Too easy to find a working car

[latogato]

I think the underlying issue here is mainly that cars are too useful and therefore considered necessary by most players.

Yes, i tried to play without them, it was miserable.

There are things in the works to make most much less useful offroad as far as I am aware for one thing.

This and the tires should wear down are old planned features, i can’t wait for them! Driving around cities and other dangers makes the car too useful.

I feel as if base decoration for small passive mood boosts would be a little thing that could improve static base viability,

That is so dwarf fortress-ish. John McMechanic has been happy lately. He dined in a very good dining room recently. He admired a fine curtains recently.

The new rot changes also allow the local environment to

Exacly, always bothered me i could find fresh milk etc. after years on the shelves. Getting food should be a perpetual problem. When the rotting times was changed i had to discard hundreds of food.

Having a large scale is great and all, but at least trying to simulate other survivors looting things, or just weather, wear and tear from zeds and other monsters on items and vehicles in newly generated areas would greatly rebalance the game and help with immersion and relative viability of static bases.

Exacly, also there should be hoarding and item destroying monsters, the giant ants, the blobs, maybe some monkey-like low intelligent monsters. I miss the acid rain which destroyed anything outside. It was an overkill, but it felt good to survive it and saw the havoc it left behind. But we have acid leaking monsters, they could destroy things too.

[ecchi_squid]

Just got tag-teamed by a giant poisonous snake and a feral leaped. Who knew they were the best of friends…

[Aabbcc]

The lore of the game is that there was considerable instability before the zombiefication became known, with lots of riots and police brutality.

Anyone arrested/killed/injured on those would mean a car in decent condition on the streets somewhere.

The zombiefication wasn’t that fast, but plenty of people still got caught before getting to safety (or to their vehicles). There were also many survivors who fled to the FEMA camp or similar, who might have piled up in buses to get there rather than go on their own.

---

In my experience, it’s easy-ish to get one or two cars that can run after checking, say, a parking lot or half a town if you have a screwdriver, but most of those cars won’t last you more than 2~3 trips before breaking down, less if you ever use it to dispose of zombie groups.

Usually, you can’t get them running again without a few tools, some scavenging, some mechanics skill (2~3), some zombie-clearing and some surplus food to grind mechanics if necessary.

[vassock]

With everyone driving off all at once, all but the most rural of areas will be totally congested almost immediately. Anyone not willing to hang around for the zombie apocalypse and not being lucky enough to be in the first 10%-20% to leave will likely be stuck in traffic, particularly if the zombies cause a crash. A single crash on even an advanced road like an interstate highway can cause a severe traffic jam under ideal conditions during rush hour. With everyone running during an apocalypse, a total stopping of traffic is practically guaranteed. This means folks will dump perfectly working, gassed up cars all the time.

Anyway, like I said, they can make it harder by incorporating an ignition interlock system like modern cars have anyway. Can’t “hotwire” a modern car like they do in the movies with a screwdriver anymore.

[anonanon]

you realize some of the newspapers talk about the zombies and say they’re months old right?

[anonanon]

honestly a car is nice but they’re kinda useless in the city
I mean generally I find the average city has about twenty to thirty map tiles of road and there you can find maybe six to eight running but only four drive ready some of which will be torn apart because running
problem is there’s usually about twenty five cars so no driving in the road really buildings are straight out forests are death traps you take away fields cars are honestly useless aside from using some frames to staple a solar panel to a fridge and some decent internal lights

[Mantar]

I dunno, I drive the Sun Wave through cities all the time. It’s five wide by twelve long now, I think. A little unwieldy, but having laser rifle turrets (and maybe some precious plutonium if the batteries start to run low) makes it fairly easy to push into a town center if I need some particular piece of loot.

[latogato]

you realize some of the newspapers and say they’re months old right?

Old just like this topic. By default you start the game in a shelter, without food or any equipment, which means you can’t be there for months, AFAIR the original (now outdated and really old) lore stated the cataclysm happened just few hours before the game start (portals opened, monsters came and murdered everyone but soon most of them died because of the acid rains or because they was unfit to this world). Anyway, soon or later the lore will be rewritten to reflect the game changes.

[latogato]

honestly a car is nice but they’re kinda useless in the city

I disagree, car is life, a getaway car when the monsters are too strong, it can outrun anything. Also you can lure monsters away from a place with honk and drive around them. Most of the time i drive around the cities and looting interesting houses. Sometimes slowly clearing a city on foot but my car is always near for a fast retreat.

If i have to drive through a city i drive slowly, there is no need to hurry and with some practice it is easy to maneuver through. Of course there are times when i have to turn back because there are too many wreckage and zombies on the road, but still faster and safer than on foot. Sometimes i can drive through a city horde, with some speed i can left most of the zombies behind before they could reach the car. Of course sometimes i miscalculate and stuck with the car, but it is an excellent obstacle between me and the zombies while i retreat into some building. So, cars are great.

[latogato]

I drive the Sun Wave through cities all the time.

Nice, i never had the patience to build something big, my greatest accomplishments are restored armored cars with a machine gun turret. Even they are overpowered against zombies and bandits.

[kuros]

Motorcycles for me. Best way to escape from unexpected hulk’s n whatnot. I also really enjoy kiting baddies with rocks while doing doughnuts.

