Calling all greybeards and hardbitten veterans! This topic has been broached before but perhaps not for a while nor since the current new release.
After rising to 18+ stats, installing many great cbms and mutating into a speedy hulkster with all skills in the teens, building an amphibious rolling fortress will all mod-cons (in lieu of a static base) - what then does one do?
My current pc can melee hulks, genocide mi-gos (adios!) and apparently outrun moose anything on 4/6/8 legs… I shun guns and sometimes throw him from buildings just 'cos he bounces! The only foe he’s yet to beat is mid-game boredom, which inevitably sees me quit and restart somewhere desolate and challenging. Increasingly I’m modding for shifts and giggles, but I just wondered am I missing some part of the play, some great goals… Or is this the insidious way that the creators entice players into actually contributing something to the party? I mean, I’m a born slacker - do I really have to evolve?
Not using the mods that increase stats will limit stat growth to what CBMs and mutations can provide, which will probably mean that enemies will actually remain dangerous.
The dearth of mid-late game content is probably less of an insidious plan and more a sign that there aren’t enough people who have developed such content, which might encourage some slackers to evolve into contributors…
True but my character is a power-hungry lonewolf and will kinda end up tough as nails anyway, besides I’m not a fan of self-imposed limitation. IMHO the game needs to scale and if that needs more content and development then I suppose I should try to help. I am quite interested in contributing ideas and effort (asap I have the skillz) to the game. Any idea where I should be posting to share ideas and get pointers as to how to be useful, without revealing potential spoilers?
BTW - it’s funny but shortly after I posted, my terminally bored character found (yet another) bunch of dead scientists and somehow managed to mindlessly detonate a mininuke whilst scavenging. YASD! I don’t know how but it was a first for me… BOOM. Problem-solved.
I don’t really consider refraining from adding mods that aren’t default to be self-imposed limiting, but more akin to playing a game on normal setting rather than using story mode.
https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pulls is where you’d post any “Pull Request” for the code, while https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues is the place for discussing it, although you can discuss things as draft in the “pulls” section.
You can’t really hide things in either of those places, but I if people read these, they should know what they’re in for. However, in the initial discussion you don’t have to spell out everything in detail, but at the end of the day the core team will have the last say. You’d also have to respect the lore and what the core team says about relative faction strengths (basically that the old guard is the strongest, and everyone else have to be weaker than that, although the upcoming non (real) human exodii probably doesn’t play in the same league as the earth based ones).
Obviously, the game’s on github, so you’ll have to suffer its idiosyncrazies.
Thanks. Still learning the ropes, so much appreciated.
Shall explore and learn - perhaps I can be useful.
I do agree about non-standard mods… It’s a minor point and prolly a question of taste but I like the stats from skills/kills mods because they seem realistic to me. Odd in a virtual world populated by shadows but it adds to my fun. My old karate club thought it was cobra kai and pushed us accordingly. Definitely seemed there was a correlation between skills and stats IRL. As well as misery and bruises…
Yah, right, you joker. Are you a servant of Lloth?
I would if it advanced the storyline. Besides if it doesn’t kill the pc then they still end up becoming a brutal bankster killa! Or should that be an Economic Hitman?
One of the things I tried, and failed, to do was take a good, clear photograph of every monster type.
You will need a professional camera, SD cards, and a smartphone or laptop computer to view the photos after. You can also make notes on the photos themselves, like when you found them, how long you were looking for them, etc.
I believe that the descriptions the game gives you of the monsters in the clear photos can’t be read anywhere else.
Heh, tempting if my pc can hunt that banker! (He became a mad survivalist after losing his house in 2008…)
Actually, maybe we can make that a new challenge game: vendetta - hunting the people what dun you wrong before the Cataclysm. Random npc hidden somewhere on the map leaving taunting graffiti to lure you into a trap - if you take the bait. Sound good?
A vendetta has the issue that the odds of anyone you hate (mutually) sufficiently to actually conduct a vendetta against surviving the catalysm are extremely poor, even if you had such an enemy before it (which most people don’t).
It would probably have to be a game start option (tacked onto any of the starts as an option that isn’t checked and which doesn’t have any point effect), with some kind of explanation for why you’d have such grudges, and some kind of weird explanation for why the enemies would still be around.
I roamed the wastes as a nature photographer to stave off boredom as well. What counts as “nature” in the cataclysm is up to you, but I for one took selfies with a lot of unique monsters from all sorts of modded and vanilla gameplay.
you can actually get to those descriptions through a circuitous method using x look around, but it is a bit unobvious
as for the main topic of the thread: obviously the mods are there to be used, but if you’re using the moral equivalent of trainers, complaining about lack of challenge is kinda incoherent
if you use the epic power fantasy mods, you have to expect to eventually run out of reasonable threats. because even when we get more content, they will be keyed towards the core game balance.
Any extensions to the game will be evaluated against baseline mods, so if you suggest content additions or balance adjustments, they will be evaluated against the base game, not a modded version of the game.
Extensive content mods also exist that attempt to ratchet up power level of enemies, but if you keep playing with the easy mode mods like stats through skill and stats through kills, those are going to be trivialized as well.
You make a lot of sense and I agree. The only mods I use are stats through skills/kills because they add to my sense of realism and fun. Life like dat.
Anyway, upon further reflection I think I’ve come to the conclusion that what I really want, is a way to win the game. I want to purge the blob, mycus and triffids. Lord British postulate? But I’m not sure that’s something I can mod. Has it ever been done? Or it’s back to C++… I expect many people wouldn’t be interested but some might and so I’m just exploring ideas.
There’s a lot of lore issues regarding ‘winning’ CDDA, mainly that the forces invading earth at this point are multidimensional superpowers, and we’re functionally a flashpoint, and we already fucked up, and nuking the portal labs didn’t seem to stop anything. Not to mention some agents like the blob are already more or less irrevocably inserted into the water table, almost every living being, etc. So a true ‘victory’ state isn’t really viable.
However, a lot of people do play with some larger meta goal to achieve with a character. I feel that settlement building is probably the best venture in this direction. The worlds fucked, there’s no way to unfuck it, and the threats we’re facing are not the kind you just stop, best we can hope for is to persist. Building a community that can do so is the closest win-state a player could hope for, but it wouldn’t end the cataclysm situation. The world will still be a wasteland, there just might be some tolerable places left if you work hard enough.
Absolutely. That’s part of the verisimilitude. However, humans are hardly prokaryotes to the aliens, since we seem to take them out pretty easily - even without mods. The aliens should be smarter (tricky) or at least tougher. But a simple fire fazes them and so their tech should be something survivors can reverse engineer.
My characters don’t believe in unwinnable situations, though they may be fiendishly difficult. Ergo, they will look for a bigger solution. Besides, although they’re excellently developed, in-game farming and building a community might feel repetitive after a while.
Given this is a sci-fi game then there ought to be a sci-fi solution. You can put the djinni back in the bottle but it ain’t easy. I can think of several theoretical ways but I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who can’t think of them on their own. They might mirror current thinking or still come to life as a mod. One can dream
your character not believing in unwinnable situations is fine (and in general no character knows about the blob in the fashion that those looking at the behind the scenes stuff as devs/players do, so they can’t know the state of the world), but the game isn’t going to accommodate that kind of delusion.
Sci-fi winning would require a conversion mod with a different lore. The base lore has the blob being impossible to defeat: although you can kill a few of its cells (zombies), the “organism” cares about that as much as an army commander cares about a soldier’s loss of a few skin cells, and I think that description is generous in favor of the humanity. Some of the opportunistic invaders might be possible to defeat to some extent, but they’re not the main threat.
