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[Robsoie]

Personnally i prefer CBN a lot more, but hopefully the more apart CDDA and CBN will grow toward different directions will make them feel less competitive as they would then be felt more like 2 different games.

[Egan_BW]

I don't play very much of either game, but didn't DDA remove the cyberpunk lore stuff? That's why cybernetics are tied to a specific faction?

I enjoy cyberpunk and the world pre-cataclysm being more interesting, so I think I'd play BN just for that reason.

[Putnam]

Overall, I think the mainline simulation caters to players who are already highly experienced with the game and thus need more challenges. It's a common fault with video games in general.

I do like it, however, because it generally has new stuff, even if it also takes stuff away. It's valuable.

As for an actual game that I can play and win, CDDA: BN is the way. It generally takes the best of the main and makes an actual game with it.

Tried both a year or two back, decided DDA was more my speed due to the more simulationist bent. It's not a matter of experience, it's a matter of preference, which seems to be an incredibly difficult thing for people to understand, given how much bulverizing tends to go on. No, there doesn't need to be some underlying reason for all that besides preference, and people don't need to be all sarcastic at each other or hyperbolic claims of player hate over stuff players such as me actually like.

And if someone tries to claim I'm a dev and therefore must be taking such criticism personally (bulverizing again): please, I did some minor optimization work that I fully intended to apply to both anyway. I've never touched features.

Unrelated:

The main thing they accomplish mechanically is increasing how much time the player spends sitting at an in-progress craft to make something.

Very reductive take. Technically true, but ignores that there's a point to doing that, which is that it means that that specific character might have to do something else if they don't have the proficiency. Very rare is a situation where you're actively blocked and completely unable to continue playing due to the lack of a proficiency, it's just options that aren't available.

[Egan_BW]

How is a proficiency system different from just adding more skills to the game? Shouldn't it all be one system, with maybe some checks taking multiple skills into account, and growing both skills?

[Random_Dragon]

The amount of effort spend trying to justify and defend DDA's mechanics as in some way objectively better instead of just accepting that your preference for them is ALSO subjective says otherwise, to be honest. Especially since you only seem to come out of the woodwork here when people have been talking about their criticisms of DDA. :V

[Putnam]

Adding new proficiencies won't clutter the skills list, proficiencies are binary rather than ranked, lack of proficiency can have different effects on different professions, proficiencies can have varying difficulties to train up that won't have knock-on effects in other places,

And perhaps most importantly, if you rejiggered skills to do all that instead, you've added more complexity than just having proficiencies be their own thing.

The other option is not having proficiencies at all, which believe it or not some people who actually play the game would not prefer.

The amount of effort spend trying to justify and defend DDA's mechanics as in some way objectively better

I never did this.

instead of just accepting that your preference for them is ALSO subjective

That is literally what I was saying, and the fact that you interpreted what I said otherwise is absolutely baffling to me.

Especially since you only seem to come out of the woodwork here when people have been talking about their criticisms of DDA.

Because I can't really defend a game I don't play beyond "it might be more your speed", which I absolutely do say when I see it, and because "when people have been talking about their criticisms of DDA" is approximately 70% of the thread.

[Egan_BW]

I mean, I don't see how skills and proficiencies represent different things. They represent knowledge and experience, so why aren't they one more complex system rather than being separate? This is how DF works.

[KittyTac]

I don't play very much of either game, but didn't DDA remove the cyberpunk lore stuff? That's why cybernetics are tied to a specific faction?

I enjoy cyberpunk and the world pre-cataclysm being more interesting, so I think I'd play BN just for that reason.

Yeah and I wanted a modern setting. But your opinion is valid.

I mean, I don't see how skills and proficiencies represent different things. They represent knowledge and experience, so why aren't they one more complex system rather than being separate? This is how DF works.

DF doesn't work that way, it has a lot of separate skills that don't affect each other. I don't see a way to do it without clogging up the skill menu, which is even less elegant.

Well put, Putnam.

[Egan_BW]

For fighting at least DF works that way. You have a general melee skill and a general ranged skill as well as a bunch of skills for every weapon type, and both are taken into account and trained when you use an attack.

[KittyTac]

For fighting at least DF works that way. You have a general melee skill and a general ranged skill as well as a bunch of skills for every weapon type, and both are taken into account and trained when you use an attack.

In CDDA you also get that, with a melee skill and blunt/edge/piercing skills. But for crafting skills it doesn't make much sense.

[King Zultan]

I don't see why people are arguing about this still, some people don't like the direction DDA has gone others do, not much to be done about it.

Basically, being light matters for a weapon, both IRL and in-game (did you notice how your stamina drains fast with a heavy weapon?).

I had a thought along those lines later in the day and I realized you could call it a Survival Shovel, then it could be heavy duty and people wouldn't have notions that it was a weapon. I've seen something like that advertised somewhere and it was basically an older style folding entrenching tool with a metal handle and one side of the shovel was a saw blade and the other was a cutting edge, the advert said you could cut a tree with it but the tree they showed were very small, along the lines of what the game calls young trees, so I wouldn't give it a tree cutting quality.

Also at this point it might as well just keep the standard shovel head shape since changing it doesn't really add anything to it.

I'll just PR it someday but definitely this experimental cycle. Thanks man.

Glad I could help.

[Blogaugis]

1. And you can satisfy the needs of your community, proficiencies are not stopping you from doing that.

They still get in the way, though. The easier option would be to just tweak the default crafting times in settings, rather than introduce a whole new proficiencies system. But, it's what the devs chose...

