Zombie behaviour changes

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about risks and rewards and enemy behaviour, and I’ll touch on that more in my game design thread, but I wanted to touch on specific zombie related bits while it’s still fresh in my mind.

So I got to thinking: Right now, what do we want the threat to be from a single zombie? A small group? A horde? A small group with a couple specials?
This is what I’d like to see:

Single Zombies
Single zombies should be a threat if you are caught unawares or unprepared.
Right now, they are just EASY. They are never a threat. So what could we change to make even single zombie encounters more interesting?

More durable:
For both plot and gameplay reasons, I could see buffing up the durability of basic zombies a bit. Giving them resistance to piercing and minor resistance to all other damage types. Make them a bit less of a paper dragon.

Surprises - At least some zombies can go dormant. They can have behaviour that seeks corners and crannies or dark areas away from direct sunlight. At night, when dormant and unmoving, they can be hard to identify and make out. Things like trashcans, lamp posts, mailboxes, statues, pipes, and ladders leaning against buildings could get the players guard up for nothing… until one of them, in the darkness of the night, turns out to really be a zombie. Zombies should also get “shocked” - falling to the ground as if a corpse, only to recover from the shock after a few moments. Players should always be cautious around zombies… even if they look dead.

But it’s not enough for a zombie to surprise a player to be a threat - right now, they take one measly swing which will probably miss and the player is good to go. So, instead, I propose making their basic attack a “grab”. What is it that kills people (at least those killed by zombies) in zombie movies? Getting GRABBED. Being unable to escape. If a player is grabbed, they need to make a strength or dexterity check to free themselves. Or they can decide to fight back. But it’s suddenly a serious, persistent threat to deal with a zombie that jumps you - it’s not a matter of one easily evaded attack (or a hard to evade damaging attack that makes them way more of a threat than we would want), it’s a matter of getting committed to a conflict you might not be prepared for.

Finally, zombies should suffer from injuries but regenerate lost health over time. Even turning them into corpses shouldn’t be enough to stop them for good. A bullet through the brain won’t kill THESE zombies (Destroying the brain will, at least temporarily, but simply damaging it? No!) as the hole is plugged with ichor and the creature struggles to continue hunting the player while maintaining homeostasis. They should be hindered by their injuries, so the player has to decide to finish them off once and for all and butcher or burn the corpse, but risk falling into the creatures clutches and committing themselves, or use the weakened state to escape, knowing the zombie will eventually recover.

Finally, we should change window movement from “move and THEN wait” to “wait and THEN move”. This means zombies in windows won’t make nearly as easy targets. They will slow the zombies down still, significantly, but they no longer grant the player immunity for more than enough time to kill any and all zombies one at a time. And attempting to flee through a window themselves, they might get grabbed and have the action interrupted as they are pulled back out into the street, screaming…

Note: None of these things will make a normal single zombie deadly. They should prefer to grab, and the player should be able to struggle to oppose future attacks (I’d love flavour saying how you’re holding the zombies face from your neck with an outstretched arm, or you are kicking the thing off yourself)and a few solid hits with a decent weapon should make short work of the creature.

They could also seek to cluster together occassionally, upgrading themselves to a group threat.

Small Groups
This is where things get a bit more interesting. Small groups, with some basic grab mechanics, become quite a bit more deadly. Approaching the situation intelligently becomes a priority. A small group of zombies, maybe with a low level special, because an actual combat threat not because of the amount of damage they deal, but because of how fast the situation can turn south if you let yourself get grabbed by a couple.

Small groups could also help the lore - falling into a basement through weakened floorboards into the middle of a now-deceased family of six that was trapped in the basement and has risen as the undead has always been a vision I’ve had for the game. And it would make sense if some zombies had some basic, primitive desire to cluster together.

More later…

2

A grab shouldn’t be an always happening annoyance, granted it would slow the player down. Checking the aforementioned stats to see if the player loses turns or not, but just being grabbed and unable to move seems a bit to… deadly.

