What “prey on sleeping players” monster did I get included?
From the new-monster thread, http://www.cataclysmdda.com/smf/index.php?topic=341.0 :
Egg-layers (Needs a better name)
Still pretty rough as an idea, but basically a small, racoon-like creature with a spiked tail, it is attracted to and only attacks sleeping victims, implanting a powerful anesthetic (to allow it to escape if the victim wakes by making them very slow) in addition to a sack of eggs that will eventually hatch and deal large amounts of damage to the player if left untreated. They can be hunted and processed into a natural source of painkiller that can be very useful to a wilderness player.
based on
[i]The first monster suggestion from this thread has made it into mainline.
I hope you all enjoy experiencing it as much as I enjoyed making it! It can be found in cities, and if you know what it is already, please don’t spoil it for the others. ;)[/i]
(This document-preferrer considers a “spoiler” to be a vehicle part.)
When I said “the first”, I meant the first that was added. Which WASN’T that one.
It was the Smoker.
KA101, I’ve also realized you’re probably not on the most recent version.
Difficulty in general has dropped dramatically in it, mostly by giving you a couple decent advantages right off the bat. It’s still not easy (and I really don’t think any of my changes make it all that much harder), but if you’re still on .2, it’s very very different.
Post #1: “What the problem is” or “How to succeed in the early game”
Balancing both the monster and game difficulty is going to require a lot of work and thought, theres no one single straightforward solution thats going to work for everyone, because not everyone is on the same page as far as player knowledge and character skill is concerned. This poses a problem when trying to balance because when people are having a hard time its impossible to know if its because they are new and dont know where to get things, if they dont know how to exploit the ‘slow tiles’, or if its because they made some really bad skill choices at the start. They might not even be using the latest versions for that matter. Keep in mind that now we have to attempt to balance two different game modes at the same time as well now, and players may not be specifying which they are using when they talk about problems with difficulty. I would argue though that the same ‘exploitative’ behavior works in both scenarios to varying degrees of success. As an example, let me outline a foolproof method for surviving early on:
The new static spawn i find to be mildly challenging, till about day 2. Running into the center of town is suicide, however you can find and make everything you need to slay hoards of standard zombies right from the evac shelter, or from the closest forest. Bash a locker, grab a pipe… it makes a nice weapon as is but run outside grab a rock and you can turn that pipe into a crowbar, now you have one of the best melee weapons for early game, its probably turn 50 by now and you have everything you need to survive except food/clothing. You can pry open doors with the crowbar, and since zombies only ever come from a single direction if you’re smart about how you approach the town and kite them, all of the old ‘exploits’ (bushes/windows) work perfectly. You should be able to loot all of the residential houses with ease. Try not to encumber your torso with backpacks and things you dont -need- on day one if you plan on fighting. Myself, i never need to take any of the speed traits, as i almost never get hit and thus am usually never in pain that aspirin wont cure.
If you need spacing between zombies, just lure some of the ones in back back onto a bush. That will delay them for a few more turns, giving you enough time to kill the one in front after trapping him in a bush as well. You can also throw a rock or two if you need to just to be safe or to thin the herd. Rinse and repeat. You should be able to kill small hoards of green zombies this way without ever getting hit. This tactic should easily give you access to 5+ residential houses on day 1 for food/clothing. Then you just slowly work your way in and kite the bigger and bigger enemies. You -may- take some abuse from a brute on day 1, but because its faster than other zombies, you can just kite it until its in the wilderness by all itself and then fight it the bushes when you dont have to worry about trying to flee from the smaller zombies after your fight, you should be able to heal most of that damage if any, that it does to you on the first nights rest. Dont try to fight other zombies after an encounter with a brute if you are in a lot of pain.
