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Dr. Arbitrary posted:It's been a while, but isn't that translocation? I had no idea that existed - need to find that spell now!
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Apr 4, 2023 20:12
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worm girl posted:Previously, ordinary zombies basically stopped being anything other than speedbumps once you had a couple ranks of melee and a real weapon. This was creating a problem where you could just walk into intersections in broad daylight with 3 or 4 melee skill and hold tab until everything in town was dead except for the juggernauts. I routinely play characters with 12 starting dex and even with a decent early weapon, dodge/melee/bashing at 3, this was not the case. Fundamentally, you couldn't do this if there were any kind of special zombie like shockers/zappers, spitters, acid zombies, smokers, boomers, grabbers/grapplers, brutes, technicians, or often, even tough zombies. That's not to mention other more exotic enemies like spiders, triffids, or even roaches, which sometimes seem remarkably accurate in combat. You couldn't do it if there were too many zombies in one place. You would run low on stamina quickly, which nerfs your fighting ability real fast. You can also only dodge once per turn, period, so even two adjacent enemies suddenly became very dangerous because you'd start to just take the hits no matter how agile you were. Grabs were already severely debilitating at that stage. And once you start getting hit, the pain as well as the limb damage is going to rapidly tank you to a stage of non-combat-readiness. Holding tab at at the stage you're describing is a bit overconfident, but not unreasonable, when fighting only one regular or low-evo zombie at a time. But if you do it in anything tougher, it's very easy to get hit or grabbed and overwhelmed and suddenly you've skipped a dozen combat turns where you're fighting at a fraction of capacity and now you've been hit five times more and entered a death spiral. The idea you could aggro 20+ nearby zombies and just hold the button and be fine is junk. As for the new change, grabs (especially stacking grabs) are already very lethal at low ranks and the only real defense players had against them was moving away and/or wasting combat turns to break free. At higher levels it wasn't a big deal because you'd mostly just automatically avoid the dodge to begin with. If breaking free is way harder now, how do players actually engage with and respond to the mechanic? It's just a random debuff that just happens and you can't really do anything about it?
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Apr 4, 2023 20:45
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Don't forget: it's a change that only hurts you if you fight in melee range, which was already way harder and more dangerous than using guns. Pretty much every special attack or trait enemies have makes melee worse and guns better - acid, electricity, grabs, infected bites, throws, all only effective if you get close. Not to mention that being in melee causes pain and injury, costs stamina, etc. so that you're always drowning in stacking debuffs. And now I guess you'll get double-ultra-super grabbed so like two basic zombies are a threat - if you're melee, of course. Meanwhile, here is a complete list of enemies that are more dangerous to a gunner than a melee fighter:
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Apr 4, 2023 21:03
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Yeah that doesn't really sound necessary or helpful to me. You're already incentivized to simply get a fast weapon and stab, step away, stab your way through all combat encounters to minimize the amount of danger you're in. And guns are already vital to deal with the numerous zombies with ranged or otherwise debilitating capabiltiies that make fighting them in melee extremely inadvisible. And yeah, grabs aren't a good mechanic because you can't engage with them meaningfully other than "don't let them attack you" and "kill zombie quickly or mash movement to try and break out" but both of those are just random dice rolls for the most part. The primary method of engagement with the mechanic is to shift the focus entirely away from dice roll combat and into the mathematical certainty of "being able to attack faster than the enemy can respond and then move back to reset the counter on their actions" and changes to the lethality of grabbing wouldn't alter that. It is fundamentally just a needlessly obscure approach to making enemies one shot you by creating poorly communicated methods of making it impossible for you to escape or fight back against them. The entire range of melee combat boils down to repeating the same action until something dies, it's just that the action is not just mashing the attack button it's doing the weird stab-disengage-stab dance which takes longer. If they wanted to make melee more interesting I think they should add more activateable abilities with more varied effects rather than putting them all in obscure martial arts and making them randomly activated. Making engaging in normal melee more lethal than it already is, is not going to change how people play at all, I think. Because I am already going out of my way to avoid it by maximising mobility and speed, which is exactly what the system encourages. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Apr 4, 2023 |
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Apr 4, 2023 21:04
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It'd be cool if there were "Martial Arts" that grew like proficiencies from fighting (and getting hit by) certain enemy types. If you scrap a bunch with zombies, you should get used to their behaviors and start dodging them readily. If you fight wasps, you learn the patterns of how they attack. In this way the player's familiarity with a threat would be matched by an in-character familiarity with the threat.
