Zombie Movement

[Pakislav]

You can call that purposeful, and you can call that incomplete.

Making them ignore all obstacles is the first step. Making them ignore some obstacles, in some cases is hell of a lot of additional work.

[halberdsturgeon]

Their rudimentary behaviour is deliberate; basic zombie types aren’t meant to require a great deal of strategy to overcome, which is why I think all of the fuss about bushes and windows is unwarranted. If you want an example of more sophisticated movement behaviour (and justifiably so), play with NPCs on and anger one of them. They’ll path around any movement-penalising terrain to get to you, even an entire row of bushes.

[kevin.granade]

correction: zombies don’t “path” around anything, it just looks like it. they can’t see through most walls, which means they can either see you and move in a straight line, use hearing (which has a stumbling mechanic) or scent (which naturally makes a path for them), or wander around at random, all of which will tend to lead them around walls.
the hard thing about nerfing kiting is doing so without eliminating it entirely. if zombies stopped to smash obstacles in their way, you couldn’t kite them at all.
I’m also in favor of corpses (and items in general) slowing movement, that would have a number of nice effects.

[FunsizeNinja123]

“You slip on that plastic bottle”

[Binky]

I’d personally prefer to get rid of bushes entirely.
Bushes allow you to drag one or two zombies at a time away from urban areas and kill them with relatively low risk in the fields. Window kiting and similar are better because you’re normally in a situation where you’re in an urban area and the noise attracts more zombies/there are just generally more zombies about.

A flat nerf to zombies could be put in to account for the added difficulty of not being able to use bushes.

Really though, do we want to have a game where new players have to learn to kite every zombie through an obscure/unclear mechanic just to survive through the first few days?

[Pakislav]

Agreed Binky.
I personally very much don’t like that, but feel literally compelled to abuse it since the game is balanced to take such huge advantage into account.

Maybe making zombies follow an alerted one, as opposed to just the player, will nerf kiting by making larger groups follow suit?

[Inadequate]

How obscure and unclear is kiting? You enter the game, run away from zombies, see zombies get slowed by terrain, put two and two together and hit zombies when they’re slowed. For all the ‘no kiting’ talk nobody has proposed a reasonable alternative. And given how the person in question also calls for not being able to shoot zombies in classic mode, I don’t expect a reasonable alternative to be ever proposed.

And removing bushes would be completely unrealistic. Vegetation exists, and vegetation isn’t going away anytime. In between the crippling of ranged combat and the rallying cry of ‘remove kiting’, I honestly have no idea whether Binky wants combat to be even remotely viable. Certainly nothing resembling ‘realistic’, at any rate.

[Gideon]

Hang on…

If I’m not mistaken, currently your speed cost (how “fast” you can move) is determined my the terrain you currently occupy.

Wouldn’t a possible solution to this be changing it so that the speed cost is determined by the terrain you are entering instead?

So, instead of things moving slowly when they are on a bush, things move slowly entering the bush. Leaving the bush then is the speed cost of whatever terrain you are entering (another bush, sapling, fence, open ground, etc). Same with windows, it takes effort to climb/crawl/shamble in to the window square but less effort to enter the room behind it from the window.

I don’t know how hard a change this would be (I’ve not looked at the code for CataDDA, I’ve got enough things taking up time in my life), but if it is reasonable it might be worth checking out.

Or I could be completely off base.

[Zaweri_Runewright]

“You slip on that plastic bottle”

Inb4 doing Zaweris. (anyone remember it?)

[Binky]

[quote=“Inadequate, post:27, topic:5402”]How obscure and unclear is kiting? You enter the game, run away from zombies, see zombies get slowed by terrain, put two and two together and hit zombies when they’re slowed. For all the ‘no kiting’ talk nobody has proposed a reasonable alternative. And given how the person in question also calls for not being able to shoot zombies in classic mode, I don’t expect a reasonable alternative to be ever proposed.

And removing bushes would be completely unrealistic. Vegetation exists, and vegetation isn’t going away anytime. In between the crippling of ranged combat and the rallying cry of ‘remove kiting’, I honestly have no idea whether Binky wants combat to be even remotely viable. Certainly nothing resembling ‘realistic’, at any rate.[/quote]

Cut the attitude Inadequate, your snarky replies don’t make you seem clever and are less than useful. I also never said that we shouldn’t be able to shoot zombies.

Kiting is unintuitive/unclear because most players don’t expect to have to kite everything. This would be fine if it was just an occasional, general advantage (like in some turn based tactics games where you have squares which give you bonuses/maluses) but HAVING to use kiting to succeed seems like a bizarre tactic.

Whilst vegetation exists, most games also don’t have vegetation that slows all creatures down and is used as the main tactical weapon.
I think the suggestions have been pretty acceptable, but they definitely would need a complete balance overhaul - it couldn’t just be that we remove kiting as the game is so dependent on it. Giving the player more options like easier to build traps, stabbing through doors and so on would help create interesting tactical challenges.

[BeigeSand]

"Classic mode does this a bit (as there are no special zombies) but the problem with a shambling horde in a game like this is that they’re just too easy to deal with by running away and using ranged weapons/kiting. Basically, anything slow with no ranged attacks is easy to fight, even if they followed you forever (I don’t know about the feasibility due to the reality bubble - you might be able to outrun them) you’d still be able to just kite them around.

Really, the only way for this to work would be to implement a stamina system and put a huge spawn rate on them.

