Vehicle difficulty should be radically changed

[Headshotkill]

We all know one of the biggest leaps in improving your survival chances is having a working vehicle, it's the fastest, safest way to travel the map and you can store a lot of loot in them. But at first it is often a frustratingly difficult RNG to find one, sometimes you spawn right next to one, currently I haven't found one in over 4 days, most annoying are the ones that work, have a key but no gas, yet they are parked near a gas station without a gas can to be found in miles. First of all we should be able to push a vehicle closer to the pump so we can gas it up, this is pretty logical.

 

That was a small grudge of mine but not the main thing I want to discuss, right now as mentioned above the difficulty curve is extremely abrubt, at first the game is too difficult to find a working car, after you've found one it's too easy to use them and they are pretty OP. IRL (don't take it too seriously I know zombies don't exist ... yet) finding a working car wouldn't be an issue at all, almost everyone has one, the real difficulty would be navigating the world, in disaster movies we see miles of traffic jams.

 

I imagine when the apocalyps hits a lot of people would zombify while driving so they would crash into houses, trees, other cars, highway barriers, etc. Some normal people would crash out of panic, most would end up on the highway stuck due to one of these accidents, this would create massive traffic jams, imagine the current car pile ups we have ingame and multiply them times 10. This is where most cars would be in perfect working condition, some with engines still running and eventually out of gas but most just abandoned. The reason this wouldn't be an easy OP stash of working cars are the following. Most would be stuck due to other cars infront/behind and highway barriers/trees on the side, these piles would be hotspots of zombie hordes, a lot of them wouldn't have keys inside them but instead on a zombie nearby or on the ground, a lot of them would have zombies stuck inside them.

The fewer remaining cars on driveways/parking lots should be in good condition with gas, keys nearby.

 

Okay you have a working car, congratulations, if it were me a lot of characters would spawn with one on their driveway/parking lot of their workplace with the key already in their inventory from the very start, still it's a step in the right direction to survive but here's the catch, all these accidents and traffic jams I mentioned would severely limit the use of cars. 

Town centers would have streets blocked by an accident + couple cars stuck in a jam, but overall they would be navigable, highways would be extremely difficult to navigate, meaning if you have a car in Rosewood, you'd be able to use it reasonably inside Rosewood but driving to Muldraugh would be a very difficult task, forcing the player to walk the jammed up highway with all it's zombies, alternatively you could use the dirt roads of the rural farmlands to reach other towns, these roads would be the most easy to navigate but are also those that suffer the most from erosion over time. So lategame with all the erosion the towns would become kinda like islands, seperated from each other by jammed up highways and overgrown country dirt roads.

 

Worst of all would be Louisville, a dozen accidents throughout the city would gridlock many junctions and streets, making it nigh impossible to navigate by car and making large parts of it only accesible by foot, bike or horse.

 

 

TLDR: I want to turn the difficulty curve of cars upside down, making getting one easier but using them much harder by limiting their navigability around the map.

I know some people like the early game of finding a working car but personally I think the game is most fun once you have a car but then quickly becomes way to easy.

Thank you for reading my long drawn out post but I'll highlight the most important bits so you can skim through it.

[Jack Bower]

I want cars with full gas tanks to explode.

I would like it if they added a ramp I could drive them onto higher elevations.

Please allow stairs to be built facing any direction while you are adding in those ramps.

 

Finally. Please allow me to jump my full speed exploding gasoline car off said ramp. Directly into someones flying sky house John Mcclane style in the most glorified self-sacrifice ever.

[NachoNinjaGnome]

14 hours ago, Jack Bower said:

I want cars with full gas tanks to explode.

I would like it if they added a ramp I could drive them onto higher elevations.

Please allow stairs to be built facing any direction while you are adding in those ramps.

 

Finally. Please allow me to jump my full speed exploding gasoline car off said ramp. Directly into someones flying sky house John Mcclane style in the most glorified self-sacrifice ever.

You need very specific conditions for a car to explode, they don't come equipped with ballistic warheads.  Now, driving a flaming car off a ramp and into the middle of a horde might be something else entirely.  Though, an exploding gas tank isn't the most destructive, as far as explosions go.  While you may get a bit of shrapnel, the shockwave is fairly weak and the most you get is a nice fireball that would attract more zombies.  Though, a flaming car exploding and covering zombies in already burning gasoline while shooting a flaming mushroom cloud into the air isn't the worst idea, provided you aren't IN the car when it explodes.  Fill the car with some additional explosives and/or accelerants and you'd get some very nice fireworks that would prove significantly more effective than a flaming car on its own.

