Bay 12 Games Forum
Other Projects => Curses => Topic started by: Jetman123 on November 20, 2008, 06:26:30 pm
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The standard knife gotten from the Oubliette is pathetic. We need combat knives! Stilletos! Pocket knives! Each of them would be for a different use.
Pocket knife = Equivalent to the knife we have now. Not very effective but cheap.
Combat knife = Costs 80-100$. More powerful than the knife.
Stilleto = A knife that's used for stabbing only. Gives a bonus when attacking in concert with the Stealth or Disguise skill, or if the Conservative isn't alarmed.
Which brings me to another concern - we need a new combat system, because spending an entire turn to stow your rifle/shotgun/pistol and pull out a knife when it runs dry is just flat-out ridicoulous. It should be possible to designate an alternate weapon, and have each individual Liberal switch between them at will. This raises some problems - it wouldn't fit with the current combat systems. Liberals would need to act individually.
As an extention on this (though not for it alone) I would suggest having each liberal able to perform an action individually in one turn if you would so like instead of everyone doing the same thing. As an alternative for this, make switching one liberal's main/primary weapon not end the turn.
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Why keep a knife as a backup weapon. A loaded shotgun is just as easily hidden in the extra dimensional storage space as a knife. Just pull a Neo and keep pulling out guns until the guards drop.
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Such features would have to be added with the added security that's planned for the future. Xray machines, metal detectors, and pat down searchers at the door could all be added.
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This is likely some time off, but this is the way I currently imagine The Future of Liberal Combat might be:
- There are two weapon slots, one for the weapon carried openly, one for a secondary concealed weapon
- Weapons in the primary slot are seen by enemies. Weapons in the secondary slot are not.
- Large weapons, such as assault rifles, may be equipped in the primary slot, but not in the secondary slot.
- Small weapons, such as pistols and knives, may be equipped in either slot, as long as some form of clothing is equipped. The secondary weapon slot basically doesn't exist if you are naked.
- Medium weapons, such as submachine guns, may be equipped in the secondary slot only if the clothing equipped provides adequate concealment, such as a trenchcoat. Medium weapons may not be equipped in the secondary slot if a weapon is equipped in the primary slot.
- Weapons may be fired or used from the secondary slot while another weapon is equipped in the primary slot at a 1-hand penalty. In practice, this means you get to select which slot you want to use for attacks, but there is a penalty to use the concealed one.
- Weapons may be transferred from the secondary slot to the primary and back again at no cost, so long as either no weapon was equipped in the primary slot, or the weapon in the primary slot is sufficiently small to be swapped into secondary storage. In practice, this means: a) If no weapon is equipped as a primary, selecting to use the secondary weapon for the character's attacks will leave the weapon in secondary but not incur an attack penalty and will not expose the weapon. b) If a small weapon is equipped as a primary, selecting to use the secondary weapon for the character's attacks will automatically swap the two weapons and use the secondary weapon as a primary.
- Weapons in the primary slot may be discarded (thrown to the ground) at no cost.
- Weapons may not be kept in hammerspace. They will be left behind if not equipped when departing for a site action. If nobody can hold a weapon, it cannot be picked up.
- Small items stolen will be stashed in hammerspace as normal.
- Large items, such as television sets, must use the primary weapon slot.
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May I request that before you overhaul the entire system, you add the ability to reload a gun before it runs dry? I've never run out of ammo or even desired to swap guns unless I've picked up a better one. But my liberals get shot at all the time because they were too busy reloading.
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Perhaps one kind of object could a bag or backpack of some sort that lets you store multiple objects or something.
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Or a cart which would be suspicious but which you could get away with if you were a good enough disguise. Or add the ability to take loot back to your car and come back for more...
A guy once walked into my school, took a television from a classroom and walked off with it. Tons of people saw him, but everyone assumed he was supposed to be walking around with a TV. He returned nine times before calling it a day.
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The ability to have wasteful reloads is already in the code, it's just disabled. I'll have the manual reload button enabled to do so for next release.