However, if you just wanted to add a hardier zombie in the main mix then this might be good, but I’d prefer to just set all normal Zs to having more HP and doing more damage."
-Blinky

This might be what inad is referring to, FYI. So you insinuated it was a bad thing in the case of ranged vs. non-ranged in some fashion, that could be construed into what he said. (Not agreeing/disagreeing)

On topic, In the traditional viewpoint of “realistic unless it is unfun/tedious” I see kiting as realistic, and what it does is allow a single melee organism to combat multiple melee organisms. One person killing a zombie or two shouldn’t present that much of an issue. Kiting allows that. It seems that it’s being argued that you shouldn’t be able to pull zombies and kill one or two zombies with ease. Which confuses me. If I’m mistaken about what the issue is someone please correct me.

[Binky]

I certainly insinuated that ranged weapons were over powered and that classic needs a shake up, but not I wasn’t calling “for not being able to shoot zombies in classic mode” in any shape or form.

On topic, In the traditional viewpoint of “realistic unless it is unfun/tedious” I see kiting as realistic, and what it does is allow a single melee organism to combat multiple melee organisms. One person killing a zombie or two shouldn’t present that much of an issue. Kiting allows that. It seems that it’s being argued that you shouldn’t be able to pull zombies and kill one or two zombies with ease. Which confuses me. If I’m mistaken about what the issue is someone please correct me.

For me, kiting goes over the threshold of realism vs fun (as outlined in the design document, fun is primary to realism). Yes, kiting allows you to bring one or two zombies over instead of loads of them, but it doesn’t just allow you to do that, it FORCES you to do that in the early stages. As in, the combat revolves around something incredibly repetitive and to my mind, not at all fun. I’m not opposed to the general idea of being able to split away one or two zombies from a horde and kill them, and I think that’s a great tactical option, it’s just leading to them into bushes to kill them seems silly.

Imagine describing the game to someone, and they asked how combat worked - ‘oh, for the most part of the early game you have to drag zombies into bushes, but then you can kill them with a wooden stick because they’re so hampered by the bushes’ - it just isn’t fun. Yeah, a lot of work needs to be put into the mechanics to balance it out, but pretty much anything would be better.

[Catfoodbob]

‘Remove kiting’ is a ludicrous idea and shouldn’t even be considered. Exactly what ‘compromise’ is even possible with removing kiting entirely?

give more basic items the block tag or maybe even give some armors as well the block tab like metal armguards

[halberdsturgeon]

Yes, kiting allows you to bring one or two zombies over instead of loads of them, but it doesn’t just allow you to do that, it FORCES you to do that in the early stages.

I don’t agree. How does the game force you to kite zombies through rough terrain? You don’t have to fight in the early stages at all if you don’t want to. If you do, you don’t have to use bushes, windows or anything else; you can stand your ground and fight zombies toe-to-toe if you prefer, and leave to heal when necessary. In some ways this is preferable, since it increases your dodge skill, whereas avoiding ever being swung at doesn’t.

[Binky]

I don’t agree. How does the game force you to kite zombies through rough terrain? You don’t have to fight in the early stages at all if you don’t want to. If you do, you don’t have to use bushes, windows or anything else; you can stand your ground and fight zombies toe-to-toe if you prefer, and leave to heal when necessary. In some ways this is preferable, since it increases your dodge skill, whereas avoiding ever being swung at doesn’t.

I feel the problem is, as Pakislav mentions, that it’s vastly superior to use kiting techniques (true, dodging doesn’t get as much of a boost, but you could train dodging on less dangerous enemies that can’t infect you) rather than other tactics/pretty much any slow enemy can be kited to death on bushes and killed with just a wooden board.
Yeah, the player can just attack zombies flat out, but kiting is pretty much risk free.

Again, I do think some kiting is fine (windows for instance), but just not having bush kiting as the best tactical plan in nearly every scenario

[halberdsturgeon]

But it isn’t. Leading zombies through bushes takes more effort and manoeuvring than fighting them conventionally, and it becomes very difficult if you’ve got several zombies clumped together at once. Once you’re skilled at fighting it becomes completely unnecessary. Even at the beginning of the game it’s possible for moderately skilled characters to kill most zombies without too much risk using an attack-move-attack-move pattern.

Using bushes can be a good tactical choice, but it’s just not the be all and end all of combat that people are making it out to be.

[Belteshazzar]

The easy fix to kiting is to realize what happened historically to prey animals that use this to their defense against human predation.

We walked them to death.

Cataclysm allowing you to outrun zombies does not take into account that even an Olympian sprinter is not going to be able to outlast the lurching horde.

Tiredness already ‘exists’ yes, but it seems more a nebulous sort of diurnal cycle instead of the physical limits of muscular exertion.

[halberdsturgeon]

I don’t think animals luring humans into bushes in order to fight them more easily has much of a historical precedent.

[FunsizeNinja123]

Oh really? Tell me why animals stay in the forests. Because we kill them. The forest is their ground, your obstacle. They lure you in, and the forest makes it hard to see.

The historical thing is that we had to hunt animals for food and shit.

[halberdsturgeon]

Yeah, animals generally use forests to hide, not to entrap humans. My point was that this thread isn’t about making it harder to flee from zombies, it’s about making it harder to lead zombies through bushes (I guess), so the analogy Belteshazzar offered doesn’t really apply. And adding fatigue from moving around won’t make it much more difficult to kite enemies through difficult terrain and kill them.

The problem I have with all of this is that the arguments I’m seeing here are ‘luring animals through bushes is too powerful, or not fun’. And I disagree on both counts. It’s not so powerful that you absolutely must do it in order to have a chance at winning fights, especially not with a strong character, and using the terrain to best advantage is fun to me. It adds an element of strategy to what would otherwise be a rather bland slugfest. Why else do movement penalties on terrain exist if not to offer strategic depth?