Also have zombies walking through puddles of gasoline become fuel soaked, basically a walking matchstick.

Also what about mutated zombies? People (especially from labs) could have been mutated before turning, getting bonuses or negatives depending on mutation.
And radioactive zombies.

Zombies should group, following sights and sounds with others. Making distractions more viable.

3

Well, I wasn’t thinking of grabbing causing turn loss. Rather, it restricts the player from moving away - if they are grabbed (which they can evade) and they try to move away, they have to pass a strength or dex check or they lose their turn instead. They can choose to FIGHT the zombie that grabbed them for no penalty, but that means the zombie will try to start biting them the next turn. So it’s more dangerous because it has the potential of restricting your movement, but at the same time it’s safer - You have a few chances to avoid damage before it gets to that point, and different things you can do at each of those points, instead of a random swipe always doing damage if it connects.

Avoid grapple
Escape from grapple
Avoid bite

Instead of just:
Avoid attack

4

A single zombie already IS a threat. No matter how well armored you are, how high your dodge skill is, or how damned lucky you are, a single zombie with a well placed attack can still damage you. Damage causes pain, which slows you down and makes everything harder. Damage will wear on your equipment, and might mean something breaks a bit sooner than it otherwise would, making a huge problem for you. Damage, also, hurts.

A single zombie is easy enough to kill, yes, but there’s never just a single zombie. There’s the FIRST zombie, and then there’s more after it. A single zombie you can fight, and in fact, that’s usually the only semi-safe time TO fight, but you have to do it before the rest of them catch up.

As for the rest of the stuff, I like the idea of zombies being able to regenerate over time. The game already has skeletons, and I think it would be cool if totally broken zombies will go into decomposition mode or something, and reemerge as goo-coated bone structures later on. The only way to finally eliminate an enemy is to burn the body and crush the bones. You can DO it, if you have time, but you might not when you’re busy running.

Regular zombies shouldn’t grab as a basic attack, though they should be able to do it at random. Grabber zombies already exist, and THEY should grab as a basic attack. Maybe even have a small range on it, because of their massive arms. Regular zombies should, to an experienced survivor, be a nuisance that is trying to kill them. They’re like the Team Rocket of the post-apocalypse world. For this same reason, I think windows should continue to turn zombies into a big blob of slow. It’s a great strategy that works early game, and allows new players to make a daring escape, or grab a few kills. It doesn’t keep you from getting swarmed from behind if you try to kill every zombie in town, though, and a couple missed attacks and you’re back to square one of having to fight a target that can and will hurt and cripple you.

Difficulty can, and SHOULD scale up later in the game, but for that we should be adding new threats. Making the most basic enemy a harder challenge will just discourage new players. Zombies that can punch through walls, like the hulk, should do so to circumvent windows and open paths to the player. There should be more wilderness creatures, like mutant fish in the rivers, or dinosaurs that appear later on (see my other post on that hidden somewhere else around here). The one thing that works almost perfectly right now is zombies. More flavor with them would be nice, like groups of specific zombies in some places. And having them try to cluster together at night would be a nice trait, too. But the zombies themselves are fine as they are.

5

Yeah, I’m currently reworking the skeleton lore to match the zombie regen effect.

Basically, when injured, zombies secrete an “ichor” that gradually fills the wound and handles the function of the missing piece. So zombies recover health, but grow increasingly “battle-damaged” with each regeneration. Skeletons are what’s left when you have a zombie that’s come back from the dead so many times it’s nothing but a thick layer of semi-clear subprime matter over a chipped skeleton.

Grabber zombies are also pretty terrible and kind of dumb, in my opinion. They don’t even grab right now.

6

Well, if ever there was a time to implement a grabbing mechanic, now would be it. Grabber zombies could be a complete step up from a regular zombie. They’ve got those weird mutant arms, so they can make grabs at range, and they’ve got a single job in a hoard, which is to detain the player. The only downside to them is that if you catch one alone, a grab won’t hurt very much, and that’s pretty much all they know how to do.