The old system is sill more of a challenge overall, as it spawns zombies in at very inopportune times often in a circle around you. This stops you from holing up in a single house to try and fend them off once the non-green ones start spawning, but otherwise use the same tactics against em. Crowbar for any houses you want to break into without causing a lot of noise. If a hoard does spawn and is too big to (literally) fight in the bush or smite as they try to get into your windows, you just run away briefly and they will go away. Im definitely not an expert player, ive never made it longer than about 12 days often due to unfortunate accidents/greed/curiosity. I dont spend my time in labs mutating/powering up, and never been in a military camp, but unless i do something particularly stupid, those first 12 days dont really pose a challenge and gives me time to get most of the skills i want to level 3-5. Once you stop heavily encumbering your character and begin to fight monsters on ‘slow tiles’, you can take on early and mid game enemies with ease if you dont allow yourself to get surrounded or take on too much pain at any one time.
Post #2: “Changing tactics” or “A new approach to an old problem”
I wanted to split my last post since it was a bit too long and discussed what the problem was. This one will focus on offering an easy solution.
For those of you who dont use ‘the tactic’, the game probably seems pretty hard, and for those that do, its fairly unchallenging. Its this sort of thing that needs changing mostly. I dont know exactly how we get there as there are lots of things to tackle along the way, but at the end of the day we need to find a solution to the issue of the ‘one tactic’ problem.
Ranged zombies and necromancers can help limit the use of this overpowered tactic, but because most monster behavior is similar to eachother, almost all of them fall prey to the same tactic. Hide out of sight behind the wall of a house near a window, and pretty much every zombie will come in after you single file to get slaughtered. Including ranged ones. So we either need further diversified monster behavior, more varied types of threats, or we need to try and make the tactic a little less effective.
We also have to consider how these changes will affect primarily melee based players. The only thing we want to do is make a melee player need to think about and change up his tactics/position slightly more. We dont want to make him take more damage from melee, unless he continues to do the exact same thing over and over again.
- Maybe the solution to all of this is to cause windows and bushes to eventually break if so many actions are taken moving into one, or attacks are made against enemies who are already in one. If too many zombies are trying to get in through a window, or if too many have crawled in through it, maybe we need to cause the window tile to crumble and lessen the movement penalty. Perhaps even completely break the tile that contained the window so that it becomes a ‘small pile of rubble’ with a movement penalty of 125 or 150 instead of 400. This will FORCE the melee player to move to a more advantaged position eventually when all his cover gets destroyed unless he wants to be overrun, or unless hes willing to fight on slightly more fair terms.
We arnt trying to make it harder, we are just trying to diversify the threat. If a player is forced to move, he could become open to new threats, but it still allows him to play smart and tactically and not take damage. He just cant slay an entire legion of zombies while standing on exactly the same tile with minimal or even zero risk. He has to start moving to other houses, or running further and further away from town to fight monsters in the bushes because all of his cover is being used up.
This proposal is essentially to make ‘cover’ a resource that needs to be managed… Since there are ways to build both walls and windows, and to move items to block windows/gaps, this damage would not necessarily be permanent. If zombies break down all the window-walls in a players house, this gives him incentive to find the materials to rebuild his windows, if he should want them. Thus we are giving the player more self-objectives as time goes on, and changing the landscape so that the world does not seem as static and unchanging. A house that used to be the perfect zombie fighting fortress, could slowly lose its effectiveness and would need repair, or need to be abandoned. Im not suggesting that regular zombies break walls, just that they can destroy or wear down the movement penalty for entering a tile over time.
Would this idea work? Instead of trying to tackle the problem from a brute force method of increasing HP or defense, or trying to script new AI behaviors, we simply limit the number of uses that the exploitable tile has, thus making it a non-permanently exploitable tactic and allowing it to be legitimately balanced method of combat? Just like we have ammo for guns, and a system to balance noise so you dont run around shooting at everything. We need a system to balance melee combat too. This does not stop a melee character from playing effectively, but it does stop him from doing it endlessly at the same location. It might require that things like fences and traps also have some sort of durability to them if they are fought on, but because they can be crafted and repaired, this seems like it would only further the survival/crafting ideals that Cataclysm is based around; that resources are not permanent and need to be managed or replaced.