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Apr 4, 2023 21:40
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Wolfechu posted:I literally burned and wasted 15 units of water the other night, making clean water. That's some Homer Simpson level cooking there I've definitely hosed up using the clean water recipe a bunch in the past, but my favorite water-based gently caress up was getting a barrel full of water that I desperately needed in a situation where it wasn't easily available, tossing it on the fire, and then realizing when I went to check later that the barrel was plastic. luchadornado posted:I would love a mod or even an addition to magiclysm that gives you a teleport/rune system. Make it expensive so you don't want to teleport around all the time, but it sucks when you have a cool house that's too far away from other things, especially if you take Wayfarer or otherwise don't like vehicles. So there's a certain kind of house that has a backyard enclosed by a wooden fence that has magiclysm stuff in the basement. You'll find a wall with some writing on it and some other items down there that hint towards a puzzle to open the wall up. I won't spoil the solution unless you specifically want it, but those basements have what you need. Vib Rib posted:What? No, you loving couldn't. I get you're invested in defending development trends but why are you saying poo poo that anybody who's played the game would know is just wrong? For almost the entirety of the time between the last stable and this current stable my strategy for clearing out towns, once I had even vaguely decent gear, was to find a loud gun, walk into an intersection, fire it off, and then hold tab to melee everything to death that came out. If I couldn't find I gun, I would use a whistle or an airhorn, though a survival whistle wasn't as loud so it didn't work as well. Point being: this was absolutely doable and almost 100% consistent.
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Apr 4, 2023 21:44
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Sab Sabbington posted:For almost the entirety of the time between the last stable and this current stable my strategy for clearing out towns, once I had even vaguely decent gear, was to find a loud gun, walk into an intersection, fire it off, and then hold tab to melee everything to death that came out. If I couldn't find I gun, I would use a whistle or an airhorn, though a survival whistle wasn't as loud so it didn't work as well. Point being: this was absolutely doable and almost 100% consistent. I have a character who has survivor/leather armor and a billhook with fior di battaglia and I still can't do that in the current stable. Yes I can take out any of the basic zombie types if I keep them one on one, but in no way can I fight a swarm and especially not if it has any specials in it, which every town does, acid spitters and electric/smoke zombies are still highly debilitating and god help you if you get a brute because they can gently caress you up in a single hit.
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Apr 4, 2023 22:40
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Before Stamina it was possible to melee-down hordes. Now you'll get tired and die.
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Apr 4, 2023 22:52
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JerikTelorian posted:It'd be cool if there were "Martial Arts" that grew like proficiencies from fighting (and getting hit by) certain enemy types. This is a good idea. We have it for offense, why not defense? megane posted:If they wanted to make melee more interesting I think they should add more activateable abilities with more varied effects rather than putting them all in obscure martial arts Snail and frog mutants get a couple things like this, and it's pretty neat, I hope they make more of that stuff. Frog especially is sort of underpowered right now, but the ability to grab guys with your tongue and yank them into stabbing range is cool, especially if you have gooped or webbed up the area. They used to be sorta unplayable because cold blooded was so bad, but thermoelectric underwear powers up cold blooded mutants now, as does carrying a space heater in your backpack (lol) The Lone Badger posted:Before Stamina it was possible to melee-down hordes. Now you'll get tired and die. Ideally you pop in, hold tab, then catch your breath before the next group shows up. OwlFancier posted:I have a character who has survivor/leather armor and a billhook with fior di battaglia and I still can't do that in the current stable. Yes I can take out any of the basic zombie types if I keep them one on one, but in no way can I fight a swarm and especially not if it has any specials in it, which every town does, acid spitters and electric/smoke zombies are still highly debilitating and god help you if you get a brute because they can gently caress you up in a single hit. Fior is great but polearms are uniquely painful on the stamina front. If you use something lighter, you'll be able to fight longer, or you can pursue a stamina-heavy mutation line like chimera or mouse. Raising your athletics skill and lifestyle score also helps quite a bit. Acid, smoke, and electricity are simple gear checks. Go to Hub 01 and get an activity suit, which completely shuts down acid and electrical fields, and get a gas mask to make yourself immune to all types of smoke. Also survivor armor has been nerfed pretty badly, it's no longer the top tier set it used to be, sadly. If you don't want an activity suit, you can craft faraday chainmail, or you can get a dielectric capacitance CBM from Rubik. Rubber boots, or fireproof socks and biosilicified boots/survivor fireboots will make your feet immune to acid. It is pretty dumb, but the game as currently designed basically expects you to have these things after your first summer. Electricity is the worst offender - there's no such thing as partial protection and it messes you up so badly that it's difficult to play without it. This is apparently a realism thing, but if that's the case then I think they should remove shockers from the general enemy pool and either stick them in specific locations or make them a portal storm enemy. It'd also be neat if specials weren't as uniformly distributed. If this was resident evil or something, you'd have the smoke guys in one place and the electric guys in another, etc., and you'd mostly only mix them together in the endgame, if at all. I know that's not totally possible here but it's something that could be better than it is. worm girl fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 00:11
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What exactly are these overpowered combos that let you just hold tab in the middle of a city? My last run I had a Longsword using ninjitsu and Montante which was strong but never got to that point. edit: I'm not being a snot I'm legitimately asking to tell me what they are so I can use them esquilax fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 00:35
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I mean... yes if you have the complete set of gear, extreme skill in weapons, the ideal weapons to go with them, and some mutations or CBMs, then sure maybe you can fight a pile of zombies but at that point you've beaten the game, such as it is, anyway. And by that point you have probably acquired enough ammunition that you could just roll into town with an armoured vehicle and shoot everything to death with a turret, or do it yourself with an M240 or something. Can you still mount coilguns to vehicles? At that point I don't even think I would still be playing much less inclined to continue to do the melee dance with zombies. And I don't think that counts as "a couple ranks of melee and a decent weapon" like genuinely at that point you have seen everything the game has to offer and nearly topped out the crafting lists.
