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I think that from a pure game perspective, a deathmobile makes sense, but really with ranching, NPC's bases, farming, and the other changes, it can be a lot of fun to have a static base, and use your vehicle as a method of going afield to bring stuff back. In that case the sorting will make it a breeze. Just unload your stuff into the unsorted zone and sort it into piles for a bit after every adventure. Combined with an npc settlement you can have your dudes build you a stockpile off near where your looting, and unload your loot there and pay them food to cart it back. Designate the place they bring it back to as your sorting and crafting area and you've got a good system going. Edit Make it so your sorting area is your garage, periodically use the advanced inventory system to dump your cargo on the ground. Sort and then load it all back up. Killer-of-Lawyers fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Aug 7, 2018 |
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Aug 7, 2018 00:23
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I was recently given a private (and now dead-end) branch of "Generic Guns" which actually updates it. Things may have changed but last I checked a few months ago it hadn't been updated since before the Glock-19 and lots of errors were included in the old GG mod, including things like machineguns being given the wrong ammo belts, ammo belts not disassembling/assembling properly, and apparently (and this was never advertised as far as I could tell), Generic Guns removes all launchers from the game. So I know a lot of people don't use it but it's in my lap now and I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and update it to parity with the new changes. Lots of changes in this version, including readding launchers in a variety of styles, standardizing launcher and rocket ammo across launchers, adding a few new generic-ified gun types and mods, and renames almost every gun. There's also an optional bridge patch that gives PK's DOOM-style weapons the Generic Guns treatment and integration. That might be hard to bring up to parity because I'll likely have to comb over PK's to make sure it hasn't added anything major in any area that's been tweaked since, but it looks from the Github that it's been mostly minor fixes. So for my relevant question: are the actual updates regarding weapon/acc changes specific to weapons and ammo, or just tweaks to broader underlying game mechanics? If it's the latter I won't have to change much, but if it's the former I'll have to re-compare almost every change to maintain parity. Also I heard 00 shot had been badly nerfed so I might just tweak that while I'm at it.
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Aug 8, 2018 07:43
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Vib Rib posted:I was recently given a private (and now dead-end) branch of "Generic Guns" which actually updates it. Things may have changed but last I checked a few months ago it hadn't been updated since before the Glock-19 and lots of errors were included in the old GG mod, including things like machineguns being given the wrong ammo belts, ammo belts not disassembling/assembling properly, and apparently (and this was never advertised as far as I could tell), Generic Guns removes all launchers from the game. So I know a lot of people don't use it but it's in my lap now and I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and update it to parity with the new changes. Lots of changes in this version, including readding launchers in a variety of styles, standardizing launcher and rocket ammo across launchers, adding a few new generic-ified gun types and mods, and renames almost every gun. From what I understand, the changes were to the underlying accuracy calculations and not to the guns specifically so I don’t know if that helps. I do have a question on generic guns and on some of the other features mentioned as it’s been a long time since I last played. With generic guns, I’ve never tried it but during my last couple characters as I realised guns actuallly mattered again, I was put off by the sheer variety of guns and ammo since it made it very difficult to use the guns I found. Does generic guns limit to specific classes (eg, now there’s a “handgun” a “submachine gun” )etc? I’d like to try a game with less fragmented gun types but I do want a little variety. Secondly on ranching and NPCs. Previously, ranching wasn’t something I even knew was possible other than maybe trying to grow food. How do you get animals and befriend/tame them? Also, how do you set up an NPC outpost? That’s something else I’ve never bothered with previously.
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Aug 8, 2018 15:53
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If I remember right, the generic guns mod is explicitly intended to reduce the insane degree of gun clutter and the amount of different, incompatible ammunition types. It condenses it all down into a few standard, comprehensibly-named categories of ammunition and generally makes it a lot easier to use guns and sort through your pile of guns and bullets, since you're no longer finding 7x7qp-omega rounds or whatever the gently caress instead of something that you can actually use (and also know what the gently caress it is). IIRC the survivor ranch thing is a fixed location. There are a few survivor camps you can run across, but there's a specific one that sends signals over the radio and is chock full of quest-giving NPCs, and I believe that enclave can give you directions to the survivor camp that builds itself up over time and becomes a little farming village with a saloon.
