It would be nice if we had the ability to create mortars/mortar shells and/or find pre-existing military ones. We can already make a rocket launcher and a flamethrower, so a mortar isn’t much more of a stretch.
I’m thinking it should take a minute or two to set up, and accuracy would take a hit if you don’t have some sort of rangefinding tool like binoculars or something, but it would allow you to bombard areas outside of your view distance.
Maybe with an NPC ally and two-way radios you can have them act as a spotter to give a stacking accuracy bonus on subsequent attacks.
Maybe even add pre-collapse military artillery pieces that can spawn randomly, surrounded by their undead crew and soldiers guarding them with a big stack of shells. You can claim this base for your faction and assign allies to man the guns and respond to calls for fire support. Just make sure your gunners can aim, and you put a lot of guards and defenses around them since artillery guns are somewhat noisy.
would likely be difficult given that the reality bubble ends a bit beyond the vision range, so the enemies you are targeting don’t actually have a set position. how would you determine hits/misses and terrain damage when the tile isn’t loaded?
For mortars to be anything but a glorified grenade launcher we would need the ability to shoot beyond the reality bubble. This is likely to be implemented for sniping first but there is no reason that mortars would follow soon after,
I wonder if it would be feasible to store which block the shell would land in and then make the rest of the calculation when the player enters that area? I guess that could result in a weird floating object constantly asking “are we there yet?” Could be awful. Teleporting a temporarily invincible and invisible player to the target and calculating right away is probably better. But that has its own issues. You’d need to make sure all the player gear and everything was completely safe from the explosion since they aren’t actually supposed to be there.
I suppose the block loading algorithm could be coded to check for waiting artillery shells, but that could be a bit wonky for its own reasons. I’ve never looked at that code, though. Maybe it already has a list of edge cases it checks for and artillery could fit right in. I dunno.
I’m thinking fungicidal artillery would be pretty nice. It might sound good for clearing crowded cities too, but I think you’d end up destroying more loot than zombies. Lotta collapsed buildings.
Could also just spawn a pseudo-item explosive on a random square within a grid (size based on crew skill, gun and ammunition quality, and possibly weather) like the game does to create craters. That way the explosion only happens when the player is within sight of it. A bit immersion breaking, but easier than recoding the “bubble” system
The destruction would be a tradeoff. My tactics would be find a suitable area like a large parking lot or park space and have my guns target and fire a few ranging shots at it. The noise will draw in zombies, which will get hit with more and more accurate fire as time goes on and more go towards the noise. That way building damage is kept to a minimum, but any items the zombos had would be all but destroyed.