7

I imagine a grabbing mechanic to run something like this.
Zombie tries to grab vs dodge/dexterity.
While you are grabbed:
If you try to move away you make a strength/dexterity check vs the zombie to break grab. Some martial arts should give bonuses for this.
Zombie will try to bite/maybe have to have double grab (IE both hands) before bite.
If you are close to succeeding via strength but not quite, maybe you drag the zombie along at a slower pace?

8

GlyphGryph: I also find the current window and bush mechanic for dealing with monsters to be almost exploitative, i feel bad about using it, but there also isnt really a ‘fair’ alternative either. A lightly encumbered zero skill character can endlessly kite zombies through bushes or broken windows to avoid taking damage, all the while doing damage to their enemies. Grab any melee weapon in the early game, a rock, a stick, or such, and any broken window or bush becomes a killing field for most low to medium level zombies. Brutes/hulks are still somewhat scary, but having multiple free turns against them really brings them down to size.

The idea of changing the current movement system to wait and then move seems like it would help remove the ‘invincibility’ exploit of being able to hit zombies 3-4 times before they are able to strike back. But doing so would have the side effect of making melee incredibly dangerous and would likely anger a lot of players who play melee only builds.

There are two fairly easy things that would potentially solve this problem and be a slightly less of a drastic measure:

1: Increase most early and mid game zombie health by 1-2 hits worth of damage (probably13-21hp or 30-40%.) This would make them survive long enough against a non-skilled character to maybe get a hit off before they die if they didnt get critically hit, and if that player decided to fight them without moving. You could still kite them from bush to bush, or from window to window, but would require more effort, time, and room on the players part to deal with them if they didnt want to take damage. This health bonus would be mitigated by leveling up your skills and doing more damage/crits, so later game characters would be able to handle them similarly to how a brand new character can right now.

2: Reduce the terrain penalty for zombies by 33-50% since they dont seem to care if they get cut when moving through tiles. This may allow them to get a hit off before they die when moving onto a non optimal terrain tile. This would mean that diving through windows in an attempt to get away from a zombie would not be quite as beneficial to a player in most circumstances. Though the player could close doors in the houses as they run through to slow their pursuers down, and could still use the windows to fight zombies in, but they would be less effective than they are currently.

This really is a multi-fold problem, i believe that both zombie stats and behavior need a bit of an overhaul at this point. For example, currently it seems that if you can see a zombie, it can see you, which means theres no such thing as sneaking past them. Having a type of zombie that allowed you to sneak past would add another layer of depth that currently does not exist. Part of the problem is that because almost all zombies aggro instantly on you from so far away, that means you can kite them around to a safe place to fight them, allowing you to do so on your own terms. If we had some zombie types which couldnt see very far, perhaps they would allow you to sneak past them. But if you snuck past them they would remain there as a threat, wandering around until either they found a scent trail to follow, or were attracted to some noise that was being made.

Thats not to say we would want all the zombies to be like this, but in combination with how zombies are currently, it would pose a different type of threat to the player. This new type could follow his trail and sneak up on him in a way that current zombies dont. Having a different type of zombie that might follow the players trail in an attempt to ambush him from behind would certainly liven things up and ruin his ‘perfect’ strategy for fighting zombies in a window when one comes through the door from behind instead while he was fighting other (normal) zombies in the window.

Ultimately i think we need to ask the questions: How do we make the combat interesting again? And how do we avoid the exploitative behaviors of only fighting enemies when they’ve been lured onto ‘slow tiles’ while also not making the game impossibly difficult for melee characters. Myself, i think it needs to be a combination of beefing up the default zombie slightly (easy to do), and changing the behaviors or adding in a couple of new types of zombie threats (harder to do.) Unfortunately neither of those will solve the problem of preferring to fight on ‘slow terrain’ but they will probably help stop the player from being able to do it endlessly and without any risk at all.

