Some weapon's stat changes suggestion

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Hello, I noticed that some weapons have odd physical properties, their weight/damage/volume doesn’t really make sense when compare to both the real world or the CDDA’s world (semi-realism).
In this thread I will try to address and propose some changes to those weapons, making them more realistic in the game world.

Most items in Cataclysm does not represent a single, actual real world item but the way I see it they represent a class/group of similar items with (somewhat) similar weight/height/length/volume. This is apparent in the fact that an item can be a component in many different kind of recipes, although the end product may differ greatly from each other. An example is the pipe (http://www.wiki.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?title=Pipe), you can get those from lockers and with some other components - craft them into all kind of stuff from pipe shotgun to pipe bomb to crowbar (see this http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=3819.0) for my very rough calculation of the size of a “locker” pipe.
OK, now onto the main part.

Name: Heavy stick
Suggestion: Increase bash damage to 16, reduce to-hit to 2
Reason: Compare this to a two by four, it has almost identical weight but lower bash damage, higher to-hit. When talking about bash damage it’s pretty clear that the weight and how can you apply force to swing the weapon decide the damage. In this regard a heavy stick should do better (more damage) than a two by four.

Name: Baseball bat and Nail bat
Suggestion: Reduce bash damage of both to 26.
Reason: I feel like those two are too good as weapon, especially considering their weight in relation to other general bashing weapons.

Name: Pot
Suggestion: Reduce to-hit to 0
Reason: The pot isn’t a good weapon to hit zombies with. Better keep them clean for the next time you want to cook something.

Name: Frying pan
Suggestion: Reduce weight to ~2.8kg
Reason: I don’t know where the original number came from, but the average size of a cast iron pan is about 18-25 cm in diameter, about 2.8kg. Anyone with a better idea how much a “average” iron pan in CDDA universe weighs, feel free to suggest/correct me.

Name: Muffler
Suggestion: Increase bash damage to 22 and maybe reduce to-hit to -4 or -5 to balance it out.
Reason: It weigh around 9.5kg, might as well give it some hefty bash damage, while the negative to-hit still keeps it balanced.

Name: Pipe
Suggestion: Increase weight and maybe damage, to ~900g and 15 damage
Reason: Now this is tricky, I didn’t really specific a number because I simply don’t know what exactly the pipe in CDDA suppose to represent, according to the recipes and another thread there are “copper” pipe and “steel” pipe ingame, so decide the exact number will be hard. Anyone have suggestion for this?

Name: Rebar
Suggestion: Increase the damage a little, maybe 14. And this is not really relevant, but maybe rebar should be a possible component in crowbar crafting beside pipe.
Reason: Flavour.

Name: Wooden javelin
Suggestion: Nerf it a bit, as right now they are even stronger than wooden spear. I suggest decrease bash damage to 2, reduce volume to 4 and remove the WEAK BLOCK flag from it.
Reason: The change I proposed above is to make javelin a little weaker than wood spear in melee but the reduced volume means players can carry more of them around - that’s how I think a throwing weapon would work compare to its melee counterpart. Since the javelin is smaller and lighter, giving it a better bash damage don’t really make sense. The higher cut damage can stay the same.

That’s it for now, I may add more in the future, hope my suggestions match the realism I was going for. Any comments/criticisms are much appreciated.

Update1: Added wooden javelins to my list of suggestions.
Update2: Some changes to suggestion following the below discussion.

2

Hmm, have now learned that the proper term is ‘saucepan’, but here’s what came to mind for a cataclysm ‘pot’:

Muffler: yeah, but it bends & deforms easily. Not made for hitting things.

3

[quote=“GrizzlyAdamz, post:2, topic:3640”]Hmm, have now learned that the proper term is ‘saucepan’, but here’s what came to mind for a cataclysm ‘pot’:

The pot could use a better description then, I imagine them to be like this:

They do? TBH I don’t have much knowledge about cars, though given that they are pretty heavy I figure that they can deal good damage too (however unwieldy they may be).

