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[Sean Mirrsen]

   And even if the backpack is empty it still isn't home free for you. I would almost say an empty one is harder to fight in because at least when it has stuff in it the thing doesn't swing around too much. Empty and it would be constantly getting in your way.

It's harder to swing, but it shouldn't be that much harder to hit. There is already the attack action point increase.

Also, I understand that these are not "shambler" zombies - most of them. But when an "adult" zombie is less dangerous than a "child" zombie, something is not right. A child is not that much harder to hit, especially if it's mindless and is just running to grab at you. It's faster, but it's not dodging or backflipping at you - it should be harder to hit at range, and it's still a harder target in melee, but not to the extent where the same person who can reliably hit an adult misses two out of three times against a child. One miss out of three, maybe. I know that I can reliably hit a large dog-sized target in front of me with a wielded object, regardless of what I have on me, and I have no "training" in melee whatsoever, in addition to being half-walrus mass-wise.

I think the problem here is manyfold, and it'll take a complex approach to rebalance it even if the underlying mechanics are not drastically changed.

[BigD145]

The world got itself in trouble because of portals and you want to make more?!

[Robsoie]

My 2nd character in the current version, that spawned in the same shelter as my first got the benefit of all the 1st guy work, a base with most items already in, i only had to transfer what was left of my shelter stockpiles into it, then manufacture a makeshift bed and build a boarded window on the only one not yet done.

And from there, sitting an reading the books i had accumulated, "dehydrate" and "very hungry" myself while doing so ( i thought not doing anything and only reading would allow to slow down that process ? ) and then going out to fill more of my water jug / make clean water with my empty bottles at a fire ( are those very mini-bottles i need to drink a lot of them to get slaked ? )  and butcher dead animals around (wonder how they died, as some of them weren't even there the day before) to get food and drink to escape the reading hunger/dehydratation.

So far it was a bit boring as i needed to prepare my character skill with the books, but now that i'm done at reaching again day 5 , time is coming to go clear more streets and buildings, already managed to kill a zombear through a window fight, the beast was a lot more resistant than i thought, i was lucky to get only my shirt teared apart.

There's a gun store nearby, but as my knife with broken windows/burning bushes have worked so nicely i wonder if i should get a rifle and then risk to attract more unwanted attention with the noise, tough maybe if i see more spitters and shockers it would be good to be able to get them from long range instead of risking melee.

[Werdna]

Really don't get all these comments about encumberance. Personally, I think it's a great system. If people want to be able to lug 100+ volume points of stuff around, yes, there are going to be tradeoffs.

Look, we're not asking them to ditch the encumbrance penalty.  Of course there should be a trade-off, and personally I kind of like the fact that it tries to penalize gaming the system with too many layers (love the fractional encumbrance idea to improve it though - that sounds perfect).  We're suggesting the "encumbered" melee penalty should be more of a slope, not a sheer cliff.  Personally I think it ought to penalize damage more, and penalize to hit a little less.

As for torso encumbrance, put on a shirt and a big heavy coat and a backpack loaded with fifty pounds of gear then try and swing something. Your balance is off and its very tiring.

Agreed: but I'm dead certain I could hit a dog attacking me, more often than not.  Not as hard and not as often as I could if unencumbered, but it shouldn't be like trying to hit Spiderman.

I also don't get why folks barely blink an eye at the massive accuracy possible for a throwing knife or bow at point blank range; but if its melee, suddenly all that crap you're carrying really, really matters!

[scrdest]

@Robsoie, Plastic Bottles are 500 ml. If you are dehydrated, it's going to take some water to bring you back up to normal.

@Encumberance: I think it should be made very clear that it's not just a threshold. I thought you only get to-hit penalties if you go over the limit, so if I hadn't read the thread I wouldn't have known it had any impact whatsoever.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Firing a bow or throwing should be an interruptable action. I.e. you expend action points to draw and fire a bow, and to wind up your hand to toss something anyway - make it so that if you're hit during that time between action start and finish, you run a high-ish chance, determined by skill and dexterity, to fumble and do nothing, with a smaller chance to fumble hard and drop the item you were trying to throw/fire. Firing a firearm should be similar, but failing the skill/dexterity check will still cause you to fire, at a significant penalty, with a smaller chance to not fire at all, preserving ammo.

[Lightningfalcon]

The world got itself in trouble because of portals and you want to make more?!

...yes?
Mainly because if you at that high a level more enemies are a good thing

[WhitiusOpus]

I believe making the storage bit like DF is a great idea. Having to actually place your items in the container, and decide which ones should be more accessible, would add more in-depth gameplay, at least in my opinion. Having a "Magical Carrying place of the Gods", where you increase it by putting on more clothing with Storage space, is waaay off as opposed to actually having put items in their containers. In my opinion, at least. I'd like to be able to drop the bag with the gear (ala Duffel Bag filled with stuff, like a Go Bag) than have to micromanage.