9

I like the ideas in the first post, but when you talk about piercing damage being worthless on zombies, I think it might be cool if that’s true only until you get a higher skill level and then it becomes deadly against normal zombies. This could simulate the scenario where in the beginning you are stabbing them pointlessly but then later when you roll into town on your motorcycle as an accomplished slayer and you stab them in the head efficiently.

10

Not worthless, just reduced. So stabbing them with a pencil or a screwdriver probably isn’t going to kill one. You need something with a bit more oomph.

11

Senses really need an overhaul.

I like how I can drive down the street and carpet bomb the town with my scent, so unrealistic.

Really shouldn’t zombies have lowered senses? Are these decomposing bodies or superhuman horrors? Right now they seem the latter. If scent was more a thing left on tiles walked on/waited on or something and the longer one is on that tile more scent is stacked, until it spills onto other tiles.

They shouldn’t have hawk eye vision eigther, tone it down a bit.

Sound needs to be less specific to the location at low PER, so a zombie may have heard a kerblam to the east but not the specific house it was in.

12

Protip: it really helps if the player can observe their character becoming more effective. At Dodge 6/Melee 7/Unarmed&Cutting 6, I’m comfortable walking around the outskirts of town in the daylight, since I want to clear it out (and then drive the Car I found back home to the Lab for repairs/modding–Driving skill is unreliable, to put it nicely). I wouldn’t dream of doing that with a starting character.

The same character can fairly effectively kill a Graboid(!) with taekwondo. (ST 11.) Ants are a credible threat in groups–as is one soldier ant–but beehives not so much.

The point is that not everything needs to be a player-panicking threat at all character-skill* levels. If players realize that certain places are safer than others, then perhaps that’s not an “exploit” so much as intelligently taking advantage of a given creature’s weakness. One can take that player right out of xyr comfort zone with existing code: knowing how to kite a zombie didn’t help me figure out how to clear out turrets or make it to the ant queen.

But it does give the player a comfort/fall-back level. “OK, I’ve got zombie-fighting down. Now, what can I do next?” (In other words, basically another way to say Argus’ of 3:27.)

*As distinct from player-skill. As demonstrated by this thread and specifically Ratha’s post, the difference between “skill” and “exploit” is basically a popularity contest. I don’t want Cata to become so hyper-optimized that people can write bots to play it. The more viable options, the better IMO.

13

Yes, single zeds are easy-- but that doesn’t mean they’re not a threat. Especially early game if you’re caught in the open even a single fast zombie can inflict enough pain to affect your skills and speed.

You find a lone zombie, what do you do? spear it to death. You find two? spear them. Three or four? Kite and spear them, as long as you have enough spears. I’ll tell you now if you get backed into a corner and surrounded on two or three sides it doesn’t matter what happens you’re gonna be in for a bad time-- and with static spawn you’re going to be flooded with more specials, brutes and hulks than you know what to do with anyway, which means a change of tactics-- I generally use a lot of traps and spears-- and because of that I hate spitters the most-- Seriously, eroding my traps and spears all day every day. Brutes can be taken at a window as long as you have a decent melee weapon.

Hulks again, Laser-guided assrape. Tone their speed down a notch and their health or damage resistance up a tad. It’s primarily for hulks that I’m forced to use traps-- nothing for taking down a hulk like four or five bear traps or a house on fire.

I do think they need a behaviour change though-- Nerf to all zed sight ranges aside from a few specials like shriekers or fast zombies and possibly a boost to small-sound hearing (not footsteps, but anything like glass breaking could travel a tad further.)

It’s kinda stupid having decomposing zombies with the same range of sight as a survivor in peak condition and with all the decomposing stuff around their sense of smell would be shot too-- although I can feasably see that they could tell the difference between rotted meat and warm blood. Give individual zeds variable values, so some have better hearing, some have better sight, while most have a lower tier of senses for example.
Because at the moment as soon as you spot them they act like guided missiles. They need to eat the dead and tainted meat. I’m sure that stuff would stink to high heaven, so why the hell do they still follow me? :stuck_out_tongue:

14

Yep, Zombies currently are laser guided heat seeking self guided atomic rocket powered missiles.

