Lengthening of the Early game the return of the Mid game

Game Talk The Drawing Board
41

By the way, I forgot to ask, what do you guys think about the Rivtech guns?

They seem to be often called OP but I am unsure if they are actually so. Sure their ammo is very common, and its very strong, but the guns themselves dont rain from the sky. Also, very few scenarios warrant the use of the firepower they offer, so when I do find them, they often spend collecting dust inside a locker of my base, (unless i enter mines, in which case I almost always try to have one with me). And thus never actually have one when I meat Hulks or Jabberwocks or Graboids ore something else

42

I don’t find them overpowered, but that might be just because almost any gun is overpowered. I don’t even bother with stronger guns and stick with 9mm as I can quite easily kill everything with it (except robots and turrets). It might be beyond the scope of this thread, but there should be a higher chance to miss and a lower chance for headshots, especially with low skill.

43

Good point.

By the way, speaking of headshots, turrets headshot far too often.

44
TLDR: Degrade and reduce resources over time: increase environmental and monster hazards simultaneously.

This, if anything, is the vision the game devs have at the moment for this. As far as I can tell, we are NOT going to do these:

-Making loot disappear when you’re not looking. NO SIR.
If you’re going to lose loot, it’s stupid to not be able to ever get it back. If NPC looting exists, it’s going to be a fleshed out system instead of an asspull “EMPTY HOUSES EMPTY LABS EMPTY MINES EMPTY TEMPLES” sort of thing, especially when magical loot fairies somehow managed to loot a house without unlocking the door, killing the zombies, or smashing a window.

-Tainting the gameworld around you so that it is not possible to last beyond a certain period even if you do everything right.
If you do EVERYTHING right and the RNG blesses you like you’ve won the lottery, it should be possible to last forever in the cataclysm. That said, the margin for error on the cataclysm will decrease over time. Zombie mobs will assault you, previously normal zombies will now transition to special zombies over time, triffids, fungals, beehives, and anthills will start spreading and need to be taken care of instead of simply waiting for you to march in with a rocketlauncher at your leisure.

If anything else beyond that document is used to add challenge, I think that it’s going to have to be very well fleshed out and considered before anything actually gets put to main.

45

dwarfkoala: Thanks for finding this link.

46

Good point.

By the way, speaking of headshots, turrets headshot far too often.[/quote]
Heashots should just be removed from the game. They might be realistic but they make for shitty gameplay.

47

So now the game should be realistic if it’s difficult and tedious, and non-realistic when it’s not? That’s a very specific definition of realism that you have there.

48
Heashots should just be removed from the game. They might be realistic but they make for shitty gameplay.
I don't agree with removing headshots completely.
49

[quote=“Zireael, post:48, topic:4912”]

Heashots should just be removed from the game. They might be realistic but they make for shitty gameplay.

I don’t agree with removing headshots completely.[/quote]
I don’t see any merit in it. This isn’t dwarf fortress. Should we have nerve damage now? Heart shots?

50

I fully agree that as in its present state hostiles encountered in the early game, are significantly squishy. Both melee, and ranged weapons (or no weapons at all!) have almost no problem disassembling them (I have had a non mutated, non hacked character with no real melee skill curb stomp a zombie hulk with nothing more than a pocket knife)
Additionally, I often find little reason to bother tackling more challenging enemies or hives because for the part most part they can normally be ignored and/or avoided entirely with little consequence.

I think a larger variety of enemies, and a buff on the present ones would do the trick, add new effects and features to them to.
For example, not only should the shocker zombie resistant to electrical attacks (chain lightning, tazer) it should also do additional damage to the survivor when wet, and/or carrying or wearing electrically conductive materials

51

Headshots/criticals/whatever we call them make combat more interesting. It’s all. It’s not about DF level of complexity.
Right now, macrosblackd is working on fixing some issues with 200+ headshots and ranged combat in general.

52

[quote=“Zireael, post:51, topic:4912”]Headshots/criticals/whatever we call them make combat more interesting. It’s all. It’s not about DF level of complexity.
Right now, macrosblackd is working on fixing some issues with 200+ headshots and ranged combat in general.[/quote]
If you have headshots with ranged weapons then you should also have them with melee weapons then.