I had also thought about having a duffel or something you could use to conceal objects in, but wasn't clear on how it would work. Having a car trunk you can access outside the building (where large items can be stashed in squad inventory) is a good idea.
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Kinda makes me wonder what the equivalent of the car trunk would be for the unmobilized squad.
Here's one thought!
When you arrive at the evil Conservative site without a car, it's essential to bring a shopping cart and a blanket. While the team is retrieving undeserved objects of greed from the Conservatives, they can store the items under the blanket in the shopping cart outside. This of course works best if you recruit the aid of the illustrious Transient class.
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Like assaigning a driver, except someone to 'Guard Cart' or 'Stay in Car'?
Stay in Car preferably your driver.
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Yeah, I would totally assign the transients to guard the cart. Or maybe the crack heads for a change of pace.
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Well, an interesting thing here would be that you don't HAVE to run out of ammo to go to the secondary weapon. You might be blasting away with a pistol at some conservatives, then surprise them, catching them totally off guard by whipping out a knife and stabbing one of them in the throat with it. You'd get a bonus to stuff like that.
I really would like more knives and better knife damage, though. If nothing more so that I could have my sneaky infiltrator use nothing but knives.
Oh! And this ties into something else! Conservative alarm shouldn't be generated if you surprise-attack someone with a "quiet" weapon, like a club or a knife, and take them down on the first blow. To enable this, you should get a large bonus for backstabbing someone. If your Stealth or Disguise skill is high enough, you might even be able to pull this off without other Conservatives in the same tile noticing! It would give us some reason to use subtle stuff, like silenced weapons or knives. ^_^
A final implementation of this would be for cops to use guns when neccessary and nightsticks when not - the gun would be their primary and the nightstick their secondary.
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The way the game is currently set up, you don't gain very much from killing people when there isn't alarm. If I'm sneaky enough to avoid alarm, I don't kill people.
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Yeah, I would totally assign the transients to guard the cart. Or maybe the crack heads for a change of pace.
Obligatory TF2 quote:
WE MUST STOP LITTLE CART!
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- Weapons may not be kept in hammerspace. They will be left behind if not equipped when departing for a site action. If nobody can hold a weapon, it cannot be picked up.
I'm sure your reason for this is to prevent lone Liberals from carrying a mobile armory. However, there are two problems. First, it's inconsistent with your "small loot goes in hammerspace" rule (admittedly not a huge problem). Second, it severely hampers the player's ability to bring looted weapons back to base to arm other Liberals. If your method of arming your goons is looting fallen Conservatives, a two slot system greatly increases tedium.
If you absolutely must restrict the number of weapons a Liberal can wield, I recommend you allow weapons to fit in hammerspace provided they cannot be equipped until you return to base. Also let the player stow equipped gear in hammerspace, as well as equip items off the ground (assuming player-dropped items still vanish without a trace and cannot be picked back up). It's still an arbitrary restriction, but it prevents both weapon-gathering tedium and the mobile armory "issue" (personally, I don't see it as a problem).
I suppose another problem with hammerspace weapons is they can be sold for (potentially) a bloody fortune. Reducing the resale price and preventing the sale of looted weapons (doesn't make much sense) are possible solutions. I dislike the latter, since I figure if you're a bad enough dude to waste 300 soldiers in one go you damn well earned those weapons (with the possible exception of kills during a siege, since you might have over 9000 Liberals providing cover fire).
- Large items, such as television sets, must use the primary weapon slot.
Individual loot items are not worth the sacrifice of a sidearm (esp. if you go the firearm + melee backup route). Money is too easy to obtain elsewhere to make the theft of at most 6 large items per squad (seriously, they aren't worth that much money anyway). Besides, a loot bag of holding seems within the fairly ridiculous spirit of the game.
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the mobile armory "issue" (personally, I don't see it as a problem).