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Apr 5, 2023 00:42
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OwlFancier posted:I mean... yes if you have the complete set of gear, extreme skill in weapons, the ideal weapons to go with them, and some mutations or CBMs, then sure maybe you can fight a pile of zombies but at that point you've beaten the game, such as it is, anyway. And by that point you have probably acquired enough ammunition that you could just roll into town with an armoured vehicle and shoot everything to death with a turret, or do it yourself with an M240 or something. Can you still mount coilguns to vehicles? Last I checked, coilguns weren't mountable, but it might have been added back in. They're very terrible though, like single digit damage terrible. The stuff I mentioned isn't endgame. You can go to Hub 01 immediately and get an activity suit after doing a couple of fairly simple quests, and the entire purpose of Rubik is so that CBMs stop being an endgame thing. All you need is a jar of anesthetic and you can get started on your cyborg adventure. Rubber boots and gas masks are literally everywhere day one, and a shallow TCL dive (requires fighting some weak zombies and sneaking past some robits) is enough to get you decently mutated. Since you only get positive mutations for your first several sips, you can drink whatever and not worry about making your guy unplayable. A 3 skill dude with an activity suit, gas mask, and quarterstaff still has a very long road ahead of them, even more so if you skipped the suit and opted for rubber boots. esquilax posted:What exactly are these overpowered combos that let you just hold tab in the middle of a city? My last run I had a Longsword using ninjitsu and Montante which was strong but never got to that point. The current meta is combat knife and iirc eskrima, but loaded stick or cudgel and brawling will take you extremely far. If you use a combat knife, try to make some sort of arm guards that have the block ability so that you can actually parry. Knives are +0, arm guards are +2, anything that says medium blocking is +4, high block is +6. You will always use whatever's best between your held and worn items. I always found montante pretty underwhelming. I tried running it in the SSLP but eventually just wound up brawling most of the time. It's possible I just wasn't using it properly. worm girl fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 00:51
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Arrath posted:You don't have to use a crafting recipe to make clean water, OP might've just put a container on the fire directly. I know there's been some drama since I mentioned this, but I was using crafting to make the water - only had like a 3L jar's worth. It was a "You've wasted all the water crafting this" situation, which surprised me too, I don't think I've ever hosed up boiling water like that before. Not even IRL. E: ^^^ I've been having a lot of good results with Krav Maga, which can also use a combat knife, or a baton, both of which are pretty decent once you get a few levels Wolfechu fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 00:55
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esquilax posted:What exactly are these overpowered combos that let you just hold tab in the middle of a city? My last run I had a Longsword using ninjitsu and Montante which was strong but never got to that point. Please note, this is all before the grab changes. Last time I played was early March, so take some of this with a grain of salt. If you want to 'Tab' your way through early-apocalypse cities, do the following. Bump strength and dex as high as you're comfortable going at Char-gen, get yourself the Street Fighting and Melee Weapon Training backgrounds however you can. You're aiming for either Eskrima or Silat for the martial art. If you picked Silat, get to (or start with) Fabrication 1, get (or start with) a knife, go find a long stick, and make a quarterstaff. With Eskrima, the early game weapon to rush is a cudgel. With both, getting a combat knife ASAP will make your life a lot easier. Eskrima is all about rapid hits. You're going all-in on hitting something multiple times before it can react. It mostly favors knifes and tonfas, and seems a bit weak defensively as well as suffering from weapon selection. You're never going to be hitting big for damage, which makes high-armor enemies a pain. And most of the weapons are knives and small clubs. It's perfect for early game, especially if you're relying on improvised stuff, but late game starts to suffer. While you'd still want to move and use positioning, like Worm Girl said, it was still all right in the early game against regular zombies to just mow them down so long as you paid attention to your stamina and exertion. Just remember to get some distance/run if you get grabbed or start to get swarmed. Silat, meanwhile, focuses on defending yourself against other attacks while you turn one enemy into mush. It grants an extra dodge, bonus accuracy on dodging, crit bonuses on moving, and all of its moves are about inflicting stun or much higher damage. The end goal is a bit less than 'Tab at Intersection,' because ideally you'll be moving a bit to position and target the weak spots of a horde. The big issues are that Silat is no faster than normal attacks and if you can't crit, you lose a lot of what makes the martial art good. It has a very similar weapon selection to Eskrima, but adds the quarterstaff (and Ironshod variety) as well as a few spears and polearms. Either way. After making your selections (and possibly while doing your 'prep' to make/get weapons), make sure to build your fighting skills a bit if necessary. Find some isolated zombies or other low-grade threats and kick their asses, or