- Let us increase/decrease spawn rates of certain things
- adjust spawn rate of buildsing with special spawns (hospitals,schools megastores)
- increase how many zombies that spawn in towns. along with special spawn rate. dont let us pick which ones. everyone will just jack up shockers.
- spawn rate of stuff in wilds. have categories: monsters, animals, fungus. higher hostile spawns should also have higher corpse spawns. to balance
- more special areas like jails,labs,bunkers, etc… make it 1 total option.
- increase how many zombies,etc… are spawned in the special areas. if it has more zombies in it, have it have more rewards.
- incease hostility of animals. default is how we have it now. let us make wolves,bears more hostile. will let us keep the game more interesting as we get stronge
- increase in spawns that may make it easier (like wildlife. ) leads to more bad weather.
- higher zombie spawn rates in town and special spawns lead to more of the ‘better’ buildings like sporting goods stores, army surplus, pharmacy/liquor store, gun store. risk and rewards.
- option to let bears,cougars break windows and break into shelters. this can go up in ‘winter’ cause they are hungry. have them come in groups at you. this is one you can raise when you get stronger so its more challenging.
If I want my playthrough to halve the number of FEMA camps, and have those that remain full of shockers, I’m not sure how that defeats your ability to enjoy the game.
Balancing for the default is fine, but I don’t believe it’s feasible or desirable to balance for every possible option setting (or restrict the options such that the only available options are those that have been balance-tested). I’m here to have fun, not slack-rope walk across the Grand Canyon. Not hugely concerned with “balance”.
As such, I oppose artificial restrictions on the World Factory’s options. Should be a separate setting for each type of building, critter, etc. Feel free to have proportion-links optional or suggested, but not mandatory.
I would love to see this feature.
Only if it’s for the debug menu , so i could have good old fun with explosions and thousands of zombies.
In the legit game this feature would be extremely unbalanced when you can make 100 squirrels spawn in your house.
And BTW wildlife spawns should be massively reduced.
I keep on having my front entrance full with literally hundreds of spider , wolf and coguar copses.
I think there should be a Scenario Mode with (say, The Big Apple, Big Pickle and Big Raw Potato) presets you can alter a bit. The branching of professions comes before, if you catch my drift.
So, anyone playing with it? The spawn, the climate, the enemy formation, the whole setup?
if you add it to options you can choose to make the game harder. Another option is make the game more dangerous as time goes on. so you gotat work fast. you need to secure your shelter with traps and fences… etc.
you get to a point in this game where its pretty easy. it doesn’t take that long. its really a matter of finding bigger guns. then keeping some explosives on you in case you get in a pinch. i never feel in danger at my shelter.
This will, in part, be added to the World Builder system once I get to it. I have a basic layout I’d like to get to work, and will share the details of that when I start that section. Not finalized in my head quite yet 
We should probably talk some more about that, actually.
I’d love to see a huge list of toggleable options come up when generating the world, but I don’t see why, for example, turning up the rate of animal spawn should cause the weather to get worse.
Maybe I want to play a game where all supernatural stuff is disabled, so it’s like The Last Man or something similar. I don’t see why I should be punished just for wanting to disable or alter a particular set of functions or monsters.
Either don’t let us change the world, or let us do whatever we want.
That’s the sandbox way. Adding arbitrary rules to something purely for fun is just irritating. I dislike games that do that, especially when it’s just singleplayer (ala Cataclysm)
I am with you two about enforcing arbitrary rules.
Just make it a list of toggles.
I am all for open options. And to add to that add a nifty indicator, the Difficulty Indicator. Something like from 1-100 depending on your choices. So tons of hulks are hard, tons of squirrels is easy, etc,etc. This way we could have there be balance (say 75 is standard difficulty) and people would be able to compare to each other more easily (I survived a week on 100, I survived 2 weeks on 90).
Do you agree?
That is a very cool idea!
[quote=“Otaku, post:11, topic:2553”]I am all for open options. And to add to that add a nifty indicator, the Difficulty Indicator. Something like from 1-100 depending on your choices. So tons of hulks are hard, tons of squirrels is easy, etc,etc. This way we could have there be balance (say 75 is standard difficulty) and people would be able to compare to each other more easily (I survived a week on 100, I survived 2 weeks on 90).
