I would just like to note that if you want to make the game harder, i suggest you do one of two things:
A) Make light step only take your sound levels down a point or two, as in dynamic spawn mode i can drag around a wheel barrow and spawn NO zombies, or
B) Make static spawn the only option. You could also tell people that light step in dynamic spawn mode makes the zombies disappear.
[quote=“nacional100, post:20, topic:8906”]a) Any bite will infect you
b) Although you will be able to kill zombies with one blow, spawn rate will be much higher.
C) armor will never totally protect you.
d) System of “facing”.
E) following the same logic, another tasty idea would be enemies making you fall to the ground when 3 or 4 of them attack you at once.
G) Zombies can’t smell you.[/quote]
A) This would only hurt weak survivors and thus be the kind of balancing we are trying to avoid here.
B) This would make regular zombies much weaker than now, while buffing special zombies hard. You’d be drowning in acid and lightning, but regular zeds wouldn’t even get a chance to bite you.
C) You mean as armor nerf, coverage nerf or what? Both armor nerf and coverage nerf could work, but they would only be realistic for cotton and leather armor (which is way more effective than it would be in real life). Realistically, a plate mail would make one immune to punches and bites. Though realistically, a survivor wouldn’t be able to get one.
D) Facing wouldn’t solve much - zombies aren’t weak because surrounding doesn’t do much, they are weak because they don’t even get to surround. Kiting zombies is very easy.
E) As above, plus it would result in bullshit deaths when you’re stunlocked after you mis-step between 4 zombies, while not affecting careful players at all. Basically, a noob trap.
G) Scent is the only sense that zombies can use against a careful player. This would make night raids even easier than they are now and encourage reckless behavior instead of tactics.
Also, there is no F)
[quote=“Cataclysmic Days Await, post:21, topic:8906”]I would just like to note that if you want to make the game harder, i suggest you do one of two things:
A) Make light step only take your sound levels down a point or two, as in dynamic spawn mode i can drag around a wheel barrow and spawn NO zombies, or
B) Make static spawn the only option. You could also tell people that light step in dynamic spawn mode makes the zombies disappear.[/quote]
Dynamic is deprecated thanks to efforts toward persistent (continue to exist on the map, independent of the player’s presence) critters. That required saving each and every critter to the map, and made the thousand-critter-plus Dynamic pools kill older machines (such as mine) during worldgen.
[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:22, topic:8906”][quote=“nacional100, post:20, topic:8906”]a) Any bite will infect you
b) Although you will be able to kill zombies with one blow, spawn rate will be much higher.
C) armor will never totally protect you.
d) System of “facing”.
E) following the same logic, another tasty idea would be enemies making you fall to the ground when 3 or 4 of them attack you at once.
G) Zombies can’t smell you.[/quote]
A) This would only hurt weak survivors and thus be the kind of balancing we are trying to avoid here.
B) This would make regular zombies much weaker than now, while buffing special zombies hard. You’d be drowning in acid and lightning, but regular zeds wouldn’t even get a chance to bite you.
C) You mean as armor nerf, coverage nerf or what? Both armor nerf and coverage nerf could work, but they would only be realistic for cotton and leather armor (which is way more effective than it would be in real life). Realistically, a plate mail would make one immune to punches and bites. Though realistically, a survivor wouldn’t be able to get one.
D) Facing wouldn’t solve much - zombies aren’t weak because surrounding doesn’t do much, they are weak because they don’t even get to surround. Kiting zombies is very easy.
E) As above, plus it would result in bullshit deaths when you’re stunlocked after you mis-step between 4 zombies, while not affecting careful players at all. Basically, a noob trap.
G) Scent is the only sense that zombies can use against a careful player. This would make night raids even easier than they are now and encourage reckless behavior instead of tactics.
Also, there is no F)[/quote]
A) It would not! Any survivor can be bitten. It would achieve the following: experienced survivors can no longer kill 200 zeds by hand and enter a Mall. They have to focus on making a plan which allows them to do so. And begginer survivors won’t be looking to enter malls, but raid small shops or pick berries until they are better equiped.
