Guns, too many? Too few?

[John_Candlebury]

You can already do that press V and select the uknown items, bang it will tell you what skill (which also tells you if its a rifle, a handgun, shotgun or a smg) and ammo the weapon uses and if its semiautomatic or not. Do you need to know anything more if you are on a rush to fight a horde? I dont think so.

[Birdie]

[quote=“HunterAlpha1, post:93, topic:4531”]here’s a nice, easy to understand zombie apocalypse roguelike for those of you who don’t like so many varieties of guns:

Home | Rogue Survivor Fan Forums

of course, be careful not to play any of the gameplay mods, as those add a couple more firearms to each class, which may be confusing to you. [/quote]
I love talking down to people!

“Revolver - Redhawk .44 cal” for example. It would help with sorting items too.

I do love the idea of items having a prefix like that. I don’t want to turn to google or waste turns examining weapons to know what type of gun I’m looking at, especially if I’m running straight into town like an idiot.

[asdfzxc]

[quote=“John Candlebury, post:99, topic:4531”]What are you guys doing playing rougelikes if you cant even bring yourselves to examine unknown items.

It would simply be a lot more convenient if you could look at a shelf of guns and say to yourself “Oh boy there’s a crapload of pistols here.”

Not pick every single one up and examine it in order to work this out.

It’s not like it would need more than a cursory glance to work out that much.[/quote]
This is the point where I laugh at you.

You find some gun on the floor of a house and examine it. You see a S&W 610 and a stack of .38 ammunition. You don’t know what a 610 is, but you know that it’s (IIRC) approximately one kilogram and takes up two units of volume, which should be enough to tell you it’s a pistol. You see a stack of .38, which tells you it probably takes that ammo type. Or if you’re lazy, you could just select it from the grab menu and read more or less the entire statblock without actually picking it up.

[DG123]

You don’t always find the ammo next to the gun. And weight/volume won’t tell you whether it’s a rifle, assault rifle, sniper rifle, shotgun etc.

The point is, why make things more complicated by having you press extra keys to see the information? Why can’t it just appear on the side of the screen when you put the cursor over the item?

I’m not saying I personally need the extra functionality being discussed here, but if it would help some people. what is your complaint?

[Grandpuh_Ty]

Shift+V, shift+E. Doesn’t take any turns. And if you’re blundering into a gun store with reckless abandon in the middle of a city you deserve to be eaten. I understand people have different play styles, but rougelikes are about making smart decisions and using tactics to overcome obstacles. And yes, why would you want to make things generic? I’ll admit I am biased, not a gun-nut cause I don’t know a lot about guns but, I am looter. I love loot, I love having lots and lots of options for equipment, this that and the other thing. So what if things are functionally the same? If they’re the same statwise there’s an equal reason to leaving it in as there is to taking it out. Simple is boring, isn’t that why we play rougelikes?

[ClaytonRISING]

Sure, there are some firearms that are functionally the same, I’ll admit that. Some of their stats differ very little. But that in no way means that we need to replace them all with generic weapons…that’s incredibly stupid. If we want to strip all the flavor and variety out of weapons, let’s go ahead and do the same with clothes and food, cause’ A LOT of those are identical.

I’m all for re-balancing them, or even giving them a complete overhaul that takes into account more things and skills.

But if you’re for generic weapons, like I said and someone else said, go play Rogue Survivor.

[Slax]

Or make a simplified weapons mod. Problem solved.

[Marduk]

Or make a simplified weapons mod. Problem solved.

Yeah, it’s actually quite easy to make as far as mods go, you would just have to remove things instead of adding them.

But it would not get popular at all, Cataclysm’s gun variety is rather limited so far. There is less gun variety than in Jagged Alliance 2, the original one, not even mentioning the gun nut heaven 1.13 is.
Most of them are quite popular, anyone who blayed CoD, BF or any other modern fps\tactical game a few times will be familiar with their names and roles anyway.

People who never played any such game are an extremely small, if not nonexistent subset of typical population of roguelike players.

[Inadequate]

I feel like you’re making quite a lot of assumptions there. Most roguelikes are still largely about swords and wizards, not exactly much overlap between FPS gamers and roguelike players. And having an encyclopediac knowledge of guns shouldn’t be a prerequisite.

