General Combat Suggestions

[PoshRocketeer]

Condensing a few old posts and some new ideas into something more readable at a glance.

 

Saw the devs saying they wanted zomboid combat to be more difficult and more interesting, and I agree, right now it's trivial to just backpedal to victory. They mentioned the possibility of having random tripping while backpedaling and while I think it may have been a joke, I would still like to go on record that I am not a fan of the idea of your character randomly tripping and getting mauled on a dice roll as punishment for even attempting to engage with the 'fun' part of the game. 

 

When I say "should", I'm not saying that I think this needs to be in the game or that I know better than anyone, it's just a way to denote that it's not currently like that now.

 

 

1.  Zomboids should cause a little stumble animation for the player if they fail to grab on but still manage to get halfway through the animation before the player escapes. This would be most punishing to players carrying large loads, injured players, or exhausted players who are just barely outwalking the zombies due to their moodles. Not to say you shouldn't be able to outwalk them for a long period of time, but if it's obvious that you should be getting grabbed, zombies giving little love bumps to trip you up seems reasonable to me, not making the situation impossible, but forcing you to find a solution quickly as you can only shrug off so many pushes. It would also be punishing to players who don't know when to "cut and run" during backpedal fights, making it much harder to push zombies on top of you away before they grab you, forcing you to really think about your timing and the spacing of the infected. Nimble and lightfoot determine resistance and recovery, naturally.
2. Conversely, when shoving zombies in hedges, they should be more likely to get tangled up and fall over. Also, zombies should have a chance to stumble or even take other zombies down with them, depending on the strength of the pusher, especially on inclines.
3. Additionally, pushing zombie's heads and upper torsos onto table tiles, curb tiles, stair tiles, etc should deal a little damage and have a higher chance to make a crawler. Zombies should also be able to slide down stairs, taking damage on the way (posted about this previously). Also pushing them out of windows and over fences would be neat, especially if it did damage/made crawlers more often as well.
4. Backpedaling over corpses should cause problems for characters with less than 5 points in nimble. This would take the 'random' element out of the idea to randomly trip the player and give it a set trigger that THEN rolls the dice once you've already failed to account for environmental factors. It's semi-realistic, but in a way that adds to the gameplay by making you consider your surroundings rather than (in my opinion) taking away from the gameplay by randomly messing with you just for the sake of it.
5. Zombies, when knocked back, should stumble in a direction correlating directly to the swing's direction, including a little chance to make nearby zombies stumble. 
6.  Weapons should have distinct stats, even if it's a small tradeoff like the wrench has better durability, but the nightstick can knock zombies around with lower strngth, but  the hammer has more damage and can be repaired without skill in Metalworking (and the relevant tools), despite being a little heavier and therefore costing more stamina. This would make for some interesting choices between weapons, even the "meta" weapons. Right now weapons feel practically the same for all purposes and it sucks a lot of the meaning out of picking a weapon. If I've got a supply of nightsticks, why would I bother using hammers? Some weapons should defintely be the 'coveted' of a category, but some more variance in the stats to make a wider variety of options worth picking would be nice. Weapons knocking zombies around in directions related to the swings would also give some of the weapons a different 'feel' to use, as the animation now directly correlates to how zombies react to your hits.
7. Killing zombies, being surrounded by zombies, nearly being grabbed by zombies, actually being grabbed by zombies but escaping, or being injured in any form should give a sadness/stress penalty, which similarly to panic, you gain a resistance to as time goes on and you kill more zombies. This would make it not impossible, but way less enticing to just go on a 100+ zombie killing spree on day 1 in order to clear the area. If you are constantly in danger and nearly dying or getting overwhelmed constantly while killing hundreds of the undead, your character should be a depressed, nervous wreck who's paranoid that something is going to jump out and get him at any moment.
8. (Addendum)  Lower strength characters should have to put much more time and effort into shoving a zombie, resulting in somewhat of an animation lock similar to fighting off a grab attempt at low strength. Perhaps with some nimble and 3-5 strenght you can shuffle around a bit while in the animation to try and avoid other grabbers, and progressively get to shoving everything as it is in game between say, 6-10 where it's an instant push with its intensity dictated by strength. It'd make picking low strength a much more serious debuff that's much harder to offset with weapon skills and cars than what we have presently.

In short: Zombies should require better timing and situational awareness to deal with, right now they're incredibly generous once you learn how to kite them, and the player should be rewarded for using their environment to offset the more difficult threat. Weapons should have more variety in their function amongst categories, and killing zombies should take a toll on your character's mental health. (in my opinion)

There is definitely more that can be done to make them a bigger deal, and I'll be periodically coming back to this as a "master list" for combat related suggestions when I think something up.

 

If anyone's got some suggestions that don't involve things like random critical misses or random chance to get the varus I would quite like to hear from you

 

Edited November 20, 2023 by PoshRocketeer
Added something

[Badgzerz]

1. Sure. 

2. I'd be more afraid of the zombie rebounding out of the hedge or not stumbling back far enough to fall to begin with. Id like to see a shoving/parrying combat skill that represents my character's understanding of physics when repelling grabs or shoving zombies over, with incorporated weapon specific shove attacks. 

3. Sure.

4. I c my idea has caught on. 

5. Yeah, directional stumbles would be cool. Maybe even a cursor based swing where I can swipe my mouse when swinging to select an attack to compound a stumble or go for an overhead smash. 

6. Meh, some weapon choices ought to always remain bad. I would rather see a different weapon class system and more meta weapons. Nothing would or should rival a 24" axe, boar spear, scimitar, entrenching shovel (axe shovel military combo) or pickaxe. A combination wrench, pipe/bar, crowbar, or pipe wrench would never be good striking weapons compared to these. I've tried to use a 36" pipe wrench as a hammer and I will never do that again. The vibration that went through the handle into my hands gave me temporary arthritis. 