[BrotherCarlo]

I think the idea is good but having all these cars is gonna lag the game out big time. If they're stuck on the highway why not use wrecks, the wrecked cars mod even makes them look nice and have loot.

Other than that I like the way over time the map would become more difficult to travel, especially with NPC quests where you have to travel to other towns this would make for good stories.

[Ciber Ninja]

Just change the sandbox settings?

[Headshotkill]

6 hours ago, Ciber Ninja said:

Just change the sandbox settings?

I would do these changes myself and it is possible to change options so all vehicles spawn in good condition but I can't produce more car pile up and traffic jams, for that I'd have to edit the map which is really difficult and I haven't found any way to edit the vanilla map.

[Blake81]

I have to say, I agree with most of OP's post. But lemme go part by part.

 

On 3/21/2022 at 11:14 AM, Headshotkill said:

We all know one of the biggest leaps in improving your survival chances is having a working vehicle, it's the fastest, safest way to travel the map and you can store a lot of loot in them. But at first it is often a frustratingly difficult RNG to find one, sometimes you spawn right next to one, currently I haven't found one in over 4 days, most annoying are the ones that work, have a key but no gas, yet they are parked near a gas station without a gas can to be found in miles. First of all we should be able to push a vehicle closer to the pump so we can gas it up, this is pretty logical.

 

THIS!! I cannot overstate just how UTTERLY UNREALISTIC it feels to find a car in the middle of a road or in a store's parking lot WITH ITS TANK EMPTY. Now, cars found in Junkards, Auto Dealers, Mechanic Shops, lined up at Gas Stations, and to some extent, Driveways (had no fuel, so can't drive, or it's broken) or random faraway roads (like they ran out of fuel and had to ditch it), I am willing to accept that they ran out of fuel for story reasons. But a car found in a traffic jam or accident? This makes no sense.

 

And yes, I agree that some manual pushing should be added eventually. Also, the ability to manually move trailers (I mean, sometimes I just want it to point in the right direction, or drag it into a garage to unpack it). Lack of it feels very much unrealistic.

 

On 3/21/2022 at 11:14 AM, Headshotkill said:

That was a small grudge of mine but not the main thing I want to discuss, right now as mentioned above the difficulty curve is extremely abrupt, at first the game is too difficult to find a working car, after you've found one it's too easy to use them and they are pretty OP. IRL (don't take it too seriously I know zombies don't exist ... yet) finding a working car wouldn't be an issue at all, almost everyone has one, the real difficulty would be navigating the world, in disaster movies we see miles of traffic jams.

 

I imagine when the apocalypse hits a lot of people would zombify while driving so they would crash into houses, trees, other cars, highway barriers, etc. Some normal people would crash out of panic, most would end up on the highway stuck due to one of these accidents, this would create massive traffic jams, imagine the current car pile ups we have ingame and multiply them times 10. This is where most cars would be in perfect working condition, some with engines still running and eventually out of gas but most just abandoned. The reason this wouldn't be an easy OP stash of working cars are the following. Most would be stuck due to other cars infront/behind and highway barriers/trees on the side, these piles would be hotspots of zombie hordes, a lot of them wouldn't have keys inside them but instead on a zombie nearby or on the ground, a lot of them would have zombies stuck inside them.

The fewer remaining cars on driveways/parking lots should be in good condition with gas, keys nearby.

 

Once again, 100% agreement on this. Just look at State of Decay 1 and 2, and how they did this masterfully; by adding lots of important intersections and roads simply PACKED with wrecks and very much forced you to go the other way around. Did it make me stop using cars or made them useless? Not really. And since in PZ, we can take cars apart, it could even be an interesting goal to our survivors; "Dismantle the wrecks blocking the road to the Gigamart so I can loot the place on car, and use that metal to barricade my windows.". Otherwise, once you get a car, you might as well get the "Whole Map Unlocked" achievement in a corner.

