I just noticed something, a lot of cities have gun-shops, a lot of cities have soldiers, police officers, and huge rows of houses. Yet none of these places actually have guns. Now I looked up the laws on New England, and it seems like people would still be able to get their hands on a gun 9/10 times. I just found it odd that the only homes I find guns in are the ones I find drugs in. Another thing that bothers me is that I never find soldiers with bullets to their own weapons. I feel like they should at least have some casings around / on them or something.
Firearms shift the risk/reward of the game significantly.
I like the scarcity for this game, but I can understand your reasoning. Where I’m at, I’m sure most of the folks (especially downtown) carry.
The spawns were balanced for you being able to easily enter and explore towns, that’s significantly more difficult now, so it’s reasonable to rebalance it a bit.
Soldiers and cops having matching firearms and ammo (and casings around them) is a techical issue that we plan to address.
Also keep in mind that this is still, ultimately, New England, where most people do not own guns, and a large portion of the guns per capita is from single individuals who simples own a LOT.
(The second largest group probably being hunters in the northern half of the region, but the CDDA setting seems more southern Mass-like rather than New Hampshire hunter-like)
[quote=“GlyphGryph, post:4, topic:3862”]Also keep in mind that this is still, ultimately, New England, where most people do not own guns, and a large portion of the guns per capita is from single individuals who simples own a LOT.
(The second largest group probably being hunters in the northern half of the region, but the CDDA setting seems more southern Mass-like rather than New Hampshire hunter-like)[/quote]
You know I never really thought about this, I’m in the incredibly liberal, socialist paradise of LA, but it still seems like everyone and their mother has a gun. I had always assumed this is the norm everywhere.
I think it’s only fair that if zombie cops and zombie soldiers would have guns and ammunition, they should be able to shoot you with them. Catazombies are already smart enough to shoot lightning or spit acid at the player, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t be able to shoot bullets, too, albeit inaccurately. Or would that require radical changes to code?
I very much enjoy the scarcity. You never know what a gun shop might hold and they tend to be guarded by a ton of horrible monsters. Can’t just rush in there, grab a ton of ammo and get to work. Leads to !!FUN!!
Aside from that making zombies incredibly and unreasonably deadly with no visual indication to the player (you can’t see zombie items), there’s a difference between zombies being able to use innate abilities from their mutations (the acid spit and lightning) and being able to properly hold and manipulate a tool.
They can’t open doors; why would they be able to work a gun?
As someone who by the end of year one has usually accumulated an armory in his vehicle that’d put many small nations to shame I can safely say…
There are plenty of guns.
Rare home defense and hunting style guns scattered around in houses would be reasonable though. Although that already happens I think, so it might be a non-issue, and just RNG screwage.
Maybe we just need to limit ammo drops from turrets and add more guns to houses. Theres plenty of guns all over the US, even in more liberal areas. Any 18 year old can go buy a shotgun or rifle at a sporting goods store like Dick’s or Cabella’s. A lot of people hunt in rural New England, and people inherit old guns even if they don’t shoot. A farm house would be likely to have a varmint rifle kicking around, and plenty of suburban home owners would rather pay $300 for a pump gun then a home security system. 12 gauges are very common, easy to aqcuire, cheap, and multi-purposed. They’re all over. Ammo on the other hand has become scarce and expensive since Sandy Hook with low supply and hoarding.
Basicly 1/10 houses should have a gun. Probably a 12g or .22, maybe a pistol. Turets shouldn’t drop ammo because they explode. Ammo should be scarce all over, people had five days to try to survive, they would have used up a lot of ammo in panic before dying or escaping. Guns are fairly common, ammo isn’t.
This way it’d be easy to find a gun and match ammo, but you’d have to be very conservative with it. Maybe you’d rarely stumble across a miltiary stockpile and have a buttload of 5.56mm but otherwise you’d want to keep a melee back up.
There are a lot of houses.
In that number of houses, there are quite a few with basements.
In those basements, some of them spawn with guns.
I always thought it was a little weird that the average house in Cataclysm is more likely to contain a MAC-10 than a Glock, and never has any sort of rifle or shotgun.
And reloading supplies seem to be more common than the guns themselves, which definitely isn’t right.
Unless the owners ran off with their guns somewhere and left the reloading supplies behind.
[tt]Personally I think items spawn with too much frequency. Or at least some of them while some spawn too infrequently. If you can survive a little while and get a decent base then eventually you end up with more weapons and supplies then you could ever need. Based on the things some others have said. Once .9 stable is released, I plan to lower the frequency spawn rate of many things while increasing a few.[/tt]
I would like to see ammo in general become much more scarcer, making the player scrounge for ammo, and be forced to hold back when it comes to fully automatic weapons.
Of course there should always be some kind of tiered system to facilitate ranged characters.
But in general, The firearm system needs quite a bit of re balancing and tweaking.
I think lower quality firearms and ammunition should be available for crafting (not just pipe rifles),
It would be good to see some form of zip guns, garage guns and the like.
Also it would be nice to see a more fleshed out ammo system, in which you could use less materials to construct a shotgun shell, the trade off being lower power and such.
Making your own ammunition is not uncommon where I live, In fact an acquaintance of mine purchases crates of surplus ammo and simply uses the components from the said crates, Along with all of his empty shells to make a shitload of low quality ammunition.
Of course there would be things impracticable to be reloading, such as rim fire, or needlessly smaller ammo.
To sum it all up:
Good guns are scarce (ie High Quality Military weapons)
“home defence” guns are common
There should be a much larger range of guns to be produced by the player.
Ammo should be very scarce
Making ammo should be quite a bit easier, with certain trade offs, like lower quality.
There’s a special “Allguns” spawn that can appear in houses (and behind gun store counters too, I think) that spawns with the matching ammo. So once in a while you’ll find a glock and a single stack of ammo in the same square of a house.
There’s a good chance that people who decided to gtfo early took their guns with them, so they’re not likely to just by lying around everywhere. Hell, in a zombie apocalypse, guns are higher up the priority list than food.
With all the guns in all the basements I actually thing there are too many now, finding a gun is usually a case of checking a half dozen houses for me.
We have to remember it is not day 0, but at least day 3.
So many owners ran out with guns, and many cops/military fought out to the last bullet already.
If you really want guns so bad- go to where they most probably are, for instance- the military outposts.
(At night) and later- get into a military bunker with those scavenged ideas.
Also remember many people got killed extremely fast. Therefore not many would still be alive to take the guns.