15

Currently I find with the reduced sight ranges, they’re pretty easy to dodge. I can do a fair bit of sneaking through town to avoid them, and if being chased dropping a stick or paper wrapper and setting it on fire throws them off the trail well

16

I can’t really say too much (I’m still plugging away on an older version) but one thing I think would be a serious help in coordinating some real bona-fide zombie hordes would be if regular/cop/soldier/child zombies could let off a nice long-range moan every so often when they get within a certain range of you, drawing every other zombie in the active area (about 60 tiles out from your location, I think?) to that location so they can join the chase. As it is, as long as you keep some houses and other sight-blocking things around you, you don’t have to worry about stragglers, so you can go along knocking them off tile by tile without too much trouble.

I actually whipped up a special attack based off the Shrieker’s special and tested it a while ago, and that plus a tweak to the maximum number of spawnable critters made for one hell of a gigantic horde (though I also botched the range data on it so they just stood in a perfect square around me moaning until the game crashed).

17

About the “dormant” zombies. It’d be nice to have them being displayed as actual zombie corpses, so they can blend better. While they might stand out in an area where you haven’t been killing zombies before they’d blend perfectly after a while, particularly in areas heavily populated by zombies.

They’d activate either by passing one tile away or walking over them (“A dormant zombie grabs your leg and tries to bite you!”), a bit like a “zombie trap”. It could create some nice mini-scare jump moments, as mentioned in the OP. For a while, at least.

18

I agree. Also, at the start of the game in particular, you don’t have the option of holing up to recover. You’ll die without food and water, too. So even one zombie is a huge threat, since you desperately need supplies (especially if you play the static spawn option) and you can’t afford to be injured.

Here’s the problem as I see it as an occasional player (I play it for a little while, have lots of fun, then put it aside for months):

Most people posting here seem to be long-time players or, at least, very avid players. Like the most active and eager players of every game, pretty much, they always want it harder, harder, harder. Everything is always too easy for these experienced players.

It’s not for me. The game is already plenty hard enough for me, and I get bored to death if I have to keep playing the very beginning of a game over and over again. (And without a save game option, that’s pretty much what you’re forcing us more casual players to do.) I want the game to be fun far more than I want it to be hard (harder, at least).

I have absolutely no problem with OPTIONS which make the game harder (or easier). Indeed, I’m a big fan of options in general. But I know that adds to the programming difficulty. And I certainly don’t want to seem like I’m dictating to anyone else here, not at all.

But I notice this with a lot of games. The people who clamor for changes always seem to be experienced players, or just very avid players, who always want a harder game. Not everyone is like that, though you probably don’t hear as much from casual players.

Of course, I’ll play for awhile (assuming I can get my current crash problems fixed) and then move on to something else. When I come back to it later, if the game has become too difficult or otherwise more annoying than fun, I’ll just play something else, instead. So I understand how casual players might not deserve too much attention - not as much as more avid players, at least.

However, it’s still worth considering that people are different, and we don’t all want the same thing here. More options would be ideal, if that’s both possible and practical.

19

I agree. Also, at the start of the game in particular, you don’t have the option of holing up to recover. You’ll die without food and water, too. So even one zombie is a huge threat, since you desperately need supplies (especially if you play the static spawn option) and you can’t afford to be injured.[/quote]
This is part of why I wanted the threat to be more tactical than cheap shots of damage. Note that in my alternative you have many MORE chances of escaping uninjured - meaning the zombies are probably easier at the beginning, but more of a threat than they are now to more experienced players.

I think options are, in a way, giving up. Especially if they are options about core mechanics. I wouldn’t have suggested this idea if I thought it made the game harder (Well, okay, changing the window mechanics would make the game harder, but that has always felt like an exploit anyway).

