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gently caress me, it seems like every city I generate lately has more special zombies than normal ones. Makes it a huge bitch to start out when you can't go into town without being mauled by shockers or brutes. I'd use the mundane zombies mod but eventually that gets stale as hell. Maybe I'll try turning down spawn density a little.
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Apr 22, 2015 06:16
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I always use dynamic spawn. Gives me a little time to grab stuff / get started before zombies everywhere.
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Apr 22, 2015 09:32
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Trying to survive as a post-threshold cephalopod is insane. After transition I also developed a cold, and I was going through ~25 bottles of water a day. I died in my search to claim more water. Any recommendations on a better mutation route? I thought being insanely smart would be nice for CBMs. Or maybe I can make cephalopod work with a purpose built RV with one of those fancy water dispensers.
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Apr 22, 2015 15:19
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Sometimes you can have runs of good luck to make up for bad - just found a working CVD machine and three functional APCs within a pretty short distance. And it's just on the verge of a bizarre, endless Lemming-Dermatik War that seems like a great source of food, water, and pelts.
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Apr 22, 2015 15:40
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a slime posted:Trying to survive as a post-threshold cephalopod is insane. After transition I also developed a cold, and I was going through ~25 bottles of water a day. I died in my search to claim more water. Why would you go Cephalopod and not set up near a river or other source of water? Especially since many of it's bonuses are aquatic in nature.
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Apr 22, 2015 15:45
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GlyphGryph posted:Why would you go Cephalopod and not set up near a river or other source of water? Especially since many of it's bonuses are aquatic in nature. Because I am the worst cephalopod 
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Apr 22, 2015 15:46
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See panels 5 and 6 
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Apr 22, 2015 16:00
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a slime posted:Because I am the worst cephalopod 'a slime' The Worst Cephalopod. The post-threshold mutations are really cool and unique, but they're difficult, obscure and outright lethal in some cases with very little you can do about it. For normal mutations the *mostly* random system is fine but I'd like for post-threshold mutations to be more guaranteed and complete so that you totally convert with all the benefits and detriments at once. Or have it so post-threshold mutations gradually build up over time to go from a post-threshold half-man/bovine to full bovine over a few weeks. One of my favourite recent playthroughs was a lab start with genetically unstable. Becoming a slime monster is great, but you can very quickly become fatally handicapped with nothing you can do about it. The way purifiers and mutagens work right now is a massive improvement over the old system, but I still feel *something* is missing in the whole progression.
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Apr 22, 2015 16:07
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I had a pretty good club-wielding brutish mighty Lab ogre die because he suddenly sprouted vines from his shoulders, gained a crapload of torso encumbrance, and then died trying to fight a bunch of zombie soldiers that boxed him into a corner because he couldn't fight for poo poo anymore. Thick Skin + Phelloderm is great for making you into a tank, but it can have weird consequences if you're genetically unstable! e: There was also the time I used mutagen and it replaced my Night Vision with Fey Eyes and I died because stumbling around blind in a lab is hilariously suicidal.
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Apr 22, 2015 16:20
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Try taking one of the Flimsy/Frail/Fragile (low HP) traits and evolve into the "Medical" mutant type (or chimera/bear/moo?) because the "increased HP" post-threshold mutations remove the starting handicap entirely, but using purifier later doesn't actually restore the intrinsic weakness. Maybe take Glass Jaw as well for full minmax bullshit, because it also gets lost with the F-triad. Also, Medical is hilarious anyway. You can get Robust Genetics (and Genetically Unstable) without having to use the starting points, the pain/disease/etc resistances eliminate a lot of the inconveniences that pile up, and if you get Deadened then you never have to deal with pain again... Which may be handy if you used all your codeine/tramadol to make mutagen and keep burning aspirin into diazepam/thorazine 
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Apr 22, 2015 16:59
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I think the next goofy mutant build I try is going to be a fully tentacle limbed Octodad character with Gills and a sneaky unarmed combat focus. I might take Ninjutsu so my millions of tentacle attacks are as silent as my movement, or Centipede Style so I can build momentum and hit 98,000,000 times per turn 
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Apr 22, 2015 17:06
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The 'very bad day' start is definitely a bitch but after a few false starts I've managed to find a first aid kit in one of the nearby houses, clean my infection and rest until the flu was gone, at that point I had a 20 strength brute character ready to destroy the country side, so I traveled to a nearby mansion where the entrance was full of plate mail and and awl pikes, a nearby pawnshop had a freaking battle axe and now I finally have a character that should be able to destroy everything, I already do something like 50 damage with every swing. It's nice. This really is still Cataclysm's biggest problem though, once you've survived for a couple of days and get to explore on your own terms the game becomes very easy very quickly.