Do you agree?[/quote]
That’s a brilliant idea!
Difficulty-indicator sounds nifty in theory.
I’m not at all sure about achieving agreed-upon standards for difficulty, though. Example: a Boomer is annoying (in concert with others, potentially deadly) to melee fighters…but pretty harmless to ranged. Smokers hard-counter ranged and require the character to have a gas/filter mask, but are otherwise not a problem.
Do I get difficulty bumps for traits chosen? Profession/lack thereof? Probably worth its own thread at least.
The difficulty should not take character traits/whatever into account. Just assume a default char, 8 in all attributes and no traits.
Not sure why the fear of balance and overpowering things is happening, considering in the options as they are now you can start yourself with 0 points, and then take traits like bad back/near-sighted/forgetful/jittery and BAM! You’re playing a hopeless cataclysm as a wobbly old grandma 
Or crank the max points to 25 in options, take all the gentler negative traits (glass jaw/trigger happy/etc) and then use debug wish for an assault rifle and a vest and some protein shakes and BAM! You’re playing Rambo…
Sometimes I play a hopeless weakling, sometimes I spawn myself a grenade launcher with every type of ammo on hand and just go on a shelling spree. Any option that allows… options… is good I’m just not sure why the season length minimum is set to 14 now, though 
Guess in my opinion the more options we have the more scenarios we can simulate, which leads to more immersion, more gameplay stories, and more greatness overall. I’m just waiting on the ability to turn zombie dogs off 
Gram-gram can’t outrun them 
I’m here to comment on the balance issues. This isn’t a board game, its not multiplayer. The only reason I can see for balance outside of the default settings would be, as was stated before, to compare ones gaming ability with other’s. This can be overcome by a simple tournament honor system such as: I start a thread outlining the rules we’ll play by (settings and what not) and post your characters end sheet (memorial) here to see how you compare.
Again balance isn’t necessary for anything other then the default settings. But I’m also not a developer of anything in any sense so maybe it is more important, but I don’t see a need for balance between a 0 point character and a 25 point character. One will always have an easier game then another.
Besides the raw luck of your spawn point and world generation, as well… For the purposes of showing off a difficulty rating number would be awesome, but even then results (luck) may vary. Could make a [VANILLA] tag on the main screen to show on screenshots that nothing has been altered from the generic settings… Granted, tricky folks could just photoshop their own tag in, but that’s your own deal
The masochists among us need a way to represent the hell they lived through, though, and memorial files and screenshots can always be edited by the dishonest (though I love the addition of the memorials, definitely something to have). Could do old-school POINTS!, where certain settings have multipliers and in-game actions/achievements award points… I’m catching the irony just now of someone named deadmerits talking about honor systems (no offense intended at all, just awesome)
In my opinion a game is balanced when you can adjust it to greatly alter the difficulty (both up and down), at least by designing a fragile character (and that’s been doable for a long while now). Not all gamers are as talented as the next, so weaker settings make any game more E for everyone. Its only bad when you crank it to the absolute max and give yourself every available handicap and still have an easy time…
Most gamers plot and plan (or read guides) and stack the deck in their favor in every possible way, sometimes right down to fractions of increases and this basically makes the game too weak (especially these newer console games)… But yeah, you can set up literally thousands of challenging modes/rulesets of the same base game, and this ends up creating an all-time classic that’ll still have a fanbase in hundreds of years after we’re all dead and gone. Any additional focus on experience alteration will only benefit it more. Is there anyone that plays cata that doesn’t open the options to alter at least one thing before starting??
i’m all for increasing the variety of options in the game, but the big one that i’d like to see would be map size/type.
small, medium, large, very large, huge, or infinite; island(s), swampland, riverland, desert, jungle, forest, hills, mountains, urban, or balanced.
[quote=“HunterAlpha1, post:19, topic:2553”]i’m all for increasing the variety of options in the game, but the big one that i’d like to see would be map size/type.
small, medium, large, very large, huge, or infinite; island(s), swampland, riverland, desert, jungle, forest, hills, mountains, urban, or balanced.[/quote]
This is a good idea.