Greatbow balance

[Erk]

With 18 strength and a quarterstaff, you can hit regular zombies hard enough to explode them. I think you’re forgetting that base damage for melee weapons is modified by strength, but this is not the case for ranged weapons. A greatbow doing 35 damage is slightly more than a 9mm pistol that I can loot off a zombie on day one without building my entire character around it, and significantly less than a pipe rifle I can build with similar crafting skills, again using commonly loot able ammunition.

I still don’t understand why you think dumping dex and perc isn’t a flaw. There are a host of things your character gets worse at, and I have no idea how you figure you can get enough skills to compensate by the third day.

[Mantar]

A greatbow doing 35 damage is slightly more than a 9mm pistol that I can loot off a zombie on day one

Just tested, the greatbow does ~80 damage using cheap wooden arrows, a Glock 9mm does ~40-50 with common 9mm JHP against a regular zombie, or almost double the damage.
Against a hulk, the situation is even more dire, with the greatbow still doing ~76-80, while the 9mm gun is doing ~25-30 damage. The faster rate of fire helps a little, but neither is able to drop the hulk before it can cover the 12 tile testing distance and take a swing at the player, at least not using basic ammo.

Using carbon fiber arrows, the greatbow jumps to ~100 damage against a regular zombie, and same against a hulk, dropping it in ~10 tiles. The +P+ ammo deals roughly 50-60 damage to the regular Z, and ~40-50 to the hulk, and a 15-round magazine just barely dropped it before needing a reload.

[Erk]

All right, that’s a reasonable issue, I’ll grant that

[dissociativity]

So we clearly need to cap more OP individual stats before mutation effects, an un-mutated player, or one without bionic strength should not be able to have 18 strength with or without a minmax, this solves the balance issue fairly quickly.

The stat requirement is supposed to make it effectively an endgame weapon, not a day 1 weapon for a minmaxer.
Perhaps allowing it to be damaged over time with firing due to the material’s tensile limits being all but breached could balance it too?

The problem here is inherently people being able to use this with day 1 stats without either being mutated, with cybernetics or high as a kite.

This leads me to also on the side suggest that bionics add to the player’s carried weight, they would naturally weigh down your body, if I had armour on my arms, my back would probably get sore from day-to-day weight more easily than it normally does.

[Erk]

I don’t think capping stats is a reasonable answer. I think making sure that things like abysmally low dex and perception have consequences is a better solution, and honestly given that my character can’t do very much when her stats are hit to that level, I’m not convinced by the core premise that it’s not a drawback. Still, perhaps it should be a stronger one.

[Trigon]

What skill levels are these tests being done with? I feel like accounting for that is important when one is considering how good two ranged weapons are comparatively. I see Kevin’s point though in rebalancing the whole game because of the greatbow.

Though I also think nerfing the greatbow is a band aid fix, given that you can minmax plenty of broken builds. Especially when starting with some of the professions already loaded to the gills with bionics.

[Erk]

Really, I think the target should be viability for a variety of play styles. So, there should be a capstone archery weapon like the greatbow and the goal should be for it to be powerful and fun to play with, and for the steps along the way to be powerful and fun. Likewise there should be good pistols and rifles, with powerful endgame versions of those, same for unarmed and armed combat styles, et cetera.

With that in mind, I’d say bows and crossbows should be balanced such that the capstone weapons, be they greatbows or some fancy compound bows, are difficult to obtain and loosely comparable to other capstone weapons.

I’d say needing 18 strength is a good start on “difficult to obtain”. Yeah, fine, you can start with that, but only if you’re building your character around it, and I think it’s debatable how worthwhile that is… Certainly it still counts as unusual. You could also add in the requirement that it be made from more complex materials than simply wood and string. I’d personally suggest working in a multiple stage crafting process, where you build a bow blank and treat it with glue, then have to let it cure for a day (using the same code as fermentation) before using other hand tools to go to the next step. Making a longbow is supposed to be a big involved process and currently it’s a matter of a two-by-four, some string, and an hour of your time at a low fabrication level. A lot of the problem starts there.

If it’s made sufficiently difficult to get a greatbow and wield it, then its damage really isn’t all that out of line. It’s more powerful than high end pistols and less powerful than high end rifles. I’d say the balance should shift a bit, hugh calibre pistols should probably outclass high end bows, but they’re still operating on the same level. As long as the bow isn’t really something one can just build on day one, it’s a pretty reasonable weapon.

[Mantar]

What skill levels are these tests being done with?

10 in all skills for testing purposes.

[kevin.granade]

Though I also think nerfing the greatbow is a band aid fix, given that you can minmax plenty of broken builds.

That’s how balance works, you establish an “envelope” of how strong a character can be at different points in their progression and with different stats, and things that step outside of that envelope need to be adjusted back down. If you were talking about a non-bandaid fix for this kind of thing, you’d instead have rules for how much damage a weapon could deal based on how hard it is to acquire and use the item in question. Items that fail that test would either have their stats capped, or the game would refuse to load them. So for example this weapon would fall into the category of “weapons craftable from readily available materials at fabrication level 4 that don’t require finding a book”.

Since we don’t have an automated way of doing that, it always boils down to examining the stats of a new item and either accepting or rejecting it. In this case I think the bow was being positioned as a end-game option for very end-game characters, but it doesn’t actually have properties that make it so. Also it looks like the “base damage is 35” statement was taken at face value, even though that’s not at all accurate, since arrow damage gets added to bow damage, bringing peak base damage for this thing up to 58.