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Apr 22, 2015 17:23
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Yeah, at that point you have to go looking for trouble. I'm OK with that though, because I like sandboxes.
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Apr 23, 2015 09:47
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I hadn't played in a few versions and decided to try it out again. Rolled a character, looked downstairs in the shelter and found a treasure trove. Several each of blankets, food, water, electronics, clothing, and the zombified remnants of the survivors that brought it down there. My Bionic Survivalist threw his backpack to the ground and prepared to duke it out hand to hand, but forgot to drop what was in his backpack somehow in the process and was unable to fend for himself because he was trying too hard not to drop his stuff. Oh well, I'll start a new character... ... Who spawns in the same shelter. Oh, this time it's on. This one ditches all his gear in a locker, straps on a flashlight and beats down a cupboard to make a nice cudgel. Taps his cudgel on the doors of the basement, calling out. "Zombies... Come out to play-ey-ay!" Every one of them who poked its rotten head out got smoked, and soon he was helping himself to the spoils AND the sliced out bionics from the last poor sucker. Feeling good, he checks his map and sees a public works and dojo just on the outskirts of town. He strides out of the shelter, walks a block and a half, then gets promptly murdered by a lone bio operator zombie who judo threw him into the bushes and ate his face off. RIP
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Apr 23, 2015 11:36
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Oh man, if I see a bio operator then unless I got a cool ranged weapon I run the other way.
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Apr 23, 2015 11:45
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Cudgels are a pretty solid counter against them. Stun is king.
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Apr 23, 2015 11:55
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Also, they can't throw you if you're using judo yourself.
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Apr 23, 2015 11:58
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A few notes that might help newer players, based on the stuff I've figured out: 1. Cooking and Survival are atrociously good skills early on. And also forever, but especially early on. You can use Survival to root through the underbrush in the woods by interacting ("e") with them, which can net you various herbs, veggies, mushrooms, eggs, containers, and crafting ingredients (maybe don't eat the mushrooms though). A decently high Cooking skill then lets you transform those ingredients into everything from bland but nutritious acorn meal to loving delicious as poo poo scrambled eggs and pesto spaghetti and whatnot. It only gets better when the season warms up a bit and you can start harvesting all those spring fruits - blueberries, peaches, plums, cherries, and so on. You can make fruit juice out of them, then use pulp to make other stuff if you have the recipes. Or, if you have some spare sugar, you can cook up some fruit leather that won't spoil. Survival + Cooking is a powerhouse combination that will Keep You Alive even if you're living out of a lovely remote emergency shelter surrounded by goddamn nothing. This is especially true if you include the mod that adds more survival tools to the world, which is honestly really neat and lets you thrive like some kind of paleolithic hobo king with your stone tools, hobo stove, and fire drill. Eventually you can start tilling the soil and planting seeds and just have a cool little berry and vegetable farm. 2. You should do your best to never melee anything early in the game. This especially applies to zombies since an early infection will most likely kill you, but is important in any case - you'll probably want to be wearing a bunch of storage equipment, which will encumber the gently caress out of you and make you garbage at mixing it up in close quarters due to brutally penalizing your Melee and Dodging skills and adding a heavy additional time cost to your melee attacks. If you MUST fight a thing in melee, try to trick it into going through a broken window to attack you. If it's still in the window when you're fighting it, all of its actions will take way longer and you'll be able to whale on it like a maniac before it gets a chance to hit you back. Throwing stuff is reasonably effective at killing weaker enemies, and if you get your hands on a lighter or matchbook, you can kill zombies with a little patience and forethought by luring them through burning bushes. 3. Don't get close to coyotes, wolves, bears, and moose. Especially moose. Moose are the loving devil. If you see one, literally make it your mission to never see it again. Get out of its visual range and do NOT enter its territory any more unless you're fully prepared to fight it. Much like in real life, moose are extremely dangerous creatures who can and will trample you into a paste if they decide they don't like you wandering around nearby, which they probably will. Wolves and coyotes will run away if seriously hurt, so you may be able to bullshit your way out of getting mauled if you throw stuff at them until they flee. Bears and moose will just brutally kill your babby character though. *3b. See also: giant wasps and, to a slightly lesser extent, giant bees. Giant bees are reasonably chill and will basically always leave you alone if you stay far away from them, but each and every giant wasp is goddamn Satan and will make it a personal mission to ruin your poo poo. They hit fast, and their stings will poison you and cause a ton of pain, letting them hit you a million more times. You will die of poison. You must look upon moose and wasps with the utmost superstitious fear. They are Death's emissaries. 