I would very much encourage and appreciate feedback and opinions, both good and bad. This is the best solution that i can come up with which should not require massive re-balances across the board and tweaking HP/defense/weapon stats/monster types. In a sense it may also enhance the survival element by giving the player more things to do with his crafting skills.
I really like that. You’ve put a lot of my own thoughts out there better than I could. Mechnically, you’re right, destroying window tiles and the like would be pretty effective at preventing the super-easy-tactic that is common right now… but I’m not sure if most players would like the idea. Maybe not for normal zombies, but for Brutes, this would make sense - a brute moving over a bush or window tile is slowed as normal but then destroys it. (Hulks, obviously, should simple destroy it like they do walls and not be slowed at all)
Another option, from a behaviour perspective, is to not have zombies so content to simply wait outside the window. If a zombies path is blocked by someone in a window frame, perhaps they should begin “seeking behaviour” of some sort for another way in - this way, if a player fight at least a moderate sized group at a window long enough, the zombies will end up coming in through other windows around the house, and the doors, actively seeking out other modes of entrance.
It might even be possible to have the corpses “fill” a window - a zombie or two might try smashing it open, but while it’s blocked the other zombies will go seek other entrances to the house - making the player have to at least move around to deal with the new threat.
I don’t think zombies should be destroying window frames and things by passing through them, although limiting it to just brutes and hulks seems pretty good. Having them destroy things like fences and shrubs and other terrain like that is a great idea. Means you need to go out and patch up your defenses every so often rather than just building a fence and having it stand forever.
The best way I could think of to destroy the window tactic is to give zombies the ability to have a chance of pushing you back a tile, based on how many are in a horde. So kiting them through windows would be a fine tactic if there’s only a few scattered around, but trying to take on an entire horde by standing in a window is just going to result in you being overrun after a while. Bunkering up should be a valid tactic, but it should require a bit more preparation than just opening a window.
Maybe zombies could reach a "critical mass". With enough of them in a horde trying to get at you, they could break through windows, doors, and other obstacles that a smaller group wouldn't be able to. Realistically speaking, it would simulate the weight of bodies against what's standing between you and them. In addition, [b]interior[/b] walls in the US are not all that sturdy - often just two layers of drywall, studs every few feet, and maybe some insulation between. If a human can punch a hole through it, then it makes sense that enough zombies could do the same.
In addition, you would get hulks and brutes charging through walls like the Kool-Aid man.
However, even playing the game regularly and often it is not easy to start out, especially with static spawn on. I would say that zombies in general are too fast, and specials seal the deal by being absolutely ridiculous. Trying to raid a house or two only a block into a town, it is not unusual for me to get swarmed by thirty or forty zombies, at least five of which are a combination of shockers and spitters. On top of that, there is no justification for fast zombies to be as fast as they are and skeletons, being without any real muscle mass, should barely be able to move.
I also agree with the above posters who say that single zombies are enough of a pain as they are.
I would go further to say that zombies from CZA capture the feel of the zombie apocalypse much better, in that they are almost helpless individually but truly dangerous when they swarm.
tl:dr: Zombies weaker individually, stronger in swarms, rarer specials, nerf spitters, shockers, and fast zombies.
I’m really enjoying the static spawn, but I don’t find it nearly as easy as you indicate. Of course, I’m just a casual player. You can’t make a crowbar without 1 Mechanic skill, which is fine (I started with that), but it’s kind of a shame to require that kind of thing in every build. But I just never find unlocked doors anymore, so…
If I’m lucky enough to find a regular zombie, I can kill it, but still take damage, often enough. That’s because I can rarely hit it, either with a rock or with that crowbar. Sure, it slows up on a window or a bush, but it still does some damage because I simply don’t have enough skill to hit it. And I can’t afford that at the start of the game, when I don’t have any food or drink at all.
And finding a regular zombie by itself, without one of the specials, seems to be just incredibly rare (or maybe that’s just been my experience). I can kill a shocker by itself, if I lure it into a good position for me, but again, I usually take damage.