face-tank attacks in the nude to build dodging, or what have you. Make sure you understand the limitations and strengths of whatever route you're doing as well. And even if you think/know you can 'Tab' your way through, you really do want to pay attention. Stamina and Exertion are both considerations when fighting, as well as pain. You are going to be taking hits early game unless you did something like start with the 'Black Belt' profession, or otherwise just bumped your stats into the stratosphere with 'Free Buy' or whatever that chargen method is. Point being, pain and exertion can sneak up on you, and you can rapidly go from 'Ha Ha Quarterstaff Silat go BRRR' to 'why am I getting bit five times every swing I do?' You also want to pay attention to threats and the environment. It's very easy to focus on just the horde of regular zombies (with the odd fat or cop zombie mixed in) and not pay attention to other threats. Wasps in the air, Ferals of all sorts coming out of the wood work. Hell, if you're playing 'No Hope,' you might just get unlucky and have a fight next to a bandit house, and you don't want to be trying to blender a horde while those guys are shooting at you. Similarly, you don't want to be having a fight near any building you want to loot (as even if you deal with the horde, you might've brought more into the area from the fighting noise), nor do you want to fight near any building with alarms. Nothing spoils the fun of this quite like the bots being called in, after all. There's obviously other considerations to this older strat, such as getting a good Dodge score or some armor, but at least in my experience that's the bare-bones version. Get a martial art and street fighting, pump your physical stats as high as you are willing to go, get your weapon, then go to town. Please note, even with min-maxing your build, that it's entirely possible to make a mistake with your debuff stats (stamina, exertion, pain) or just get unlucky (Woo fighting near the Collapsed Tower, poo poo!) and lose a run even if it is going well. Truthfully, the 'Tab in Intersection' trick stopped being a guaranteed early-game strat for me sometime late last year, and became a bit dicey even before the grab upgrades.
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Apr 5, 2023 01:46
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Irn current experimental a post threshold slime mutant with Zui Quan works really well as you can have 32 int. It's even more fun if you play with stats on kills or magiclysm.
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Apr 5, 2023 02:09
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megane posted:Don't forget: it's a change that only hurts you if you fight in melee range, which was already way harder and more dangerous than using guns. Pretty much every special attack or trait enemies have makes melee worse and guns better - acid, electricity, grabs, infected bites, throws, all only effective if you get close. Not to mention that being in melee causes pain and injury, costs stamina, etc. so that you're always drowning in stacking debuffs. And now I guess you'll get double-ultra-super grabbed so like two basic zombies are a threat - if you're melee, of course. Sab Sabbington posted:For almost the entirety of the time between the last stable and this current stable my strategy for clearing out towns, once I had even vaguely decent gear, was to find a loud gun, walk into an intersection, fire it off, and then hold tab to melee everything to death that came out. If I couldn't find I gun, I would use a whistle or an airhorn, though a survival whistle wasn't as loud so it didn't work as well. Point being: this was absolutely doable and almost 100% consistent. And as The Lone Badger pointed out, most good weapons start to get heavier than the improvised weapons you have in the first couple days, which means even with high athletics, fighting a ton of zombies in a row will tank your stamina and make each zombie suddenly much faster than you. Even when you're killing zombies in just a few hits, they'll be coming at you fast enough you won't have any time to catch your breath. So your survivor who's been sleepwalking through fights but now has to face four adjacent zombies is going to be slowed, exhausted, and only able to really defend against one of them per round. They get grabbed, smacked around, and bitten really fast, and then those are all going to stack pain debuffs, stamina debuffs, and so on. Holding tab to kill an entire town is a real strategy, but not remotely as early as you two are describing. worm girl posted:Acid, smoke, and electricity are simple gear checks. Go to Hub 01 and get an activity suit, which completely shuts down acid and electrical fields, and get a gas mask to make yourself immune to all types of smoke. Also survivor armor has been nerfed pretty badly, it's no longer the top tier set it used to be, sadly. Also gas masks make you lose stamina quicker because of how oppressively balanced mouth stamina is so wearing them constantly isn't really practical, and bulky suits increase stamina use and tank dodge chance, so what you're describing will only compound many of the above problems unless, again, you're already an endgame god. On top of all of this the proposed change doesn't actually help. The problem is that melee combat is boring and offers little for the player to actually control in any way. It's boring at high level, where you can hold one button and win against hordes, but it's also boring at low levels, where you're constantly getting unavoidably grabbed and slapped around. There is no meaningful way to engage with it. The only way you can play differently is obstacle kiting, all melee encounters are otherwise nearly identical. Making it harder doesn't change any of this.