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Aug 8, 2018 16:24
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PiCroft posted:From what I understand, the changes were to the underlying accuracy calculations and not to the guns specifically so I don’t know if that helps.
Unfortunately the standard version also eliminates launchers entirely so that's what this version's trying to fix.
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Aug 9, 2018 05:08
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Generic Guns exists partially because you would finally be able to break into a gun store and then find 3x pistols that took 9mm, 2x rifles that took 5.56x45 NATO, The devs have literally never been to gun store. Magazines are the profit driver. IRL it's more like 1x gun:20x magazines for that gun.
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Aug 9, 2018 07:07
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Thanks folks, gave it a try and it feels a lot better. I can actually build up a decent stockpile of guns and ammo now that isn’t 90% weapons I don’t have mags or bullets for.
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Aug 9, 2018 09:10
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goatsestretchgoals posted:Generic Guns exists partially because you would finally be able to break into a gun store and then find 3x pistols that took 9mm, 2x rifles that took 5.56x45 NATO, Maybe it's just realistic looting. Everyone has already taken the useful stuff and left the trash behind :P
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Aug 9, 2018 09:14
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While I'm not the original creator nor the one who made this branch I do have permission to post this, so Here's the update of Generic Guns that actually includes launchers. It hasn't been updated in a few months, but it's still more recent than the original GG mod. Main change is that it doesn't cut grenades/rockets out entirely. It also fixes ammo belts for machine guns, de-blacklists a few weapons that have now been made generic (like the bicycle shotgun, the combination gun, underbarrel shotgun mod, etc), and renames all the generic guns for alphabetical sort order (e.g. "shotgun, pump action" instead of "pump action shotgun"). The included "what's changed.txt" should spell out the fixes in more detail. If you're using GG already, this should be stable and a bit more flexible.
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Aug 9, 2018 09:36
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Angry Diplomat posted:If I remember right, the generic guns mod is explicitly intended to reduce the insane degree of gun clutter and the amount of different, incompatible ammunition types. It condenses it all down into a few standard, comprehensibly-named categories of ammunition and generally makes it a lot easier to use guns and sort through your pile of guns and bullets, since you're no longer finding 7x7qp-omega rounds or whatever the gently caress instead of something that you can actually use (and also know what the gently caress it is). You're wrong, the new NPC bases are nothing like the survivor ranch. You start them once you have two followers and put them wherever you want.
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Aug 9, 2018 17:15
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:You're wrong, the new NPC bases are nothing like the survivor ranch. You start them once you have two followers and put them wherever you want. Oh, that's pretty cool. I don't know that it's cool enough to make up for the many, many unfun design decisions made in recent... uh, years, but it is a big enough step forward to constitute new content, which is something c:dda has been desperately short on for quite a while. If dynamically generated NPC settlements that change over time could be implemented somehow, we'd have the beginnings of a real endgame - manage your survivor commune, trade with and assist friendly communities nearby (or raid them, if that's your thing), bust up raider camps and overthrow despots and whatnot, rebuild civilization one lovely tent village at a time. Of course, that would probably require some fairly extensive restructuring to achieve - I recall people talking about how background events away from the player would have to be extremely heavily abstracted and/or scripted due to the "reality bubble" logic around which most of the game mechanics are built.
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Aug 9, 2018 17:24
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Well if it was realistic you could go into some random prepper's basement and find collections of 20 guns and piles of ammo boxes lying around in lockers and on display with gas masks and armor and food. Or at least, one of these. And actually once in awhile you do find places like this! Though maybe not with the huge piles of ammo you'd expect nor matching ones but hey, it's kind of funny how random Rambo wannabes have more hardware than you find in science lab armory stocks.
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Aug 10, 2018 02:09
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It would be nice if spawning logic at least worked in groups. So like if a gun was spawned it would ensure that ammo/magazines spawned in the same spot would be a type that actually goes with that gun.
