Tell me about guns?

[Caplin]

So, my latest randomly generated character is a US army recruit with a ridiculous amount of SMG and handgun skill, and his very own M4 carbine. I don’t know much about how guns work in latest experimentals, or indeed at all.

Would anybody care to enlighten me? I managed to load the magazine with bullets and put it into the gun, but I’m guessing I’ll run through 30 rounds fairly quickly unless I’m careful. Honestly, the combat knife might end up being more useful in the long term, but the guns are a new game mechanic for me, so I’m curious.

I read rumblings on this forum that magazines aren’t a very popular change in some circles, but don’t know much beyond that.

[Shopkeeper]

If memory serves the recruit starts with a bayonet (though that might only be for the winter screnario) it turns your rifle into a multipurpose spear and the reach attack is insanely good.

The M4A1 of course counts as a rifle, so you need to worry about your marksmanship and rifles skills. You start with something like three mags worth of ammo, but only one magazine so make sure to keep it topped off. You don’t want to have to handload your magazine with zombies barring down on you.

The combat knife will be your best friend though, the rifle is noisy and overkill for standard zombies but a valuable weapon against special infected later on. Train your marksmanship using pistols, the ammo tends to be far more plentiful and they’re better suited to fighting in close quarters (where rifles have a penalty).

[deoxy]

I like the concept of magazines for guns (so you can actually reload in a reasonable amount of time), but the implementation had some fairly rough spots, where getting a gun AND a magazine you could use in it was REALLY REALLY rare - I think that’s the main source of the animus, there.

Capital F selects between fire modes (full auto, burst, single shot, undermounted grenade launcher, etc, if the weapon has more than one), so if you want your bullets to last, stay at single fire most of the time. Also, take time to aim - there are some little bars that tell you how likely you are to hit, headshot, etc.

I actually don’t mess with guns much - I tend to play melee machines, since you only run out of health and stamina (get away, rest, get those back), not bullets (uh… hope to find more?).

[Caplin]

Capital F selects between fire modes (full auto, burst, single shot, undermounted grenade launcher, etc, if the weapon has more than one), so if you want your bullets to last, stay at single fire most of the time. Also, take time to aim - there are some little bars that tell you how likely you are to hit, headshot, etc.

Hm. Aiming bars sounds fairly visual, do I need to open another issue for that? I admittedly haven’t tried firing it yet, my only ranged weapon experience has been with rocks and my knife spear. Is it more complicated than aiming for a specific tile?

[hobophobic]

-Eye and arm encumbrance have a big effect on your aim, be careful to keep them low to greatly improve accuracy

-Your skill for the gun you are firing (handgun/smg/rifle) is more important than your marksmanship skill

-Try to find/craft a low damage weapon to train skills. For example, nail guns, BB guns, blowguns, pneumatic guns, bows, crossbows. Amoebic molds are a perfect enemy to train skills on, they have high HP and can’t really fight back. Ants, triffids and fungal spawns also work well. Or you can kite regular zombies a safe distance away from larger hordes. Use junkfood/music/etc to keep your focus up.

-Weapon mods are also a great boon. Find or craft whatever you can to improve your weapon’s stats.

-Use common/low damage ammo to train, horde rare/high damage ammo for dangerous encounters.

[hobophobic]

I read rumblings on this forum that magazines aren’t a very popular change in some circles, but don’t know much beyond that.

A lot of it may have been due to the fact that guns were pretty much broken to the point of being unusable for a lot of the implementation process, but that’s mostly been taken care of and mags are a lot easier to find. Also, there is a mod which makes all mags generic so any mag works with any gun.

[Caplin]

Well, trying out aiming at a lemming–why did I have to start near a swamp? I’m not quite sure how to interpret the info I’m given on confidence. Does the amount of any given symbol translate into how likely I am to graze or hit or whatever? Or do I want to worry about positioning or color?

Thanks for the info so far. Needless to say I didn’t fire.

[kevin.granade]

Damn, yea that’s not going to translate into a screen reader that well.
There are two bars, labelled “confidence” and “stability”. "confidence is on top, and indicates your character’s estimate of getting hits of varying quality. If I remember correctly, * symbols indicate chance of headshot, + symbols indicate chance of a “good” hit, and - symbols indicate chance of a regular hit. Grazes aren’t estimated. The chances are cumulative, so 5 * plus 5 + plus 5 - plus 5 spaces means 25% chance each of headshot, good hit, regular hit, and miss.
Now that I think of it, the real problem is those spaces, you’d have to just remember how many there are, plus counting how many times your screen reader calls out the symbols, which sounds pretty crappy.
It should be fairly easy to make an option to display it as a list of percents, like:
25%, 25%, 25%, 25%
Would that be better, or do you have another suggestion?
The “stability” bar is simpler, it steadily fills up as you aim, and once it’s full it means you’re aiming as well as you can.

[Straume21]

On a side note, how hard is it to find magazines for guns in the latest experimental? I tried it recently and it was extremely, extremely difficult to find any good number of magazines for the weapons I wanted to fire.

[Caplin]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:8, topic:11626”]Damn, yea that’s not going to translate into a screen reader that well.
There are two bars, labelled “confidence” and “stability”. "confidence is on top, and indicates your character’s estimate of getting hits of varying quality. If I remember correctly, * symbols indicate chance of headshot, + symbols indicate chance of a “good” hit, and - symbols indicate chance of a regular hit. Grazes aren’t estimated. The chances are cumulative, so 5 * plus 5 + plus 5 - plus 5 spaces means 25% chance each of headshot, good hit, regular hit, and miss.
Now that I think of it, the real problem is those spaces, you’d have to just remember how many there are, plus counting how many times your screen reader calls out the symbols, which sounds pretty crappy.
It should be fairly easy to make an option to display it as a list of percents, like:
25%, 25%, 25%, 25%
Would that be better, or do you have another suggestion?
The “stability” bar is simpler, it steadily fills up as you aim, and once it’s full it means you’re aiming as well as you can.[/quote]

Thanks, Kevin. Yeah, a list of percentages sounds like a good idea, as long as I know what each one is referencing. I’ll go ahead and create a Github issue for this while I’m awake and reasonably coherent.

[Chezzo]

Someone mentioned bayonets, but didn’t mention what is so cool about them.

When a zombie gets within one tile (not right next to you, one tile away) you can hit F until your fire mode is bayonet, hit f to “Fire” and give them a stab. It is is a good way to save bullets.

It also works with a lot of spears.

Also, aim speed, lower is better, but you can increase this by installing mods which will hurt how fast you can aim but help accuracy. (Thanks, BrainDamage in irc.)

For example, if you put iron signts on a desert eagle, that has a aim speed of 4, would bring the aim speed to 6, but the dispersion down. But put it on a M4A1, and it would stay the same. So aim speed takes the higher of the two values.

But the sight dispersion takes the lower of the two values. So on both the desert eagle and the M4A1, iron sights would bring the sight dispersion down to 45.

[Logrin]

Having multiple magazines ready is great for cutting down on the time it takes to reload a weapon. What’s more you can even wear ammo pouches on various parts of your survivor to cut time even more.

You can even keep say: a magazine loaded with special ammo as your panic button this way

Even better for certain non-mag fed weapons you can craft bandoleers to mitigate slow reloads. Wouldn’t want to shake out those shotgun shells from the bottom of your duffle in a firefight would you?