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Apr 5, 2023 04:01
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So my last character died trying to retrieve a Solar Backpack. I figured my battery charging issues were over, and was so mad I ate it before getting to set it up. I just got another one and was so excited to get it set up! Imagine my surprise when I learned it only works if you have bionics. Vib Rib posted:Good thing the futuristic mounted turrets, meant to be autonomous and unmanned for extended periods, were changed to only have like 30 bullets in them! There was a time when taking them down could net you hundreds of bullets, but that was too easy. Really tired of "we should go for realism, not balance" until something makes play easier, then it's "who cares if it's realistic, it breaks balance". This is something I agree with and does worry me about this game and others like it: I know some stuff can seem super broken / ez-mode to players with years of experience, but for new players it's really worth having some simple and reliable strategies to get going. I started CDDA a week ago and I'm only now feeling roughly familiar with the UI and only feeling marginally comfortable fighting zombies; this is after many failed attempts, some hours of YouTube tutorials, and wiki reading. The whole point for most players looking at a huge game like this is to interact with all the cool/fun looking systems (the vehicles one in particular here). Dying repeatedly on the first day because you don't understand the like, five different systems that actively modify your attack and defense power and can change on every single tick and the only way you'd know is from experience or seeing a single glyph change isn't super fun, it's demoralizing. As an example, I can't overstate how important it was that Worm Girl's tutorial said "Take Street Fighting and then turn on Brawling and then never think about it again, this is fine for every situation". When you can barely understand how to move items, some easy and effective strategies are not only good, they're pretty much required to reduce the mental load and see through all the static. JerikTelorian fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 04:02
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Vib Rib posted:Good thing the futuristic mounted turrets, meant to be autonomous and unmanned for extended periods, were changed to only have like 30 bullets in them! There was a time when taking them down could net you hundreds of bullets, but that was too easy.  ??? I actually went and checked this with all the gun turrets. Each dropped hundreds of rounds. This has been the case for years now, and to my knowledge has never changed. Vib Rib posted:Yeah but not at melee 2. I've played this game for years and you don't get to that point with 2 melee, 2 bashing, a leather trenchcoat and a cudgel. At no point did I or anyone mention 2 skill. You're moving goalposts now. worm girl posted:with 3 or 4 melee skill ... no more god mode at 6 melee. Furthermore, a leather trenchcoat isn't really armor. It's a piece of clothing with bad coverage that offers a couple of points of incidental protection. You should not expect it to do much for you outside of making your life a little bit easier while you try to put an actual kit together. I'm not actually sure why you brought leather trenchcoats up though, they were never mentioned anywhere. I did not say you can massacre dozens of late game enemies in your street clothes. Vib Rib posted:ol okay, so "a couple ranks of melee and a decent weapon" means literally top of the line gear. worm girl posted:The stuff I mentioned isn't endgame. You can go to Hub 01 immediately and get an activity suit after doing a couple of fairly simple quests, and the entire purpose of Rubik is so that CBMs stop being an endgame thing. All you need is a jar of anesthetic and you can get started on your cyborg adventure. Rubber boots and gas masks are literally everywhere day one Vib Rib posted:"After your first summer" (at least on default season lengths) is what, 150 days survived?? It's been 120 days for four years now, but I didn't mention it because of the player's gear/skill progression, I mentioned it because that's roughly where the midgame begins in terms of monster evolution. Prior to Fall 1, there are relatively (relatively!) few evolved zombies running around and the gear checks are much more infrequent. Standard zombies have a 30 day evolution half-life, and the first stage evolutions usually have a 28-42 day half life before they become the very dangerous types that have you constantly soaking in acid/smoke/poison/spark fields. So 60 days after game start (mid summer) you will start seeing occasional big bads around, and at 90 days they become quite common. I'm also not sure why you are jumping on this, as it runs counter to your argument. Yes, you should be well established by Fall 1. If you don't have better gear than I've described here by then, you are behind the 8 ball. Vib Rib posted:Also gas masks make you lose stamina quicker because of how oppressively balanced mouth stamina is so wearing them constantly isn't really practical Let's take a look at that. Here's a firefighter PBA mask (the most common gas mask, has the same 16 enviro protection as a standard gas mask). It has 20 mouth encumbrance, identical to a half gas mask:  A standard gas mask has 30, which is a bit more dramatic at 66%, while a light survivor mask only drops it to 85%. Your breathing score does not affect stamina loss, only stamina recovery, which isn't that much of a factor in the middle of a melee anyway, but you're spoiled for choices if it's a concern. Furthermore, a high lifestyle score can easily add 10% to your total stamina pool, with athletics skill piling more on top of that. You can also reduce stamina consumption with melee skill. This is all to say that while losing a bit of stamina regen is bad, there are many ways to increase your starting stamina pool that more than make up for it. Relying on stamina regen to carry you through a fight is generally a bad idea (especially with crowd crush) unless you're doing some aikido shenanigans and trying to rest while getting pummeled. If you only have a 30 enc gas mask and it's really bothering you (I don't have any trouble with them, but different strokes I guess), you don't need to wear the mask if there aren't smokers or bloaters around. It only takes about 3 seconds to pop one on or off, and you can easily assign it to a 50 or 100 move pocket. There's also a low tier CBM that completely blocks regular smoke. Once I get that, I often just live with the poison gas. Chargen mutants can pick up the poison resistant trait which is pretty nice, and the blood filter CBM is really handy in the midgame. Vib Rib posted:bulky suits increase stamina use and tank dodge chance, so what you're describing will only compound many of the above problems unless, again, you're