The restriction of marksmanship training to long range shots seems to be a little silly.
I’m trying to train my marksmanship and archery using a crossbow, and with only 3 marksmanship, I’m unable to train any further with this weapon, even at the maximum range the game will allow me to fire it at (10 tiles).
It seems pretty unfair that it’s impossible to train your marksmanship beyond 3 without using a rifle or other long ranged weapon. Especially when the game is generally balanced around close range encounters, even when using ranged weapons.
Personally, I think it would take more skill, and be a more impressive feat of marksmanship, to hit a target at 50 meters with a pistol than it would to hit a target at 200 meters with a rifle. Perhaps the formula could be adjusted to factor in the maximum range of the weapon you’re currently using?
So, I’ve attempted to find documentation here and on Github, but I haven’t seen any discussion that states it explicitly: Were the aiming skill changes intended to make it impossible to train ranged skills without a live (or undead) target? I just picked up a new experimental yesterday after some number of months away, and was surprised to discover that there appears to be no way to get even residual XP for ranged weapons unless you’re trying to kill something.
Some of the Github discussion about the aiming rework (for instance, This discussion) seemed to imply that XP only for hitting an enemy was a forgone conclusion, so I was wondering if there was another discussion somewhere where the decision to get rid of non-combat ranged training was made, or that this was simply an unintended consequence of attempting to reward success in aiming for ranged weapons. (I suspect it’s the latter, since plinking inanimate objects is the simplest method of training ranged weapons in the real world.)
One simple way to bridge this discrepancy would be something along the lines of a mode in the aiming menu that allow furniture to be designated as a valid target, with most of the underlying mechanics related to skill gain working as normal (with perhaps a hefty nerf for stationary targets.) Another possible kludge would be to argue that a person can still learn from a miss, meaning that there is a minimum level of experience gain for any shot taken.
However, before I descend into munckin-esque whining, I mainly wanted to know if this was working as intended.
Shooting objects for xp is officially not supported because of pure grindiness of manual targeting. It’s better to have no way to grind it than to make it so that to use guns properly, you’d need to repeat a very tedious action for a long time. Just lesser evil here.
The idea for fixing it properly would be turning skill training into a long action that handles the grind.
Allowing targeting objects would be more work than it is worth.
I see. Well, I obviously disagree with the idea that you cannot improve marksmanship without attempting to kill something, but I’m not currently coding for for CDDA, so that’s the consensus of the devs, I guess.
(I understand the desire to remove grinding, but I kind of think that grinding is going to be inevitable in a crafting game that rewards preparation. Also, I’ve been attempting to train up archery in my current game, and I can tell you that attempting to train on live targets is even grindier, given the way you have to choose weak ammo, kite, and conserve the Z population to get any kind of gains. Plus, the whole “removing the ability to do something that works in the real world” thing.)
Anyway, hopefully at some point in the next few months I will figure out the problems I had with Github the last time around so that I can contribute more towards the problem than griping. Hopefully someone revisits the issue soon.
It’s less about the grinding as “training with no enemy”, since that can be exploited anyway.
It’s more about grinding being very tedious.
If someone wrote an interface that allows consuming ammo and time to gain gun xp (more for better ammo), it would be OK to have this kind of “grinding”.
Oh, I understand that you’re not against target practice in principle; my complaint is more that the old [tedious] system for target practice was removed before something existed to take its place.
Again, I know that you guys deal with enough whining around here, so I’ll stop harping on it.