It is a problem though. You can put on security uniforms with sidearms equipped, walk all the way to the back of a CEO mansion, cause an alarm, then suddenly pull assault rifles and heavy body armor out of thin air to shoot your way out. Even worse, under the current system you can do this in a sweatshop when starkers.
At the absolute very least, each item stored in hammerspace should impose a location-dependent (possibly also outfit-dependent) stealth/disguise penalty; eyebrows would be raised higher at a group of guards carrying three large duffel bags in a mansion than in a factory, to say nothing of how high they'd be raised at a group of naked "garment workers" doing so in a sweatshop.
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Alright, heres how you can fix that without losing hammerspace. You can wear 2 layers of clothing at a slight disguise penalty depending on whats worn. For instance, you can wear a security uniform over body armor since IIRC body armor is just a vest without a penalty. However trying to wear heavy body armor under the security uniform would cause a slight penalty because such excessive protection is a bit excessive even for security. Some outfits would be outerwear like trenchcoats and bunker gear, which couldn't be worn under clothes but concealed anything under them. Others like bondage gear and heavy body armor would be formfitting and would go under any non formfitting armor. So maybe three layers, outerwear, clothing, formfitting.
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To be honest, I don't much like my idea, so I'm perfectly open to alternatives.
Another thought, modifying E. Albright's suggestion about location-dependent penalties for items in hammerspace. Suppose that each item has a bulk value (0 for things like money and documents, 1 or more for things like guns and stolen equipment), and depending on the total bulk the squad is hauling around, you get a suspicion penalty. This could be communicated to the player through emotes about the squad carrying duffel bags as it moves from tile to tile through the level. When picking things up, you'd get messages about shoving them into your duffel bags. You could add an extra tier where the squad starts moving piles of stuff around in a push cart, with an associated increase in the detection penalty. Thus, we remove the hammerspace believability and realism issue by removing hammerspace entirely, replacing it with mention of physical storage objects the squad is towing around, tied to a detection penalty (no combat penalties or anything, just can't sneak around). For some locations, such as prisons, bags would have to be searched to be allowed in peacefully.
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Aye, I meant to bring up bulk in my above suggestion. D'oh! I'd largely agree with what you outline. In a perfect world I'd still prefer to see some notion that some outfits are more or less conspicuous with bulky junk; people with dollies in work clothes in an apartment building aren't going to be as conspicuous as people in expensive dresses with dollies in... well... pretty much anywhere. Also, location should matter; a hand truck is going to stand out in a gentleman's club regardless of what's on it, while in a factory I'd expect its conspicuousness to be more tied to its (presumably concealed) contents.
But that's in a perfect world. I'd be quite pleased to just see a bulk penalty added (which presumably would also affect how hard it is to get something out; if you're resorting to carts and bags, you're not going to be able to instantly get out that AK 47, but you should have no problem whipping out the knife you tucked into your boot).
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If you were to implement dufflebags and so forth, would it not be prudent to introduce or combine a concealment skill into one of the previously existing skills? Perhaps disguise and stealth could, together, decide how suspicious something is, and whether it is detected during a search (obviously very high levels of the two would be necessary for this, but still, I'd like the opportunity to smuggle things through "checkpoints")?
I very much like the thought of a sidearm, and it seems only logical that most weapons, when held, cause suspicion (though, a person wearing a suitable uniform during the suitable times {meaning conservative times where walking around with a gun is reasonably common} would be able to carry openly). Perhaps if you have nothing in your primary, you automatically switch your secondary to your primary when attacked?
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To be honest, I don't much like my idea, so I'm perfectly open to alternatives.
Another thought, modifying E. Albright's suggestion about location-dependent penalties for items in hammerspace. Suppose that each item has a bulk value (0 for things like money and documents, 1 or more for things like guns and stolen equipment), and depending on the total bulk the squad is hauling around, you get a suspicion penalty. This could be communicated to the player through emotes about the squad carrying duffel bags as it moves from tile to tile through the level. When picking things up, you'd get messages about shoving them into your duffel bags. You could add an extra tier where the squad starts moving piles of stuff around in a push cart, with an associated increase in the detection penalty. Thus, we remove the hammerspace believability and realism issue by removing hammerspace entirely, replacing it with mention of physical storage objects the squad is towing around, tied to a detection penalty (no combat penalties or anything, just can't sneak around). For some locations, such as prisons, bags would have to be searched to be allowed in peacefully.
