Bay 12 Games Forum

Bug: Crack Heads no longer have terrible Intelligence and Health, presumably since stats are now distributed after the creature's type is selected.

I don't care what key it is, just put it in the game already.

The damage done by the chain was probably some combination of a bad defense roll, good attack roll, and strength bonus. Chains do poor damage, otherwise.

I think there really is a problem with combat due to the recent changes to health and armor.

The root problem is that weapon damage was originally written on the assumption that without armor or high health, you'd usually take a strong enough hit to get incapacitated. Since 4/7 of the time you get hit in a limb, where you don't have useful armor, hardly anyone gets a non-incapacitating wound now; if you get shot in a limb or unprotected vital location, you almost always start bleeding out or just plain die. Even the piddly .22 revolver has a damage range with a midpoint at 75, and if a guy takes more than 49 damage he's mostly useless in combat.

Another thing to note is that armor is actually quite powerful (police vests will usually let 5 health liberals survive a three hit burst from an m16), but since most armor doesn't provide good coverage to your limbs you end up having to rely on the health mod, which usually won't do much.

The current system may be more realistic, but it's also not a lot of fun, as it makes getting into fights impractical except as hit-and-run affairs where you kill one or two conservatives near the entrance to a site before they can react and then run away. If you get into situations where the conservatives can get shots off at you, people will start getting incapacitated very quickly due to limb wounds even if they all have fifteen health and army body armor. If you don't have armor, the result is largely the same except people are going to die when they get shot in the chest rather than shrug it off. It also heavily devalues the health stat.

Though, now that I think about it. Tactics in this manner should be relative (a bit) to agility. What good is knowing where to move when you can't get there fast enough. Reflexive movements are usually a combination of intelligence (fast thinking) and agility (fast moving)

I wouldn't penalize people for having low agility; it's already important enough, seeing as how it's tied into all the weapon skills. I would just give a straight up bonus to everyone in the squad based on the highest tactics skill available.

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.

This breaks save compatibility. Damn, I was doing real well too.

Well, you probably can't win with the election bug in place, so you should upgrade.