already an endgame god. The activity suit has a whopping 3 torso/leg/arm encumbrance. It does have 15 foot encumbrance, which is indeed a few points higher than many of the boots in the game, but 15 points lower than rubber boots. The Faraday chainmail suit is only 10 encumbrance and offers 100% coverage and 13 bash and cut protection, which is frankly phenomenal. Running that under a survivor duster or over a nomad bodymesh only totals out to 15 encumbrance which is well within acceptable bounds. Yes, this will slightly harm your chance to block or dodge an attack, but those aren't reliable means of protecting yourself under most circumstances, as you can generally only have one block and dodge attempt (two with certain martial arts and high skill) per second, meaning that fast enemies or even just two enemies will often be swinging at you with a 0% block/dodge chance. I will grant that the faraday suit is a tall order, but I've pointed out two much easier alternatives to get, and also discussed how lightning in general is sort of iffy as a mechanic. I would vote for it to be greatly reduced or removed entirely, as it doesn't make a ton of sense and isn't all that fun to deal with. Armor has no skill roll and at 100 coverage it simply works every time, even when you're helpless. It is really a no brainer. Given the hostile tone and apparent attempts to divert the conversation or move goal posts, I can only assume you're arguing in bad faith here, so I'm not actually expecting this conversation to go anywhere, but hey. Maybe someone else will find this helpful. worm girl fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 05:41
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I'd definitely love to get into how the person most dedicated to defending all the game's worst decisions is picking through the reeds to ignore the actual point about how this helps nothing related to the actual problems melee combat has both at low and high level, or repeatedly flipping from "you can definitely just sleepwalk through melee combat very early on, so this is a good change (even if it's overtweaked right now)" to "well obviously when I said 'early on' I meant at the point when most players are already so powerful they're bored with the game", or thinking "actually this makes your stamina come back slower, it doesn't make it go away faster!" is somehow an own when in practice both things will leave you with less stamina and thus a nerfed ability to fight. Or hell, how if you know the meta gear and beeline for it you'll be fine, or even arguing CBMs as early-game available when the explicit, stated intent of Kevin is to push CBMs to be more endgame where possible.worm girl posted:At no point did I or anyone mention 2 skill. You're moving goalposts now. worm girl posted:ordinary zombies basically stopped being anything other than speedbumps once you had a couple ranks of melee E: I was dead wrong about the ammo, though. Probably had it confused with Bright Nights. Vib Rib fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 07:04
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I have tried quite a few melee styles and weapons with 6-8 fabrication skill and a giant pile of books, I can technically make a few historical weapons, nothing I am capable of making has made fighting a horde of zombies trivial so it sounds like the issue is with the specific combination of martial arts you're using and those should be changed rather than trying to make everything more deadly to compensate. The most effective weapon I have found is still generally the combat knife. I have not found quarterstaff type weapons to be very good even if you have karate, they just don't do as much damage and are slow enough to hit with that you will still take return strikes a lot of the time. Probably the most effective fighting method I have found is a combat knife with ninjutsu which just makes it hit harder, basically. But it's still very effective without a martial art behind it. I really don't feel like we are playing the same game, possibly because you're describing a very specific loadout of weapons and abilities.
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Apr 5, 2023 07:15
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I don't think karate is very good. It adds a bit of damage and a tiny bit of speed (less than 1/10th of a second per strike in most cases) but not much else. Brawling on the other hand gives you feint and grab break which are a pretty significant boost in stable. Silat meanwhile gives you synergy with sweep and adds a stun on crit to your move pool, meaning you'll be stunlocking enemies and preventing them from hitting back. This is with a +6 block bonus and attacks that cost either 103 or 52 moves (rapid strike) and a weapon that can't be yoinked by technicians. The combat knife outdamages it for sure, and eskrima gives it a stun and a ton of bonus damage on top of that. You're right that this needs adjusting - combat knives are supposed to be high end KA-BARs and shouldn't be as ubiquitous as they are at the very least. They probably also need a damage nerf.
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Apr 5, 2023 07:33
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JerikTelorian posted:Also, and I know this is probably against the "spirit" of the game, but is there a mod or something that just gives you god mode? I know that people view the game as a thing to be slowly pieced together experientially, but I've already read the wiki and am reasonably spoiled on stuff. I made a world where I could create a superhuman to just teleport around and see stuff, but I'd like to just be free from health concerns (I did this on a map separate from my "survival" game to maintain the sense of exploration there). I like to play games like Minecraft or SS13 or Stormworks and just see the stuff people made and the little intricacies they put into the work. If you're playing Dark Days Ahead and don't mind playing with the experimental builds, I'll plug my mod "Extra Lives" - It gives you the ability to respawn on death in a number of ways, and has various difficulty settings including a Tourist mode that gives you unlimited lives and all 3 respawn options. https://github.com/ProAtWorkHere/CDDA-Extra-Lives https://github.com/ProAtWorkHere/CDDA-Extra-Lives/releases/tag/v1.1.1
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Apr 5, 2023 08:44
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Vib Rib posted:But to just lie and then accuse me of moving goalposts and arguing in bad faith is like some very weird and low effort attempt at gaslighting. this is getting stupid and embarassing. find and quote the relevant post or knock it off.
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Apr 5, 2023 10:30
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Synthbuttrange posted:this is getting stupid and embarassing. find and quote the relevant post or knock it off.