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Aug 10, 2018 02:15
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Angry Diplomat posted:Oh, that's pretty cool. I don't know that it's cool enough to make up for the many, many unfun design decisions made in recent... uh, years, but it is a big enough step forward to constitute new content, which is something c:dda has been desperately short on for quite a while. They do change. You can get various structures built, expand them, defend them, use the NPC's to move stuff around and make forward operating bases that they can transfer stuff back and forth from. Of course, the guy who was developing them left because someone made a sorting system that didn't use NPC's, but a lot of the workshop stuff is in JSON now, so I guess it's trivial to make buildings do new things.
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Aug 10, 2018 04:08
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Hello, I'm back from a, dang, five-year break. Back in my day my big accomplishment was getting a vehicle to 1200 mph, striking a wolf for 11000 damage and spinning into the forest where I hit a tree and my four gas tanks exploded, ending a year-long game. Looks like the OP hasn't been updated since then, how does one get back into Cata?
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Aug 10, 2018 04:48
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Evilreaver posted:Hello, I'm back from a, dang, five-year break. Back in my day my big accomplishment was getting a vehicle to 1200 mph, striking a wolf for 11000 damage and spinning into the forest where I hit a tree and my four gas tanks exploded, ending a year-long game. you download the latest experimental and off you go basically
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Aug 10, 2018 04:49
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You get the Cata launcher, and play with that, never having to download expermentals or most mods manually again. edit: https://github.com/remyroy/CDDA-Game-Launcher/releases
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Aug 10, 2018 07:01
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:There's also some work being made on letting you Ebookatize real books with the e-ink, so you can carry your recipes around with you. As someone who prefers nomadic gameplay, this cannot come quickly enough
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Aug 15, 2018 17:55
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dylguy90 posted:As someone who prefers nomadic gameplay, this cannot come quickly enough Oh my god yes. I had a fortunate run way back when where I found a fully stocked library on night 2. Dragged 2 full duffel bags of books back to my basement hideout and emerged the smartest guy in the post apoc.
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Aug 16, 2018 02:12
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goatsestretchgoals posted:Oh my god yes. I had a fortunate run way back when where I found a fully stocked library on night 2. Dragged 2 full duffel bags of books back to my basement hideout and emerged the smartest guy in the post apoc. Books are one of my biggest criticisms of this game - it's very difficult to level up skills without them, and with them it's absolutely trivial. I feel like there needs to be some sort of middle ground where books are valuable, but aren't the thing that basically determine how high your skills will be.
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Aug 16, 2018 03:55
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The Cataclysm way to fix that is to hack another kind of item on top. Perhaps some kind of tinkering project item that gives you skill-ups to a cap once a day (and does so automatically when you sleep), and once you hit the cap it turns into a useful item relevant to the skill you made it for? So my Mechanics project made out of pipes and wood and stuff probably turns into a pipe rifle, for instance. Basically, resources then become your learning bottleneck as you keep fiddling and experimenting with things in a more abstract way rather than needing to futz with things like constantly disassembling and reassembling items or vehicles.