I’m enjoying this, but I normally have to run away when I see ANY zombies, at first. Once I get just a bit of throwing skill, I’ll try to lure one off by himself. I was able to lure a brute into lava, which was fun. My throwing skill has improved greatly, so I can wear them down, but I still can’t hit anything at melee, because it’s too dangerous to try. And the specials seem to be everywhere.
My point is that, for me, the difficulty has been just right. With static spawn turned on, I’m raiding outlying homes and being very grateful for everything I find. The cities are deathtraps, but not suicidal at night. (Of course, I’ve got Night Vision and Light Step. Without those, it would be much more difficult. And Animal Empathy has kept me from being killed by the widespread wolves, cougars, and bears.)
Everyone is different, but, as I say, this has been just about right for me. I wouldn’t want a harder game. But if I did want a harder game, I’d just start without Night Vision, Light Step, Animal Empathy, and Mechanic skill. I could always use a different build if I wanted something harder (and not use the disadvantages as extensively as I do).
Been thinking some more, this time about modifications to zombie movement/tracking
Zombies have several modes:
Dormant: Dormant zombies will not move at all, and will be the hardest to notice. May be misidentified as corpses.
Wander: Wandering zombies will walk semi-randomly. Certain things, such as smell or the difficulty of traversing a square can influence their random walk. Low activity level. Will move roughly every fourth turn (smell can increase this significantly)
Investigate: These zombies have had something specific trigger this behaviour. They will travel to a given square and then revert to wander - investigating zombies have a certain interest level, which will decrease over time. They will revert to wander if this value reaches zero, and will acquire a new investigate target (and a new interest level) if a stimulus can overcome their current interest. Moderate acivity level, will move roughly every other turn. They will sometimes smash obstacles, but this reduces their interest level.
Aggro: These zombies have spotted the player and identified him. They are actively hunting for the player. If they can not see the player, they will head roughly to his last known position. If they cannot path there because the way is blocked, they will attempt to follow the walls and work their way to the player along that path. Aggro zombies have a high activity level and will move every turn. They will smash obstacles to path to a player, but will only recalculate the path if their current path is obstructured or they identify the player.
Smell
Zombies do not go aggro from smell, but if there is an odour and it is more dense in a neighbouring square they are far more likely to move to that square than to remain still or wander in a different direction.
A zombie that has gone aggro will drop a “scent bomb” when he goes aggro. This will not send other zombies aggro themselves, but will encourage them to generally move in the direction of an altercation. The sent bomb will cover a relatively small area - maybe expanding to a 5x5 square - and then the zombie will generate a persistent scent as it moves around, leaving a trail for other zombies to follow - if they happen to wander across the scent bomb area or the trail itself.
Zombies will be generally more active in areas with high scent, and will occassionally smash objects if there’s an area of higher scent on that square.
The players still generate a persistant scent cloud, but this should quickly permeate an area making nearby non-aggressive zeds more active but NOT able to directly seek the player out.
Smell will fade over time. Some tiles may hold sent better than others - moving through a swimming pool or river, or hiding in a full bathtub, may foil pursuers
Smell will spread over time. Smell will also have some difficulty spreading through certain tiles, and some tiles will not have smell pass through them at all.
Sight:
Zombies do not always identify players on sight. They must make a perception check to identify a player just as players must make a perception check to identify zombies. Generally, zombie perception is poor.
However, a player does NOT need to be identified to become a “target of interest” for a zombie. Any source of motion (including other zombies, if unidentified)
Aggro:
Zombies do not go aggressive simply by seeing a player - rather, they need to identify a player and pass an “interest threshhold”.
Been following this thread and for the most part I’m not ecstatic about the proposed changes (although I do like the notion that a zombie has a chance to latch on to you.) Zombies are, at their core, strong and unrelenting but also mindless. The key advantage humans have over them is the ability to think tactically and use their surroundings.
So if the chief goal is to put limits on the tactic where standing on one side of a window makes you an invincible god, I propose the following: include some measure of fatigue in the game. Chopping up zombies is hard work, even if you have advantageous ground.
Here’s the notion I was working on.