53

[quote=“Bonevomit, post:52, topic:4912”][quote=“Zireael, post:51, topic:4912”]Headshots/criticals/whatever we call them make combat more interesting. It’s all. It’s not about DF level of complexity.
Right now, macrosblackd is working on fixing some issues with 200+ headshots and ranged combat in general.[/quote]
If you have headshots with ranged weapons then you should also have them with melee weapons then.[/quote]

They are already in, they’re called CRITICALS!!!

54

A lot of the comments in this post are very frustrating to read as a more casual player. I never ended up playing 0.9 but 0.8 was took me many, many tries before I was able to move past the early game. The character who did only managed to do so by hiding out in the woods for a week, training until a visit to the town wouldn’t be fatal. It wasn’t until my character reached her second summer that I found a squad of dead military, and firearms and ammunition have been sparse and almost always mismatched.

I mean a lot of this sounds like, “I’m too good at this game, and the noobs aren’t crying enough, so it needs to be harder.” Not ever player knows every trick. If all the changes are implemented it might better meet your narrow vision of masochist fun, but it is almost guaranteed to make the experience more tedious for 90% of players.

Really, I dunno why the “It’s too easy!” players don’t simply play a character with an alcohol addiction (after all the tremors and hallucinations, it wasn’t until autumn that my character ceased to be chronically sick 100% of the time), and crank up the spawn rate for their games. No one is gonna be whining about headshots or the availability of ammo when there’s literally a hundred zombies bearing down on you from every side.

55

Yup.

This. I agree with this. If you’re so good, try playing with a jacked up spawn rate.

56

Well, this thread is not about making the early game any more difficult. I think most people agree that the early game is already well balanced. But once you get hold of some ammo, a weapon and a car there is simply no longer any challenge at all. It should be more difficult to get to that point, and that is what this thread is all about.

Cranking up the spawn rate is fine and was a nice addition to the game. But 3 times as many enemies also means 3 times as much loot. And once you arrive at a certain point within the game there is no longer any difference between 3 Zombies and 30. They can’t harm you anyway.

Not sure what happened with your character, but alcohol addiction really doesn’t last as long. Get enough food and water and lie low for a couple of days: done. It is really funny how easy you can cure a life long addiction in this game. :slight_smile:

57

You’ve hit the nail on the head really, what we need is a lot less ammo, nerfed weapons and cars which aren’t death machines.

I’d suggest that all craftable weapons/ammo are much worse than their found counterparts, which requires you to actually search for stuff. This is fine in early game, as weapons will still be strong enough, but eventually you’ll need to find better stuff, which requires exploration.

If you can push this through John, it’d be a massive step in the right direction, but after the flak your incredibly common sense wakizashi request got, I’m not hopeful.

58

[quote=“juliawang87, post:54, topic:4912”]A lot of the comments in this post are very frustrating to read as a more casual player. I never ended up playing 0.9 but 0.8 was took me many, many tries before I was able to move past the early game. The character who did only managed to do so by hiding out in the woods for a week, training until a visit to the town wouldn’t be fatal. It wasn’t until my character reached her second summer that I found a squad of dead military, and firearms and ammunition have been sparse and almost always mismatched.

I mean a lot of this sounds like, “I’m too good at this game, and the noobs aren’t crying enough, so it needs to be harder.” Not ever player knows every trick. If all the changes are implemented it might better meet your narrow vision of masochist fun, but it is almost guaranteed to make the experience more tedious for 90% of players.

Really, I dunno why the “It’s too easy!” players don’t simply play a character with an alcohol addiction (after all the tremors and hallucinations, it wasn’t until autumn that my character ceased to be chronically sick 100% of the time), and crank up the spawn rate for their games. No one is gonna be whining about headshots or the availability of ammo when there’s literally a hundred zombies bearing down on you from every side.[/quote]

You argued against something, but never actually made a point on what bothered you or what was a bad addition, and you really didnt argument the only two things that you did mention, perhaps If you did that we could change something; I personally don’t think anything discussed here would make the game masochistically hard or incredibly tedious to 90% of the community, without mentioning that nothing in here should make start game harder, most of it is directed to reintroducing the mid game

Also remember that rouge likes are supposed to at least be moderately hard, and I do think cataclysm falls short, you probably already read why. You shouldn’t expect to sit down and master it on a day like you can do with casual games, your getting better at it should be the result of several hours of failure and effort.