B) I would play without special zombies, but of course that depends on your taste. If you still want shockers and spitters, the game can be configured so that many more vanilla zombies are spawned, and once in a while a special one joins the party. And of course classic zombies will be weaker on their own. The point is, hordes are the ones you will fear.
C) I agree
D) If you increase spawn rates, zombies do surround. And if the city were designed as I explained, it would be more possible that a large group comes unexpectedly from behind a corner.
E) even careful players will have to think thrice before messing up with a horde. Have you seen TWD? I think this concept is well depicted. The survivors have guns and all the shit, but often they get surrounded and cornered anyway . It’s a matter of logic. Don’t you find the absurdity of 4 zombies punching and biting you without daring to step into your tile?
G) I agree with that.
I am not suggesting my ways are the only ones. I’m just saying I like them, and there must be a way to make the game more difficult for ANY player, not only newbies.
Aren’t roguelikes about that? Even an expert player in Angband, NetHack, ADOM, ELONA, Brogue, etc, will die often.
[quote=“nacional100, post:24, topic:8906”]A) It would not! Any survivor can be bitten. It would achieve the following: experienced survivors can no longer kill 200 zeds by hand and enter a Mall. They have to focus on making a plan which allows them to do so. And begginer survivors won’t be looking to enter malls, but raid small shops or pick berries until they are better equiped.
B) I would play without special zombies, but of course that depends on your taste. If you still want shockers and spitters, the game can be configured so that many more vanilla zombies are spawned, and once in a while a special one joins the party. And of course classic zombies will be weaker on their own. The point is, hordes are the ones you will fear.
C) I agree
D) If you increase spawn rates, zombies do surround. And if the city were designed as I explained, it would be more possible that a large group comes unexpectedly from behind a corner.
E) even careful players will have to think thrice before messing up with a horde. Have you seen TWD? I think this concept is well depicted. The survivors have guns and all the shit, but often they get surrounded and cornered anyway . It’s a matter of logic. Don’t you find the absurdity of 4 zombies punching and biting you without daring to step into your tile?
G) I agree with that.
I am not suggesting my ways are the only ones. I’m just saying I like them, and there must be a way to make the game more difficult for ANY player, not only newbies.
Aren’t roguelikes about that? Even an expert player in Angband, NetHack, ADOM, ELONA, Brogue, etc, will die often.[/quote]
A) You mean making bites essentially insta-kills, like in say, Project Zomboid? Then melee would get worthless… And dogs would be the worst thing ever.
B) Due to roguelike mechanics, even hordes can be funneled. Zombies walk in straight lines.
D) They only surround until you learn how to kite. Until we have advanced zombie spawning/AI mechanics that make them work in semi-organized way, you can always dance in spot to make them form a narrow triangle. Plus, faster zombies get in front of slower zombies.
E) I haven’t seen TWD. I’m pretty sure movie mechanics don’t translate well into games, especially roguelikes. Multiple creatures per tile could solve a lot of problems, but the entire DDA is designed around one-creature-per-tile, changing this would be like adding z-levels (a big project). Instead, we have considered (we as forum in general) adding a “grabbed” debuff to zombie attacks that would slow you down and make it harder to fight.
Your idea of zombies would make it much harder for the newbies (both new survivors and new players), while not affecting established survivors (who have guns and skills with bows). There are many ways to negate the threat of ambush right now, both outside (slowly “shaving off” zombies, aggroing them one by one) and inside (knocking on the walls to provoke them into angrily stomp and smash things, revealing their numbers).
I’ll probably help you with making your mod (after feature freeze wears off and when I’ve got enough time), but I don’t think it would solve the difficulty problem.
Other roguelikes differ in one very important thing: they have “difficulty levels” tied to dungeon levels. DDA is open world.
OK. It is clear that we have different thoughts about the matter. I personally refuse to lose faith in the permanent evolution of gameplay mechanics, in this case applied to a Zombie simulator.
I won’t focus on this problem yet. Probably later in my life, when I finish studying computer science! I hope that then I will have the skill to simulate the apocalypse as I wish.
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