4. Zombies are easily distracted and really hate all living creatures. If you're being chased by a zombie and you don't like your odds of escaping it or beating it cleanly, look for an opportunity to lure it past an animal. They'll often break off pursuit to chase squirrels and dogs and stuff around. If you're feeling extremely gutsy, you can even try luring a zombie closer to a hostile animal that's also chasing you; if the zombie attacks the creature, it might get pissed off and turn around to fight it, letting you trudge hurriedly away with your fifteen backpacks full of potato chips and cream soda. This is pretty risky, but if you pull it off it's an amazing counter to giant wasps - zombies don't feel pain and are immune to poison, so they'll completely steamroll those venomous assholes. 5. You should try to get your hands on a pipe and a hammer of some sort (a rock works fine) and craft a makeshift crowbar for more efficient burgling. It's a pretty decent melee weapon starting out, and it lets you raid locked houses by forcing open their doors instead of breaking their windows. This makes less noise than smashing windows open, and doesn't leave broken windows behind that cannot be covered with curtains. If you're lucky and sneaky, you can sometimes break into a house via the back door, close the door behind you, close all the curtains, burgle the poo poo out of everything, and slip out before the zombies get suspicious enough to start smashing their way in. Stand to the side of open doors so you're not visible through them, and use shift-X to target them to lean over and peek through, letting you spot any zombies within visual range without them seeing you. You can also use "e" on closed curtains to peer through and find a zombie-free escape route through a window. Sneaky burgling is a really good strategy for a new character - although it's somewhat dependent on luck, it's quite a bit safer and more reliable than just sprinting through the city screaming and smashing through windows in the desperate hope you'll get away with all your sweet loot before a spitter melts your legs and a feral hunter eats your face. Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 15:39
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Probably the biggest advice starting out is that pain kills. Pain seriously reduces your ability to function, and you may not die in a fight, but if you come out hurting you will be easy pickings for whatever else comes along. Don't be afraid to take a breather and pop some pills after being thrown by a hulk.
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Apr 23, 2015 16:13
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With an lighter and a crowbar you have everything it takes to clear a city block. If youre ever in over your head (chased by a Brute etc.) just suck into a house, let them follow you in, and then burn it to the ground while you slip out unseen. Take plenty of vitamins and you can sometimes shrug off infections!
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Apr 23, 2015 16:48
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you know that you can use a knife and a lighter to cauterize wounds to avoid infections right?
Slaapaav fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 18:22
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i mean its the opposite of how cauterization works in real life where unless you have chemicals to clean the wound before you apply the hot metal bit you will increase the chance of the wound becoming infected to roughly 100% due to the heated flesh being prime breeding ground for bacteria.
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Apr 23, 2015 18:34
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Cauterizing never works very well for me, it's just a way to kill yourself with pain.
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Apr 23, 2015 18:40
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I think the best way this game could continue to escalate difficulty after you've become basically invincible is to really focus on making developing and defending a colony of survivors a chief goal. Maybe establish a colony formally with a similar mechanic to starting a new vehicle, and you can assign some basic tasks (you go fishing with this fishing rod, you go wood chopping with this wood axe). That way there would be reason to keep collecting food and supplies even after it's trivial to keep yourself fed. Steer towards Dead State / Dwarf Fortress in the later game.
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Apr 23, 2015 18:46
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30 or so pain doesnt really kill you?
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Apr 23, 2015 18:46
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Cauterizing is helpful early on if you have a day to burn resting off the pain or solid painkillers, or found a decent set of weapons, which is not often the case. By the time you start becoming a seasoned explorer you likely will have found disinfectant somewhere.
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Apr 23, 2015 18:50
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I'm really hoping for some new type of endgame dungeon with monsters that can actually challenge an endgame character. A portal to a fiery hellscape would fit with the game. Keeping a group alive sounds fun, but I still want something that is challenging to the individual player as well
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Apr 23, 2015 18:51
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Sergeant_Crunch posted:I'm really hoping for some new type of endgame dungeon with monsters that can actually challenge an endgame character. A portal to a fiery hellscape would fit with the game. Keeping a group alive sounds fun, but I still want something that is challenging to the individual player as well Yeah, just being able to go into/interact with a shimmering portal would be neat.
