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[ggamer]

what happens when you spawn a brute or a hulk? Can archers actually hurt hulks?

[forsaken1111]

what happens when you spawn a brute or a hulk? Can archers actually hurt hulks?

With decent skill and arrows, yes.

[Angle]

Also, don't build up a horde chasing you. Make sure to kill any you come across or retreat.

[forsaken1111]

With level 8-9 archery and metal arrows I was getting headshots of 150+ damage or more. Really there wasn't much that could stop me.

[MrWiggles]

I've manage to kill a brute with a broad sword, a window with 6 skill and 5 melee.

[ggamer]

I killed one with 5 +damage dragon style crits with no windows or bushes

[Darkmere]

I think the problem with skill levels being so good is... skill rust that everyone (including me) just turned off. Those high, highly effective levels are very difficult to maintain if you have skill rust on, but kinda game-winning if you have rust off. That wouldn't be so bad, but rust also affects nigh-impossible skills like first aid.

I'd do something drastic like turning rust off and drastically scaling up the XP required to get high-level skills (and also probably dropping the XP rate on crafting arrows by half or more) so that it takes a long time to hit high levels but once you do, they're worth the effort.

Related... zombies aren't supposed to be the end-game threat that character skill is judged by. Even jabberwocks can be seen from far off, so you can have your molotov prepared, or whatever you like. Right?

[Girlinhat]

Level 6 is 'highly skilled' you understand.  About skill level 4 should probably be considered 'professional pre-apocalypse' such as with tailoring, mechanics, and comparing to other skills like melee and shooting.  When you reach ~6 you're like, military level.

For comparison, skill rust caps at level 7.  At any level above 7, skill rust is the same rate as it would be at 7.  This means that it's VERY high skill level, as far as the game goes.

So yes, this is all working as intended.  Level 6 is very high because you no doubt have rust turned off.  With it on, it's increasingly difficult to get such high skill levels, and you're more likely to be running around with 4's and 5's.  This is partly because skill rust is brokenly powerful...

[Angle]

I think the problem with skill levels being so good is... skill rust that everyone (including me) just turned off. Those high, highly effective levels are very difficult to maintain if you have skill rust on, but kinda game-winning if you have rust off. That wouldn't be so bad, but rust also affects nigh-impossible skills like first aid.

I'd do something drastic like turning rust off and drastically scaling up the XP required to get high-level skills (and also probably dropping the XP rate on crafting arrows by half or more) so that it takes a long time to hit high levels but once you do, they're worth the effort.

Related... zombies aren't supposed to be the end-game threat that character skill is judged by. Even jabberwocks can be seen from far off, so you can have your molotov prepared, or whatever you like. Right?

Yes, exactly this! The xp gain is waaaaay to fast. Remove skill rust, or at least nerf it really hard, and instead have the XP cost per level go up exponentially, and increase it significantly even at lower levels. And yes, zombies are not supposed to be a late game threat.

[SalmonGod]

I put skill rust on the middle option.  The one that has rust but won't force you to drop levels.  It somewhat makes sense to me.  Like if you're learning to ride a bike and stop before you've got it, you'll be starting over from scratch next time you try.  But once you've got it down, you don't forget.  Turning skill rust off completely would feel like cheating for me. 

All this does is force me to do focused training on most skills in order to get above level 4 or so.  Which makes sense.  It takes concentrated effort to become an expert at anything in real-life, too.  But it does seem to happen too quickly.  The skill rust starts making training difficult around level 8 or 9, in my experience, because that's about the point where it takes more than one day to raise a skill and then you lose half of the xp you earned overnight. 

Before that, with archery for example, I can easily train up to level 6 in the first two days.  That's without even trying too hard.  It just happens incidentally as I work on making a decent store of arrows for starting out.

[werty892]

This

[Gamerlord]

What's with the latest build? I can't run it. It keeps giving an error message and then saying it's stopped working.

[azmodean]

The leading cause of game crashes on startup is save incompatabilities.  We're working toward making saves backwards and forward compatable, but it takes a long time to wrestle the infrastructure into the right place to make it work.

Re: skill progression.  I agree slowing down skill gain is going to be part of the solution, also there are probably some effects in particular that need to be nerfed, like headshotting (doesn't make sense at all for a jabberwock), fire effectiveness (I'm not talking about your molotov use, more of the "use a paper wrapper to stunlock a jabberwock" strategy), but perhaps jabberwocks should be somewhat fire resistant.

Digression: Personally I'm of the uber-realistic school, so if it were just up to me I'd base skill progression on the adage*, "mastering a skill takes 10,000 hours".  However, mastery by this definition is "world-class competitive", and the benefits would be extremely front-loaded.  This would probably require scaling up the max skill numbers massively to have appropriate resolution, and would completely replace skill rust.  Another outgrowth of this direction would be that typical level of skill for many things would definitely be non-zero, so e.g. driving, cooking, computer, first aid would generally never start at 0 outside of a specific negative trait.  I'm... not at all sure there'd be any support for this kind of thing though, so I'm really not pursuing it.

Sorry if this has been mentioned before, but I know it was a point of interest here.  You can now install headlights pointing in arbitrary directions.

*Did some reading, it's not just an adage, it's backed by research, interesting.

[Gamerlord]

It isn't save stuff, it happens when I finished making the character. This was the curses version, I tried the other one and I got to about midnight on the first day and then the game crashed.

[Sheb]

Skill rust should still be a thing though. One way to do it would be for the game to store the max skill level you attained, and give you a large learning bonus (~x5 seems about right) until you reach that point again.

It would make keeping a large library (so that you can refresh your knowledge before implanting a CBM) worthwhile too.