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Aug 16, 2018 04:54
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the ranks of skills feel gamey and inauthentic as hell so i honestly don't see the point in 'fixing' books. it's still absurd that i can suddenly start making GBS threads out cargo pants and complex survivor gear because i spent 24 hours making briefs from curtains. leveling up at a skill is drat stupid because that's not how that poo poo has worked in the history of ever. until you make a learning mechanic that makes something resembling visceral sense, books are not going to make any visceral sense. so at the absolute least they should have a good place in game, which currently they do. they are the gate between the early and mid games. the early game is by far the hardest thing you're going to face. you lack weapons, armor, consumables, and knowledge. knowledge is the last of those that you will get and you get it by using your weapons and armor to carve out a quiet spot, and your consumables to give you the time to extract the knowledge. you make that trade and now you are in the mid game. congratulations, shinji. at least that is discoverable and understandable, and doesn't bog down the player with a bunch of repetitive horseshit to escape the basic survival trap. in general i'd say if you wanted to replace it with something that made more sense, here's my hot take: abolish skill levels entirely and just replace each skill with a more gradual proficiency level, where 100 proficiency points is roughly equal to one level in the current system. abolish auto-learned recipes entirely beyond the basic ones everyone knows (like rock in a sock). each recipe has a specific proficiency that it considers ideal, which again can just be equivalent to its current difficulty * 100 to start out with. so cargo pants would be proficiency 300 (subject to tweaking). to learn the recipe, you would have to either spend its ideal proficiency in your own proficiency points or have a book on hand and craft it until you've memorized it. spending your own proficiency points basically simulates the serious level of focus and mental investment that goes into designing your own poo poo. you can craft anything you know, but if you're under proficiency the time to craft goes up geometrically. so again using cargo pants takes 48 minutes to craft normally - at 300 proficiency, it would take 48 minutes. at 200 it should take twice as long (1 hr 36 minutes), at 100 proficiency 3x as long (2 hrs 24 minutes), and at 0 proficiency 4x as long (3 hrs 12 minutes). of course you gain proficiency steadily any time you're working on something at least as complex as your current proficiency + 100 so getting proficiency back up isn't actually that onerous in terms of player input - it just takes a lot of loving time. books are still worth their weight in gold because they have all the ready made recipes and keep you from needing to spend ages reinventing everything from scratch, but they're not the 'read this and magically be a know it all'. you could even finally make the whole memory mechanic they've tried to shoehorn in a couple times worth it by just capping your overall number of proficiency points at 500 * your intelligence or something. if you fill up you can mark something to rust down to allow your unarmed or firearms or whatever to go up - which, again, would not actually stop you from making meth even though you tanked chemistry, it would just take a really loving long time to do so. the biggest implementation hurdle here would be that you'd have to go back and add appropriate costs to a lot of interactions that otherwise just check the skill - mechanics, for example, would probably need a 'recipe' (and appropriately itemized books) for each task you make while creating a vehicle. so again, you COULD spend a ton of time disassembling hulks and making a deathmobile by fits and starts, but you can't just disassemble a 5 car pileup and then slap together a loving doof wagon on the road it used to be on.
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Aug 16, 2018 07:38
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Car building doesn't need to be made even more of a pain in the butt. 
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Aug 16, 2018 07:44
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i don't think it really would be. if you had some basic books it'd actually be easier, if you didn't it'd just take longer. not like the current changes to 'balance' it, where you need a loving ph.d. in reading the realism preferences of some rando nerd to figure out what's even possible today. e: alternately just make all of the basic things like "put down frame" and "install quarterpanel" auto-granted stuff in the vein of rock in a sock, whatever Coolguye fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 08:03
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Didn't someone try to figure out what a person would be reasonably capable of doing with 0 skill?
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Aug 16, 2018 12:32
