The addition of snow would be a great asset to the game. It can freeze weaker zeds, weaken strong ones, and keep vehicles from rolling around. Making mud a factor too?
Really, it would plant C:DDA firmly into the ‘survival’ genre. And require boatloads of work too . . .
Essentially an alternative to the cart wheels that while requiring more resources to craft does allow the construction of an actual driveable vehichle. Either in the form of the land skimmer shown above or perhaps a homemade hovercraft.
I was thinking more enemies coded to take less and deal more damage to vehicles for the blob/ able to digest items like the shoggoth from PK’s mod, the humans laying down mines and roadblocks(dynamic check that checks for static humans within 10 map tiles*days elapsed, and more obstacles the higher the number), the fungus having big walls(fungusy turrets that shoot at anything that moves thats nonfungus, obviously includes vehicles, and can move one tile every half hour to readjust itself) and the triffids having tarp covered spears with poison, ensnaring roots, or maybe venus fly trap style mobs guarding shiny loot.
Could just add hostile vehicle type enemies. Giant Triffids with plant spitters, giant blobs that shoot smaller blobs, big winged shoggoth things for the Nether creatures.
In general it would be possible to create a Situation where only dragged shopping carts or bicycles exist. By draining the game of all fuel for example.
The Situation is pretty much like in real life. Cars can carry more. Increase your range. And can be used as weapons.
Only by eliminating them (or having some car hunting chicken drone) will stationary hole up be better than nomad life.
If I may ask isnt one of the core ideas that was said for the game a while back is that your not suppose to be able to make things more then you scanvenging fof them? If thats still the case wont vehicle s always be the goal for everyone to survive?
The question is really one of availability of fuel.
Cars are so massive and massively useful, yet without fuel they wont run.
My death mobile has every tile a 60 l vehicle tank, filled with gasoline and or diesel.
after emptying out a few cars, then hitting a gas Station or two, the thrill of running out of it is over.
Sad, one would think the gas stations were pumped dry before cataclysm due to widespread fuel crisis…
Now that would make a base more interesting again.
I would like to also note that fun is above most things in a game so to just boil this down a bit what fun do we get out of current vehicles model and how much fun would other models/mechamics give us. This is horrible English sorry.
I agree, except the “just” part, it’s not impossible, but not trivial either.
There’s a really straightforward way of doing this, which is that petroleum naturally denatures over time. The existing gasoline and diesel would be unusable after a few years, and it’s rather resource intensive to make more.
Couple that with reasonable fuel consumption (existing mega vehicles consume a fraction of the fuel they should be), and you’re handily going to run into chronic fuel shortages.
They don’t have to be eliminated to make stationary bases competitive, they just need reasonable resource costs.
If there were an objective way to measure what is fun and what isn’t, it would be simple, but that measure doesn’t exist, so asking for “more fun” is pointless.
So based on the analysis, one could say that less available fuel from gas stations and cars, coupled with a shelf life for said fuel, coupled with more fuel consumption of heavy vehicles would be doable and provide more balance.
One can consider also the fact that roads would be blocked by abandoned vehicles.
Currently the vehicles dont mind straying from the road. Any vehicle just as happily plows through the dirt next to it without issues. That could change too. Imagine wreckage covering both sides of the road. And your 10t death mobile risking getting stuck on the field next to it when driving through it.
I suppose tractor tires by Design would have an easier time doing that. Tank treads too perhaps. But even those vehicles might topple and get stuck.
How to solve this without having a height map, and an awful lot more complication in the source code? I have no idea.
But I imagine a game where I fix up a truck to move loot. Having to get off it sometimes, jerrycan in hand, to the next gas station or car that might have fuel.
Just to be able to keep going with the vehicle.
With the ability for cars to get stuck outside of roads, might even have to abandon the death mobile, siphon all fuel from it, stuffing the loot in a wheelbarrow or cart or somesuch and having to move on like that.
Tedious perhaps.
But I feel this would be a win for the whole game. I remember having trunks full of dehydrated vegetables (because bushes just spawned wild vegetables like mad).
That has changed now. And while of course I have to do more than search bushes to feed my character now, I am happier.
Cause thats what feels more right. Especially when NPCs talk about starving. While you could shower them with wild vegetables immersion suffers.
Well yes fun cant really be measured and I didnt clearly say it right. What I’m want to say is how would bases be fun compared to the moblie bases. Can you make stationary bases as good as the build a death machine. Or maybe I just dont like the idea of nurfing cars till basses are better to make and use.
Honestly I think that an attempt to make sedentary lifestyle more interesting will fail unless it involves an almost complete rework of the game’s map gen, a lot of work on npcs, and the implementation of some sort of very good random event mechanics.
As it is, sedentary lifestyle in this game is just a boring way to play the game. That either involves wasting a lot of time moving to/from an increasingly distant base or just doing nothing at all while your crops grow.
Nerfing vehicles might be necessary, but It wont make bases interesting.