7. Sure. Those zombies got a human context to em, it would take a lot out of anyone to get used to bludgeoning them initially. 

 

[PoshRocketeer]

49 minutes ago, Badgzerz said:

1. Sure. 

2. I'd be more afraid of the zombie rebounding out of the hedge or not stumbling back far enough to fall to begin with. Id like to see a shoving/parrying combat skill that represents my character's understanding of physics when repelling grabs or shoving zombies over, with incorporated weapon specific shove attacks. 

3. Sure.

4. I c my idea has caught on. 

5. Yeah, directional stumbles would be cool. Maybe even a cursor based swing where I can swipe my mouse when swinging to select an attack to compound a stumble or go for an overhead smash. 

6. Meh, some weapon choices ought to always remain bad. I would rather see a different weapon class system and more meta weapons. Nothing would or should rival a 24" axe, boar spear, scimitar, entrenching shovel (axe shovel military combo) or pickaxe. A combination wrench, pipe/bar, crowbar, or pipe wrench would never be good striking weapons compared to these. I've tried to use a 36" pipe wrench as a hammer and I will never do that again. The vibration that went through the handle into my hands gave me temporary arthritis. 

7. Sure. Those zombies got a human context to em, it would take a lot out of anyone to get used to bludgeoning them initially. 

 

4 was not your idea, it's just a retrofit of something the devs half-jokingly mentioned once.

Edited November 18, 2023 by PoshRocketeer

[Unamelable]

To be honest

I agree with all suggestions here

[PoshRocketeer]

On 11/18/2023 at 12:14 AM, Badgzerz said:

 

5. Yeah, directional stumbles would be cool. Maybe even a cursor based swing where I can swipe my mouse when swinging to select an attack to compound a stumble or go for an overhead smash. 

6. Meh, some weapon choices ought to always remain bad. I would rather see a different weapon class system and more meta weapons. Nothing would or should rival a 24" axe, boar spear, scimitar, entrenching shovel (axe shovel military combo) or pickaxe. A combination wrench, pipe/bar, crowbar, or pipe wrench would never be good striking weapons compared to these. I've tried to use a 36" pipe wrench as a hammer and I will never do that again. The vibration that went through the handle into my hands gave me temporary

 

I honestly think these two ideas are inherently linked more than I had initially thought. A lot of the weapons have very particular 'quirks' in their animations. Hammers for example give a bit of a jab forward so that you hit with the head, and to see that represented in gameplay as a side-and-back swing as oppoosed to something like a night stick which has a wider arc that would be knock things to the sides with very little backward momentum would be an interesting choice to make on its own.

 

I do agree that not all weapons should be 10/10, I just want to see more of a "podium" style to picking your weapons rather than a "pedastal", that is to say multiple viable options sharing within the top slots, with one or two that edge out the rest, or have limited use but are great weapons, like machetes and katanas as an example, rather than a single option that is objectively better than everything else.

Edited November 20, 2023 by PoshRocketeer

[EnigmaGrey]

Tbf, a decent amount of this has come in private conversation, but we're up against the limits to the engine on a lot of it. This'll probably change as new devs get up to speed and can expand the rendering and physics components of the game.
 

I feel like we're already at number 6, though? Take the constant memeing about Crowbar vs. Axe on the Reddit, for example. Everyone should know the Bat is superior, but they just want to be wrong. /s Golf clubs and pool cues, on the other hand, are never going to have any real use beyond a "oh shit, they're coming, grab whatever" or as a newbie trap. But, I guess it really depends on the weapons you had in mind in the comparison - there's always things to improve and balance or revisit.

[PoshRocketeer]

On 11/20/2023 at 6:34 AM, EnigmaGrey said:

Tbf, a decent amount of this has come in private conversation, but we're up against the limits to the engine on a lot of it. This'll probably change as new devs get up to speed and can expand the rendering and physics components of the game.
 

I feel like we're already at number 6, though? Take the constant memeing about Crowbar vs. Axe on the Reddit, for example. Everyone should know the Bat is superior, but they just want to be wrong. /s Golf clubs and pool cues, on the other hand, are never going to have any real use beyond a "oh shit, they're coming, grab whatever" or as a newbie trap. But, I guess it really depends on the weapons you had in mind in the comparison - there's always things to improve and balance or revisit.

With #6 I mean that some of the high tier options should have different strengths and weaknesses relative to each other, the example I gave is that hammers do more damage than a nightstick, but aren't as durable and are a little heavier, while the nightstick knocks zombies around with lower strength  with better knockdown potential, or that the wrench is a worse weapon than both but is significantly more durable.

 

There are options between dfferent categories that are viable, and the crowbar/vs baseball bat is a great example, but in most categories there is one option that is just the best and nothing else matters. For short blunt that's the Nightstick, there are no downsides, only upsides, except that it can't be repaired, but they're dime-a-dozen, so onc eyou find one there's a good chance you'll never need to go back to hammers. 

 

For axes, the fire axe is the best, no contest. Carpenter axe is way too slow and heavy, hand axe is only good to run with long guns. There's not many axe types, though.

 

Long blunt is alright, it has a couple of good options, though it could use some variety in general.

 

Also if you've never swung a golf club, a golf club would be genuinely effective, but it would break quickly. Murder scenes with gold clubs are genuinely pretty horrific because it's a small, heavy point on a long shaft.

 

Long blade kinda doesn't count because it's only 2 weapons and they both 1-2 shot most everything,. Same for spears.

 

For short blade there's the hunting knife and... that's it. 

 

In general, more variation in weapon stats in general would  be nice, they all just kinda function identically and do pretty much the same damage. 

 

 

Edited December 6, 2023 by PoshRocketeer