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"Visceral" skillbuilding theorycrafting: Let's imagine making a high-tech thing. It could be anything, but for sake of argument let's go with "plasma rifle". Step 1: Unskilled Our tweaker drunkenly stumbles out of his burning building and raids a pharmacy to deal with his flu, blah blah blah, eventually finding a pistol. Like an ape at a monolith, he doesn't know how to make it, but he does know how to use it. He kills some zombies. Step 2: Low Familiarity Shooting some zombies gets him 'familiar' with the weapon. Reloading/cleaning it does too (to a limited extent). At "Familiar with Pistols" Level 1, he can Study it, like how one does with books currently. This can get him to 3. Dissecting the gun can get it to 5-6, but has a high chance of eventually breaking it-- maybe irreparably, maybe not. Familiarity allows better care and maintenance of the gun (or tool/gear/etc), so that it jams/breaks/misfires less often (or uses less energy/fewer charges) Step 3: Skilled At Familiarity L3 or so, you can begin crafting that item from parts (depending on the item in particular, you might learn recipes for the parts as well). This gets your familiarity up very quickly (ie, 1.5 levels per craft (with diminishing returns, so you arrive at L10 after 5ish crafts). Items crafted at (Familiarity + Fabrication) 0-4 are "makeshift" : Positive attributes (damage, efficiency, speed, durability, capacity, joy, etc) are at 75% base, negatives (weight, volume, noise, encumbrance, etc) at 125%. Items crafted at F+F 5-12 are "base" Items crafted at F+F 13-19 are "finely made" (positives 125%, negatives 90%) Items crafted at F+F 20+ are "masterwork" (positives 175%, negatives 75%) At Familiarity with Pistols Level 5-7 or so, you learn the "Rifle" and/or "SMG" schematic. You have to start over, leaning on your Fabrication skill since 'Familiarity with Rifles' is at 0. Step 4: Mastery No matter how many pistols/rifles/whatever we make, we never learn "plasma rifle". So that knowledge has to come from books! We find a Physics book with several recipes, including "Plasma Tech". Ideally, we would have the player become Familiar with physics, then Familiar with plasma tech, at which point they would learn the Plasma Rifle schematic. Step 5: Experimental With the use of pen and paper (or a CAD program) (or VR environments) (Or a CBM Dream Recorder) you can spend time sketching schematics. Doing so grinds familiarity, and has a random chance of generating new schematics from your related Skills/Familiarities. For example, if you don't use the simplified guns mod, this would allow you to come up with all the various firearms etc. It's worth noting that the whole process applies to everything: becoming familiar with LSD and skilled in Cooking might allow you to sketch out Space Acid, for example. Miscellaneous -Labs (maybe modified arcades?) might have VR setups where you can "craft" "items" without using materials, to grind your familiarity up to a limited extent -Factories, nano-fabricators and/or builder robots can be commanded to build schematics that you know (or they are pre-loaded with) -- on a side note, having controllable robot arm (car factory style) to aid with car building would be heckin sweet, particularly if you later grafted it onto your back 40k Techpriest-style -Books would provide Skills ("fabrication") and/or discreet schematics that you can become Familiar with. -Every single (discreet) item in the game has its own Familiarity associated with it. -Crafting relies on the Familiarity of the object as well as the relevant Skill (skills are generalized, Familiarites are specific)
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Aug 16, 2018 19:15
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personally, i don't think anything with specific levels that sea-change quickly is gonna feel very natural. the 'level up' experience where you suddenly get a lot better at something isn't one that happens in real life. one day you might retrospectively realize 'holy poo poo, i can actually do this now, a month ago i couldn't' but that isn't you leveling up, you already had that skill and you just had a moment where that hit you.
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Aug 16, 2018 19:35
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My personal thoughts are that I don't like any system where I can suddenly go from being able to make meth in 30 minutes to taking a considerably longer amount of time to do the same job because my brain decided it wanted to instead hold enough firearms knowledge to be able to hold my arm straight while shooting. It would just be gamey in a different way where you spend like a month making as much meth as humanly possible so that you never need it again and then you spend a month shooting anything you want until you're pretty much well outfitted and then you spend a month making bombs or whatever until you never need any of those again. I'm fine with the current system even as videogamey as it feels because I'm playing a video game. Same reason I don't play with filthy clothing enabled or the carrion system enabled; that kind of micromanagement doesn't just feel boring for me to deal with (seriously I could clean out my fridge in real life and indeed I already remove spoiled food from my place of residence in the game habitually just so it doesn't end up in my recipes) but it's also completely unnecessary in a game as abstracted as Cataclysm already is. I'd much rather have some kind of permanent endgame involving stopping whatever evil juju is responsible for all of these zombies/migos and some kind of way to permanently cleanse the earth of the fungal infections. Maybe even some kind of system where you reclaim the scientific equipment sitting around in labs/at the bottom of mines and get right what the scientists get wrong then to have development go towards trying new ways to make the underlying system feel less like a video game because its always gonna be gamey there is no way to make gamers not terrible min-maxing hobgoblins. reignofevil fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 19:57
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reignofevil posted:My personal thoughts are that I don't like any system where I can suddenly go from being able to make meth in 30 minutes to taking a considerably longer amount of time to do the same job because my brain decided it wanted to instead hold enough firearms knowledge to be able to hold my arm straight while shooting. It would just be gamey in a different way where you spend like a month making as much meth as humanly possible so that you never need it again and then you spend a month shooting anything you want until you're pretty much well outfitted and then you spend a month making bombs or whatever until you never need any of those again.