 

Plus, it's not like we don't have them congestions already, the one in the south crossroads and the one in the Dixie intersection. However, these are piles of wrecks, not functional cars (some aren't burnt, but usually have pretty much all red stats, so they may as well be wrecks), and this makes no bloody sense; those cars were in use! Or else how they got there? They should have at least half a tank of gas, have the keys in (or in nearby corpses/zeds) and be in average working condition. They should, however, have dead or mostly dead batteries (due to leaving lights, radios and the like on), or, be on and working, and have a decent horde around them; these things, along with high zombie activity (coming because the noise), would make said places reasonably difficult to pick working cars from. And even if you find the perfect car in there, getting it out of the jam would be a challenge unto itself (again, the ability to push cars would prolly be needed here).

 

So "More Traffic Jams" plz devs. It's not like it'd be too hard to tweak the existing feature of the wreck jams to add them.

 

Also, while we're on that, can we have the cars from "Events" (camping sites, police blockades, tire changes) to NOT BE utter wrecks and/or have no keys nearby? It has never made any sense, and has always greatly annoyed me as it's one of the few ways to find a working Ranger. Accidents I take it, it's part of it, but cars on all other events should be in far better condition than the ones on accidents. I mean, these people kinda drove there in that thing before shit hit the fan. How come that car looks worse than the ones in the Junkyard? It makes no sense...

 

 

[Headshotkill]

@Blake81Thanks for the support, you hit on a couple other points that sometimes bugger me too, just little details that undermine the overal immersion of the game.

Also now you mentioned the ability of disassemble these wrecks to open up new routes is another lategame option I didn't consider.

Recently the devs mentioned their vision how lategame would be about small medieval tech settlements of survivors adapting to this post pandemic world, perhaps two settlements who want to establish a safe trading route would cooperate to open up a passage on one of the highways between their bases.

[Frosty83]

I think cars availability should generally depend on the number of days you start into the zombie outbreak. In the early days you'd expect many working cars with fuel, and you'd expect to find keys on nearby zombies or in nearby homes. But weeks into an outbreak you'd expect most gas to be used up, and many of the cars to be damaged and the keys lost.

 

The problem with the difficulty curve is that it seems to be intentional, PZ is one of those games where it starts hard and gets easier the more you improve your character, setting aside the water and power being free for the first few weeks. And the difficulty curve of vehicles seems to fit in with that same theme. Getting gas is generally not too hard if you have an interactive map and know where the gas stations are. The spawn locations all seem to have gas stations within a day running distance, enough to acquire fuel and haul it back to a car. I think hot wiring is either a bit too dependent on skills and either that should be lowered or better yet keys for cars should be way more common and placed in sensible places like on tables/counters in houses adjacent to where cars spawn.

 

But the RNG in general is quite brutal, the same problems exist for cars as with basically anything else, whether it be generators, gas cans, weapons, decent armour, etc. With a large player base regularly playing any game with RNG elements you're always going to have people who roll unimaginably bad RNG and unimaginably good RNG and the difference between those runs is going to be extreme. So far my main struggle with cars has always been the RNG element more so than the mechanics of the game and I can say the same for the other necessary components for survival.

[ZombieHunter]

On 3/21/2022 at 1:57 PM, Jack Bower said:

I want cars with full gas tanks to explode.

 

Explosions happen in movies - also it is near empty gas tanks which explode not full tanks.

 

If you shot a Fuel Drum Full of Fuel you would not have an explosion ( I know Michael Bay lied to you all this time ) 

If you have a Fuel Drum with 10% fuel and sitting outside for some time and shoot it - has a higher chance of explosion ( Crazy I know ) 

 

The reason is Fuel catches fire, but it is the Gas ( as in state of matter ) which is explosive.

 

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With that said people should be able to carry fuel in plastic bags.

 

 

https://quintanaroohoy.com/mexico/ahora-transportan-huachicol-hasta-en-bolsas-de-plastico-en-puebla/

[BrotherCarlo]

On 3/28/2022 at 3:48 AM, ZombieHunter said:

 

With that said people should be able to carry fuel in plastic bags.

 

I believe any  watertight container should be able to carry any kind of fluid, only difference should be wether the container is heat resistant for cooking over fire.

[BrotherCarlo]

Last dev diary mentioned NPCs getting stuck in traffic a couple times as their starting stories so perhaps they already made the pile ups bigger?

[Headshotkill]

27 minutes ago, BrotherCarlo said:

Last dev diary mentioned NPCs getting stuck in traffic a couple times as their starting stories so perhaps they already made the pile ups bigger?

Yeah I noticed and it would be weird if it was only that little jam at the crossroads and west point bridge so I guess they made it bigger, also nice to see people turning zombies in their cars. what I think most is what happens if they reach the hospital?