Overall I’m pretty interested in the new changes. I’ve been playing since 0.A or about 2013-ish so changes like these are obviously really welcome (in my case) as they spice up and change the strategies I have to use immensely. I like getting a wrench thrown in my plans, maybe I’m just weird.
In any case my years of experience often trumps any hurdles I come across and I guess I can’t take any more shortcuts (as much as I’d love to) when it comes to CBMs.
I’ll just stick to night raids with a gun (if available) since night-time completely negates most of the shocker-variants as they can’t see in the dark with the light they produce (unless things have changed). I can easily avoid them or shoot at them with silent weapons like crossbows if need be, I only really engage them during mid-game when I’m hunting for bionics anyway. A fireaxe is both an available and powerful weapon and are insulated against shocks, perfect against general zombs as well as the surprise shockers/zappers.
they’re also a good place to put slightly advanced power storage solutions, and things which rely on them. which would include the robotics, drones, and exos you mentioned, but it’d also help with things like directed energy weapons. their primary limiting factor in real life is power density.
medical stuff is also likely, particularly things that might work as mutagen research precursors.
I would still love to see a variant of artifact generation that let us create procedurally generated super soldier serums that gave you powerful buffs and drawbacks for a relatively short time (days)
Does anyone just run at electric zombies and, I don’t know, just kill them quickly? Works well for me. Sure I take damage, but it’s not much of a loss, like 5- 25% of my health in damage.
I’ve done that, and sometimes come out fine, with maybe a minor loss to health, other times gotten badly zapped and come out with a few broken limbs, or set on fire and died instantly. Depends on luck.
Wait really? They can set you on fire? I’ve been shocked hundreds of times as I’ve played I’ve never started on fire from electric zombies. I’ve only started on fire once it was recently when a new enemy, some dark smoky boomer set me on fire. My ANBC suit got burnt one time and the other time my backpack burred up.
Also when I rushed electric zombies in the past I usually end up dead or low on all limbs no broken bones. I have very little experience with broken arms or legs because in this game I usually die because my head or chest broke. Arms and legs are easier to armor up due to having strapped armor you can wear over your armor. The chest and head don’t have that luxury. And get your face covered without too much encumbrance can be hard at times.
It’s happened to me twice directly, another time an incandescent husk caused stuff next to me to catch fire, and another time I’m not sure what happened, something exploded and insta-killed me, and the only special zombie around was an incandescent husk. It may have ignited a can of gas in my inventory. I’m not sure if they can actually set you on fire, but I’m pretty sure they can set your clothes on fire.
The most recent time I got broken limbs, the limbs already had some minor damage. Had a surprise encounter with a hidden shocker in a building, and I believe it broke both arms and took my head (previously uninjured) down to less than 10. That character has fairly low base hp though. The most they do with a single zap I think is around 25 damage, but sometimes they can get 2 or 3 off before you get within melee range, or before you take them down with a pistol or shotgun. Incandescent husks hurt more but have a short range field effect instead of a ranged attack, so getting close enough to hit them without getting zapped is difficult, but it’s easy to wear them down from range.
Yes, Incandescent husks are the ones that are easy to spot and down with ease for me. though they are rather rare and you might find electric-proof suits before you even meet one.
I’ve never used gas in CDDA, because I like batteries more. For my vehicles and machines, it just seems easier to me and more renewable too.
I primarily use melee in this game. The hatchet is one of the best early-game weapons. I now just got a poleaxe as I did a library start because I had the worst luck when it came to finding glassworking and historical smithing, and only my current 0.F game for the first time have I ever gotten my hands on them. This also might of happen too because I stopped using dino mod, which was the hardest mod I’ve dealt with. Due to bullet sponge dreadnought long necks everywhere. Even with Crit DMR, and hundreds of bullets that I wasted try to kill the masses of them.
I generally use electric as primary power source, with a gas or diesel engine as backup, with the exception of my mobile auto shop cart, which is all electric, and a 3x3-tile gun buggy with just a V8 or V12 for short trips.
Don’t think I’ve ever found an electric-proof suit in the game.
I also primarily use melee. But I tend to go hard on both bionics and mutations. Hatchet is great, but I usually opt for a tanbo (from one of my mods). Low damage, but high accuracy bonus, and very compact. Short enough that you can connect a quick blow with a flick of the wrist, yet long enough to still have a bit of reach. With the cumulative damage bonuses from my bojutsu martial art, it’s quite effective.
Never found an ANBC suit? Not surprising, I think it’s new. The hazmat zombies have it in labs and you can make it now.