Also, update the first post with wooden javelin.

4

Can’t say I’ve gone out and tested it, but if you do a bit of image-googling they’ve got a plethora of cross-sections. The piping one would grasp as a handle is thin, and the big bit you’d be striking things with is more or less hollow. Made to channel gas- not holding up well to other stresses is just inference.

5

Ahem, and now you should listen to a man who had been in Russian Army for two years and works in morgue as of now.

Heavy stick - don’t even fucking think about lowering to-hit. Why? Because good 'ole stick lays in hand pretty nice. So nice that humanity made a shitton of weapons utilizing the stick as a handle and inspiration.
Baseball bat e.t.c. - have you ever tried to hit a man with this shit? It can easily kill you if you take a full-scale blow in the head and that’s no joke. Thrashed skull isn’t a good thing to live with. Regards nailed one - have you ever seen a body mauled by the bear? I saw that. And I see very little difference between a bear and a man with a nail bat.
Muffler - no way, dude. Game’s muffler is an unwieldy shitbag of fuckery bull-ass. Why? Because it have no pipe to hold on. Muffler on a long pipe is a dangerous weapon, muffler without a pipe won’t be more effective than a rock in a sock.

6

Hey, your good use of english vocabulary aside, are you implying a rock in a sock isn’t the be-all end-all of melee weapons?! How dare you sir!

7

Ahem, I lost you for a moment, but did you mentioned that rock-in-a-sock is a thing worth using versus the undead rotting body empowered by the grey alien vomit-inducing goo on a regular basis?
That’s terrible, simply terrible. Disgusting and ignorant.
Try putting rock in a sock and beating up your behated ass-duff neighbour with it without receiving a crushing kick in the nuts and being beaten up(maybe even with assistance of a boot).
This is a weapon of misery, and this is never effective vs. the shambling pain-ignoring stinky dead bodies.

8

infectedmochi - regular pots (in new england) are the ones with the single handle on the side. The one you posted a picture of is specifically a stockpot, and other two-handled variants are stew pots.

We’re actually in the middle of a major item rebalance thanks to the amazing work of Rivet, so I’m pretty sure all of this stuff will get addressed for 0.9 or soon after regardless.

9

[quote=“trusty_patches, post:7, topic:3640”]Ahem, I lost you for a moment, but did you mentioned that rock-in-a-sock is a thing worth using versus the undead rotting body empowered by the grey alien vomit-inducing goo on a regular basis?
That’s terrible, simply terrible. Disgusting and ignorant.
Try putting rock in a sock and beating up your behated ass-duff neighbour with it without receiving a crushing kick in the nuts and being beaten up(maybe even with assistance of a boot).
This is a weapon of misery, and this is never effective vs. the shambling pain-ignoring stinky dead bodies.[/quote]


[size=12pt]Haters gonna hate[/size]

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Thanks for all the inputs :slight_smile:

About the heavy stick, I was thinking that because the stick is heavy, swinging it around isn’t gonna be easy - also I proposed the lower to-hit so it differ from other bashing weapon (pipe, bat) and keep it balanced with the damage increase. I’d like to point out that a large number of random-generated characters in the game have an above average Dexterity, so that will balance things out IMHO.
Regarding the bat, I did bash things with the bat before I don’t really notice a significant different compare to, say, a heavy wooden stick. But maybe just that I’m weak I don’t notice the different :stuck_out_tongue: Anyways I proposed the change to the bat and nail bat mainly with balance intention, but I will edit the post and tone it down a bit.
The description in the game mention the muffler “very unwieldy”, the -3 to-hit reflect this, do you think it should be lower? I want to keep the damage though so to balance it own I guess a reduced to-hit is warranted.

[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:8, topic:3640”]infectedmochi - regular pots (in new england) are the ones with the single handle on the side. The one you posted a picture of is specifically a stockpot, and other two-handled variants are stew pots.