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Aug 16, 2018 20:04
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That refresh wouldn't take extra time though it would generally speaking just be you loving up at some step in your goal (delicious methamphetamine) and then probably remembering how you hosed it up after the first try because thats basically how human memory works. Its more muscle memory than anything else. My biggest objection is that this would just give me another thing to micromanage in a game that is already micromanage-y enough as it is. If I sacrificed time and energy to get the components to make meth and also sacrificed time and energy learning to make meth* and I sacrificed time and energy trying to actually make the meth just let me have my drugs in a timely fashion already I'm probably gonna get cornered by a shocker brute and murdered in two days anyway. edit- *I recognize your proposed system would at least remove some degree of this stage of the process but really I have no problem with complex tasks like this requiring a recipe I don't know how to make meth in real life and given unlimited time to 'figure it out' from my current status as an idiot I am almost certain I would never actually end up with any meth
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Aug 16, 2018 20:13
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If the thread will permit me to give some more of my unsolicited opinions the prior conversation has actually given me some thoughts that I'd like to record somewhere. As a gamer I try to look at Cataclysm and the various mechanics that make it up from the perspective of what incentives a mechanic leads toward and how it rewards the player. Generally I also try to give some thought to how tedious a mechanic is to interact with versus the reward given for overcoming the tedium. On rare occasions whether or not a mechanic makes any sense in the real world will also factor into my internal calculus for whether a mechanic is worth including but I have a firm belief that anything that you want to include for 'realism' needs to also either contribute to incentivizing the player to have more fun or reward the player for not having fun. The reward for not having fun should generally outweigh the time I spent being frustrated in some manner. For example thinking about the above system where we would no longer hardlock items behind recipes I would personally be incentivized to leave the evac shelter on day one; collect as many bird eggs as possible so that I can live off scrambled eggs for a week and collect the lumps of iron necessary to spend that week making a full suit of armor and a survivors machete. Sure it might actually take me all spring but I have a hell of a better chance to survive doing this than I have exploring and trying to survive in the more dangerous environments looking for parts and tools. A system in which I had limited proficiency points and had some degree of choice means that once I'm proficient at making armor since I lack proficiency in electronics to make a soldering iron and probably can't make a makeshift welder or batteries for it I'll instead just spend all of summer making more suits of armor so that as they are damaged I can easily swap them out. I'll have spent something like two seasons just getting myself out of the early game with as little personal danger as possible and my reward will be that even though I am too slow to adequately flee from danger about 85% of the available in game enemies can no longer actually hope to harm me. This means a significant amount of the challenges I would expect to face have been subverted and in my personal opinion a great deal of the fun derived from cataclysm is from the feeling that you are constantly at risk; gathering up supplies so that you can mitigate that risk in various ways and then finally the late game is feeling like you are no longer vulnerable to the things that you once looked at as beyond your capacity to surmount. I feel like it runs a real risk of taking what fun still exists in the game and incentivizing you not to actually have any of it. Obviously a player could ignore this incentive the same way I ignore the incentive to make a ton of clothes I don't need until I can have duffel bags and I ignore the incentive to take parts off my car and put them back on until I can make a death-tank but good game design is not putting things in place that the player has to actively ignore in order to experience the actual game as it was intended to be played. The current system of part-shuffling and underwear making is kind of a best-we-can-do compromise (or at least I can't think of a better way to implement it; not that I spend time implementing anything in this game thus far) where it would frustrate players who are playing the game properly and interacting with the crafting and mechanics system to find their character never got any better at it. Unfortunately being able to get better at something in this way means that you can use the systems in ways generally not intended to increase your skills beyond what makes logical sense such as suddenly being able to craft a duffel bag after having made a bunch of gloves. 