[Spoilers] Sketch II

[acidia]

WARNING!?! Discovery of new places is a large part of their appeal. The title has warned you already, leave now unless you are comfortable with missing out on an exciting part of the game. Please, please don’t spoil the fun for other people. I’ll leave it to your own discretion what to discuss outside this thread.

[spoiler]NECROPOLIS
Ground floor, designing a town with a square layout that can be both customized and blend in with the map to prevent suspicion.
The original map has three areas: motel, church, and pumping station. Some form of those have been included. The vault will be on z-2, accessed from the sewers on z-1. I decided to go ahead and post to get some suggestions on how the town should look. My plan was to build everything then choose bomb blast areas/craters… changing/destroying the town based on how close things are to these craters. Other than radiation, z-0 will have very few hazards. I don’t want to really give away that there is a vault under the town. My thoughts were to have a few CHUDS randomly throughout the area but when I spawned a few I noticed that whenever zombie health was rebalanced their health wasn’t… they used to be on the light side of difficult. Houses are going to line the east side of the town… maybe another two in the northwest and southwest corners.

I’m thinking one blast on the northern motel; hotel rooms are monotonous so no real loss there.
Another a tad south east of the salon, another no real loss.
Another a tad northeast of the garage, houses and the parking lot would be damaged.

Something needs to go just east of the church but I can’t think of anything that would go well there…

[/spoiler]

Let’s hear some ideas

Feel free to post without spoiler tags, everyone has been warned by now.

[kevin.granade]

To enhance the screening effect, maybe have towns with a similar layout spawn without a vault?
I’m worried your nicely laid out town is going to stick out from the lumpy blob that is our usual town like a sore thumb.

[vache]

A way of controlling globally the spawn rate of specials would be nice. I may look into that at some point.

You can define alternate mapgens for each tile, so it might be advantageous to try and keep buildings inside one omap square as possible so that the arrangement can be semi-random.

I don’t like how the shops share a double wide wall, single looks better, but a little gap in between two would make a nice alley. East of church could be a cemetary, a daycare would fit, or you could move the park over there, add a gazebo and some playground stuff. I’d try to arrange the grocery store to open southwards, towards the other shops, and try to get the parking lot down that way as well, maybe making the grocery store smaller in the process. A dollar general type store would be a nice addition or maybe an alternate. Small towns usually have at least one dive bar, down in the southwest corner next to the fast food restaurant might be a good place for it. The other restaurant could have the counter shortened a little bit to make room for more tables in the corner. You could split the motel office area up into main office, back office, laundry room to use up the extra space, also some motel rooms could be two single beds, and maybe use tables instead of counters and throw in dressers. Might be able to fit a small school in along the sides? Salon should have a counter with cash register, and display racks for beauty supplies. I’d add a fence and some busted cars around the outside of the garage.

If the area is going to be irradiated, I would try to make sure there is some indication that the place is radioactive. Maybe have dead bodies around with geiger counters and unwrapped radiation badges. Radioactive gas could seep out of the sewers periodicaly (not sure how to pull that off without digging into the code), or maybe include a new specifically radiogenic monster, but the player would need some way to know they were associated with radiation; something like the ghouls from fallout.

Side note, you might be able to pull the motel out and make it into its own special so that it pops up normally, that way it won’t be a dead giveaway when you see one.

[KA101]

Yeah, motel and PD should be pulled out (or at least copied out) and made into their own buildings/variants. The PD didn’t have nearly that kind of detail last I saw it, so it’s a dead giveaway too.

[fishy1234555]

Put an antiques gun shop behind the church. That would be great there. That or a pawn shop.

[kevin.granade]

+1 for graveyard behind the church, but maybe push it out to the border of the town? graveyards are rarely in the middle of a town unless the town grew around it, and this doesn’t look big enough for that.

[acidia]

Went with a pawn shop and library behind the church. Dive bar is in. I’ll convert one of the hotel rooms to a laundry. Before I start polishing/filling in the architecture I kinda need a sense of how large to scale the blasts.

I’m split between adding another blast at sites 1 and 4.
Site 2 looks cool but I’d say it might need to be a tad bigger, no? I was thinking just breaching the back of the furniture store.