59

I’d agree that the early game hasn’t gotten easier- I died early, and often in the current “stable” build, moving to the daily exports has drastically increased how easy the game is, largely due to increased spawn rates for… everything. At least that’s my impression. I’d be lucky to find a couple pairs of pants and a water bottle in the starting shelter before, now there’s a ton of stuff- not all useful, but still a lot of stuff. The maps are also much, much more densely populated with houses, “special areas” and the like.

I actually started a new game/world yesterday (default loot and spawn settings) where I walked out of the shelter and the next map block down (20 squares?) was a crashed helicopter (something like that anyways, a bunch of metal scrap and military gear) with a few military packs, eight guns of various descriptions, sizes, technology levels, and countries of origin, and a couple of those disposable rocket launchers (no ammo other than the rocket launchers, but hey). Just lots of stuff, and it doesn’t really make sense that it’d be there. I know that’s the nature of random map generation, but it kind of ruins suspension of disbelief.

I just deleted the world and restarted after taking a screen capture for nostalgia.

I’d much, much, much prefer a game where the atmosphere is like The Road (novel or movie) where finding a prepper’s bunker is a
life-changing event. A global flag for scaling loot generation doesn’t really address the much more realistic case that other entities in the world will be constantly looting/consuming/breaking things and items will either be hard to find or concentrated in certain locations due to hoarding or being overlooked by others.

The tough thing is that rebalancing this sort of thing requires additional systems in the game- for loot ordering, generation, item degradation, spawn rates, dynamic changes to the world over time- etc. I hope to contribute to this, but yeah- it’s intimidating. All of the extremely-specific code (yeah, labs) smack-dab in the middle of the generic routines like map generation also clutter the code base up something fierce.

As for something useful- I think the earlier comments on the loot generation system not scaling well is accurate. My impression is that this bit of the system works for using a n “n in N” chance to generate objects, where n is a scalar value indicating the probability of that thing generated (like houses, with a base chance of “1000”) and N is the cumulative total of the probabilities of all objects possible in that spot. This means that as we add items, the chance of a given item dropping decreases, while the chance of ANY item dropping increases dramatically. Since there are so many analogous items the fact that you got a can of chicken soup instead of beans also means very little.

A couple things I think could help:

  1. Items should have a chance of being overlooked based on your perception, their volume, and the location they’re placed. You shouldn’t automatically spot every matchbook in a room full of rubble (or every pistol in the middle of a helicopter crash) Thoroughly searching a location should be possible but should take time. Some of this already exists with the current “multiple items in a square” stuff- if there’s rubble in a square it should also hide things in it.

  2. Animals should eat things. Food in particular. Things are smart enough to bash through doors, why doesn’t that dog/moose/racoon/bear eat the cereal sitting on this counter? They seem to be pretty set on eating/attacking the character.

Anyways- those are some thoughts.

60

Regarding guns

Actually I think that Guns are so strong because their mechanics are not played very well. Lets take pistols as an example:

Pistols have a very short range, and technically high dispersion values, and when shot from a distance larger than 5 tiles the chance to miss or not to do killing damage is very significant. Because ammo is a scarce resource, you attempt to conserve it at all costs, and when you have to use it, you will do it in the most efficient which literally means waiting to the monster to be adjacent to you to shoot it for maximum damage and almost negligible chances of missing. And well as you are technically holding the gun against the zombie and shooting, even 22 rounds do extensive damage (which of course makes sense).

A good solution in that case would be to reduce your hitting chances when zombies are very close, perhaps justified by the zombie erratic and fast movements and instead move the “golden spot” between accuracy and damage a few tiles away from your character, so at least you would have to take terrain into account and leave a reasonable distance from your target if you want the best possible result