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Apr 5, 2023 12:22
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Looking at the content and just sheer amount of time put into firearms, it seems the current design direction is that guns are awesome and any character not using them is intentionally adding challenge to the game. In a game like Call of Duty this is expected, but Cataclysm has significant role-playing elements and facets that make melee interesting, such as mutations. Games in a similar vein try to balance the meta somewhat, which doesn't happen in CDDA. The funny part about using challenge as the reason is that I used to just loot an M4A1 and grab a bunch of ammo and be unstoppable on the first day or two. Melee takes significantly more resources and strategy to get to a useful point. And when that reason falls flat, realism is pointed to. Portal storms, XEDRA, the Exodii - there's all sorts of things in-game that weaken realism. It's hard to have a cohesive vision for a game, and this is one area where CDDA really struggles. edit: I don't want this to seem like I'm making GBS threads on the game and saying it's unplayable. I've got hundreds of hours into it at this point probably. This thread is at its most useful for me when we constructively discuss perceived shortcomings and someone implements a solution. luchadornado fucked around with this message at 13:39 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 13:28
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I'd like to see improved horde behavior to make guns a little less dominating. They are very much meant to be better than melee weapons because that's how it works IRL most of the time, especially against enemies that don't feel any fear or pain - a bullet is usually going to be the fastest way to interrupt their vital processes - but if the associated noise was more punishing than it currently is, and maybe if guns were less accurate overall, it might shake things up. Another fix might be to reduce the buff small enemies get to their dodge in melee. Things like roaches and flesh raptors are supposed to be hard to shoot because they're little and running around all over the place, but they're also just hard to hit in general. IMO punching a bird or a big bug out of the air as it divebombed you would be pretty easy compared to shooting it. Anything to encourage switching weapons and tactics as the situation changed would be a big help. Grabbing could also hinder your ability to use a rifle, so you'd be encouraged to like, drop your m4 and gut the zombie with your combat knife or just punch it off of you. This could even tie into martial arts, I'm pretty sure krav maga covers rifle wrasslin' IRL.
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Apr 5, 2023 14:00
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Vib Rib posted:What? No, you loving couldn't. I get you're invested in defending development trends ... The cloud of Dorito dust o'er the horizon is meteorologically impressive but not particularly insightful. Consider instead not being weird by even the standards of a survival roguelike thread?
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Apr 5, 2023 14:06
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Yeah Id be good with grabbing making shooting hard as hell for rifles. Malus for pistols but not as extreme maybe?
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Apr 5, 2023 14:28
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Vib Rib posted:On top of all of this the proposed change doesn't actually help. The problem is that melee combat is boring and offers little for the player to actually control in any way. It's boring at high level, where you can hold one button and win against hordes, but it's also boring at low levels, where you're constantly getting unavoidably grabbed and slapped around. There is no meaningful way to engage with it. The only way you can play differently is obstacle kiting, all melee encounters are otherwise nearly identical. Making it harder doesn't change any of this. Imagine if I could emptyquote this so hard it started boring a hole into the ground and made its way slowly toward the core of the earth.
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Apr 5, 2023 14:31
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That all sounds reasonable as a start, and where I was going was: I'm a 23 strength cattle mutant that knows Muay Thai, don't make me use a .50 cal rifle to have fun in later game.
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Apr 5, 2023 14:36
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nightwisher posted:If you're playing Dark Days Ahead and don't mind playing with the experimental builds, I'll plug my mod "Extra Lives" - It gives you the ability to respawn on death in a number of ways, and has various difficulty settings including a Tourist mode that gives you unlimited lives and all 3 respawn options. This sounds great, thanks! I think one of my biggest holdbacks with the game is that I'm deeply interested in the exploration and crazy simulationist base/vehicle crafting and only marginally interested in the combat aspect. The thought of having to start over smashing benches again is a bit frustrating. This isn't a knock against the game, I'm just not quite the target audience.
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Apr 5, 2023 14:53
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JerikTelorian posted:This sounds great, thanks! I think one of my biggest holdbacks with the game is that I'm deeply interested in the exploration and crazy simulationist base/vehicle crafting and only marginally interested in the combat aspect. The thought of having to start over smashing benches again is a bit frustrating. This isn't a knock against the game, I'm just not quite the target audience. If you didn't know - if you have any NPC followers, you can play as one of them upon death. This kind of sucks if you're the min/max type, but thematically is kind of a good solution. Making exploration easier might be a good place for a mod to focus: means of teleportation, ways to quickly exit bad situations, ways to become invisible, ways to play with the scent system. I know magiclysm does some of this. edit: Let me jump, glide, or zipline across rooftops somehow. Especially if I'm a bird or a frog. luchadornado fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 15:00
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Did they ever address that issue where being a frog or rabbit or whoever else might be able to jump good couldn't jump over z level gaps? Like if you tried to jump between houses that are only two tiles apart you'd inexplicably fall and eat a full body poo poo sandwich.