The anatomy of a blast goes: pit (to access sewer level), wide ash circle, thin earth mound, dirt, dirt/ground, rubble/wreckage/smashed cars (where there are things to push out). Might need to add a few charred wrecks in the ash region to break monotony.

Hoping to start on z-1 by Memorial day.

Graveyards have been something people have been interested in for a while… but I don’t really know how to make them interesting architecturally. A few scattered vaults with basements might be interesting but other than that… meh.

To clarify, I am trying to keep the idea that the site is a vault somewhat concealed but I realize there is little chance that someone who is very familiar with the game with be deceived. The world map entry looks fairly bland and I’d suspect a rather new person would just think it was an unusual to see some buildings they hadn’t seen before and very few zombies. Difficulty would progress with z level, so even if they do enter the sewers… death isn’t guaranteed and they may leave before finding anything of interest.

[KA101]

Uh, probably worth redoing Crater terrain and the mini-crater map_special if you’re gonna make specialized craters. Those blast patterns are much more detailed than the current kind and another dead giveaway that you’ve found a set-piece situation.

Apart from that and having their locations semi-randomized (so building X is not “nope, it never exists, always bombed out”), yeah, looks interesting so far.

(And I’m opposed to having a Vault as such in the game at all. )

[vache]

Currently, the lore is that labs were bombed to try to control the outbreak. Why was this town bombed?

[acidia]

From what the lore used to be, craters were never specific to lab structures? At the time of outbreak, a technologically more advanced China and North Korea are at war with South Korea and the US. The military is for the most part deployed overseas and sleeper cells in the US detonate bombs across the country. With the US crippled, ‘Bombing of large US cities by an unknown aggressor commences.’ Unless all that got ret-coned to just be bombs to contain outbreak, no world war abroad.

It doesn’t stick out too much here… maybe just a few houses on the east

[vache]

Try setting those road exits as road connections and see if they actually all hook up right.

[KA101]

[quote=“acidia, post:10, topic:6230”]From what the lore used to be, craters were never specific to lab structures? At the time of outbreak, a technologically more advanced China and North Korea are at war with South Korea and the US. The military is for the most part deployed overseas and sleeper cells in the US detonate bombs across the country. With the US crippled, ‘Bombing of large US cities by an unknown aggressor commences.’ Unless all that got ret-coned to just be bombs to contain outbreak, no world war abroad.

It doesn’t stick out too much here… maybe just a few houses on the east

Said aggressor could be the US government, too. Tough to tell inside the Cataclysm.

[acidia]

I swear item spawning fields are black magic.

I only got from the top left of z-0 to the police station. Being fed up I just started on the sewers. I’d love to hear some ideas on how to keep architecture interesting before the vault proper starts. The yellow walkways are the main paths while the little pipes leading off the main ways are blocked off with metal bars for the most part, they really just function as part of the atmosphere. The plan was to have a light population of giant centipedes with sewer fish and chud in concentrated areas but that may change.

vache - no luck getting them attached smoothly. I can get the streets to connect but they still have sidewalk artifacts.

Tip, on windows hold ctrl and mouse wheel to get a better view quickly

edit: ya, the blue squiggles are just place holders for vehicle wreckage… which I always mess with last

Z-0

Z-1

NOPE!

[acidia]

Just took on 5 C.H.U.D. at the same time with a random start character a crowbar and a kevlar vest. Flat ground, surrounded. These just won’t do… well unless we actually wanted to fill the vault/area with the 1,000 people that a vault was designed to hold. Armor needs a nerf, stray attacks literally do nothing to you.

One option would be to make them glass cannons, keep their hp lower than normal zombies but give them a stronger piercing attack. They are quick (110) but armor negates anything they might get a chance to do.

Thoughts?

[vache]

Armor is being discussed in a few different places right now. I’m okay with both buffing CHUDs and adding ghouls. Either way, there needs to be some variety in the enemies.

Also as for the layouts, I think having so many buildings connecting directly to the sewer system is kind of odd, especially with the bars for some of them. Maybe have a little antechamber room leading to the sewers in between. Also, those doors probably wouldn’t need to be used very often and most people would cover them up with furniture, so you might try (for example in the building northeast of the church) having storage racks or bookcases butt up against the door so it’s not immediately visible.

