No kidding, armor will be by far the biggest problem, and you basically covered the whole thing about it so I don’t really have anything to add to that other than some examples of how things could go wrong:
–You’re about to go into a massively radiation covered area, but: “Why would I wear that? There’s so much encumbrance and this provides more armor!”
–You need to travel light and quick, but: “Nah, this doesn’t have enough protection.”
–You’re about to fight a horde of zombies, but: “Obviously I need environmental protection right now!”
–You want to give them gear with less encumbrance but with less armor: “Sure, I’ll actually be able to hit things, but that doesn’t matter. It’s fine!”
–You want to give them lots of storage space, but: “But this doesn’t cover enough of me! And the protection is terrible, so why the Santa would I wear this?”
If this system isn’t balanced efficiently, the chance of stuff like this could happen very easily. Possibly even dangerously so.
In theory, like Aabbcc mentioned, melee would be easiest, then ranged weapons, then armor.
Assuming we flesh out the existing opinion/trust system a bit more, improve the equipment evaluation system somewhat, and get a better value on post-apocalyptic barter value of items:
you have an option of telling the NPC where you want to go and what you want him to do. Depending on how what you’re telling him appeals to his goals and how much he trusts you, he might do one of the following:
a) decide to relocate to a “safe” place and watch your equipment - “you can go into the radioactive crater, I’ll stay back”
b) quit your company, giving back some of your goods - “you’re crazy, here’s your stuff, we’re even”
c) quit your company, taking everything you’ve given him - “you’re crazy, I consider this pay for working with you, bye”
d) say “sure, I’m with you!” and accept whatever scheme and gear you’re providing.
but honestly, NPCs don’t currently have the smarts to warn you when they decide to go off to sleep in the middle of a zombie infested city, nor to walk a dozen tiles to the bed at the other end of the farmhouse when they want to sleep while you’re crafting. So the kind of system of trust and evaluation that some people want is years away.
I wasn’t thinking that advanced when it came to trust, tbh.
What I was thinking was, basically:
“Evaluating if armor A is better than armor B is a pain” ->“there’s bound to be many cases where a worse armor as evaluated by the system is the better choice” -> “just convert it into a numerical value and take the hit to your trust credit if that’s the case, if it’s only a temporary thing chances are you can just trade back the old armor and end up even”.
Of course, a sensible evaluation of how much things are worth is kinda necessary for this, as well as ways for gaining trust, and some loophole closing to avoid things like the player gaming the trust system by flooding their inventory with bandanas.
We could have some preference system where NPCs would rather have damage mitigation over low encumbrance or storage space over coverage, among other things. Sure you can’t force everyone to use everything but that also makes some sense.
Question, if I do a barracks expansion for the faction camps can I get away with just making a uniform template (like ta-50, military equipment issue) that is a straight gift to the NPC? All personal gear in the existing slots is “put in their personal locker” (destroyed) and the equipment that you give them is equipped. That way it limits the player gaming the system by stealing their good stuff. If you have a faction camp that is to the point of wasting an expansion on a barracks you aren’t going to have any sort of shortage on weapons and armor manufacturing ability. If you wanted the gear back you’d still have to barter for it or whatever but it would avoid waiting for the gear optimization algorithm that could be a LONG ways away.
@acidia: by the time you’re doing that, chances are there is nothing the NPC could have that you couldn’t trivially make or find by the dozens.
The issue with ‘stealing’ is mostly about the first NPC that spawns next to you at the start of the game.
I know im late a year but this…the let survivors have a run dafaq away at all costs button… I would really love that lol. I lost all my npcs to a freak accident involving “16x difficulty”, (4 times evolution speed and 4 times numbers, real milleage might differ, did that cause millitary base loot OP lmao) a research facility and 100kevlar hulks. Could slow them to allow survivors the retreat but thats about it lol.
Why can’t npc survivors understand 100 kevlar hulks all at once is abit much even for a dude with 800 rounds of .50 cal and 10k 5.56 ammo.
I actually hit the millitary base quite early fyi. With a character with decent aim speed and baiting the first few millitary zeds out, you can net about 5 rounds on average from the ammo you originally had just opening fire on slow millitary zombies(assuming it takes 3 rounds to kill each one, make sure to prioritise acid snipers as they can cause pain and slowdown which makes this tactic suddenly suicidal.). Also got a cloaking system from disecting the bio ops in base that saved my reckless ass so many times afterwards.(including the great kevlar hulk swarm escape)
maybe we should work on a ritueal system, you know where the player can decide on a few set actions (cook, eat, wash then read some until going to bed) to preform in a given sequence. this would not only be a nice quality of life improvement at allow you to skip larger amounts of time easier but could also be used for NPC’s possibly even expanded so that you could set up defecto production lines (milk cows, boil milk, make cheese and powdered milk) and other activities to make managing factions easier, simulate the operation of faction camps and your faction in general beter. this would make NPC’s a lot easier to manage and more usefull since they can if you set things up right do many things for you or make much stuff for you.
i it think limited tactics would be a good edition since if you and your group of pals have been fighting together for a while than you should work together to a large extent and you being the leader should be able to coordinate them to a degree. to make up for how this effects game balance give some of the same code to enemies to make them use limited tactics as well. wolf and dog packs should stay close together and only attack if they are all within a certain distance of the target and then all at once instead of just one making them much more dangerous and zombie masters should be able to effect the behavior of zombies and actively direct them instead of the zombies just mindlessly charging the player only the normal chaff should rush the player while the ranged zombies keep distance and the master and necromancers stay way back gaurded by brutes and hulk that only turn hostile if you get to close or attack one of the masters or necromancers. the fungeloids and triffids could also use some “strategies” or coperation between there different forms to reflect the fact that they are part of a greater whole and guided by a intelligence.