They take forever to reload, and have really low range. Is it just me, or are crossbows massively nerfed.
Btw, I was using the experimental build if that matters
Well there is the mondo ancient german crossbow that was added recently (Ganz-something) that has redonkydonk range. But yeah crossbows could use some work. I hope that they get a variety of bolts like bows have arrows soon.
The crossbows used to be useful before .6 a little bit. the bolts you get for them when you find the traps can pierce armor on solders. Old version of arrows could not and it same skill. Now that you have better arrows you can craft no.
the only real value of a crossbow is so you dont have to spend a starter point on archery. Bows are rare finds. you need level 1 archery to craft a bow. you can disarm a crossbow trap and train with a crossbow. its a hassle cause you get 1 bolt most of the time. there are now archery books you can read to get to levle 1, but you have to go to town for this and this is really dangerous without some kind of range weapon.
i prefer to just start with archery.
to make crossbows at all useful crossbow traps should do more damage so you can build them and put them near your house or something. maybe you can arm them and put them in a door or something or at windows. right now, not real useful. another could be that crossbow traps in the woods are more common. so you can disarm some and get a few bolts to train archery.
Yeah, crossbows should probably do a bit more damage to balance their slow fire rate and have a larger ammo variety.
Not sure how the rail-mounted crossbow matches up to a normal crossbow, but my shotgun/crossbow is pretty damn useful. Cleared a FEMA camp with just the crossbow and a bayonet. And a Molotov. I did notice the low range though, which I think is a little odd.
I think I see how they plan to balance it, my arrows are showing up as damaged and things when I fire them.
But then I pick them up and they go right back in the normal pile, I think they have some work to do on it
Crossbows can actually reload pretty fast if you have high STR.
With the updates to bows I do agree with you though, crossbows probably need a small buff.
I think you could make crossbows more practical a few ways.
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Their bolts tend to be smaller, so make them lighter in addition to being able to craft more of them more easily. Arrows could also be harder to craft given that they’re quite complex, I think bolts tend to be a bit simpler. Realistically it should take at least half an hour to make an arrow, so you could make crafting times more important for ammunition, and arrows could weigh a lot more due to being much longer.
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Crossbows should be moddable! It’s gun shaped so I should be able to tape a bayonet to it, or improve the magazine on the repeating crossbow, or add an electric winch or something which would remove all strength scaling from reload times, but change them to a flat, relatively fast rate. Basically a crossbow should scale with your engineering ability more than your skill at using it. The ganz-rustung is cool as hell, but you could do with some more options for more everyday crossbows. An all-metal bow for example which doees more damage in melee and fires much more powerful shots much further but which requires a lot of metal components to make and weighs quite a lot, though isn’t as big as the ganz rustung. Also possibly you could combine the coilgun and the crossbow to create a hybrid railgun or something that can only fire metal ammo (but perhaps can also fire nails), hard to make again and requires a lot of multidisciplinary skills, but would function a bit like a sniper rifle or something. Slow ROF but high damage and accuracy. There’s a lot you could do with more engineering for crossbows.
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Bows should require good ammo, crossbows should require a good crossbow. As above, crossbow ammo is just a little pointy thing you fire out, whereas arrows are much bigger and the type of arrow greatly affects the function of the weapon. If you expand on this idea, crossbows should be something you can waste ammo with. The bolts could be easier to make but also lower quality, and perhaps craftable from more things. You could make good bolts if you wanted to, but it should be more viable to just fire any old tat out of the crossbow, possibly including pebbles like an upgunned slingshot.
You could do a lot I think to make crossbows not only useful, but quite different from bows. For one thing, frankly, I don’t think crossbows should have anything to do with archery, they should train rifles or pistols depending on the size of the crossbow you’re using, and be built using mechanics and possibly electronics for some more advanced models.
I think the main difference between the two is that bows require extensive training to use. Not that guns and crossbows don’t require training and that you can just pick up and go, using a bow is much more reliant on training than those two. The precision on xbows should be much higher, or at least higher than a bow given characters that have no talent or experience with either.
I think this is true for both bows and xbows, not unique to xbows alone.
And some bows can go a little too far…
shotgun crossbow and railgun crossbow are these brand new crafted items? what skills do i need to make them? Is this a .6 change?
Arrows should be nerfed , so that the armor piercing is below zero and the arrows bounce back from clothes right into your eyes.
Haven’t touched crossbows in 0.6+, but in 0.5(nightly) I was using them to supplement early melee. They are silent, sometimes give their ammo back, and a close-range shot usually kills almost every zombie. I liked them this way - slow, shorter range, but very damaging - and would suggest keeping this approach.
There is a gun modification “rail-mounted crossbow”, it can be applied to rifles or shotguns.
It’s rare, but it’s been in the game for awhile, it isn’t new to 0.6.
[quote=“Disarcade, post:12, topic:2091”]I liked them this way - slow, shorter range, but very damaging - and would suggest keeping this approach.[/quote]Except crossbows tend to have better range than regular bows due to their stronger pull. It’s half of the reason for having a stock. It’s ridiculous to have them be inferior in anything but reload speed.
[quote=“Weyrling, post:13, topic:2091”]There is a gun modification “rail-mounted crossbow”, it can be applied to rifles or shotguns.
It’s rare, but it’s been in the game for awhile, it isn’t new to 0.6.[/quote]And i’m pretty sure they are still terrible due to the weird decision to stick crossbow range as a bonus on the crossbow instead of on the bolts themselves like every other ammunition in the game (Rail mounted crossbows use the range bonus from the gun they are attached to, which is usually +0, making them useless due to the decision to not give bolts their own range.).
Think this is how archery weapons be. XD
Bow - Only deadly at high enough archery skill
Crossbow - EZ to use but less skill dependant
And things that i hope to be added.
Crossbow - Modern-style Crossbow(idunnowhaticallthisXD), Steel Rebar Bolt(and Heated),
Stonebow MOD(to fire Pebbles, Rocks for Ganz-Rustand etc), Scope, Bayonet
Game needs ballista.
A crossbow you can set on the ground, and then "e"xamine to aim and shoot.
Very Long reload time, incredibly bulky (akin to moving a steel frame) but long range and extremely good damage, able to damage walls and vehicles, and gib hulks.
requires decent archery skills and a very high level in mechanics to make.
Ballista must be implemented ASAP , though i wouldn’t want to be the guy who spends moth crafting one and then goes dragging it around the city in the apocalypse.
Though miniature ballistas and catapults , like the ones you can hold in hand would be way better weapon in the apocalypse.
Wait, are handheld catapults a thing? I’m totally ok with that.
And I can’t remember the actual name, but is the Ganz-Raspberry basically a handheld ballista?
Wait, are handheld catapults a thing? I’m totally ok with that.
And I can’t remember the actual name, but is the Ganz-Raspberry basically a handheld ballista?[/quote]
If Ganz-Rucksack can fire burning bolts then it is a ballista , if it cannot then it’s just an other weapon that never spawns and there is no real reason to use it.
Ganz R-U-stuck is awesome by its definition, since you pull its string with foot crank. But IMO strong character with bow can do more damage than low grade crossbow, but that depends on bow itself. I heard that archaeologists found some ship which belonged to king Henry VII. (god knows which Henry it was), it was transporting longbows, and these longbows have 90kgs draw. Wouldn’t want to piss off his longbowmen.
Edit: It was Henry VIII, ship’s name was Mary Rose, bows were English Longbows, hooray for Wikipedia