Bay 12 Games Forum
Other Projects => Curses => Topic started by: nenjin on May 04, 2011, 07:47:22 pm
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In the continuing effort to make recruiting less tedious to get closer to what you want....I propose tables no longer despawn after you visit them. They simply always have a higher chance of having people present, and of having more people present, every time you visit.
It makes sense to me since people come, people go, but the tables stay and get new occupants. Plus, not having to spend 20+ minutes at a time trying to recruit something other than hippies and dropouts, more reliably, would be a big help.
Further things you could do is reduce the chance people will occupy a table to 0% once a hostile action is taken at a site.
Also maybe add benches to parks to serve the same function, only they always spawn in the same places.
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Good idea!
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On a related note, tables (if present where combat occurs) should reduce to-hit for ranged weapons because they allow covering behind them. Not much, as the tables don't block bullets, just the line of sight.
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On a related note, tables (if present where combat occurs) should reduce to-hit for ranged weapons because they allow covering behind them. Not much, as the tables don't block bullets, just the line of sight.
This would have to be communicated to the player somehow.
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Some special message whenever the table "blocks" the attack?
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Some special message whenever the table "blocks" the attack?
Something like that would work. "Brunelli hits the table instead of the target."
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^ But then we'd hit the wall of realism - most handguns are powerful enough to shoot through standard tables!
Vonnegut hits the adamantium table instead of the target.
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I was trying to be clever by avoiding any claim that the table blocks the hit, just saying that you hit the table and not the target. Not clever enough, it seems. :)
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Or the table could absorb one attack and then despawn, leaving only the occupants. Like "Brunelli hits the table instead of his target. The table collapses/explodes/falls over!"
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make it clear that thay moved around, i.e."Brunelli dives under the table! X miss him!"
does any one think that have some items listed as cover and read out for dodges, so it feels more like every one is moveing a round in fights.
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The dodge skill really should have a more visible effect in combat, rather than feeding you generic miss effects. "Bob dives for cover!" "Susan dodges like Neo from The Matrix!" "Steve ducks at the last moment!"
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As a tiny Easter egg, extremely good martial arts could give a minuscule chance of...
Vonnegut catches the bullet in midair!
Or with swords...
Vonnegut slashes the offending projectile in half!
EDIT: Back to the point. Making tables not despawn is just a matter of commenting a few lines as far as I can see. Based on quick testing, it seems to work just fine;
* Tables will not despawn - they'll have people around them when it's safe and under them when there's an alarm
* Benches and computers won't despawn before alarm - after alarm they never have NPCs so I see no problem in making them despawn then.
MORE EDIT: Forgot to mention, because my sitemaps.txt won't load I can't be sure whether benches work.
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Can the game differentiate between what kind of NPC is under the table (in the closet, heh.) It would be odd to see like the Police Gang Squad all hiding under a park bench.
Other than that, awesome sauce. People hiding instead of straight evacuating is a nice touch.
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Vonnegut slashes the offending projectile in half!
Vonnegut is hit twice for double damage!
Lol, they did this on an episode of mythbusters... They proved that a samurai sword could and would chop a lead bullet in half (albeit it damages the sword too), but all that happens is that you get 2 holes in the target instead of 1...
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Can the game differentiate between what kind of NPC is under the table (in the closet, heh.) It would be odd to see like the Police Gang Squad all hiding under a park bench.
Other than that, awesome sauce. People hiding instead of straight evacuating is a nice touch.
I think it wouldn't be too hard to, for example, do the following;
If there's alarm and you run into a table, a random number god is consulted and there could be a 1/3 chance of the game generating a security/police force specific to the site "fortified" there, and 2/3 chance of being normal NPCs. When it's evac-mode tables could either be always empty, have a x% chance of being empty vs occupied, or always be occupied.
About hiding under the table, just in case someone thought otherwise; that already was there, I just made them not despawn. It is a nice touch though!
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I don't think it makes sense for a different group to be hiding under the table each time you visit; personally, I would favor despawning tables after the alarm too, unless the encounter system is upgraded to allow the original group to be stored and kept there.
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Won't be a problem to make them despawn after alarm. Yeah, it's a bit silly to have a new group under the table each time. Imagine people rushing under the table which is surrounded with bodies of other silly people.
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So this goes to something that's always bugged me about LCS.
And that's the encounter rate vs. what's going on. This is a meta issue I don't really expect resolution on, but....
Being able to track groups more effectively is what's always held back the mission simulation from being more interesting or being paced differently. When you're recruit shopping, you want tons and tons and tons of encounters, very quickly. When you're infiltrating, or have raised the alarm, you want less encounters but of a more dangerous variety. It seems like once the alarm goes up, all you see is conservatives for the most part, so its tweaking what happens at the site but only in so far as its allowed by an encounter generator.
If the game was actually playing with hard numbers of populations at a site you could do so many more interesting things with encounters. When you run into 3 sets of Police Gang Units now fleeing a site, you abstract that by thinking "Well it's just the same gang unit chasing me down" but you know that's not what's going on under the hood.
So things like, different groups of people showing up underneath tables really points to where the simulation starts to break down. If there were actual populations being generated and tracked each time you visited a site, you'd have a reason to leave a site when recruiting because you've basically tapped out the people that are there for that day and never found the ones you want. This population might be way larger than what you see in a single or multiple run of tables...but it's finite, and you'd eventually see them all and go "ok, time to go back to the apartment and come back to see who's here tomorrow."
And if you could play with the site population list during the mission (as opposed to generating it on visiting the site and that's it), it opens up a lot of possibilities for making the game world react in an even more believable way to player actions (or you could slowly add and subtract people to the encounter list turn by turn, to simulate people coming into a site, hanging out, then leaving. It's doing the same thing as we have now, but with a far higher degree of control.)
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I just posted in another thread about LCS combat system and how the raid system used by a Roguelikelike game Decker could suit LCS as well. It would take a lot of work, though. Perhaps improving the current, simplistic system would be better.
EDIT: So, back to the point again - shall I commit the no-despawn version? I will, as Jon suggested, make everything despawn after alarm but not before. Tables will still have one encounter after alarm (hiding under the table).
MORE: Yes, tables definitely should despawn during site raid alarms. I feel like a [pillaging] hun after slaughtering several tablefuls of people...
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The dodge skill really should have a more visible effect in combat, rather than feeding you generic miss effects. "Bob dives for cover!" "Susan dodges like Neo from The Matrix!" "Steve ducks at the last moment!"
I added a rudimentary special dodge message system to the trunk. It's based on a skill roll, not on whether the attack would've hit without dodge skill. Still, it gives the player feedback; dodge helps.
To expand the system, more messages should be added, and there should be separate messages for different attack types.