I’ve had back luck not finding martial arts books. I roleplay myself and the best martial arts I found was ninjutsu in a lab start. I normally start with Taekwondo as that was a martial I learned in IRL to a black belt and it’s pretty useless in CDDA. As none of the unarmed weapons work with it because it seems to use only your legs. Which makes it good for using ranged weapons, but I don’t use them because I don’t want to/need to. And if I do use range it for some I can’t fight in melee because it’s too dangerous like an owlbear, juggernaut, or iron golem. Kiting works against all of these besides the owlbear, but that is the least worrying common baddie.
I found the survivor tech was really good when I started with it in a bunker start. As I’m an intelligent character. 10 str, 8 dex, 13 int, 6 per.
Oh, I might have found those. I do lab starts a lot.
Ya, that’s partly why I made my martial arts mod. With a couple of exceptions, it’s learned mostly through experience, trial and error. Skill levels matter somewhat, but it’s mainly hitting things, killing things, dodging things, getting hit, etc. all giving you various stacking +0.01 bonuses for as long as the martial art is active.
One of the characters I’m currently playing, as well as the previously mentioned character, are self-inserts as well. Martial arts training (judo and ninjutsu (bujinkan budokan)(plus bojutsu, kenjutsu, kyujutsu irl)), lots of book learning in various subjects, optimistic, and high alcohol tolerance, but physically disabled, hard of hearing, sleepiness + chronic insomnia, squeamish, stomach problems, overweight, social anxiety. I would 100% use bionics and mutations to overcome my disabilities if it was an option, so so does she. I’d definitely go for the optional extras too, like armour plating, just because.
There’s no gameplay nor lore value to having some random subset of cbms available from cdda-earth. Why would they be compatible or similar to a standard from another dimension? Or would we be developing two different, incompatible types of bionic? Keeping them on cdda-earth in anything like the old way restores all the same problems I’m trying to solve - how did elective bionic implants become widespread so quickly on a world otherwise like ours? Who developed and approved these technologies? Why isn’t more of cdda-earth different if they’ve got such difference in their prosthetic surgical gear?
Besides that, what would it add to gameplay? We’ve got cbm stores, zombies you can harvest cbms from, and very shortly will have explorable dungeons you can loot them from as well.
Best you could do is to replace “Failed Cyborgs” / “Broken Cyborgs” / “Tech Junkies” starting characters and all that stuff, making those being Exodii envoys that found earth before “The Blob” did, trying to establish a new place for them to live or something, but couldn’t “fix” themselves or find the materials to do so by themselves with earth’s (comparatively) primitive technology. That would give an explanation as to why such characters exist.
This would also have to lead to the full removal of Broken Cyborgs, Nurse Bots and Prototype Cyborgs from Labs and other earth spawns, or replacing them with Prototype Humanoid Robots - which are a thing we currently can kind of build IRL already.
This is assuming the CDDA Earth is to be kept as realistic as it can be - there are many other things that would need attention in that regard, but as far as CBMs go, I’m very much on the side of making them hard to find, considering installation is now (technically) easier with the Exodii doing it for you. Back before this faction, it was very much easy to become a bionic god in less than a month if you were lucky with dissection loot. Just within 1 lab and 2 or 3 anesthesia kits.
I don’t plan on removing most of the cyborg starts, just slightly refluffing them and making them later game - which they already should be. These are solutions in search of a problem. Likewise with the other cyborg-adjacent things, they’re just gaining new lore and becoming things that happen later in the cataclysm.
Alot of people almost never play later start scenarios, it could be risky making pretty much all the fun CBMs as later starts. Also to make labs more worth it, will there be more fun stuff involving mutations?
You could still have CBMs within labs, they’d just be rarer. Changed based on the new lore revamp; pitch it as more those labs dissecting and examining those CMBs and studying them, instead of actually creating them.
If I recall from an old lore tidbit. What kicked started the whole dimensional tech thing was a destroyed vessel that crashed into our dimension, dead passenger and all. An their advance tech lead to kick-starting much of the advance research. Could this passenger be replaced with a Exodii scout maybe?
Oooo, and maybe this can lead to the preservation of the failed cyborg starts, since our dimension tried and failed miserably to replicate the tech they found.
So you’d have,
Start A: Close to the beginning of the cataclysm, Cyborg players with a LOT of terrible cybernetic parts made poorly from reverse engineering.
Start B: Late game start with better cybernetics thanks to them being received from their original creators, the Exodii.