2. You're wrong on the first point, again they said it will be automated when implemented (and there's an explicit moratorium on "press S to shit" mechanics). And actually human waste will only be added (in an abstracted way) when faction camps are more developed wrt that so that you can indeed make things out of it. But a lone survivor won't "make" enough to be worth implementing anyways. And yes there's an intended playstyle, sort of. But again I am fine with it. I don't think it should be a pure sandbox game, if I wanted that I'd go fire up modded Minecraft.

Raises the question whether this whole mechanic has a point if automation is required... But, if they really want to go for that simulation fetish, they are free to do so.
Oh, intended playstyle(s) exist(s)... well, at this point, what would be the DDA's audience? I heard some folks say that they want to borrow some of the project zomboid's charm.
Or Minetest, for those open source, free to play enjoyers.

Like your whole argument is pretty subjective and I respect it, but I feel we just have a fundamental difference in what we want out of Cataclysm. And that's fine, you have your fork for that sort of thing. I just want you guys to understand where I am coming from.

There were several questions which didn't receive an answer. These mostly can be rephrased in the role-play nuances:
Let's say I'd like to play as Isaac Clarke (engineer) from deadspace as archetype, with some additions of knowledge in robotics and/or biology, and using them, rebuild civilization. I sadly have to conclude that neither DDA nor BN can really simulate this... reconquest of the planet (yet, at least).
Let me know when DDA implements mad scientist/engineer playthrough possibility, bent on retaking the world via less ethical (building robot armies, cloning, secrets only the sith know) means.
As for where You're coming from... So, You prefer action? Fighting, scavenging? At least I personally prefer building.

Alright folks, let's NOT get another CDDA thread locked. 

There has to be a valid reason for the thread to be locked. I don't think You need to worry about this (too much). Though, thanks for reminder.

Very reductive take. Technically true, but ignores that there's a point to doing that, which is that it means that that specific character might have to do something else if they don't have the proficiency.

Why?
The reason why crafting is used, is to acquire tools via safer means. How proficiencies help in this regard?

Adding new proficiencies won't clutter the skills list, proficiencies are binary rather than ranked, lack of proficiency can have different effects on different professions, proficiencies can have varying difficulties to train up that won't have knock-on effects in other places,

And perhaps most importantly, if you rejiggered skills to do all that instead, you've added more complexity than just having proficiencies be their own thing.

The other option is not having proficiencies at all, which believe it or not some people who actually play the game would not prefer.

Why skill list cluttering is considered as a bad thing?

Same can be said about the other folks, who prefer not having proficiencies instead. What are the reasons, that made presence of proficiencies their preffered option? Or, reasons why they wouldn't want the game to be proficiency-less?

[KittyTac]

1. Tweaking crafting times changes times for everything, including everything that doesn't need profs.
2. The audience is people like me who play mostly for simulationism, I guess. Not everything has to have a wide audience.
3. Doesn't BN have an ending where you close the main portal and the Cataclysm ends? CDDA vetoed things like that and honestly I'd rather have no ending than an "a winner is you" end screen. Yes you can't rebuild the planet, much like you can't play as a wizard and slay dragons... unless you're playing Magiclysm. You can guess what I'm getting at, iirc it has been stated that a "Mankind Reborn" mod where you could build factories etc in spite of realism would get accepted into the repo. It just needs someone to make it.
As for why I play this game? I like a combination playstyle but leaning towards combat/looting. I don't build my own structures but camp in existing ones, why build a house when there are perfectly good empty cabins (or evac shelters) already strewn around. The option is there but I never used it. I mostly craft stuff I can't loot or would take ages to find like rare tools, medieval weapons, etc.

I'll let Putnam answer the rest, don't like jumping in in that way.

[Blogaugis]

3. Doesn't BN have an ending where you close the main portal and the Cataclysm ends? CDDA vetoed things like that and honestly I'd rather have no ending than an "a winner is you" end screen. Yes you can't rebuild the planet, much like you can't play as a wizard and slay dragons... unless you're playing Magiclysm. You can guess what I'm getting at, iirc it has been stated that a "Mankind Reborn" mod where you could build factories etc in spite of realism would get accepted into the repo. It just needs someone to make it.

That ending is fairly barebones right now, there were plans to make it reduce strength of certain enemies and switch to 'rebuild the world' stage, but these are long-term plans and it will take time 'till BN gets there.
So, it's endless cataclysm. Gives a pretty depressing vibe.
As for the rest - noted.

[Random_Dragon]

I also have some ideas on my long-term to-do list that pertains to the endgame state. Aside from the obvious where I want to someday figure out how to flesh out the actual unique section a bit more (which entails C++ stuff on top of mapgen writing, ech), a few of those ideas would also pertain to the endgame's effects.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The main idea I had is this should trigger a change in the nether monsters in general, as lore-wise they're the most tied to the other worlds they originated from, and probably the least adapted to our world. If zombie evolution is set to slow after closing the superportal, then we can probably go right to adding the spicy side effects. If not, I'd also throw in "all nether monstergroups get flagged as dying like when you kill a queen monster" effect as the main related positive effect.

Either way, closing the superportal and surviving would get the attention of things out there in the netherium. They wouldn't be able to mess with you in the same way as whatever takes notice of you when you have the nether attention effect, but they would be able to relay what they saw to critters on the other side that CAN do something about it. This would have the effect of increasing aggression from nether monsters, in particular making it so the previously non-aggressive nether monsters will now be agrro'd to you. Ideally this would be paired with making those monsters a bit more interesting as combatants, so that once they're pissed off you suddenly have a new hazard you might've easily overlooked previously, one that's properly tied to and triggered by player progression instead of time.

This would also pair well with Arcana, which has another way to get a blanket aggro from nether monsters, for basically similar but Arcana-specific reasons.