storage space of the clothing item. [EXPANDABLE] or something to tag items that can be modified as such. Provides a small % boost to the storage space on a clothing item that scales with tailoring skill. Displays like “Reinforced Cargo Pants (Fits) (+9%)”. This is a reward for tailoring skill to slightly offset (though not replace) having nullified storage of layered clothing items. Put a low hard cap on it at 10 tailoring skill, for say… 20% max possible?

Now then, I bothered to type all that out. If someone replies “Well I just roleplay around these game issues” I swear I’m going to quit following Cata and just wait for Cata 2.

2

I fully support those ideas! Clothing really needs a bit of an overhaul.

In addition I would like to suggest fractional encumbrance. I get that both sneakers and combat boots can be comfy, but one of them is clearly better for running. That should be represented in the game.

Also, there is no reason at all for shooter-type characters not to fully equip the torso. There should be a penalty to speed once your torso gets very high encumbrance (can’t move so well when you wear two backpacks, a sweater and a kevlar west).

3

Actually that makes me think more about encumbrance.

The additional clothing location flags have overlapping encumbrance regions. So I should elaborate on my original post:
All duplicate expanded tags exceeding an amount have an increased encumbrance penalty. I just said two backpacks on shoulders, but really it should be all items with some consideration, probably with fractional encumbrance.

I’m going to say slings could be effectively unlimited, but have an additional +torsoencumbrance ea. sling past 2 slings.
Belt/Fanny items should have a +torsoencumbrance ea. item past two for a hard cap of 4 (two front two back).
Pants are effectively unlimited, but with an increasing +legencumbrance for each pair.

Also, all underwear, briefs, panties, bras, swimwear, etc should just be removed. It’s the bloat’s bloat, and there’s no shortage of other fire-starter material.

4

Well, I just roleplay around these game issues.

5

I know at one point the clothing overhaul was going to be based on different storage depths. So you could wear 5 chest rigs, but it’d take ages to get stuff out of the inner most one.

To be honest though, I think the changes mentioned are what is needed. It’s currently ridiculous that you can run around with 8 backpacks and 8 leather jackets on and not be incredibly, incredibly encumbered just by the sheer amount that you’re wearing.

A simple way around this would just be to give all items an encumbrance rating (so at least 1 or more) and make the base limit higher. So instead of it being 1-5 (or whatever it is) it’s 1-20, but everything counts as some encumbrance.

6

I find this surprising, as that means framework to keep track of what storage space belongs to which clothing piece and tracking what items are actually in it. That’s a lot of work to implement, and last I heard it wasn’t happening on the grounds of it being too big of an overhaul. Not that I wouldn’t mind it being implemented, as then that’s framework to go all Jagged Alliance 2 on it or implement a grid based visual inventory. To be honest, my dream Cataclysm game DOES involve a JA2 1.13 + shaped grid inventory, but I think my original suggestion is both more practical and still in the vein of what Cata is.

Right now we have tracking of which clothing items are “above” others, so I don’t think it’s too hard to add a bit of code to implement either the complete (only outermost blocking item has storage space) or partial (% reduction by coverage % of above item) reduction of clothing storage. Hence I’m shilling this pretty hard, as I still think it’s the most important part of my suggestions and very reasonable to implement.

Just increasing all item encumbrance ratings across the board? That would mostly work in regards to addressing game balance now that removing clothing actually takes time. The real catch to that though is ranged vs melee, where you can have free arms but look like a utility-vest-golem given life with bare sprinting legs; or just max out your pants, and let them come to you to smash things silly.

So you can have ultra high encumbrance and still eat hulks for breakfast, having your proverbial 200+ storage cake and eating it, regardless of high encumbrance.

The thing is I do kind of like the options available for “character builds” in that regard, so I don’t really want to get rid of the two min-max options for King-of-Pants and Living-Trenchcoats. However the maximum possible capacity needs to be nerfed and a third option of balanced encumbrance should be desirable (player must spread out storage items to truly max storage space). Capping the clothing storage to just the outermost (excepting otherwise minor and limited [OUTER] flagged items IE holsters and slings) items and capping the player to only having two shoulders achieves this. I also like the decision of whether to have your fragile storage clothing exposed outside of armor layer or not because right now it’s a no brainer when it could be a decent tough player decision/call. Actually, given that, non armor clothing is too durable as it is. In conjunction, they should be more fragile.

Oh!

KA101: That gives me an idea for the new mutations expansion suggestion for the ongoing overhaul. The HUUUGE mutation that makes most clothing unwearable? Have it provide the player with more shoulder space, allowing more than two single [SHOULDER] items and up to 2 (or more?) both [SHOULDERS] items. Being able to easily haul multiple duffel bags or larger would be a pretty decent tradeoff to the whole limited-clothing penalty AND the insane carrying capacity goes really really well with the gigantic strength carrying-weight boost that comes with it.

7

I only read the OP and some fragments of other posts because I am in a hurry.
I like the idea and “fixing” the clothings system has, in my opinion, a higher priority than adding “item x” to the game.

I also don’t know how far we are from making items that have a storage value a container. This would make things easier, too. Having two pairs of pants on, as well as a trenchcoat and army jacket won’t help you storing a fire axe in one of those pockets.
It will be a realistic method to counter emcumberance when we are able to just drop our duffle bag full of food, tools and other survival stuff on the ground and fight the zombies with nothing on but our combat gear.

