If you’ve ever traveled across the US, you’ve probably driven down a seemingly barren road or out of the way main road and seen a small developed zone with maybe a bar, gas station and general store. Or sometimes even less; maybe just a bar, maybe just a general store and gas station.
My suggestion is to add to map generation the ability for bars or other places of that sort that could quite possible spawn on a long stretch of road by themselves. So, instead of just seeing a gas station every once in a while, you may see a bar and gas station.
Hell, you should even add the few random houses here and there.
Not every single person is going to live in city limits; there are going to be rural houses.
I think it would add a bit more towards fleshing out maps and giving more options of places to scavenge early game.
But it should be limited to bars, gas stations, general stores and houses. Anything else wouldn’t really make sense (IE: putting a liquor store out there would logically cause a lot of robberies, IRL)
Really good idea. I think this should be taken into consideration.
But should they be exactly like normal houses? What about making a different kind of house?
Cabins and farm houses are fine (all though I think it would be cool to add dirt/gravel roads), but I’m pretty sure there are roadside houses in rural New England, right? I honestly have no clue, haven’t been there haha.
Agreed on the trailer park thing not really making sense- outskirts of a city or behind an airport, perhaps. It’s really not the sort of thing you’d arbitrarily run into out in the middle of nowhere. “Mobile home” trailer parks of the type many people would guess at are also vanishingly rare in New England, as they’re just not that survivable in the winter. Off-the-grid single family homes on their own lots (old farm houses or modular homes) are 99% of what you’d run into.
As for where it would make sense- tourist/summer camp towns in the Adirondacks, Catskills, and Northern Appalachia tend to have gobs and gobs of summer-home trailer parks and permanent RV camps. Either way, the biggest haul from a place like this should be generators, propane, and LNG.
On the same topic, I’d rather see a hills-have-eyes type mutant enclave that only spawns out in the middle of nowhere. With a nuclear crater or some such thrown in for good measure.
The problem is that from a game play perspective, this would make the game even easier to the point of it being pretty much game-breaking in DDA’s current state. The only thing that really keeps any semblance of balance is that pretty much everything useful is either in the centre of towns (with loads of Zs around) or in compounds. Even just a few little rural areas would make the early/early-mid game laughably easy.
To test this out, set city size as 1 or 2 and see how hilariously easy it is.
Granted, a few more flavourful buildings like a few bar stops might be ok in strict moderation (much like gas stations now), but I don’t think small villages would be a good idea balance wise.
[quote=“Binky, post:13, topic:4856”]The problem is that from a game play perspective, this would make the game even easier to the point of it being pretty much game-breaking in DDA’s current state. The only thing that really keeps any semblance of balance is that pretty much everything useful is either in the centre of towns (with loads of Zs around) or in compounds. Even just a few little rural areas would make the early/early-mid game laughably easy.
To test this out, set city size as 1 or 2 and see how hilariously easy it is.
Granted, a few more flavourful buildings like a few bar stops might be ok in strict moderation (much like gas stations now), but I don’t think small villages would be a good idea balance wise.[/quote]
Going to the edge of a huge town and looting houses would be the same exact thing as looting a house along a stretch of road.
Setting the town sizes low would be make the game easy, of course, because special shops like military surplus and gun shops would still spawn.
But houses and bars aren’t that huge a destination for loot. Of course a house on a long road could spawn a survivor’s basement; but that’s no different than a house on the edge of town spawning a survivor’s basement.
From a real-world perspective, having some random, road-side businesses out in the boonies somewhere and more rural homes spattered around makes sense. Although you could also argue they don’t exist in DDA because of insert near-future reason here.
I agree they could make the already laughably easy game-play even easier though. I guess if they were pretty much completely looted already so they just gave you some rudimentary items and a place you can fix up for a temporary holdout it’d not throw the curve off even further. Having them near the roads (and, in my dream world … we get working driveway type road that automatically connects buildings to the main roads … oooh the fantasy!) would mean that when NPCs & hordes get fixed and stuff, you’d probably be less safe living in a place right by the main highway as you’d be easier to find.
The assumption I’m making is, if YOU (survivor) think it could be a good place to loot because its out in the middle of nowhere and probably “safe” then any other of the few still-living looters out there would probably have come to the same conclusion & gotten to it first (or the owners, seeing as how there are less zombies in rural areas, “got out” with their possessions and died somewhere else).
There are loads of ways to make this work (a lot more stripped/looted houses on the outskirts as Dominae says for instance) but at the moment it’d just make for even easier pickings without much danger of dragging more zombies in from the centre of cities.
I do think it needs some extra buildings out and about though, just heavily looted ones where the food/water/gear cost of exploring probably equals itself out.
But having them already looted or heavily “picked” is pointing towards there being other survivors in the world actively doing something, if not then it begs the question, “Who did this and where are they?”
Also, you can go to a size 10 town and easily loot houses on the outskirts with very little zombie attention; how is that any different than looting a house not in town?