More Rebalancing Options

[Necrosia]

I would like to see more rebalancing options mainlined in future releases if possible. For instance, there are very few ways of making zombies stronger other than doubling their speed and health. No real option for them to do more damage. I also find double or nothing to be excessive, and would like to see some “in between” options, like a 50% increase instead. Likewise for making them weaker. I understand this is very easy for users to do if they know how to edit the mod infos of the current rebalance mods, but it’d be good to see them included by default so players don’t have to go in and have to tune the rebalance mods to suit their needs every time.

[kevin.granade]

I’m not opposed in general, but can you be more specific? “More options” is almost guaranteed to be ignored based on excessive vagueness.

Also, you do realize that if we add a bunch more difficulty options, selecting which options are set to what will be exactly the same as having to “tune the rebalance mods”.

[Necrosia]

Sorry for the vagueness. It’s a fairly vague idea in general though, since it just involves various ways of tuning the game’s difficulty higher or lower with more detail than what’s currently available. Mods that increase or decrease zombie damage, survivor and player health, and more fine-tuned ways of setting zombie health (25%, 50%, 75% increases or subtractions) and speed, just to name off a few.

[jcd]

If it were possible to inject percentile ‘difficulty values’ for player & monster hp, player and monster attack damage, effectiveness of armor, player & monster speed and everything else imagined, somewhere in the code, that would be awesome.

It would also be in the spirit of cata (freedom) and allow for nice customizations depending on the person in order to get difficulty “just right” without having to complain to implement rebalancing in mainline. (other than new features, but those could come with their difficulty value as well)

But is it feasible to do so without lots of work?

[Coolthulhu]

But is it feasible to do so without lots of work?

Not in a balanced way.

It would be possible to write a Lua script that multiplies all stats by some value or even recalculates them non-linearly, though.

[Soyweiser]

I seem to recall somebody suggesting to pisskop (of pk’s rebalance mod) to introduce more variants via the Z growth line. So instead of Z -> Spitter Z (I have no idea what the upgrade lines are, this is an example).

It would become Z -> Z2(slightly stronger) -> Z3 (stronger) -> Spitter Z.

that way you can introduce a little bit of variance. And if you keep the names / description of the various Z levels the same, you would not even notice the upgraded status as a player.

No idea if that is exactly how it works. But could that be a good stopgap solution?

(this however will have to be introduced as a mod, as it greatly breaks savegame compatibility in various ways).

[kevin.granade]

Applying any kind of simple scaling to a monster or group of monsters with a lua-based mod would be trivial, look at the contents of the zombie speed adjustment mods for an example.

I don’t have any intention of doing more work to make this more user friendly, though I’m not opposed to someone else writing a nice ui (in or out of the game, both would work) to make adjusting those parameters more friendly.

[BeerBeer]

If it were possible to inject percentile ‘difficulty values’ for player & monster hp, player and monster attack damage, effectiveness of armor, player & monster speed and everything else imagined, somewhere in the code, that would be awesome.

Yes. This. A thousand times this.

I might see a dilemma though. If these are added into general game options, possibly in an entirely new tab, it would mean that the settings could be changed at any time. If, on the other hand, we put the various zombie toughness settings into the world settings, then any regrettable choices cannot be reversed without creating a new world, or resetting the world (I wouldn’t know).

Do we want to allow the (pansy) players to tweak down their settings or do we want them to live with their choices? Cata may be about freedom but it’s also a roguelike.

I would only allow tweaking the zombie settings - HP, speed, attack damage, possibly hearing range, vision range and other senses. Maybe check how Project Zomboid does this. We would have to be careful with each setting, as giving hulks 100% attack strength might mean instakill. The allowed range should be conservative at first. Each setting’s extremes would have to be considered to avoid inadvertent tragic choices.