What I expect to happen:
Either bump the strength requirement even higher to shift it to a higher tier of weapon, or reduce the damage level to bring it in line with other weapons that are as easy to acquire.
Increase the fabrication level required to make it, probably to around 8 since by all accounts crafting a wood bow of this kind is extremely difficult, and the difficulty continues to increase as the draw weight increases.
At some point in the future, require construction from an exotic wood and using a much more involved crafting process.

[Erk]

10 in all skills for testing purposes doesn’t do much to inform about the power level of the greatbow if accessed in early game, then.

[Trigon]

I agree. Fabrication 8 seems appropriate. I’m not a game designer by any stretch so you’ll have to forgive some of my views as they strictly come from a playtesting standpoint.

Being able to get the greatbow as early as you can definitely seems like the easiest thing to balance without removing the fun element of having a strong archery weapon for the characters who can take advantage of it.

I agree with Erk in that there should be strong capstone weapons for characters to work towards and have fun with. The sense of accomplishment is important from a player standpoint. The sense of accomplishment is lost if you can craft it on day one easily. So making it harder to craft is definitely a good place to begin balancing this weapon.

[dissociativity]

I mean how about we make the great bow take longer to fire?
It’d presumably take longer to draw, there’d be more recoil from the force too.

This or we could make great arrows that have a far higher resource cost, are only used in the great bow or a ballista

Bows requiring stamina to fire will also change balance around bows for the better.

[Mantar]

That test, to me, was about the relative power of the 9mm pistol vs the greatbow. But okay, let’s do this.

With “day 1” skills (2 marksmanship, 4 fabrication, 0 in all else except 3 in pistol and archery, since you need 4 fab/3 archery to craft the bow) and the 18/4/8/4 minmax stats, the wooden greatbow manages ~70 damage per shot vs a regular Z, the pistol 48-49 per shot, and the zombie gets one tile closer before perfect aim is managed.

Vs a hulk, the pistol does 25-31 damage, but the wooden greatbow does 67-74 damage. Both seem to get about two shots before the hulk is on top of you, the pistol gets a third shot shortly after the hulk strikes you, while the greatbow gets you hit almost immediately after the second shot.
So it’s not significantly different results, comparatively speaking, the 9mm and greatbow manage roughly the same ratios at the same skill levels.

A more instructive result for a wider comparison would be to see what a dedicated pistol build would do compared to a dedicated greatbow build – all those points put elsewhere could make a difference. But this was just about comparing the weapons themselves.

[Erk]

You’re right about a dedicated pistol vs greatbow build … The 18 STR does nothing for pistols and the 4dex/per heavily penalize it. I’d also say that the difference between ~70:50 and ~80:50 is significant, since bows should be more skill derived, but I agree that it’s not enough. At low level archery, the greatbow just shouldn’t outperform handguns. It may be that the only way around this would be to require higher level archery to craft the greatbow, since i think anything else would require changing the actual code to alter the archery skill effect.

That said, I’d say your most important finding there and before is that the greatbow has much better armour penetration than a pistol. I’m not an expert but it seems to me that doesn’t make much sense, especially with basic-ass arrows. That looks more like an engine problem than a weapon design problem, since the armour penetration stats for fire tipped arrows are poor.

[Mantar]

These weren’t fire-tipped, they were basic wooden arrows.

[darktoes]

For those interested, the current plans for changes to the greatbow are as follows:

• Changing the total damage with top-end broadhead arrows to around 34 damage, though I may reexamine that number later on. A PR is on the way that will let me give arrows proportional damage rather than flat damage increases, in which case the earlygame OP-ness issue will be even less pronounced, as crappy arrows will make for crappy damage.
• The crafting recipe will raise in difficulty, requiring either logs from a tree or specially collected quarterstaves (not to be confused with the existing quarterstaffs) and a more involved process. It won’t be perfectly realistic (2 year wood-drying time anyone?) but it will make more sense than taking some sticks and a string. Also I rather like Erk’s curing idea, so I might use that.
• ALL bows, crossbows, and pneumatics, will see a stamina cost at some point. Arrow spam at low archery levels will become far less possible, and getting the most out of your bow will require a substantial investment in skill.

I’m not interested in giving the greatbow weird self-damaging effects or having it require special materials. 210lb longbows were historically made and some are even in use today. Which alone suggests that the greatbow should have far more damage, as it’s for superhuman strength, not just normal people who practised their whole life.

There’s also been some discussion on improving the other 3 stats to help reduce the viability of the 18 strength starter build. Whether anything will come of that I don’t actually know.

As for 9mm pistols, it’s been established pretty strongly that a mid- to high-end bow will outperform a 9mm in terms of damage. I don’t have an issue with this from a realism OR gameplay perspective, as 9mm is one of if not the most common ammunition, and the guns that use it are just as common. It’s a bottom-end gun, so it makes sense for high end weapons to outperform it.
Keep in mind no bow has automatic fire, while a number of 9mm guns do. Small rounds have their own advantages.

[Erk]

As far as I’m concerned that list basically addresses all the issues. Later, more complex crafting, damage more normalized and more skill dependent, and higher stamina cost would be everything I’d like to make me feel like it’s a serious question between guns and bows, and maybe get me to pack a firearm as a backup.

[Trigon]

I agree. I think that list is perfectly adequate.

[Tamior]

Changing the total damage with top-end broadhead arrows to around 34 damage

As for stat min/maxing, I don’t think there is a simple fix, as it’s not a problem of min/maxing per se, but rather a problem with what each individual stat actually influences.