- Becoming fatigued increases your encumberment
- Attacking increases your fatigue
- There are mutliple levels of fatigue. The earliest level or two are mainly to nudge you into finding a way to get out of the situation you are in, while the higher levels become debilitating.
- Physically demanding attacks (melee, throwing, bows) increase fatigue much faster than shooting a gun, but even constantly shooting a gun will start to wear you out (recall The Battle of Hope in World War Z?)
- Fatigue fades fairly quickly as you do less-demanding tasks
- Stimulants can partially negate the effects of fatigue for a while
- Players get a warning when they are getting close to the fatigue limit (“You are starting to get worn out from all this physical activity”) and then a description of their new fatigue level (“Your arms are getting sore.” “Your is starting to feel very heavy.” “Your is beginning to feel like lead. You can barely lift it!”)
- Fatigue can either be generalized or tracked for each body part
- Other physically demanding tasks could also cause fatigue – riding a bike, chopping wood, etc.
- Fatigue can be extended by starting traits (“Fit?”), mutations, bionics (maybe one that cancels fatigue at the expense of battery power)
So basically under this system, standing behind an open window will protect you for a while, until your arms get so tired that you can’t raise your machete for a single blow more. Then the horde rolls over you >:-)
Not thrilled about the change either; if zeds are to have several states, it’d help if those that would be obvious to the player get mentioned in-box, similar to how animals are Ignoring/Tracking/Hostile!. (Wandering/Investigating/Attacking!)
I really like the idea of zombies reacting to stimuli and having different alertness levels. The more diverse their behavior, the more a player will have to change his tactics or come up with clever ways to deal with them. Right now, the zombies see your PC and make a bee line straight for him, so kiting is the obvious tactic and a too effective one. Current zombies are defined by their abilities, like fast zombies or grabbers, but you could also make new types defined by their senses or behaviors: A blind zombie with good hearing, a tracker zombie, a curious zombie that will open any doors he sees. Having different types of zombies would make for more interesting encounters, while keeping them still feel like “normal” zombies, as opposed to more types with new superpowers tacked on.
I don’t know what kind of pathfinding Cata uses, or how hard it is to change, but zombies should be able to attempt to find an alternate route to a PC if they can’t easily reach him. If you stand in a window fighting off a horde of zombies, some should circle around the house and break through doors or other windows. Zombies are dumb, but they have at least some rudimentary intelligence.
The idea of a “scent bomb” is kind of strange. Isn’t all scent in the game assumed to be the player’s scent? Or are there different odors the game keeps track of? I’d assume that a zombie would just moan or howl when it saw a living human, and thus trigger nearby zombies to investigate the noise. And that way the player would also hear it and know he was in trouble.
I agree. Zombies can’t feel pain, so they can’t be dissuaded by anything. You just have to destroy them or escape them. But since they’re mindless, you don’t have to be a genius to out-think them. That’s kind of the whole point of zombies, isn’t it?
After all, there are a million other enemies in the game, so if you want diverse behavior, why wouldn’t you use one of them? Just my 2 cents.
Well, zombies obviously aren’t COMPLETELY mindless. And some of them are downright tactical (Masters, Necromancers). But yes, most are pretty close, which is why the majority of the behaviours I’ve described are pretty mindless behaviours. The only exception being “if you can’t get in here, go look for another way in”.
There are a bunch of interesting options floating around this thread. The ideas of fatigue or generating new zombie behavior types would certainly be worth putting more thought into, but involve the creation of entirely new systems which will probably span months of development and tweaking.
The idea of zombies pushing a player back from a window or moving him to a less advantaged position seems like it could be relevant, if they ever got to take a turn against you. The problem is that the majority of the time they dont get any turns.
Fatigue would certainly stop the endless fighting without penalty, but would also encumber the player during normal fights when not in a window or against a bush. Unfortunately this might have the side effect of making head on combat from things that you cant escape even that much more risky and dangerous, which would push more people to the tactics that are causing the problem in the first place. Perhaps combat should just speed up the hunger/thirst as a compromise? Even though i do like the fatigue idea in general. Dont know how well it would be in practice.
