Is it just me or are Crossbows utter crap

[Stevensonz]

[quote=“Inquisitor Dust, post:18, topic:2091”][quote=“woflsipder, post:17, topic:2091”]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?[/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.[/quote]

It’s a hand held Ballista, I designed that with other new crossbows to be balanced vs bows (but now newer bows beats them and another balancing issue rises regarding X-bow vs Bow), it spawns in mansions and pawnshops, adding new bolts would be easy just a quick yes from devs on balancing and new bolts and buffs on them could be done and a little reduction on bows if they’re that overpowered.

[esran]

currently bows are way better than crossbows. the problem is that i can mmake metal arrows easily, but cant make steel crossbow bolts. basicly bows are amazing because they are incredibly inexpensive to use. i also agree with balistas and catipults. i want to put a catipult on my car and lay siege to a military outpost.

[kevin.granade]

Good ideas about differentiating the two weapon types, will keep them in mind.

I’m planning on swapping crossbows to using the rifle or pistol skill , this came up in a previous thread on skills not making sense sometimes. Just haven’t gotten around to it.

A ranged accuracy change I’m planning will address much of the OP-ness of bows, by making the quality of the bow provide an effective cap on accuracy. Right now with enough stats and skill you can take a very innacurate bow and hit with pinpoint precision. After this change, the most benefit you can get from skill/stats will be to have the weapon operate at it’s peak accuracy, not better than ideal.

Once this change is in place, we will likely relax the range limits somewhat, since that’s primarally determined by accuracy anyway.

I also agree that scaling of archery progress vs rifle/pistol progress should happen, not sure how to do that yet though.

[Jotun]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:23, topic:2091”]Good ideas about differentiating the two weapon types, will keep them in mind.

I’m planning on swapping crossbows to using the rifle or pistol skill , this came up in a previous thread on skills not making sense sometimes. Just haven’t gotten around to it.

A ranged accuracy change I’m planning will address much of the OP-ness of bows, by making the quality of the bow provide an effective cap on accuracy. Right now with enough stats and skill you can take a very innacurate bow and hit with pinpoint precision. After this change, the most benefit you can get from skill/stats will be to have the weapon operate at it’s peak accuracy, not better than ideal.

Once this change is in place, we will likely relax the range limits somewhat, since that’s primarally determined by accuracy anyway.

I also agree that scaling of archery progress vs rifle/pistol progress should happen, not sure how to do that yet though.[/quote]

I would very much like to see accuracy-based range limits rather than hard range limits.

It does annoy me that I can’t even try to shoot at something beyond a very short range with a lot of weapons.

Perhaps also some indication of our likelihood to hit would be helpful? Just something like ‘I think I can hit that’ or ‘That would be a hard shot to make’ or something when we cursor over a target/area.

[pingpong]

Crossbows should be balanced by being higher-tier. Superalloy bolts with radioactive warheads (to simulate depleted uranium), without a change in encumberance would be nice.

On the note of bows, I was only using a longbow, afraid of the Reflex crashes, and I could still two-shot most of the robots I meet. With enough armor I could take like 10 shots from a turret and still walk away with little damage.

Another balance of crossbows could be they could be based more on mechanics instead, not the literal skill as I had that at like 23 last game before I quit out, but you could do fancier things, like an autoloader crossbow with magazine, uses a UPS to fire, and can be mounted on a car and used for turrets. Also, all arrows, even the metal ones, could have a very small amount of armor-piercing, and armor could be more effective especially against stuff like blunt or cutting, which would help balance out piercing/cutting and rifles/shotguns being a lot more useful, as now it seems you only need a bow and an SMG to deal with nearly anything, the rest being stuff like triffids for which you better have fire or a high-damage melee. Stuff like the lasers could be balanced by being almost entirely armor-piercing, or have an added stun effect.

If a magazine mechanic was ever brought in, magazine-based reloads could be useful as a one-time reload cost, vs bows which could have a cost for both loading and drawing the bow, depending on the strength of the bow in question.

[Mdnthrvst]

Steel Bolts should be craftable. The reflex recurve bow with even wooden arrows just shits all over them, and restricting Crossbow use to piddly wooden bolts (apart from purely-random traps and stores) based on the pre-overhaul balance paradigm is silly.

There’s no reason why someone who can fashion a nuclear-powered Killdozer from scratch shouldn’t be able to shape some bolts out of scrap.

There should also be mechanized crossbows that relieve the burden of drawing them - hell, even today’s crossbows have CO2 canisters and counterweighted pulley systems and a whole bunch of crap that makes them highly efficient.

The Crossbow end of the archery overhaul simply added a pointless pea shooter, a pest exterminator for crap that isn’t worth spending arrows on, and a ridiculous sniper. What about stuff like this?

http://www.scorpyd.com/crossbows/ventilator/

[pingpong]

I’m playing a dev build, and unless I’m mistaken, they may have taken out the Reflex Recurve bow from crafting. I have like 8-9 archery, 6-7 mechanics, and a bunch of survival and I can make all the others, except the Reflex Recurve. Unless they allow me to make metal bolts though, crossbows are still terrible compared to even a longbow+metal arrows. Only reason I’d use it is to train pistol.

Edit: Nevermind, it takes NINE archery to make the reflex recurve.

[Bladerock]

Crossbows should just be better at everything than an equivalent bow, except reload time. That is realistic.

Also, someone fix the darned rail mounted crossbow already.

[BMacZero]

[quote=“pingpong, post:6, topic:2091”]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[/quote]
I think they actually do stay damaged, they just get stacked together for cleanliness in the inventory.

[GlyphGryph]

Personally, I wouldn’t worry that much about it. Once the fatigue system is introduced, and bows actually require loading (and continually drain fatigue while loaded), that should suddenly make crossbows a bit more attractive - although, yeah, bows might be a bit too accurate at the moment. I’ll have to run some tests.

[pingpong]

Well one thing that’s going to nerf arrows more than anything, is dispersion will be capped, as in the normal code I guess it can go negative, so you can get headshots most shots. Later it will be capped at weapon # or something.