I’m worried the gun system becomes this insular thing, where everyone rushes in to toss in their own favourite gun, and any attempt to alter anything about it is sneered off as ‘casuals’ and ‘lrn2gun’, with no thought of balance with regard to the rest of the game, only for accurate representation of guns vs other guns.

There really doesn’t need to be so much condescension and shadowpunching, nobody has actually called for generic guns for several pages now, and legitimate suggestions for adding mechanics have been shouted over. There’s nothing wrong with making mechanics clearer, there’s been discussion about that on the melee weapons rebalance and nobody seems to have a problem with it there. It’s somewhat strange that in a situation that can actually be solved constructively by adding more mechanics and showing how your particular favourite differs from the rest, nobody wants to actually do so.

[ClaytonRISING]

No one needs an existing, extensive knowledge about firearms…cause, you know, you can just look at the weapon in-game and you know, learn everything you need to know about it. Hell, you can even COMPARE different weapons! Look at the times we live in!

[Inadequate]

[quote=“dwarfkoala, post:85, topic:4531”]I’d like a system where when you look at a gun’s information screen, it displays
Damage: ||
Dispersion: ||||
Recoil: ||
and so forth, maybe with the actual values in parentheses next to the actual display. That way you can easily get an idea of how the stats for a weapon upon looking at the information screen.[/quote]

[quote=“Dominae, post:67, topic:4531”]Boy did this devolve into scream-fest chest pounding fast. Man.

My thoughts -

I personally like a more “realistic”-seeming world where all kinds of terrible crap went wrong and we’re facing the end-of-days but we aren’t living in a cartoon or video game world. So, weird, video-game-crazy Dead Rising-style stuff is just silly to me and I dislike it. Currently, that means I ignore (as was screamed in a prior post) a chunk of content because I don’t want to play with it. I’d choose “Crazy Weapons: Off” if it was an option at world-gen. Futuristic stuff is cool, exotic stuff can be neat (tho I’d argue how “exotic” is New England really, even some years in the future?) but just downright “wtf” stuff? No thanks. But that is a different discussion I guess.

As for guns … I agree with the “there are so many and yet so few” argument. There is a crap-ton of different kinds of firearms, and ammo variants, yet they all pretty much do the job exactly the same. Pull trigger, zombie dies. Do the different stats actually do anything? Is having 21 points in blah-blah better than 18 points in it currently? Is there a noticeable difference to the statistics? Should there be then? If there isn’t, why bother having tiny variations in stuff?

Everyone saying “just make a pile of guns and a pile of ammo, pick one up then the other highlights”: this is fine if you’ve found shopping carts of the crap and toted it back to base. If you rush a gun store with zombies on your heels thinking you’ll fight your way back out, how long is someone supposed to look through option screens and item details before they are able to grab items to fight back the horde? Every step counts … they’re gaining on you …

Run run run … kick in the door … OMG guns, thank god … uhm … well … this is a H&K something … err … ok, so … inspect this one … Remmington … that takes … wait … no … thats not the right ammo … hmm … Time Out zombies, I need to fumble with menus. If I walk over and pick them up one by one, and walk to the ammo to see if it fits I’m zombie-chow. Now what?

… or worse … if too many options are spawnable, it is very much the reality that all the guns and all the ammo that spawned will STILL not give you a combo that fit together in that store.
I find a gun or two, and then just carry it the entire game for emergencies; usually I’ll keep a couple for different targets (a shotgun, a SMG). I don’t see enough difference in the stats to warrant bothering to look at them too closely. I load every other gun I find into a shopping cart and horde them “just because”, but I play melee usually anyway so I don’t get too into the gun thing.

… adding the caliber to the right of the item name when looked at quickly, would go a long way:
If I hit (v) to check loot in the gun store, have it say:
Glock 19 (9mm)

Let the item inspection screen say:
Glock 19 (9mm)
Stats: ## Stats: ##
Stats: ## Stats: ##
Stats: ## Stats: ##

… making it so ammo spawned checks the gun and theres a very good chance it’ll match (so a gun store has 3 guns and 4 ammo spawned, make it give a really solid chance the ammo will match the guns).[/quote]

I’m referring to requests like these. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting easier displays, and several people have suggested very reasonable ways to do it.