[KA101]

FO-style ghouls AND a FO Vault together are not mergeable on my watch. Too much IP crossover of the sort that we ban in new gear. Gonna need to put a bit of a DDA spin on 'em, sorry; buffing CHUDs and eliminating the “ghouls” would be a better solution.

(We realize that there are a lot of blatant pulls already in the game. CHUDs are technically one of them, but are IMO far less recognizable; I’d never heard of the concept before playing DDA. We want to get away from IP-pulls. Step 0 is to not keep adding to the problem.)

[kevin.granade]

ok, yea that’s a good point

[acidia]

Whaaaaa, we wait till after the floor plan is laid to complain about IP crossovers!

Nah, its all good. I kinda wish guns were considered IP… I recognize about a quarter of them. So, if we are trying to avoid it might as well go the long way around. From hardest/slowest to implement to easiest/fastest.

Poll 2, electric boogaloo:
-A Sino Block extraction team assaulted the vault in search of a VIP. Place at least 1 static airframe in one of the lots along with ‘combat damage’ and road blocks around the perimeter. Two dozen or less enemy commandos spread about the map but they would be roughly on par with a late game player. May just devolve into sneak, snipe, or get them to come around a corner so you can get the first shot off. Either way, the map would be far more dangerous since a step around a corner without peeking could net you critical or fatal damage. The drawback of grabbing their sweet gear would be that the armor material/ammo would be unique.
-A hostile militia attained knowledge of the vault prior to the cataclysm. The craters would be reinterpreted as car bombs used to create havoc so that they could secure the vault for themselves. Standard kit would be the equivalent of a m1/m9/m16, army pants/blouse, and knife. Wouldn’t be terribly dangerous but you would be fighting more of them at a time than the sino block commandos. You could get plenty of .30-06, 5.56mm, and 9mm ammo along with what you find in the vault.
-Hostile AI, may go with the existing high end robots or scrap them and do new designs (I don’t think they have ever been used). Either way, the end result would be a giant robotic triffid grove. Goal would be to destroy the AI mainframe, scouts would function like eyebots and summon light combat units. An assortment of large utility and combat units would make the town and especially the vault more dangerous.
-Bio-weapon victims, essentially making the C.H.U.D. into glass cannons. Damage would vastly increase, speed would increase a little, and hp would stay lower than normal zombies. The ‘damage’ could be interpreted as straight damage or have them carry weaponized Ebola where they can spit on you from range 1 but the disease itself would be fatal unless treated.

[KA101]

Uh, guns kinda are; it’s why we’re looking for more fictionalized companies like Rivtech.

FWIW I’ve been mentioning the problem for a little while now. Sorry I wasn’t more forceful about it.

Hostile bots have been in demand for a while; weaponized Ebola seems overkill but boosted CHUDs (lab gone awry) could work too. The idea is not that you can’t have a large underground complex with a town above it: it’s to avoid people saying “Oh, I guess they have Vault-Tec here too…”. Make it a DDA thing, not a FO knockoff, OK?

[vache]

I really want it to stay irradiated, and have radiation themed enemies. How about this for a DDA-sized backstory for the vault: the company contracted by the government to build the evac shelters realized there was a significant need for some actually functional and well stocked shelters, so for every n evac shelters, they built one vault. These vaults were meant for REX-84 continuity of government operations, and were meant to have living facilities as well as basic command, control, and communication infrastructure so the government could continue to coordinate while secured. Unfortunately, these vaults had a critical flaw with their nuclear reactors, which caused them to slowly leak radiation when unoccupied, and incredibly quickly while occupied. The blob interacted with the radiation to cause it to take over while the subject was still alive. The radiation/blob combination causes the subject to become radiogenic and get buffs while in radiation, including faster regeneration, higher damage output, and better damage absorption. Because of this, it becomes harder and harder to kill enemies the further into the vault you get. The enemies give off a nice radioactive glow, and the size of the glow lets you know how irradiated and thus how powerful they are.