'Fixing' this* (so that making gloves only makes you better at making gloves; making lockpicks doesn't suddenly mean you can make a knife spear etc.) would mean removing even more abstraction from the game in a way that won't ever really make sense because ultimately the system the entire game works on is hitting a button on the keyboard then some time in real life passes and you either have passed or you have failed. Not wanting to make a hyper-accurate simulation in which the developers analyze a ton of different sewing techniques and materials sciences to try and make some kind dwarf fortress style skills system where you have glove making and storage making (clothes) and storage making (cars) means that we are in a situation where a duffel bag is simply as relevant to a main characters skillset as a balaclava is and somehow the necessary items and skillset for creating both are the exact same. In my opinion this is a good thing because a more all encompassing skill system would be tedious. It wouldn't actually add anything to the game except more incentive to make a ton of makeshift backpacks and then a ton of footrags and then a ton of handwraps and on and on without actually providing any kind of reward for the player outside the bounds of what he can actually do with the system we already have. It is unfortunate that this means the early game has a tedious route to success but again I view it as a best of both worlds scenario where we are paying tribute to the fact that in real life people had to actually innovate based on prior experiences (for example learning to make a duffel bag when previously they had only hobo bindles or coming up with some unique invention by having life experience with other concepts that allowed you carry them over into unrelated fields) while also providing skill books for players who don't view the idea of making a ton of makeshift lockpicks and using them on locked doors until you can somehow change out a car battery as a favorable way for their character to survive in the post apocalypse. Obviously my opinions on whether you could actually make something like a suit of armor or methamphetamine without any prior knowledge are already documented here. I generally like the realism -> reward balance that the game currently strikes by making me explore for books for more advanced recipes and concepts. I feel like it has a good design as far as incentives to play the game as it is meant to be played because when I think of what the goal of cataclysm is I think about exploring towns for resources and combating supernatural creatures for ownership of those towns and resources. I generally like the current system as a whole as a result and when I'm playing I'm usually having fun doing these things even if I die and have to reset my whole world and start over again from scratch. In my view it makes my success more legitimate that I had a hundred failures before I finally hit upon that lucky overpowered item drop that lets me get my death-car up and running so I can start selectively engaging with the risks and dangers of the game because failure was always a real possibility and from a roleplaying perspective the idea that while I can't make meth or a suit of armor on my own; so long as I had no stardew valley to distract me and dedicated instructions that didn't use too many hard words, I could possibly accomplish what I sought out to do feels close enough to how I'd hope a hypothetical real life zombie survival situation would go (lmao I know but let me have my fantasies that is what games are about!) that I am generally satisfied when my character actually does it and I don't feel like at any point in the process I got my reward cheaply. While this has obviously gotten far outside the boundaries of what anyone is proposing as far as I am aware I just wanted to write all of that because it is the exact same basis for why I think the game cataclysm is worth me investing my time and energy into playing and why I think several of the mechanics introduced in these more modern builds don't work. They aren't generally being implemented with the philosophy that anything put into the game to make it more realistic better also make the game more fun or needs to be balanced with some kind of reward for interacting with the systems. Anything that is put in to make the game simpler on day one should be balanced with something that makes me more hungry to go out and see what is just past that next forest. Obviously the current configuration of the game has its flaws and some day I hope to be able to leave my mark on the game to address these flaws but I genuinely feel like if the above were kept in mind for most of the design decisions being made there really wouldn't be any need for me to ever touch it. I think Cataclysm stands as a wonderful game but I can feel it getting less wonderful with each passing build and that genuinely discourages me from trying to figure out how to actually make it compile; mapping out some of the more arcane systems preventing us from having batch-disassembly or a system in which we could actually restore power to previously existing homes because when I think about what really needs changed I just end up with a list of poo poo I'd rather take out wholesale because it doesn't add anything but keystrokes at the end of the day. *to step outside of our analysis of the above proposed changes to item crafting; since I am well aware that nobody but myself is even talking about whether we should be able to make simple clothes until we make duffel bags. Edit- In retrospect I'd probably be able to be proficient enough by making improvised welders and batteries from car-battery-acid that I'd be able to repair my armor but you get the gist. reignofevil fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 22:27
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I really would like a long-term objective, like "reach the last safe bastion of humanity (optionally: with as many friends as possible)" -Said bastion is some 900 km away in a random direction -Referenced by survivor notes/survivors/radio broadcasts etc so you can narrow it down -Across a mountain range (completely impassible in the winter) -Through a radioactive hellscape with much more dangerous critters (murderous acid rain in the spring) Of course there's nothing saying you can't start your own hippie commune and stay put forever, but a nigh-on impossible win condition is the staple of roguelikes! and they shoot you to death if you have any visible mutations or too many bionics Evilreaver fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Aug 17, 2018 |
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Aug 17, 2018 00:00
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Evilreaver posted:I really would like a long-term objective, like "reach the last safe bastion of humanity (optionally: with as many friends as possible)" I quite like this.