I think you’re thinking of Fallout, sir. Or the Lore Changed and I’ve somehow ENTIRELY MISSED IT. But, last I checked, there was rioting because of a peacetime draft, not from any sort of resource shortage.
Anyway, I agree with John on what he said. NPCs should be reworked if sedentary lifestyle is going to be usable. I keep pushing the idea of a Refugee Center NPC being able to come to your base and buy stuff off of you. Someone else suggested a Harvest Moon style shipping crate.
Personally, I believe if there was more of a “Post-Cataclysm community” feel you could get going on, there’d be more reason to stay in one place.
It’d also be nice if I could harvest crops with a tractor and not destroy them.
That could have been more clear. The comment referred to what would likely happen in real life. And could ve ADDED to the lore as a justification for finding little fuel.
As for the Trading, a whole book has been written about Reconstruction of Society after a Cataclysm.
It is called ‘Society after Doomsday’.
In it there is an essay called ‘I, Pencil’.
Which invokes the incomprehensibility of trade and production system.
One can code all he wants, he will never be able to simulate the invisible hand of the market.
And just suppose we had a harvest box and NPC traders showed up, loaded up and left the reality bubble without anyone or anything interfering.
What do you get then? Credit for your cash card? Or can you buy stuff from a list, as in the ‘arena’ Mode?
There might be little motivation to trade for things you can find or craft yourself.
And getting high end items reliably from a camp of starving survivors would also have to be explained in-game.
Why dont they use those fusion cells, blast a hole into Lab entrances and equip their elite scavengers with it to get more food from hunting and such?
Why would they want to trade it with you?
Because your reputation with them is so high?
Maybe that will work, but it will have to be carefully explained in the lore.
Well, trading in that case would come down to “what we can use” against “what we have.” Sure, those fusion cells could blow a bigass hole in something secure, but that group might not have the manpower or weaponry to deal with what’s inside, whereas just trading it for some food is a much safer option.
Trading is a pretty complex subject, but just having something ingame to let players get items they want using things they have is probably a good idea.
For the refugee camp it would be akin to grow enough food to survive winter and get a stockpile of seeds for the next year.
Having access to clean water. And heating the place in the cold.
Also, to prevent the outbreak of an epidemic inside their community.
Those might are the priorities the community needs to concern itself with. Perhaps they could send the player out on Reward Missions, to get antibiotics for the community?
Has been there, but the content is more or less static. What if with every run the missions would change?
Something akin to the rumor system in DF.
Preventing full time residence in a vehicle from being the only viable option is not the same as forcing a sedentary playstyle, though it’s not unreasonable to read the current thread and come to that conclusion.
The intended outcome of making a stationary base viable is not to replace having one or more vehicles, but to make the typical playstyle involve both stationary bases and vehicles. If someone wants to restrict themselves to a “traveling light” playstyle, that should continue to be viable as well, as long as they can scavenge or buy the resources they need.
Examples:
While mobile weapons platforms (tanks, APCs) exist that should be able to handle any threat the game throws at them, these vehicles are not capable of operating autonomously, and require a home base for storing excess items, repair parts, repair tools, fuel, ammunition, etc.
Large cargo-hauling vehicles also exist (i.e. an 18-wheeler or to a lesser extent a 6-wheeled cargo truck), but I anticipate balancing them to the point where using them as a daily scavenging vehicle is impractical due to high fuel use. OTOH, if you were to pack up a base and move to a new site, it should be feasible to scavenge one specifically to handle a move without having to shuttle back and forth.
I could imagine a mostly self-sufficient cargo bicycle capable of carrying the player, repair tools and spares for the bicycle, as well as supplies such as food, water, weapons etc, but this kind of setup would require constant scavenging to continue replacing items as they are expended.
The thing with stationary bases is that no matter what you do with a stationary base you are going to be using a vehicle as your stationary base to handle your welding and cooking anyhow so why not add wheels and move it closer to your current scavenging location.
If we want to make a stationary base more viable we need to give it a benefit other than storage space and farming.
Maybe the anvil or some other components should only be available through a constructed item so mobile people would need to stop and setup a temp base when they want to do certain crafting projects. If we ever get npcs who can do crafting for us while we are gone that would help stationary bases.
Edit: Another thought is add in stationary variants of tools and nerf the crafting time for mobile ones… a little electric forge will not be able to melt down as much metal as a massive stationary forge would
I already do this in my mobile play-through. Every winter I park my solar deluxe-RV behemoth and set up camp to produce fruit wine, and sometimes diesel. When it stops being rainy and dark I roll on out again.
Some of the suggestions are very much of the “force sedentary lifestyle” kind.
For example, limiting large vehicle storage and fuel efficiency, requiring stationary crafting parts, making proper refueling on the run impossible.
I’d much rather see stationary bases “become usable” by making the world more alive:
While those would take more work, they would naturally make static bases more viable by rewarding sedentary lifestyle rather than by punishing using vehicles.