Great direction in the experimental

[Vastin]

I’ve played stable 0.C quite a bit, and just recently starting playing the latest experimental builds - and I have to say I’m very happy with the general direction it is going. It has already taken a solid stab at addressing some of my gripes about 0.C, namely:

Skill Development

• Love that it is generally slower (esp. combat skills). It was so quick to jack combat skills up in earlier builds that you quickly felt invulnerable, at least in melee.
• Rust is now off by default. Avoiding rust was just an aggravating logistical exercise in my experience. Will be happy to never see it again.
• Separate point pools. Yay to no longer having to start a character with zero skill in order to max out your permanent stats.

More advanced Zed threats:

• I’m glad to see that there are now more advanced versions of most of the zombies to keep the threat level graduating as my character develops, rather than simply going ‘over the hump’ and leaving the challenge of the game behind. I’m hoping that there are several tiers of evolution ultimately.
• Glad to see that acid is no longer the all consuming puddle of doom. Given how much harder item repair is now, that’s doubly welcome.
• Hoping that other mob types likewise evolve as the game progresses, but I haven’t encountered many as yet.
• Love the newer versions of wandering spawn hordes where they are more erratic and scattered, with clumps frequently forming in cities. Makes traveling around particularly on foot more exciting.

Better balanced melee combat:

• I’m not clear on exactly how much the combat dynamics have changed, maybe its just the much slower skill development, but it seems like there is a wider RNG outcome for attack rolls? It used to be that gaining one or two skill points would graduate you from being a punching bag to a given enemy, to becoming almost invulnerable and scoring constant crits. I’d like to think that even at fairly high player skills, a zombie pleb could still land the occasional hit/crit. Maybe it’s still as deterministic as it was before and I just haven’t gotten my skills up into the 6+ range yet? Hard to say, but either way it feels a lot better.

Better encumbrance:

• Really like the more granular equipment encumbrance, and the new layering system. Feels MUCH better. So much better in fact, that this is the one thing that would prevent me from going back to play 0.C(stable) as I would miss it too much.

More detailed UI:

• In line with the encumbrance changes, the overall more detailed feedback in several areas of the UI is greatly appreciated, particularly as it doesn’t seem to have come at a cost of more button presses or sub-menus. Nice job keeping things under control there.

Things I haven’t sorted out yet:

• Not sure about vehicles yet. Seems a good bit harder to get things rolling on that front, if you’ll forgive the pun. Pretty rare to find a working vehicle, and damn hard to get that first level or two of mechanics going. Seems like swapping tires and batteries should be difficulty 0 tasks to help get things started (as it is, it’s books and lock-picks). Also looks like it takes about twice as long to do most vehicle jobs? (30 min instead of 15?), might be nice to see some reduction of those times as your skill in this area improves.

Negatives:

• The only really negative experiences I’ve had so far are with a few out-of-range threats with no good way to deal with them, namely:
• Very early Brute spawns (regular and SHOCKER variants) - I’ve seen these on pretty much the first day, which seems crazy, given that they are fast and have good perception, and you have no chance against them. The only thing that tends to save me is the fact that they knock me 10 squares away to give me some running room, and even that only really works at night. I’d kind of expect at least a week before these guys start spawning. Mind you, I have usually escaped, but especially for newer players this threat level seems like it would be a non-starter.
• Wandering teleporting NPC’s. I’ve been purposefully hunted down by NPC’s with combat rifles and high skill, who can apparently teleport past any sort of traps/defenses while I am sleeping/crafting, and reliably one-shot me. I’ve had to restart at least one game and turn them off altogether to avoid that situation because I simply had no answer to it, even in fairly advanced (survivor) gear.
• Ranged weapons suffer no penalty in melee. Ranged weapons - especially two-handed ranged weapons such as rifles and bows should suffer monstrous penalties at zero range. Currently they work just fine, aside from their lack of block/parry, which seems extremely unrealistic. One handed ranged weapons should have a reduced point-blank penalty, but still suffer somewhat.

So overall a very positive experience with the experimentals, aside from the occasional crash bug, but that’s what auto-save is for. My gripes are pretty minor, and probably very easy to address as well - except for the NPC thing, which is clearly a complex system to work out. GL w/that.

[keyspace]

Seems like swapping tires and batteries should be difficulty 0 tasks

These are known (e.g. this issue), arising from those vehicle parts using “legacy” definitions, which have a fallback in code to minimum difficulty 2. One could port just these two to the newer format, but that’s a “special snowflake” approach that could make it harder for someone to tackle the rest later…

[stk2008]

Yay another ascuse to right this again.

We as the CDDA comunity are very lucky to have the contributers that we do.
What other game gets so many updates every single day.

You lot rule thanks for the hard work :).

[Greiger]

With the vehicle thing would it be reasonable to put a lv 1 mechanics book as a somewhat common spawn in cars? (the cars_misc pool) Car manuals are a thing, I’ve had one in every car I owned, and it’s not something people would grab in an emergency to make them super scarce. While they are too specific for advanced learning they should be able to get you to 1.

I put some in my own mod and they seem balanced enough. Sadly I don’t remember how to submit simple json changes to github.

[Zanos]

[quote=“Vastin, post:1, topic:13063”]Better encumbrance:

• Really like the more granular equipment encumbrance, and the new layering system. Feels MUCH better. So much better in fact, that this is the one thing that would prevent me from going back to play 0.C(stable) as I would miss it too much.[/quote]
  What’re you talking about? The old encumbrance system was fine. All this stuff for 1 torso and 4 head encumbrance? Totally fair.