The problem is that with the mechanics with the way they are now, it’s incredibly difficult for newcomers and incredibly easier for those who know the “right thing to do”. What I’m trying to do with these suggestions is narrow that gap while, at the same time, making the game more fun.

I don’t think “they grab instead of biting you” would make things that much harder (well, unless you draw a large group and try to take them on in melee, but that’s something more experienced or better kitted players would be doing). If anything, it makes it easier, and gives the player more options to boot.

The game, right now, is pretty clearly both too hard AND too easy. It’s hard if you don’t know about the overpowered exploits and options. It’s easy if you do, and easier for each you discover. I don’t want difficulty to be about discovering easily exploitable situations you can just hammer on over and over again, though.

20

Here’s the problem as I see it as an occasional player (I play it for a little while, have lots of fun, then put it aside for months):

Most people posting here seem to be long-time players or, at least, very avid players. Like the most active and eager players of every game, pretty much, they always want it harder, harder, harder. Everything is always too easy for these experienced players.

It’s not for me. The game is already plenty hard enough for me, and I get bored to death if I have to keep playing the very beginning of a game over and over again. (And without a save game option, that’s pretty much what you’re forcing us more casual players to do.) I want the game to be fun far more than I want it to be hard (harder, at least).

I have absolutely no problem with OPTIONS which make the game harder (or easier). Indeed, I’m a big fan of options in general. But I know that adds to the programming difficulty. And I certainly don’t want to seem like I’m dictating to anyone else here, not at all.

But I notice this with a lot of games. The people who clamor for changes always seem to be experienced players, or just very avid players, who always want a harder game. Not everyone is like that, though you probably don’t hear as much from casual players.[/quote]

I consider myself a recreational player, who prefers to read the documentation provided prior to investing time in a game. I was lucky to get in whilst the Whales wiki was still fairly accurate–in particular, prior to the new wilderness monsters, child zombies, CBM-splitting, etc. That let me have a fairly good handle on what was going on, and the melee guide was quite adequate to help me get through the initial learning curve. In fact, I’ve not yet discharged a firearm in-game–crossbow & BB gun, but no gunpowder or energy.

WCG hits on a very important point: without having some portions of the game that are straightforward yet rewarding, fresh players don’t stick around. Taking advantage of zeds’ difficulty with confined spaces is fairly straightforward and easy enough to include in a new-player tipsheet. “Find a way to slow and bottleneck your pursuers: dense plant growth, windows, or even a doorway can greatly reduce the amount of attackers on you at any one time. Setting a fire may break the pursuit, but can destroy useful structures and gear, so only do so as a last resort.”

(And there are times I’ve had a zed make it through the window whilst I was elsewhere in the building, or perhaps enough zeds show up that they breach multiple windows; miss once or twice and suddenly you’re getting swamped after all, etc. One game that went 14 days started by my taking too long in the 90-minutes, and getting besieged in the back room of a Bar until nightfall.)

From my perspective, Cata has an inverse difficulty curve: one starts out being depressingly incompetent at everything (can barely ride a bike, for fae’s sake!) and without any significant resources. There’s just barely enough time to get maybe half a decent set of gear–if you know what to look for and where it might be found–then one scrapes & scrounges until, hopefully by mid-spring, one has decent personal kit & at least an idea where one’s going to camp. Once the personal & camp are done, then one gets to have fun picking targets; there’s enough time to develop the character, explore potentially dangerous situations, craft neat things, etc.

Problem is, towns are by far the best place for starting gear. Any change to zeds affects the player’s ability to obtain decent gear, and by extension disproportionately affects the game difficulty.

GlyphGryph, I’ll say this as nicely as I can: so far as I can tell, you’re one of the avid players WCG was talking about. Given the prey-on-sleeping-character monster you got included (to say nothing of the thread generally) and the removal of HP Ignorant, I’m not inclined to believe you when you say that your changes don’t make the game harder, especially since our definitions of “fun” appear to vary.