Vehicles are overpowered

[turkler]

I feel like cars are in a pretty good state right now, requiring constant maintenance and fuel, and they exist for a really good reason

 

now, do you know how fun traveling in zomboid is? with the modern sedan, west point to rosewood takes about 35-45 minutes of driving, full throttle mind you. now, to be fair, I stopped once to refuel, so you can take 2-3 minutes off from that.

now, imagine that, but on foot.

do you realize how painful would that be? that eventual trip that every player has to make, since supplies will eventually run out, that's such a pain in the ass. I don't even know how long it takes on foot since I've never done it. I attempted it once, but got bored after an hour so and gave up.

cars exist, and for good reason.

[SVAFnemesis]

I vote yes on this one. Car's are OP. I'm playing on survivor difficulty right now and the moment I find a mid size vehicle is the moment when I can begin to grind down zombies just about anywhere. The problem right now is that you can grind hordes of zombies by running over them at low speed repeadedly, and half a day is enough to clear several blocks without vehicle taking much damages so it's a powerful and repeatable procedure. I think vehicles should not be running over corpses and down zombies so easily. In real life a sedan actually can easily be put to a stop by just one or to human like objects. If anyone wants to hit zombies at highspeed sure they do it with the cost of damaging their car. Low speed grinding should not happen. Let's keep vehicle mostly a logistic solution, not a zone clearing method. For mid game zone clearing, I'd promote firearms.

[voggi]

I agree that being on top on a pile of zombies should potentially stop your car, but if you were driving something like a pickup truck or another vehicle that would be heavy and potentially have four wheel drive would have a higher probability of plowing through a horde and making it over a big pile.

[Strepan]

Why not a middle ground gameplay wise ? We could reinforce cars with steel bullbars but those would probably deform quickly after a few collisions. And when the bullbar fails that's the car itself taking damage, potentially at the cost of failure very quickly or randomly. So yeah you can hunt zombies with your car but not for a long time.

 

As for the matter of being stuck by hordes it would make sense. The Total War games have a similar mass mechanism with heavy units like cavalry or chariots. If you charge a stretch out line or loose formation, your unit can keep momentum and cross it. If you charge a compact formation, your units get bogged down and stopped. That's how this game balances charging units.

 

Once bogged down, the zombies can attack your wind-shields and this is how you died.

 

Another point but probably more difficult to implement : damage to yourself as a driver. Modern cars are made of materials allowing kinetic energy of collision to be absorbed by the deformation of those very materials. A 1990' car, or worse a straight up zombie apocalypse steel bullbar, take the full brunt of kinetic energy, impacting more the driver than a modern car which behaves differently by deforming.

 

In theory in the absence of deforming designs, the best bullbar for your short term survival should be something similar to a pilot/cow-catcher in a train : something which deflects instead of acting like a ram.

[Morbo513]

Would like everything Strepan mentions, though I think vehicle modification should be quite extensive - reinforcing the chassis and other major components, in addition to different types of passive weapons and armour, eg. a cow-catcher, wire mesh and/or bars over/instead of windows, that sorta stuff. Nothing too mad-max but just enough options for the player's vehicle to be able to be somewhat unique. These would have course make the car heavier, slower to accelerate, harder to handle, less fuel-efficient and harder on its tires, suspension, brakes etc - the player could balance this out by stripping out non-essentials and using different parts.
 

That said, realistically, I think you probably could run over a zombie at low speeds without doing significant damage to the vehicle or occupants - doing so to a zombie at a time, 100 times over, I don't think would make much of a difference. Rather, I think cars should have a risk of getting their wheels caught in piles of corpses so it's more risky to use against crowds.
With the changes to damage to vehicles from hitting zombies, I think cars should preserve much more intertia at medium and high speeds, especially if they're on the heavier side.

On the subject of vehicles in general, something else I'd like to see is being able to use "seats" for both passengers and cargo, regardless of whether there's a seat installed - currently that just means even more empty space, but for some reason you aren't allowed to use it. For passengers, it could mean they're much more susceptible to damage from crashes - cargo could be dropped/damaged on crashes, especially if the boot's open or the car's missing doors.
 

Edited April 30, 2020 by Morbo513