And for heaven’s sake, I’m agreeing with you. You were calling for a mechanic rebalance right at the top of this very page.

[ClaytonRISING]

Inadequate, whatever you do, DON’T AGREE WITH ME!

Us two agreeing might very well rip a whole in the fabric of reality.

[Inadequate]

Ideological compromises must sometimes be made for practical gain. Now do you have any actual suggestions for ‘rebalancing them, or giving them a complete overhaul’, or are you going to continue to cherrypick points that can’t be objectively disputed for due to being matters of opinion?

[dwarfkoala]

I would really like to hear Clayton’s suggestion for that, actually.

[FunsizeNinja123]

We could add item durability to guns. Military grade weaponry is gonna have better durability, while civilian weapons have alright durability, and makeshift weapons have crappy durability.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

I’d argue item durability for everything, but I’m quite certain that a few devs (and players) don’t like that idea. Part of the daily maintenance that doesn’t need acting out, they say.

I’d also argue for separating magazines from ammo, but the same counter-point would apply- (for good players, so long as they have the magazines it’s just adding another step).

Otherwise there’s only so much balancing you can do if:
The standard practice is waiting until zeds are close & shooting them point-blank. All guns are going to obliterate them, as they should, if you press the barrel right up against the zed’s forehead.

Otherwise, fire rate/burst modes could take another looking at, plus/including doing away with 1 shot/burst per turn.
Plus general looking at the current stats.

We’ve also had more than a few good suggestions in this thread.

-Caliber in the name
-spawn rework
-less diversity for civilians and especially military, (based on caliber), rarer things in basements/pawnshops

What else was there?

[FunsizeNinja123]

We could just add mags and put those into the spawn lists with the ammo racks in the gunstore. So mags would be there too (some with bullets in them, and some not) and Boxes(?) of loose rounds would be there.

[ClaytonRISING]

I think multiple things should be taken into account, some based on player’s skill some based on the weapon itself:

Handling is a big one. Not only for the weapon, but also derived from the player’s skill in the specific class of weapons.

Recoil should play a bigger part in firing weapons. Some weapons, especially automatics, are going to behave entirely different than semi-automatic weapons.

There should be an in-depth, realistic magazine and clip system. We should have to collect clips and pre-load them before battle. It’s realistic. There isn’t a hidden, unlimited supply of magazines a la’ Call of Duty.

Firing a weapon should take into account hitting different parts of an enemy and “stopping power”. For example, hitting a zombie center mass with a 9mm or a similar caliber isn’t going to do much, but hit him with a bigger round and he should take movement penalties. Let’s just assume that zombies don’t feel pain, they are still going to feel the force of a slug or large caliber hitting them. They should loss action points or something similar, maybe even be knocked back or down.

All though this would require a whole rewrite of the damage and health system, there should be area specific damages and drawbacks to shooting an enemy. Hitting a zombie in the arm isn’t going to damage him or slow him nearly as much as hitting him in the chest or head. I understand that the zombies in this game are only really dead when their bodies have sustained a huge amount of damage, so much that not even the goo can repair them. Alright, that should show in the game.

I would continue, but to be honest XCOM is calling me.

[asdfzxc]

We could add item durability to guns. Military grade weaponry is gonna have better durability, while civilian weapons have alright durability, and makeshift weapons have crappy durability.

This is sort of implemented already. Guns have a hidden durability stat that determines how likely they are to misfire.

[GrizzlyAdamz]

Handling is represented in the skill bonuses & I think recoil+dispersion; 'tis what things like ergo grips currently effect.

Are you sure recoil doesn’t play a large part?

You’d have to apply the same MP effects to melee weapons as well- this is also a big buff, I don’t know if it’s needed.

Differences in where you hit them are represented in grazing/hit/goodhit/CRITICAL etc already.

I’d say freeing [f]ire from the end-turn-button would make a big difference for all of this, (specifically, recoil & reloading).

[quote=“FunsizeNinja123, post:115, topic:4531”]We could add item durability to guns. Military grade weaponry is gonna have better durability, while civilian weapons have alright durability, and makeshift weapons have crappy durability.

This is sort of implemented already. Guns have a hidden durability stat that determines how likely they are to misfire.[/quote]
wat? That doesn’t sound good at all.