I like this but I think it requires the ability to drop items.
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To circumvent the "Don't want mobile armory" issue, and the "really need to loot guns off dead Conservative Swine" issues, just disallow hammerspace when a squad is going to a site, then allow it again. It's the most simple method. You can also limit hammerspace as "unretrievable on site", so those 20 SMGs you picked off the cops can be collected but not used.
I'm not really for the reduction of price for firearms. Course, in a Arch-Conservative society, you probably get a free AK-47 when you open a bank account, and a free Anti-Tank Missile system when you buy a car. So we can all sleep easier.
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If you get rid of hammerspace, make it toggleable. I love hammerspace, my entire liberal agenda would fall apart without it.
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I like what John proposed. That would work best. But there needs to be a penalty for carrying those in the way that they could fall out. If they fall out, you could pull a fast one and try and grab it without anyone noticing but the chances for that are ULTRA slim. Unless you have a high stealth skill and agility stat.
And only if nobody is in your current square you could actually pull this off.
Depending on what falls out, the situation will adjust.
But first and formost we gotta get rid of hammerspace. I'm sick of pulling out hammers out of it.
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I like the duffel bags/dollies idea. You can stick stuff in hammerspace, but it gives you suspicion penalties.
And I like Yanlin's "stuff falling out" suggestion, so stealthy and fast liberals can stop people from noticing that your duffel bags are full to bursting with AK47s.
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Also you could just remove hammerspace and give armor pockets. Trenchcoats would have the most, storing maybe up to 10 items, while things like Body Armor would have 2 and Tactical SWAT Armor have 3, etc.
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To be honest, I don't much like my idea, so I'm perfectly open to alternatives.
Another thought, modifying E. Albright's suggestion about location-dependent penalties for items in hammerspace. Suppose that each item has a bulk value (0 for things like money and documents, 1 or more for things like guns and stolen equipment), and depending on the total bulk the squad is hauling around, you get a suspicion penalty. This could be communicated to the player through emotes about the squad carrying duffel bags as it moves from tile to tile through the level. When picking things up, you'd get messages about shoving them into your duffel bags. You could add an extra tier where the squad starts moving piles of stuff around in a push cart, with an associated increase in the detection penalty. Thus, we remove the hammerspace believability and realism issue by removing hammerspace entirely, replacing it with mention of physical storage objects the squad is towing around, tied to a detection penalty (no combat penalties or anything, just can't sneak around). For some locations, such as prisons, bags would have to be searched to be allowed in peacefully.
I don't like this idea much, because I don't think it should be possible to sneak around while carrying lots of weapons or stolen goods no matter how stealthy you are. Doing this makes the weaker-but-stealthy weapons (like pistols) a lot more valuable.
As far as weapon slots go, I think everyone should have a secondary weapon slot that they can switch to freely, can contain any weapon, and that each weapon is hidden if currently possible or visible if not. Having a bunch of special rules regarding weapon slots and concealment is unnecessarily confusing. There could be a one-turn delay for switching weapons if micromanaging the system to bypass reloading is distasteful.
I'd like the removal of squad inventories except for a temporary, limited hammerspace available during site missions. The on-site inventory could contain up to 1*number of liberals on site large items, and an infinite number of smaller items (possibly with a few bonus slots for things like trenchcoats). The only other use of squad inventories I can recall offhand is moving items between safehouses and the pawn shop, which could be replaced by creating a "transfer items" activity and allowing the player to sell anything in the safehouse at the pawn shop. Items bought from stores/the pawn shop would appear back at the safehouse if the liberal making the purchases doesn't take the item.