Umu. I'm not questioning the viability or potency of crit builds, or sneaky characters.
I'm pontificating about the possibility and merits of adding a sneak attack crit to enemies unaware or just aware of you. It won't be a big effect on skilled characters with very high critical chance, yes, but that factor alone doesn't really determine whether it's right to be added.
Well, it would be an improvement mostly for the less skilled characters either requiring high end equipment(cbm's) or specific items(smoke bombs). I think it's utility would not be that great in the end and probably requiring more coding work than it is worth, especially if they plan on eventually adding a proper stealth system and would have to recode it. Also, the way i see it, in the case of zombies and some other monsters, criticals due to being unaware don't make much sense since they don't really fight defensively and your movement making noise(unless you have tentacle legs or something else) and them trying to move towards the noise means they're on the move already anyways.
On another note, I just had a look through github and found this entry
https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/10889 "Fix friendly monsters being friendly to hostiles of same species" Will this make friendly NPC's attack unfriendly NPC's now? I tried making a diplomatic character some time back but that didn't work because my friendly npc's didn't protect me from the never-ending flow of unfriendly ones.
Speaking of diplomacy, aside from books, is there a decent way to train speaking? Seemed that no matter what kind of interaction I had with NPC's the skill only went up by 1% and seeing how dangerous these interactions are...