I agree that ranged weapon usage kind of sucks due to the lack of ammunition, but nerfing melee isn’t the way to fix it. After quite a bit of experience I feel quite confident in saying that melee is, if not WELL balanced, then at least balanced in such a way that it’s fun. Ranged on the other hand is flat-out unpleasant, having to deal with limited ammunition, the weight and size of bullets/arrows/bolts, long aiming times, etc. Ranged combat just isn’t useful when you could have top-end melee weapons, armor, and bionics by the time you have a steady source of ammunition.
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Much of how I play now is with the assumption of what you wrote. I never like playing with any of my garments having an encumbrance over 10. So traveling with only light gear is nice. While giving a good reason for why I gripe about this in every garment topic. Yeah…the ones where I want more options for light “shoot & scoot gear”.
I hope however, that being ABLE to dodge completely will still exist. Maybe a percentage or something? To give a real life example. I got into a bit of a scerfuffle with a guy. I got away and we were near a outdoor work bench. Guy picks up a hammer an whipped it at my head. I dodged it completely and it went through a window lol
My point? You can break a grab where without taking harm from someone trying to harm you as well as completely dodging melee and other non-gun weapons with little or no training. It is a tough thing to code. I sympathies.
Hows that going by the way? Make a thread for it if you have stuff to test specifically. I’d like to test it.
We could have some sort of debuff for when the player gets surrounded by a horde (or pushed against a wall) that not only decreases dodge, but makes it harder to attack, move and breathe on a general sense to simulate those scenarios where people get trapped within a crowd and sometimes suffocate in it.
Having dozens of zombies pushing against you by all sides should be a death sentence in most cases.
Also agree a bit with armor values. Even if you’re covered in kevlar, getting repeatedly beat up is going to chip away at you, but it’s important to make it so armor isn’t suddenly ineffective against bullets and stuff.
More enemies with ranged attacks would be rad too.
I believe it already is if you don’t have Zui Quan or a ton of armor. You only get ONE dodge per turn by default, the second attack that comes your way can’t be dodged. And I think being grabbed prevents any dodging.
Zui Quan is OP primarily because it gives you more or less unlimited dodges per turn, that and the counterattack.
If you want to play an awful boring “realistic” game where you’re supposed to sit in one place, I suggest Seven Days to Die. When I played I even had repeated character corruption from a bug that existed for over a year, and got downvoted to hell in my review for saying it. Unturned was more fun, but it’s so boring and the interface was awful last I played. I like exploring in Cataclysm and a lot of the maintenance stuff going out of the way with “overpowered” CBMs. You’ll never forget when you die to something stupid, like a single acid spitter that beats the % coverage and suddenly your legs are melted and you can’t do anything. You’ll realize why you need “overpowered” things.
Reminds me, I’m probably the only person who ever played Minecraft with the goal of finishing the content and putting it down. 
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Survivor armor and good melee/dodge still let you stand in the middle of a small or medium horde without much problems. And what I previously said is that this scenario shouldn’t happen because a person would have REALLY restricted movement in the middle of dozens of zombies pressing against them from all sides, effectively leaving no space to dodge or attack or whatever.
I’m wondering what start scenario/world settings you do, that you get the materials for making all that stuff, and the power armor, and the CBMS with out leaving your initial area, do you play in a mega city? I normally have to travel a bit to find a bunch of CBMs, and military gear, and such. But haven’t started in a mega city I need to get better.
A bit contradictory here, you’re saying melee isnt “too good”, but it is “so good that ranged combat isnt with pursuing”. Those sound like the same thing to me.
In my own opinion, melee is certainly too good, particularly unarmed combat with its plenty of stunlocking techniques. As far as equipment, the thing that solves 90% of your problems is either an appropriate martial art trait, or an appropriate martial art book. The rest is just some basic protective armor against regular zombies, so you can grind the combat skills quicker, and that’s about it. Even at about 4 or 5 in melee, unarmed and dodging, you get to be a nigh unstoppable killing machine.