New zombie behaviors such as those which would allow zombies to pathfind, or to possibly play smarter would certainly change up the difficulty of many encounters. It would surely help Cataclysm in the long run, and ideally having the game evolve to include those kinds of behaviors would be great, but im not sure this solves the fundamental window problem for the majority of cases though. I guess if we had smarter zombies, then the ‘exploit’ would only exist for certain types of enemies, and in certain situations.
I made a video showing the ‘window exploit’ for anyone who cares to watch it. It does not show off or address all situations, but it should be a pretty good starter to help everyone understand the problem. You can find the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2QV0NBqdVw - Cataclysm DDA 0.2 - The Power of Windows
Hello. Um. I picked up Cataclysm a couple of months ago (via RogueBasin), and even though I’m still mostly playing 0.1 - 0.2 is too crashy for me - I thought maybe I could share the reasons I was drawn to the game in the first place. I feel a little bad making them my first post, because I feel like kind of a naysayer, but here goes.
I have a hard time really getting behind anything that makes run-of-the-mill zombies any harder to fight, and here’s why: What drew me to the game in the first place was the description on RogueBasin - I think it said something like ‘a fully-realized crafting system’, construction, vehicles, and so on. There was all this stuff to encounter, like crazy mutations, and interesting creatures everywhere, and all this weird otherworldly stuff you could encounter, and…it was basically just tantalizing you with all this stuff beyond the zombies (note: Beyond the Zombies, good name for a punk band?).
I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not really a hardcore player or a player who’s in it for the ‘zombie experience’; you could say that I’m mostly an Explorer and a Reclaimer (or a major-event-doer), going by the Musings on Game Design thread. Zombies are really just kind of an obstacle to overcome, like a first stage that lets you know you’re ready to go out and take on bigger and better challenges when you can handle them (except for the special boss zombies that come out after a while, which kind of do feel like an achievement to outsmart). Zombies feel like a first-contact threat, and, at least in my version of the game - I read that difficulty may be turned down for 0.3 - they really are a threat you need some strategy and luck to deal with. Anything that makes it harder to get past them and get set up to go on to all the other interesting stuff out there, most of which seems stronger than zombies, really feels to me like it’d have to be balanced out with something that you can use as a new advantage, at the least, because it seems like, especially in a game doesn’t have a save feature, anything that makes good content inaccessible just doesn’t add to the fun. What I’d really like is to see the later, non-zombie content developed a little more: the other location types besides cities, the other creature types, interaction with the world (both through NPCs, human or otherwise, and changing the land around you), more mutations, and…so on.
So yeah, that’s what I was thinking: please don’t make zombies harder to the point where a player who isn’t totally hardcore would have trouble advancing to the rest of the game. I hope this didn’t come off as insulting or telling you how to do your jobs; I just thought I should put in my two cents as a player. Thanks.
Edit: Well, apparently 0.3 came out while I was thinking up this post? Huh. If anything I said doesn’t really apply any more, feel free to ignore it.
[quote=“Sunrise, post:38, topic:491”]I have a hard time really getting behind anything that makes run-of-the-mill zombies any harder to fight, and here’s why: What drew me to the game in the first place was the description on RogueBasin - I think it said something like ‘a fully-realized crafting system’, construction, vehicles, and so on. There was all this stuff to encounter, like crazy mutations, and interesting creatures everywhere, and all this weird otherworldly stuff you could encounter, and…it was basically just tantalizing you with all this stuff beyond the zombies …
So yeah, that’s what I was thinking: please don’t make zombies harder to the point where a player who isn’t totally hardcore would have trouble advancing to the rest of the game.[/quote]
Yup, I couldn’t agree more, Sunrise.
I realize that people are different, so not everyone will agree with this,… but that’s kind of the whole point. Not all of us are hardcore enough to always want the game to be harder.
And, personally, I get bored when I never get to see the later parts of a game, because my characters never survive long enough. The early game is fun, but I really don’t want to play the same thing over and over again. (Of course, I can always save-scum, but that’s kind of awkward, too - nothing you’d want to do all the time while you’re playing.)