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Apr 5, 2023 15:10
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A player-positive recent change imo was the removal of the ability of standard human zombies to track players by scent clouds. This keeps the beginner from having to constantly avoid char-seeking zombie missiles from the getgo, and night raiding in the early game is a lot safer. I think this helps early melee indirectly, in that you don't have to be able to gun/whack down the day 1 hordes in order to survive until you get better skills or weapons. I mean, z-dogs still suck though.
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Apr 5, 2023 17:43
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luchadornado posted:If you didn't know - if you have any NPC followers, you can play as one of them upon death. This kind of sucks if you're the min/max type, but thematically is kind of a good solution. All of these are pretty simple things that can be added through modding which is great, hell I'm working on pretty much all of these concepts with another mod I'm working on. And yeah, scent has been heavily nerfed for most zombies, it was kind of ridiculous just how well they could track you. Zombie dogs will still chase your rear end through an entire city if they get a whiff of you though, yeah.
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Apr 5, 2023 20:48
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All right, good time to stop digging. Worm Girl, I'm sorry for the insanely hostile words, mostly directed at you specifically. Going through a lot right now and it manifested as some of the lamest posting ever, which is still no excuse to take it out on other people. I apologize for attacking you just for trying to explain your position on a video game in a level-headed way and I'll try not to be such a dipshit in the future.Neophyte posted:A player-positive recent change imo was the removal of the ability of standard human zombies to track players by scent clouds. This keeps the beginner from having to constantly avoid char-seeking zombie missiles from the getgo, and night raiding in the early game is a lot safer. I think this helps early melee indirectly, in that you don't have to be able to gun/whack down the day 1 hordes in order to survive until you get better skills or weapons.
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Apr 5, 2023 20:57
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I feel like the discussion has mostly moved on now but it is definitely the case that you can trivialise melee fights in general with 3-4 in your melee skills and a fast weapon with the sweep and / or precise strike techniques, and ideally rapid strike as well (the trusty cudgel being a great example although it has rear end damage). You get in 2 or 3 hits per zombie "turn" baseline, and then you have a decent chance to trip or stun them, which prevents them from hitting you back, so you can keep beating on them. Thanks to crafting and practice recipes you can get to this point within a few days of ingame time You don't need a specific martial art although silat, eskrima and fior synergise well with this strategy for obvious reasons - silat makes you trip and stun more and deal more damage vs tripped / stunned enemies while eskirma makes you attack really fast and also has a stun crit technique, and fior also focuses on downing the opponent though most of its weapon choices are slow. Brawling is perfectly good though. I would guess that people having trouble with melee combat are tending to use slower, harder hitting weapons which don't have the crucial techniques which give you an action advantage over the opponents. This is all ignoring the recent grab changes, I'm not really sure what to make of those yet
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Apr 5, 2023 21:58
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RabidWeasel posted:you can trivialise melee fights in general with 3-4 in your melee skills and a fast weapon with the sweep and / or precise strike techniques, and ideally rapid strike as well (the trusty cudgel being a great example although it has rear end damage). You get in 2 or 3 hits per zombie "turn" baseline, and then you have a decent chance to trip or stun them, which prevents them from hitting you back, so you can keep beating on them. Thanks to crafting and practice recipes you can get to this point within a few days of ingame time I think the point others are making, and I am making, is that this is a decent amount of prep for trivializing early fights, compared to an M4A1 which is really easy to get. And beyond early fights, this doesn't hold up at all - guns rule all. Magiclysm is solving a lot of my complaints with the game however. For anyone that hasn't tried it, it's a really great way to liven up the base game. Besides Sky Island, has anyone played with Xedra evolved, the dinosaurs, or any other fun mods?
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Apr 5, 2023 22:29
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If you wanted to make conventional firearms less effective you could perhaps make loud sounds aggravate the zombies and incite them to move faster for a few seconds, proportional to the magnitude of the sound. So firing a gun is going to make a horde a lot more dangerous if the zombies can see you. Which also keeps guns in play because SMGs/pistols can be suppressed to be much quieter than rifles can, and doesn't affect bows/crossbows at all. Also makes crashing around with a car more risky too. Explosives would be dangerous to use but emphasises using them in a hit and run fashion or timed explosives deployed stealthily. Walking up with an AR or MMG and trying to mow down a horde is likely to get them to converge on you very quickly, and you are then forced to keep shooting and draw more of them even faster, or try to disengage and wait for them to calm down. luchadornado posted:I think the point others are making, and I am making, is that this is a decent amount of prep for trivializing early fights, compared to an M4A1 which is really easy to get. And beyond early fights, this doesn't hold up at all - guns rule all. I did a sky island with xedra evolved and it adds a bunch of new weird objects to find which give you spells, but they're a bit more interesting than the stuff in magiclysm. Haven't managed to find very much though other than a hand mirror that teaches you how to make a clone to distract enemies, and a paperweight that lets you summon a dagger made of dreams. Not good enough at magic to really utilize them though. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 23:07
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OwlFancier posted:Also makes crashing around with a car more risky too. This is something I've always wanted. A big loud car crash making the zombies show up is classic. Loud noises and dynamic spawns were supposed to do this, I think? But I'm not sure it ever worked.
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Apr 5, 2023 23:39
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