However, as a melee zombie-slayer and enthusiast, seeing melee just flat out nerfed in its current state I would very much consider a proper anti-fun move. As powerful as it is, melee is just one of two convenient ways of dealing with zombies right now. You either hit 'em to death, or you shoot 'em to death. And if I’m forced to just shoot 'em to death just for the sake of it, that’s basically just more keypresses.
What I would much rather have is proper support for variety in dealing with threats. Melee should be viable for most regular zombies, rather dangerous against Brutes or Soldiers, very dangerous against shockers or acidics, and straight out suicidal against Hulks. But there should be tools other than fight or flight - stealth, for scoping out locations before engaging in potential combat, proper tools for luring zombies out, such as perhaps intentionally triggered car alarms, things such as filthy clothing masking scent and reducing detection radius, etc. Zombies could also be made more scarce but more dangerous individually and more varied in things like speed, detection radius and similar, requiring more forethought in how to approach a situation.
Melee could then be made ‘realistic’, perhaps implementing limitations such as - you don’t want to hit a skeletal juggernaut with a katana since it’ll likely break, and the same goes for wanting to strike it with your first. Hulks being slower, but obliterating you if they smack you once, and so on.
Basically, what I’m trying to say is - nerfing melee to be ‘realistic’ would work best if melee is just another tool in a toolbox - being that the toolbox is rather tiny right now, nerfing melee is just meh.
There are zombie pheromones to mask your scent, and plenty of ways to lure zombies out (burning houses being the most popular).
I think that making zombie slaying less convenient is the main idea behind the melee nerf. Ranged accuracy was raised quite a bit ago, so they’re a far better option now.
I agree with the “tool in a toolbox” approach but close range as it is now is more of a multitool.
Sneak has been discussed a few times already and if I’m not wrong it is quite hard to implement without vision fields and those can’t be done without requiring mouses to play the game, which seems to be (understandably) a no.
Higher detection distance would be awful early game and irrelevant afterwards. And those make non combat solutions harder, which seems to not be your intention (or mine).
Once more stuff was in it’d give an opportunity for rebalancing. Different detection radius could add ghillie suit, refractive armor, etc. Enemies that sniff would have more threat than those that see. A kennel could have lots of zombie critters. In general there could be slightly more multi-hit or rapid weapons, so enemies could be segmented more by health/armor/speed. We already have scorched zombies, maybe “scorched” could have a risk of burning your gear and hurts you extra without fire protection, but a “molten” zombie would be a big problem. Both a hot zombie and cold (winter/lab) zombie could influence internal temperature, pushing a need for insulation and heating/dissipation mechanics.
It sounds dumb, but I was surprised rats and other critters weren’t interested in my food, nor me when I had food on me.
Speed is an annoying mechanic because this isn’t a classical fantasy rpg. No potions of speed, no boots of speed, wands of slow, etc.
Important distinction, I said that it isn’t worth pursuing late game because there just isn’t enough ammo. If there was more ammo around and/or it was able to be crafted more reliably/easily, it would be fine. When you have a 200 zombie horde, 500 rounds of 9mm just won’t cut it, and there’s usually a lot less than that lying around. The few times I’ve tried to do ranged weapon play I run out of ammo so fast it’s not worth doing. Regardless of how it’s balanced, I’m going to keep using melee most of the time because it’s just so much easier to manage.
That said, an A7 rifle and some solar panels throws that whole thing out the window and makes ranged play amazing. Even that uses more power than it probably should though.
For dodge one thing i can think of balancing it is if you dodge, you automatically move to an empty tile adjacent to you.
It may not sound much but if you think about it even if you have a character who have a high skill in dodge and have armor with low encumbrance but when your surrounded by zombies on all sides it doesn’t matter because you have you have no space to dodge to.
So with 2 or 3 zombies you can still dodge but still be cautious when there’s seven or more zombies on your sides.
But that’s just my suggestion cause i don’t know if its easy to code into the game
@Darktoes Yeah but if it was nerfed it wouldn’t be easier to manage, would it 
As a quick and easy buff to firearm combat, without doing anything to any other mechanic for the moment, I’d like to suggest significantly increased stockpiles of ammo at gunstores, and very large ammo caches at military installations. This makes perfect sense I think. At the moment in gun stores you can find like 40 rounds of a few types. I’m not a trigger-happy American, but wouldn’t gun stores have way more than that? Military bases should have crates full of ammo.