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Aug 17, 2018 00:10
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I am super tired and greatly amused by misreading that as "armor made from methamphetamine". Isn't the NPC system how you deal with skill rust and avoiding omnicompetence? Tell your NPC grunts to practice and craft while you're off adventuring and scrounging. Have them specialize? Haha, then some grog who prefers crafting can make some Recettear-style crafting management mod that makes the NPCs do the pesky adventuring for you.
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Aug 17, 2018 00:18
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I still think the nigh-impossible win condition should be "reach a portal and physically enter the gribbly hell dimension (optional: bring your deathmobile with you), then destroy the gribbly hell dimension" and you have to do it for multiple gribbly hell dimensions and each one eliminates a different threat and requires a different weapon of mass destruction. Wipe out the fungus by deploying some kind of fungicidal fuel air bomb at its heavily-guarded source. Annihilate the triffids by setting off an extremely powerful incendiary device at the heart of their lethal, jungle-like realm and escaping through a portal before the rapidly growing inferno consumes you. Drive out the shoggoths and whatnot by breaching their Lovecraftian Silent Hill horrorshow ur-realm, and then nuking the poo poo out of said ur-realm. Halt the zombie apocalypse by uh. I dunno. That one is probably Earth-oriented. Do a bunch of quests and Lab raids and poo poo and research some kind of vaccine that's insanely difficult to synthesize, and then bring samples of it to the Old Guard. Anyway let us go into other dimensions and gently caress them up, is what I'm saying.
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Aug 17, 2018 00:25
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Rockopolis posted:I am super tired and greatly amused by misreading that as "armor made from methamphetamine". It just makes the zombies bite faster D: Might as well be covering myself in bath salts for all the good this is doing me!
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Aug 17, 2018 01:36
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Win condition: A fully enclosed farm with a patch for weed, a long dock with a comfy chair and a fishing pole.
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Aug 17, 2018 01:45
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Angry Diplomat posted:I still think the nigh-impossible win condition should be "reach a portal and physically enter the gribbly hell dimension (optional: bring your deathmobile with you), then destroy the gribbly hell dimension" and you have to do it for multiple gribbly hell dimensions and each one eliminates a different threat and requires a different weapon of mass destruction.
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Aug 17, 2018 06:54
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goatsestretchgoals posted:Win condition: A fully enclosed farm with a patch for weed, a long dock with a comfy chair and a fishing pole. This is already how I play the game, basically like an apocalyptic stardew valley.
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Aug 17, 2018 07:11
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Angry Diplomat posted:I still think the nigh-impossible win condition should be "reach a portal and physically enter the gribbly hell dimension (optional: bring your deathmobile with you), then destroy the gribbly hell dimension" and you have to do it for multiple gribbly hell dimensions and each one eliminates a different threat and requires a different weapon of mass destruction. The nice thing about a game like Cataclysm is they could put in as many "win conditions" as they want really, since it's a sandbox. I like to think of it along the lines of like, going for extra runes in Crawl. There's no reason to do it other than you want to - but it's a fun challenge. Being able to make some kind of permanent impact on the world like that would be interesting. Although one of the end-game challenges could also be to just travel to an "alternate earth" which literally just drops you into a freshly generated world (undoing any sort of worldwide changes you've done) with whatever you decided to take with you, so you could always "reset" the game if you wanted to.
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Aug 17, 2018 07:21
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