[Delirium]

I started using cars not so long ago but i don’t think car is an achievment. The mobile fortress with turrets is an accomplishment, though.
I doubt that decreasing number of working cars will balance anything. It could be implemented as a mod in blacklist section but surely not as a standard option.

[kuros]

My last four games, there weren’t enough cars in the nearby cities to hack together a single decent one, even if I could make welding glasses.

[Rose]

As it is IRL, the vast majority of cars near sidewalks and near garages are in pretty good condition and usable for hundreds of miles, with the only real obstacles being that some are low on gas and that most modern cars are impossible to “hotwire” without extensive, hours-long repair work due to computerized security systems. This is true for numerous reasons:

This. I really hate all those leaky tanks in the cars. I understand that damage is randomized, but seeing a literal MAIN BATTLE TANK that’s leaking diesel on the tarmac just pains me so much. It’s quite hard to damage a fuel tank in a vehicle unless you smash your ride into a light post or a tree at 60 mph, and at that point there will just be no car at all.
It’s really pitiful observing all this mess with the cars in CDDA. Really, there are millions upon millions of cars in any country, and a lot of them are in a nice shape. And a nice shape does not mean ‘I can probably start the engine and drive at least a mile away from here,’ it literally means that all parts are green or MAYBE yellow. No pink or red parts, not to say grey.
And @vassock is right, the main obstacle in a situation like post-apocalypse regarding cars is the basic need to have a key to start an engine. Of course, most cars are not protected with anything but a factory issued immobilizer, but it effectively stops a random guy from running away with your car. Surely, a professional car thief can bypass any immobilizers, car alarms, blockers and other security features in a matter of minutes, but your character is not exactly this guy, right?
So seeing damaged cars standing in the streets is horrible and should be changed, imho. Getting inside a car and driving away is unrealistic and also should be changed, it’s not Grand Theft Auto here.
But maybe car keys could be added. Like you see a Humvee standing in the middle of the road and some zombie soldiers running around, and one of them should have the keys.
Some cars could also have the keys in a lock, like the instance where the person has to run away or just gets eaten right in a driver’s seat.

The Zeds are also really annoying because they just blindly smash the cars in their way wherever they go. It gets absurdly stupid when a Zed can not walk around a single corner of the car and starts whacking it to death. Really. An obstacle avoidance intelligence should be present even in their heads, since they are already able to maneuver around walls and things having walls.

[Invalid_Username]

Stealing a car isn’t as difficult as one may think. In a world where the prospective thief doesn’t even have to worry about being sneaky about it, it would be even easier. ‘Gone in 60 Seconds’ is not an accurate representation of stealing cars in real life. You don’t need to be some “professional car thief” to jack a whip, you just need a functioning knowledge of how cars do stuff. Mechanics 1, maybe. Electronics 1 or 2 as well for E-cars.

Also:

Like you see a Humvee standing in the middle of the road and some zombie soldiers running around, and one of them should have the keys.

Just for that, go find me the Humvee keys and go pick up fifty feet of flight line from Supply. While you’re at it, go find some chemlight batteries and blinker fluid so we have everything we need.

[TheKobold]

The original reasoning that most cars are damaged was acid rain at the beginning of the Cataclysm. I’m not sure if that has survived the lore changes as the game has evolved. But I could see much of the damage on cars coming from a horde of zombies coursing through the city eating people as they flee in the days/hours just before our characters wake up and start treading through the “empty” cities. But some of the damage is extreme for even a horde stampeding past.
The real reason cars are so damaged is game balance. A death mobile is relatively easy to make when you focus on it. If most cars were in good condition then it would be even easier.

[kevin.granade]

It’s really pitiful observing all this mess with the cars in CDDA.

You should really rein in the harsh tone here. This kind of thing makes me want to just ignore your problem.

Adding immobilizers and key-based access and then removing some of the vehicular damage is fine, so get to it. If you can’t, please request it politely instead of being rude about it.

As it is IRL, the vast majority of cars near sidewalks and near garages are in pretty good condition and usable for hundreds of miles

That is in peacetime, dda is literally a post-apocalyptic warzone. Riots, fires, gunfire, explosions, rampaging monsters, panicking drivers. We don’t have a system for accounting for all these sources of damage individually, so instead we have random damage.

It’s quite hard to damage a fuel tank in a vehicle unless you smash your ride into a light post or a tree at 60 mph

If you have an outline for what sources of damage are reasonable to apply, provide it and someone can look at applying it. If not, you’re not helping, just repeating that you think there’s a problem doesn’t do much, but if you can round up some information and rationale for how it should work, you would be helping a great deal.

[Trigon]

Presumably cars with missing gas tanks had theirs swiped by an enterprising survivor to add another tank to their own vehicle.

[Rose]

instead of being rude about it.

I’ve never intented to be rude to anyone about the problems or things I personally don’t like in CDDA. The way I meant it is that I myself feel pain when I see so many cars that are damaged in a strange way (including internal parts).

If you have an outline for what sources of damage are reasonable to apply

I just didn’t understand this phrase (since i’m not a native speaker or such). You mean things like proposing a model for a ‘car that has been used as a bullet shield’ and listing parts that could appear damaged?

[Azure_Soul_Azur]

I’m pretty sure he did.