[n9103]

The only real take-away I'm hearing about the encumbrance vs melee debate, is that skill 0 melee should be even worse.
Those claiming they had no idea how encumbrance affected the game are only admitting that they didn't really look through the character screen. This is a roguelike, and that is a cardinal sin in roguelikes.
As someone who's worn a lot of different backpacks, and layers, and equipment, and etc., and done some actual combat, I can tell you that Everything is harder with more than one layer over skintight ones (and only two of those max), as the clothing binds against itself, causing restriction to movement. Any restriction will not only slow your action, they throw off your coordination. The same holds for just about any other piece of gear.
Anyone that thinks you should be an effective fighter with a pack of any kind, has never actually fought with a pack of any kind. It's not impossible, but you put yourself at a significant disadvantage straight off the bat.
Add to that the expectation people have that a 0 skill character will actually hit often with most any melee weapon, and do enough damage to matter to a zombie is somewhat astounding to me.

Other than making 0 skill even worse in combat, the only idea I have is turning 1/2 or more of the misses into ineffective/glancing/bouncing hits.

I personally think that a lot of the encumbrance numbers are low.
Also, anything in the game called  a "backpack" is a bookbag. The other packs IRL have different names in-game, or don't exist.

[/soapbox]

[Knight of Fools]

The only problems are that you can't "forget" the map, you can't regenerate terrain from the map screen, you're stuck with whatever character the creator gives you, and it would take forever to make something interesting.

Look in the save folder, all the files with "seen" in the name record what parts of the map you've explored, delete them and it resets to nothing.
I don't understand, "regenerate terrain from the map screen", do you mean "turn this square into (for example) a house, that will be generated when the pc gets in range"?

Yeah, basically that's what I mean. Right now if you want to regenerate a tile you have to actually be in the area, select the tile you want to regenerate, and then change it. This makes something such as, say, creating an entire town a little more difficult and tedious. Being able to regenerate entire swathes of land, like turning an entire town into a forest, would be nifty too.

And for deleting the map tiles, wouldn't that have the side effect of erasing any changes you've thrown into that area? Speaking mainly from the perspective of custom scenarios, if I wanted to make a custom building that the player could discover in the course of play, I'd want to keep any custom tiles, items, and monsters I put there.

Nothing super important, obviously. I'd rather have core features than editing tools. But it'd be something nice to have for those who want to take the time and effort to make custom games.

[Robsoie]

@Robsoie, Plastic Bottles are 500 ml. If you are dehydrated, it's going to take some water to bring you back up to normal.

Ah so those are "mini-bottles" as i started to wonder about then, not the regular plastic bottles of 1.5 l ( 150cl ) ones we have here (here as in my country i mean), fortunately that seems easy to mod (as the file that has the plastic bottle definition is containers.json in ..\data\json\items )

[i2amroy]

Look, we're not asking them to ditch the encumbrance penalty.  Of course there should be a trade-off, and personally I kind of like the fact that it tries to penalize gaming the system with too many layers (love the fractional encumbrance idea to improve it though - that sounds perfect).  We're suggesting the "encumbered" melee penalty should be more of a slope, not a sheer cliff.  Personally I think it ought to penalize damage more, and penalize to hit a little less.

An eventual plan is to shift ENC from giving you a "level" penalty and over to a flat penalty. Once this is done we should have much greater control over the level of penalty, since we will no longer be confined to only whole numbers but can instead scale on a slope.

I believe making the storage bit like DF is a great idea. Having to actually place your items in the container, and decide which ones should be more accessible, would add more in-depth gameplay, at least in my opinion. Having a "Magical Carrying place of the Gods", where you increase it by putting on more clothing with Storage space, is waaay off as opposed to actually having put items in their containers. In my opinion, at least. I'd like to be able to drop the bag with the gear (ala Duffel Bag filled with stuff, like a Go Bag) than have to micromanage.

Having working containers is also planned, but it's a fairly big rewrite (requiring a rewrite of practically all the inventory code) so nobody has actually decided to embark on it yet.

[GlyphGryph]

There is supposed to be a skill floor for enc penalties. Did that get removed somehow? (Basically, you can get as bad as random chance but no worse)

[Werdna]

Look, we're not asking them to ditch the encumbrance penalty.  Of course there should be a trade-off, and personally I kind of like the fact that it tries to penalize gaming the system with too many layers (love the fractional encumbrance idea to improve it though - that sounds perfect).  We're suggesting the "encumbered" melee penalty should be more of a slope, not a sheer cliff.  Personally I think it ought to penalize damage more, and penalize to hit a little less.

An eventual plan is to shift ENC from giving you a "level" penalty and over to a flat penalty. Once this is done we should have much greater control over the level of penalty, since we will no longer be confined to only whole numbers but can instead scale on a slope.

Sounds great.  I appreciate that your reading comprehension is not nearly as binary as some in this thread.      Despite disagreements with certain experienced combat backpackers out there that think a pack should make you into the combat equivalent of a paraplegic, I think the encumbrance system is pretty neat and grounds the game in a little realism.

[i2amroy]

There is supposed to be a skill floor for enc penalties. Did that get removed somehow? (Basically, you can get as bad as random chance but no worse)

I'm not sure, I haven't exactly reworked my way through the melee combat function chain after the creature class update. It's certainly possible that something was failed to be ported over form the older functions to the new ones.