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Apr 23, 2015 19:10
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Sergeant_Crunch posted:A portal to a fiery hellscape would fit with the game. I struggle to see how, thematically. Dimensional labs (the cold ones) are the ones with a tap into the Sub-Prime plane full of mi-gos and shoggoths and the origin of the PE2073 (or whatever) sample, i.e. the source of all bad stuff that's going down. I totally agree, gameplay-wise. There's loads of anti-fire equipment and CBMs, it'd be a natural counterpart to the cold labs, and some new monsters would be cool. It would mean the usual easy-mode combat trick of "burning poo poo" would be neutered, too. Maybe you could spin it as the Cthonians rising, or something - there's enough lovecraft poo poo shoehorned into the game already.
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Apr 23, 2015 19:22
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DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:I struggle to see how, thematically. Dimensional labs (the cold ones) are the ones with a tap into the Sub-Prime plane full of mi-gos and shoggoths and the origin of the PE2073 (or whatever) sample, i.e. the source of all bad stuff that's going down. The sub-prime plane (planes, actually, there's more than one) are not a monolith. The Cold Labs just tap into a cold part of them. There could be hot parts too! See: Antartica vs. The Sun in our own plane. Being able to go into the sub-prime is actually pretty extensively planned out, it's just a really big task.
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Apr 23, 2015 19:25
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DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:the Sub-Prime plane... i.e. the source of all bad stuff that's going down. Wall Street! 
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Apr 23, 2015 19:40
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I love the open endedness of this game, but is there anyway I could take it with me and play it on a mobile?
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Apr 23, 2015 19:52
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Slaapaav posted:you know that you can use a knife and a lighter to cauterize wounds to avoid infections right? Cauterization is a last-ditch gamble, though. There's a risk it'll advance the infection instead of curing it, and as mentioned, you get a good chunk of pain each time you attempt it. If you need to cauterize a wound, you're already in trouble! The best course of action, when possible, is to just not get an infected bite in the first place, and the best way to do that is to not get into melee with zombies.
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Apr 23, 2015 22:34
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its better to use medical supplies but in the first few days you dont always have those. Being infected without having medical supplies leaves you with a very low chance of survival unless you can cure it, curing the infection can have you healing for several days depending on what you did to cure the infection.
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Apr 23, 2015 22:53
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I finally got together my super APC. So much fuel storage that draining three entire gas stations put me at 10%. Spike-plated bumper. Recharging stations, solar panels, few hundred units of clean water. V12 engine giving me a top speed of 2000 mph despite being a five ton monstrosity. I died by accidentally slapping a regular shock zombie with a crowbar, paralyzing me, just in time for a zombie bio operator to waltz around the corner. gently caress me
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Apr 23, 2015 22:57
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There is a lot of work being done on making the zombies get harder and harder as time goes on. Every zombie has an upgraded version now, and every 14 days the chances of basic zombies turning into them goes up. It's a step in the right direction. They just need to fix hordes, really.
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Apr 24, 2015 03:38
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Amazing Member posted:I love the open endedness of this game, but is there anyway I could take it with me and play it on a mobile? Theoretically, but the required inputs would make it a nightmare to play on anything smaller than a laptop with attached numberpad. Also, moose, wolves, coyotes and stuff ain't poo poo if you bop them on the head with a cudgel. The stunning attack is just that good.
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Apr 24, 2015 03:42
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I really like Dragon Striking things with 20 intelligence - 100+ damage per strike if you move a bit between hits makes for very quickly dead enemies. I'll have to try cudgels when I'm above ground level though.
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Apr 24, 2015 04:13
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Cudgels with Niten-Ryu take those things to 11. I mean you could use a katana sure but cudgels tell shocker zombies to gtfo fantastically.
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Apr 24, 2015 05:02
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Is there a description anywhere of how all the different martial arts work and their various brokenness? I've been quite happy with karate and quick-striking zombies to death (was hilarious fun cleaning out a school as waves of child zombies attacked me but apparently my -500 guilt doesn't agree) but would like to try out some of the more interesting ones. Also what's the easiest way to get lighting in a base beyond finding a handy working terminal? Do I need to wait until I have enough mechanics to build a solar charged headlight box?
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Apr 24, 2015 05:36
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