Making melee flat weaker wouldn’t make it harder to manage, it would just make melee fights longer (and they’re already far too long). Adding interesting mechanics that make it more complicated or strategic might be alright, but I think that most melee attacks themselves are already a bit weak, or maybe basic zombies have too many hit points.
More ammo would probably be fine as a stopgap, but in the long term I’d like to see some way of getting functionally infinite ammo. Maybe building camps in certain locations gives you a constant supply of resources? Maybe traders become common lategame and carry lots of ammo? Maybe laser/energy weapons become more common?
In my experience, letting more than three zombies get next to me is asking to start a death spiral, even with an endgame bionic mutant melee character. That gives me one dodge, and then I take two hits, which is no optimal, but doable with my setup.
That said a first day character with Zui Quan and a decent dodge skill doesn’t care how many zombies are next to him, but that’s a problem specifically with Zui Quan’s unlimited* dodges.
- actually I think it’s 100 dodges per turn, but at that point it might as well be unlimited.
Let me bring to the table an idea we’ve proposed before, grab and tear.
Zombies surrounding you and grabbing you pull you apart from every direction.
The more grabbed you are, the harder it is to dodge and the less your coverage matters, surrounded your 100% might become effectively 95%?
second one is just an idea, the first we should definitely have, especially with stronger zeds
I was actually thinking overall lower detection distance (coupled with stealth, crawling, hiding behind cover etc), but have certain zombies have better detection that you have to either avoid or lure away.
As for zombie pheromones, I don’t even consider that item to exist, since it’s so overpowered and easy to attain. You can literally clear massive zombie hordes with a fat stack of those with hardly any danger to yourself. There’s no diminishing returns, zombies don’t just become passive but rather kill for you, it’s so crazy good that I don’t even consider it canon. It’s more of a thing for crazy cataclysm.
The game in general suffers a lot from the fact that dealing with zombies is given very little development attention. It’s a major draw of the game, but far more effort goes into making the game a simulator. Which is not a bad thing in and of itself, it’s just that right now we’ve hit an awkward point where the design decisions of old are being replaced with new designs, and the melee system is super old and decrepit, but it doesn’t have enough support in the new systems to make overhauling it feasible, in my opinion. Too much relevant stuff is missing from a zombie apocalypse simulator, stealth and sensible NPCs being the prime example.
@Mantar Well yes, with dodge alone (unless your using Zui Quan) you won’t last against a group. If your armor can absorb all attacks then its something else. The grab and bite updates made it more dangerous, and thats a start.
@barbascientiam Agree with pretty much it all, I wish stealth was easier to flesh out in this game.
I think melee is quite good for beginner character, that is with 0 in all skills. One Zombie can be killed, a few more and ou have a problem. so no change here is needed.
For mid game char (I’ve never reached end game 
) there should be more hard enemies, possibly with ranged weapons, possibly with armour piercing attacks:
- Zombies (after some time) can have pistols and use it. Shold be powerfull enough to pierce player armor, but no insta kill. that would mean “Chaaaarge” is no option. Better: Pistols can be almost invisible under clothing, right? so unless player pass peception test “pistol” zoblies looks like regular ones.
- (more?) enemies with Armor penetrating attacks. Can be “Pain only”, or EMP-like (bionic power goes to zero or bionic is not useable for few minutes), paralizing, Radioactive…
- Grab attacks: No dodge, but also armor value should be reduced (imagine medieval knight with plate armor - safe against mob with knives, but if grabbed, knife between helmet and armor…),
- Damaged armor should have reduced coverage - holes in power armor don’t protect your body - but also should seriously reduce resistance to elements (fire, acid, water etc).
- so each armor (material ?) should have enemy who destroy it fast - acid for metal, bile for leather, etc. So if player is equipped with Super Armor he could be forced to retreat by some enemy (combination of enemies).
Or something like that. some stuff is/were in PK mod, but as it is pretty outdated, perhaps some stuff can be moved to Vanilla, or to few smaller mods?