Big post, lots of future implementation notes. Most important parts are probably the NOTE at the end of the first half and the first paragraph of the second for you tl;dr’ers out there.
Honestly? I want to put both of these in the game, as well as Master zombies making all the zombies near them smarter in their pathfinding. (Probably with a small nerf to the upgrade special in return). The fact that the total extent of strategy required to deal with every single damn zombie in the game boils down to “lure them on to a bush/pit/window frame, hit them once, then run around and lure them onto another one, repeating till they are dead”. Is one of the handful of things that really bug me about Cataclysm. Heck, that strategy is a functional way to win against 90% of the enemies you will encounter in the whole game, requiring only tiny tweaks here and there. (Shocker zombie? Use a non-conducting weapon. Hulk? Use bigger pits and your ability to run. Fungaloids? Wear full body coverage while you do it.)
Right now literally the only common enemies that require a different strategy than that one line are the robots, and that’s something I’d like to see spread out to the other factions (which was the reason I made them a zombie and not a robot). Higher level monsters should force you to adapt your strategy in fighting them, and provide a challenge to those characters that are farther in the game. How about sniping that master/necro out of the group before you attempt to deal with it lest they lead those shockers into a flanking maneuver? Maybe a fungaloid creature that can’t spread the fungus itself, but gains power based on how much of the nearby terrain is fungalized, requiring you to burn it out? Or a pair of triffids, one long range heavy-hitter and an attack-less tank that actively tries to stop you from reaching its long ranged partner, forcing you to either power through the tank or out snipe the hitter? There’s tons of combinations that could be done, all of which would fit the lore, and all of which get blocked the instant that we stop any faction but robots from using tactics greater than “run at the enemy blindly”.
Note: I’m not saying that they don’t need any nerfs, they probably do (and lord knows I’ll be taking a few more balance runs at them myself). What I’m saying is the fact that they actually add some strategical variety to the game should not be the reason for that; and the fact that they appear difficult simply because people are too stubborn to change their tactics from the monotony most other enemies in the game use is not a valid reason for nerfing in my opinion.
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[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:28, topic:9483”]By the way, could zombies and robots be allied without wrecking the lore? I mean, military bots not targeting the military zeds and zeds not considering them a threat. Scientist zeds don’t attack own manhacks either and it makes sense that zeds would not go for robots, trees moving on the wind and similar “not alive enough” stuff, at least the stuff that doesn’t attack them.
This would help with placement of zombies like this one - military/zed areas could overlap without one side eradicating the other.[/quote]
Per the current lore while zeds might not be actively hostile with robots, robots should be fairly actively hostile with nearby zeds in most cases. In an ideal case you’d probably have robots targeting all zombies except for those that matched their particular faction (i.e., military robots wouldn’t target military zeds, science robots science zeds, copbots would still target cop zeds because we state that as part of the problem but riotbots shouldn’t, and so on). Zombies should mostly ignore robots unless the robots are actively attacking them or making loud noises.
So you might have a military zombie standing next to a bunch of military drones and everything will be peachy. But if a normal zombie happens to walk by the military drone should target it with extreme prejudice (even though it is ignoring the drone) and then the noise from the explosions could cause other zombies to attack the drone. The actual military zombies could then go either way, either just ignoring everything or joining in with the other zombies to take down the drone (despite the fact that the drone won’t be hostile to them). The end result of the fight should either be that the zombies eventually damage/destroy the drones, and then wander off (possibly with the horde being joined by the military zeds), or the drones should wipe out any nearby zombies except the military ones, at which point they would go motionless (not attacking back at the military zombies) until eventually the military zombies lose interest.
Alternatively you might have a situation like a bunch of riotbots and copbots run into a military outpost. At the beginning the riotbots should probably recognize the military zombies to be figures of authority, so they would just ignore them. Similarly the military zeds and robots will ignore the riotbots and copbots. However the copbots have a programming error that makes them want to take out all humanoids, zombie or living, so they would attack the military zombies. At that point the military robots, recognizing danger to their personnel, would attack the copbots. The military zombies, distracted by the noise, and being attacked by the copbots would then attack either the military robots or the copbots. Should any attack the copbots, the rioters would label them as “rioting people” instead of figures of authority and try to peacefully cuff them. The military drones don’t recognize this cuffing as an attack since it’s not a harmful attempt, and ignore the riotbots completely. The situation quickly devolves into a bunch of one-way grudge matches, where the copbots are trying to kill everything not a robot, the riotbots are trying to peacefully detain anything humanoid that attacks the copbots, the military drones are attacking anything that is trying to hurt the military zombies, and the military zombies are attacking anything that makes too much noise. The end result could really go any way, depending on how many of each side there is an how much ammo the military drones have. You might end up with a bunch of dead copbots and riotbots, or a bunch of cuffed military zeds. Or maybe the copbots successfully slaughter the military zeds and the military drones run out of ammo so the copbots just wander away, leaving a military outpost with ammo-less drones and a bunch of dead military zeds.
It’s kinda beyond the reach of our current faction system, but it’s what I’d eventually like to see in the game, and I feel it captures a lot of the chaos that went down during the Cataclysm.