8

Tracking storage space per-item isn’t a lot of work. The hard parts are:
Dealing with the existing FUBAR inventory code.
Making a nice UI on top of nested containers.

9

I like some of the OP’s ideas.

10

Item capping is a tricky subject, mostly as a lot of players (or the ones on this forum) are against any kind of hard caps (I myself am usually against them) for roleplaying reasons. A way around this would possibly be done by having a distributed encumbrance. So lets say you got 10 encumbrance on legs (out of 20 max. for instance) that could put 2 encumbrance on everything else. This would be a representation of body strain. Obviously this would need to be worked out but would stop just min/maxing melee or ranged.

Although a truly overhauled inventory system would be good, I feel that encumbrance needs to be fixed as well/could be fixed in the mean time.

11

Item capping is a tricky subject, mostly as a lot of players (or the ones on this forum) are against any kind of hard caps (I myself am usually against them) for roleplaying reasons. A way around this would possibly be done by having a distributed encumbrance. So lets say you got 10 encumbrance on legs (out of 20 max. for instance) that could put 2 encumbrance on everything else. This would be a representation of body strain. Obviously this would need to be worked out but would stop just min/maxing melee or ranged.

Although a truly overhauled inventory system would be good, I feel that encumbrance needs to be fixed as well/could be fixed in the mean time.[/quote]
I think there should be at least a few hard caps: backpacks for instance, like the OP mentions. It’s just plain silly wearing 4 backpacks at once (two regular and two leather). I don’t think there is any roleplaying scenario where you need that many backpacks either.

However, I do like your suggestion about distributed encumbrance. Seems to be a simple and elegant solution to the problem.

Also, there should be at least a minor incentive not to wear helmets. There is literally no use for baseball caps and the like, except for roleplaying reasons.

12

[quote=“Uneron, post:11, topic:5035”]I think there should be at least a few hard caps: backpacks for instance, like the OP mentions. It’s just plain silly wearing 4 backpacks at once (two regular and two leather). I don’t think there is any roleplaying scenario where you need that many backpacks either.

However, I do like your suggestion about distributed encumbrance. Seems to be a simple and elegant solution to the problem.

Also, there should be at least a minor incentive not to wear helmets. There is literally no use for baseball caps and the like, except for roleplaying reasons.[/quote]
Why? There’s almost no reason to use 90% of the rest of the armor in the game except for RP’ing as well. And let’s face it, in the zombie apocalypse/every-pocalypse you’re probably going to want a helmet vs. a baseball cap.

13

Nobody here actually cares about realism, it’s just a catchphrase to shout when nerfing something and a concept to be tossed aside when it gets in the way of nerfing something.

14

Quit reading my mind.

15

[quote=“BeigeSand, post:12, topic:5035”][quote=“Uneron, post:11, topic:5035”]I think there should be at least a few hard caps: backpacks for instance, like the OP mentions. It’s just plain silly wearing 4 backpacks at once (two regular and two leather). I don’t think there is any roleplaying scenario where you need that many backpacks either.

However, I do like your suggestion about distributed encumbrance. Seems to be a simple and elegant solution to the problem.

Also, there should be at least a minor incentive not to wear helmets. There is literally no use for baseball caps and the like, except for roleplaying reasons.[/quote]
Why? There’s almost no reason to use 90% of the rest of the armor in the game except for RP’ing as well. And let’s face it, in the zombie apocalypse/every-pocalypse you’re probably going to want a helmet vs. a baseball cap.[/quote]
Not really. Think about all the TV-shows and movies with zombies or some other sort of apocalypse going on. In almost all of them the protagonists don’t wear helmets.

It’s the same reason you don’t wear helmets every day in real life: They are quite cumbersome and annoying to wear, and also get quite hot after a while, even in a temperate autumn or spring.

16

I’ve worn a helmet for quite long periods of time before without complaint, and I’d do so even more if I knew roving undead might bite my head off at any moment. Any disincentive would have to be fairly hefty to counter the inherent defense a helmet gives you, and that large a disincentive would be unrealistic. Your issue with helmets is unhelpful, unrealistic and irrelevant to the subject at hand.

17

I don’t see how it is irrelevant in a thread about clothing mechanics. Right now head encumbrance is sticking out as it is the only form of encumbrance without any negative ramifications whatsoever. Also my experiences with helmets have obviously been very different then yours.

You are also jumping to (wrong) conclusions again. I even stressed in my post that those penalties should be minor. Perhaps wearing helmets would be still the wiser choice, but there should be at least some incentive of not doing it.

18

I’ll have to disagree there. The only times I personally don’t care about realism are:
A) It’s an extreme balance issue (which is a very rare occurrence)
B) It’s old code that still needs to be rewritten (this is much more common, and is the case with the clothing system)
C) It’s old content and is grandfathered in (such as the night CBM)

Those are pretty much the only times where realism isn’t a major factor.

19

Realism is important (and I know I’m one of the stronger proponents for realism), but it shouldn’t be so important that it forces us to keep terrible/completely unbalanced gameplay mechanics.

Distributed encumbrance gets rid of problems of people ultra min-maxing body parts. That adds realism as well as gameplay balance.

I think there are possibly better and more advanced ways to do it (please, for the love of all that is sacred, please lets not have the ‘NO QUICK FIXES’ argument again) I feel that it might be a good move forward.

20

I’m not arguing against it, I’m stating why a better encumbrance system is needed, because the one we currently have isn’t realistic. :stuck_out_tongue: