Ranged combat nerfed?

[Clek]

So I apparently missed quite a few updates jumping from the last stable to the latest experimental.
I wondering if it’s just me or did ranged combat get nerfed heavily?
I’m sitting in a field at night trying to take out two Military turrets at an military outpost. I’m as close as possible before they can shoot me and I’m wielding an HK416A5 with standard .223 and a rifles skill of 3 and a markskmanship skill of 3.

I’m maxing out my steadiness and it shows I have a 7% hit chance and 9% to graze the target. Shouldn’t this be a little bit higher considering my target is brightly lit, stationary, I have all the time in the world to aim and using an Assault rifle (semi auto fire)?
So I turned on debug mode and ramped up rifles and marksmanship skills up to 10, just to see if it’s because of my “low” skills but this didn’t actually change that much. Is this intended for balance reasons?

[Solusphere]

It’s not intentional. From what I understand it’s the result of some futureproofing changes to the accuracy calculations, which messed with the balance in unanticipated ways. Kevin has been slowly working on it, while looking for real-world data on weapons with which to calibrate the system going forward.

Coolthulhu’s patches (found here) revert the accuracy system to how it was before. I’m not sure how up to date they are though.

[Clek]

Thanks a lot. Good to know this isn’t the final stage because I was going insane trying to hit those turrets.
Any idea how I’d go about installting these patches and if it’s even possible in an already running save/world?

[Solusphere]

No idea, sorry. I don’t use them myself. You could try asking in the mod’s thread.

[vassock]

I wonder if anyone can chime in on this. I noticed even Coolthulhu’s patch doesn’t fix this too much. If anyone has fired a decent rifle with a decent scope, you know you can hit pretty much any zombie in the head at any or most of the ranges that DDA is even capable of displaying with about a 95%+ probability. In my last game, I made a lot of progress and finally got the A7 laser rifle. I just couldn’t keep playing when I saw I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with it. Turrets are just as difficult to hit despite being sitting ducks. This is THE game breaker for me. Guns should be cool. In this game they are tedious/worthless. I realize practical accuracy in combat situations drops, but stress and experience are not modeled in this game (like they are in 7.62) and until that’s implemented, if ever, they need to set accuracy to that of a target range.

They need to forget about the 0.D milestone open items until they deal with this. Seriously, I don’t care about soup spilling out of my can if I leave it on the ground! Can someone explain how I can get a vanilla experimental and mod this in myself?

[kevin.granade]

If anyone has fired a decent rifle with a decent scope, you know you can hit pretty much any zombie in the head at any or most of the ranges that DDA is even capable of displaying with about a 95%+ probability.

Gun performance is intentionally scaled to fit the ranges possible in the game, if we made effective gun ranges match the real-world equivalents, two major things would happen.

1. Any enemy with a gun could shoot you (at kill shot accuracy) as soon as they detect you. That means turrets, combat bots, and hostile NPCs.
2. Any enemy without long ranged attacks would be trivial to kill with any serious gun.

A lesser but still serious issue is that if we instead made gun accuracy reflect real-world ranges and “saturate” at sight range, there would essentially be no difference between the vast majority of guns, and essentially no differentiation between different player skill levels with respect to guns.

Addressing this requires a massive overhaul to how the game world is modelled, which I plan on doing, but not immediately, and to be honest, it’s not even on my top 10 list of major priorities.

Coolthulhu’s patches (found here) revert the accuracy system to how it was before.

That reverts to the state as of https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/17962 and https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/18020 or so, which established a maximum range of 30 squares for all firearms. This is technically “before” , but it does not match the state as of 0.C. The ranged handling as of 0.C was extremely different.

stress and experience are not modeled in this game (like they are in 7.62) and until that’s implemented, if ever, they need to set accuracy to that of a target range.

Just the opposite, if we consistently gave the player the benefit of the doubt in every case where we aren’t handling something yet, every time we make the game more detailed would be a nerf, that doesn’t work.

Can someone explain how I can get a vanilla experimental and mod this in myself?

CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/blob/master/COMPILING.md

[vassock]

But don’t you think it’s cartoony to make ranges totally nonsensical just for the sake of making guns practically “different?” It’s fine to avoid modeling stress levels and just make guns target range accurate. The only time I’ve really seen stress levels modeled to affect accuracy was in combat simulators, not zombie apocalypse games. The vast majority of enemies in this game are NOT humans (some games don’t even have humans I would imagine) and therefore can be thought to be of as little more than walking targets. So why model to game to always reflect what would be the case 1% of the time in a “real world” situation (a human encounter) at the expense of not modeling the game to always reflect what would be the case 99% of the time? Just to give a “sniper rifle” an accuracy advantage over an assault rifle fired semi-automatically? Personally, I find having no difference between a sniper rifle and an assault rifle accuracy wise in single shot to be far more bearable than what the case is now with the unbelievable accuracy issues. If worst comes to worst, just take the weapons named after really accurate guns out of the game. Who would miss them? The game can’t even simulate long-range encounters.

Guns now seem to work like homemade pipe rifles where accuracy is concerned.

[psyxypher]

Personally, I think that burst mechanics should be changed so you can actually fire that burst of 10 bullets in a straight line…

[Midas]

But there’s already

no difference between the vast majority of guns, and essentially no differentiation between different player skill levels with respect to guns.

Seriously.
In most my games I find all guns identical, the main difference is ammo only. Effective shooting distance for almost every gun in the game is point blank or 5-6 tiles max, so shotguns and 9mm SMG are the absolute choice.

[psyxypher]

Effective shooting distance for almost every gun in the game is point blank or 5-6 tiles max

Really now? I’ve managed to get effective distances at about twice that range for some guns (read: Rifles), while having that issue for SMGs and Shotguns…but those are supposed to have small ranges.

IMO, the main problem is Dispersion, because it makes it incredibly hard to have a good shot at range, and it gets even harder the further out you try to shoot.

[Midas]

Yup. I tried with various types of firearms, and after the distance of 5-6 tiles I miss much more than I want from a reliable weapon (and I still have to spend turns to aim).
I tried to shoot a military turret with fully tuned-out sniper rifles from a minimum safe distance, from more than 200 shots 0 headshots, 5 got, 5 grazed. Yes, I know that turret is smaller than human, but I expected much better perfomance from a sniper rifle with scope and stuff in hands of a skilled marksman against the immobile target. Spits of corrosive zeds are just about accurate as a rifle.

About the balance problems:

Any enemy with a gun could shoot you (at kill shot accuracy) as soon as they detect you. That means turrets, combat bots, and hostile NPCs.

Should guns be only binary? Like either the divine instrument of instant destruction, either the almost useless metal stick? Military turrets are pretty deadly already, NPCs are too. And enemy with firearms should be considered dangerous, hmm?

Any enemy without long ranged attacks would be trivial to kill with any serious gun.

I think spawnrate of guns and ammo could be reduced to make them more valuable.

[vassock]

I already get killed by NPC with firearms as soon as I aggro them and walking into a turret’s range in a lab is often a death sentence unless every inch of your body is covered by heavy armor to prevent the 9mm rounds from penetrating.

Every zombie movie out there paints guns as very useful and stocked gun stores as the holy grail. Here we have lots of gun stores, but even tuned up guns are little more useful than a katana.

[psyxypher]

I have much different experiences with guns. Usually, I’m doing pretty good, even at low levels of skill. Also keep in mind that if you do put a ton of mods on your gun, you actually increase the aim time by making it heavier (that being said, I’m not sure if the Rail Laser Sight does anything because its weight might actually counterbalance the aim-speed bonus). Second, Bipods are only usable on very few surfaces (likely leading to Midas’ outcome above); perhaps changing this would help.

I’m pretty sure I’ve said this, and I’ll say it again: Recoil and Dispersion hamper guns a lot. Hopefully Kevin will move the hardcoded cap on Dispersion over to item definitions in the near future so people can experiment with 0 Dispersion weapons. I feel it might address some (but not all) issues.

[tarburst98]

yeah, i’d be fine if the big gun(barrett rifle) could get 0 dispersion but took even longer to aim then it does now, it’s supposed to be the absolute final in extreme range firepower, it’s loudness combined with a silly aim time would mean you can get one or two good shots off at a target before the horde starts to descend on you, which is enough to soften or kill whatever it is you are shooting at. aka it would perfectly fit it’s job of killing a SINGLE high profile target while being basically worthless at shooting a group.

[vassock]

Seriously, there is no dispersion at the ranges present in this game, except maybe if you take a revolver and remove the barrel.

[psyxypher]

Seriously, there is no dispersion at the ranges present in this game, except maybe if you take a revolver and remove the barrel.

You and me are playing very differently, if that’s the case. What guns are you using?

[vassock]

I’m talking about in real life.