I’ll admit I did enjoy it as an exercise in character optimization, but there’s no arguing it was very poorly balanced. The new system is much better, but it did swing clothing modifications from “broken OP” to “completely useless”, except for on headgear.

That’s actually a bit of a theme whenever something gets overhauled. The changes are generally good, but something gets ignored or messed up and is then never fixed, or at least put off for a long time. The ranged overhaul made weapons useful past spitting distance without having to max marskmanship, weapon skill, 14 percetion/dex, and using a weapon with a scope and no dispersion, but the 30 tile cap is arbitrary and prevents you from sniping dangerous targets.Perception affecting sight dispersion is very nice, though. Low recoil weapons have effectively no penalty for being fired in burst mode, since you aim once and retain the benefits until you move. And finally ranged weapons other than bows/pneumatic weapons are still not very good in practice, since they generate tons of noise and are expensive to make ammunition for.

The vehicle overhaul ported a lot stuff to JSON, but prevents you from having multiple active engines and generally wrecked fuel economy to the point where heavier vehicles can burn through hundreds of liters of gasoline on 10 minute drives, and electric vehicles, lights, and fridges are basically unsustainable.

Something that bothers me personally is how recipes are learned. Being able to memorize them from reading books was fine, I think, and having to carry a stack of books in case you need to craft something is tiresome, and makes moving a character to a different world in case you want to change your world settings or a mod gets added or depreciated very annoying. It’s also nice to know what books you already have at a glance with the highlighting colors, so you would immediately know you didn’t need a book if you had already gone through a copy because it would be grey instead of yellow. It would be nice for recipe learning to be either a mod or dedicated world or system option, since the consensus seems to flip flop on how it should be.

We were in a bumpy spot for a little bit with filthy clothing and vitamins, but I think we’re in good shape now. It’s just easier to bitch.

[Vastin]

Ah, I had sort of noticed that I was rarely (read: never) learning recipes while reading anymore - but it does seem that any book that has a recipe you don’t know is still highlighted yellow, not grey, so you know which ones to take with you?

It also sounds like the fuel economy stuff is likely to be sorted out shortly - more of a bug than a design intent issue AFAIK.

The only design thread that’s currently nagging at me is the ranged weapons. There seems to be some significant friction about where to go with them. Rifles seem insanely overpowered at the moment, at least in the hands of NPCs? The 30 sqr limit seems arbitrary of course - so I’m guessing that has something to do with keeping ranged combat relevant by restricting it the the maximum perception range of most enemies/turrets? I’d like to think there’s a better way to handle that.

There’s definitely some very non-intuitive stuff going on with point blank ranged weapons accuracy being unaffected by melee attacks and the like, where you can just stand stock still and keep shooting with perfect accuracy even while a horde is literally clawing at you. That bothers me quite a bit, but I assume it will be dealt with one way or another. Or maybe I’ll just code my own mod for it. Kinda itching to poke around in there a bit.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

[quote=“Vastin, post:6, topic:13063”]Ah, I had sort of noticed that I was rarely (read: never) learning recipes while reading anymore - but it does seem that any book that has a recipe you don’t know is still highlighted yellow, not grey, so you know which ones to take with you?

It also sounds like the fuel economy stuff is likely to be sorted out shortly - more of a bug than a design intent issue AFAIK.

The only design thread that’s currently nagging at me is the ranged weapons. There seems to be some significant friction about where to go with them. Rifles seem insanely overpowered at the moment, at least in the hands of NPCs? The 30 sqr limit seems arbitrary of course - so I’m guessing that has something to do with keeping ranged combat relevant by restricting it the the maximum perception range of most enemies/turrets? I’d like to think there’s a better way to handle that.

There’s definitely some very non-intuitive stuff going on with point blank ranged weapons accuracy being unaffected by melee attacks and the like, where you can just stand stock still and keep shooting with perfect accuracy even while a horde is literally clawing at you. That bothers me quite a bit, but I assume it will be dealt with one way or another. Or maybe I’ll just code my own mod for it. Kinda itching to poke around in there a bit. ;)[/quote]
I think the cap is there due to problems with dispersion calculation/laser-mosin.

[Medicine]

Agree with pretty much everything in the OP; switched to an experimental a couple of weeks ago and not looking back.

Things I like:

• Guns are useful!
• Much better encumbrance system.
• Running and stamina are finally a thing!
• Automatic inclusion of items in adjacent tiles for common actions (reading, eating, etc.)
• More light sources; less reason to live in the evac shelter just for a console.
• Early skill progression seems more balanced.
• Better flexibility in crafting recipes.
• A lot of people seem to disagree, but I like the new inventory design. That said, I play on a pretty big screen.
• Vehicles seem to have a better chance of decent fuel/battery than they used to, even if they’re broken.
• New locations, vehicle types, etc.

Things I’m not so keen on:

• Tank drones. Jesus.
• There’s very little reason to use handguns over rifles, apart from ammo conservation or creating less noise.
• Shocker brutes, grenadiers and hulks seem to appear very early. Even if you get away from them, they’re a huge area-denial until you’re tough enough to take them on. By then, it’s likely that whatever they’re ‘protecting’ is trivial.
• Even with search features, the crafting menu has become insane if you don’t specifically know what you want to make.
• Quite specific, but: I notice ammo crafting recipes have a shared dependency with the marksmanship skill, which seems to level very slowly. Maybe the threshold should be lower, but ultimately I don’t see how shooting competence and reloading competence are connected (disclaimer: I live in the UK, where we don’t have guns).
• I understand the reason for keeping recipes tied to books, but man it’s a pain in the ass to go to your bookshelf anytime you want to check what you can/can’t craft.

But, all in all, this is a terrific game and everyone involved should be enormously proud of what they’ve made.