We’re actually in the middle of a major item rebalance thanks to the amazing work of Rivet, so I’m pretty sure all of this stuff will get addressed for 0.9 or soon after regardless.[/quote]
Thanks for the clarifications :slight_smile: English is not my strong suit (I’m not a native English speaker) so some confusions are inevitable. I will update the first post accordingly.
Looking forward to Rivet’s items balancing.

12

Muffler: Not everything has to be a good weapon. And if it deforms on-hit, it won’t transmit as much force to the target.

13

You got a valid point - one that I overlooked before, now did we know for sure that the muffler in Cataclysm have a pipe attached or not. I’ll have to update it again the reflect this.

14

Do you guys actually look for mufflers and use them as melee weapons on purpose?
I expected you guys to argue about things like how much damage should a baseball-sized rock do instead :>

15

wooden javelins are supposed to be more powerful than a wood spear.
The wood spear is literally a heavy stick or 2x4 sharpened to a point. or was that the pointy stick now? geh, I can’t remember. been awake all night. Wooden javelins are the upgrade, fire-hardened tip and a grip.

Pipe: What’s the damage at now? 10? to be honest I think it’s fine where it is. If they were lead pipes I’d certainly want more damage but I’m pretty sure they’re small steel pipes, say 3ft in length-- or so I think from crafting them into makeshift crowbars. Then again, they’re long enough to use for chain link fencing. It is a mystery. If we do go with a 3ft one, you’d be able to get some leverage behind it but there would still be plenty of better weapons around.

Rebars: Yes please, and double for the crossbow crafting. Could make a nasty bolt out of them, but you’d need to make a crossbow that could fire them. Since someone modded in the Gantz Rustung I’m pretty sure a rebar crossbow would be a nice addition.

Basball bat: Maybe drop the damage a tad.
Nailbat: If you’re dropping the bash, up the cut. Stands to reason, if it’s full of nails you can’t bash with it properly, but the nails will still have a lot of force behind them to maul stuff. Might wanna check out injuries from them IRL, they’re pretty terrible.

16

[quote=“Iosyn, post:15, topic:3640”]wooden javelins are supposed to be more powerful than a wood spear.
The wood spear is literally a heavy stick or 2x4 sharpened to a point. or was that the pointy stick now? geh, I can’t remember. been awake all night. Wooden javelins are the upgrade, fire-hardened tip and a grip.[/quote]

A problem I see with the wooden javelin is that javelins isn’t supposed to be a superior weapon compare to a spear - if anything a javelin is weaker in melee because it’s lighter so can’t apply much damage and shorter so you can’t really gain a reach advantage. The javelin is supposed to be a throwing weapon, right now the game make no distinction of this - the javelin in game and the way it’s is described is a “better” weapon than a spear, the recipe for the javelin is weird, making a javelin from a spear is easier than a spear from a wooden stick.
I acknowledge that the wood spear require addition component to turn to a wooden javelin and while I don’t agree with this recipe, for now I won’t suggest that we change it, instead my proposal was that to make the javelin act more like an actual throwing weapon, it will be better at cut damage (all the additional components must do something), cannot block attack and lower bash damage because it weighs less and lower volume to reflect the fact the javelins are smaller and the player can carry more of them around.

An idea scenario would be the player carry a spear for close combat and several javelins to throw at zombies - soften them up before going for the kill.

17

Yeah, that makes sense. Lower weight and vol, lower bash slightly. Don’t remove block, even though they’re lighter they’ve still been hardened by the fire and any kind of spear or javelin would be perfect for blocking.

Should probably just give all spears/javelins block and fast attack, except pointy sticks which should get fast attack for virtue of being a sharpened stick.

18

The stabby spear things are supposed to be roughly like:
pointy stick -> wood spear -> knife spear
-> javelin

So I agree that the javelin shouldn’t be doing as much damage as the wood spear in melee.

19

The copper tubing that is in the game is about .50" in outside diameter. I know because I made the tubing, and sorted it out with Kevin Granade.

20

Thanks!