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[ChairmanPoo]

try whales' forums. http://whalesdev.com/forums/index.php

[teoleo]

thank!! I have a wrong adress.... :O)

[ChairmanPoo]

On marloss berries

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Being a marloss carrier means that whenever you eat a berry you spawn a fungal bed, with the chance of friendly creatures. Possibly of new marloss bushes, too.

FOR I'VE TASTED THE FUNGUS.

[BurnedToast]

Yeah, melee combat is overpowered as it is.

I think we need a nerf that makes it less effective against things which you shouldn't be able to whack to death (hulks, bears. Fungal spires, I guess. Ugly large things in general) but still lets you kill fast things that should be killable by it (regular zombies, etc...)

Melee is not really overpowered, IMO. If gun ammo was more common (or more accurately, it was easier to match guns with correct ammo) or could be manufactured/purchased then there would be no reason to ever touch melee.

Basically anything melee does, guns do from range and with 0 skill required. Try killing a giant wasp with an axe with 0 skill? You're dead. Handgun? 1 - 2 shots, it's dead before it's even in range. Even with skill, there's a chance you don't 1-shot the wasp and it gets to sting you with the melee weapon.

The only thing I'd touch about melee combat (at least in the short term) is maybe make the crushing stun a little more rare.

[ChairmanPoo]

Melee is not really overpowered, IMO. If gun ammo was more common (or more accurately, it was easier to match guns with correct ammo) or could be manufactured/purchased then there would be no reason to ever touch melee.

Melee is silent, guns are not. Moreover, melee as it is now allows to kill very easily things that are not supposed to be killed easily (eg Hulks). I think, just like you can't kill a Hulk  with a .22, you shouldn't be able to kill it with a crowbar, either. To kill the larger zombies requires heavier ordinance (most commonly a couple of shotgun slugs. Which makes killing them noisy). Likewise, they shouldn't be killable by normal melee weapons (should require at the very least a katana or a machete), and should have drawbacks (at the very least no melee stun).

Basically anything melee does, guns do from range and with 0 skill required. Try killing a giant wasp with an axe with 0 skill? You're dead. Handgun? 1 - 2 shots, it's dead before it's even in range. Even with skill, there's a chance you don't 1-shot the wasp and it gets to sting you with the melee weapon.

You do require skill, if you intend to hit anything beyond melee range.

I think the whole thing as it stands makes melee a no-brainer for characters. That at 0 skill guns are better is irrelevant. It's so good, and training it is so easy (so much easier than gun skills, in which you're limited by their noisiness, and the lack of ammo) that makes all other combat skills pale in comparison.

[The Merchant Of Menace]

So basically you're saying encountering a Hulk before you've had a chance to raid a military bunker should be an instant game over?

And guns are really easy to train, the trick is to train up using the guns that have really common ammo types, and as for noise, there's a reason we have silencers in the game/

[Whales]

Point on stunning hulks.  I might make the stun effect harder to achieve against large monsters, or perhaps compare the damage dealt to the remaining HP of a monster to see if they're stunned.

I also need to make shooting fast-moving monsters more difficult, and maybe turn up the difficulty of shooting small monsters.  Small monsters are marginally more difficult, but not enough; fast-moving monsters offer no reduction in accuracy, while they do generally have a high dodge speed, meaning they're tough in melee but easy as always in ranged.

[teoleo]

I have a dream: this game with isometric or 3d graphics......

[Flying Dice]

I have a dream: this game with isometric or 3d graphics......

Why? Much better as it is.

[FunctionZero]

I have a dream: this game with isometric or 3d graphics......

Why? Much better as it is.

Graphics never hurt anyone, plus they'd be good for those adverse to ASCII.

[G-Flex]

Graphics never hurt anyone

Graphics take time and effort to implement, and to support, and aren't necessarily beneficial to the game. It also makes adding additional content more difficult, because graphics need to be created for them.

Say Whales adds some new, weird creature or terrain type or what-have-you. An ASCII version can be released instantly since he wouldn't have to wait on new graphical content. A graphical release, on the other hand, would be delayed. This could potentially get annoying, as people who prefer graphics would either have to wait for that, or continue to play an old version. The best-case scenario is if Whales has someone on hand to make graphics at a moment's notice (or does them himself and doesn't take much time to do so), causing minimal delay.

Oh, and you meant "averse", not "adverse".

[ChairmanPoo]

IIRC there were tilesett versions, but yeah, it's not practical to keep the main branch tilesetty, I think. Unless you have a really big team like crawl.

And having decent diabloesque graphics is even less practical :-P

Besides, Cypher had it right in "The Matrix". After a while you stop seeing the symbols :-P

[BurnedToast]

Guns are not terrible hard to train either - like merchant of menace says. shoot off common ammo types, or even better shoot off arrows to train firearms (arrows are effectively unlimited). Melee at least requires enemies to train on (and requires those enemies to be in range to hit you back)  I don't see how you can say high skill melee being pretty good at killing stuff right next to you and hitting you back is overpowered when high guns skill headshots stuff you can't even see on the screen yet.

It just comes down to the crushing stun. If whales makes it harder to crushing stun hulks (and other big guys) like he mentioned, then I think it's balanced pretty well, because you most likely won't one-shot that hulk and he WILL hurt you a lot in return meaning if you've got a gun you will want to use that.

[FunctionZero]

Oh, and you meant "averse", not "adverse".

Probably. Thanks for correction.

In any case, I didn't say we need to drop everything we're doing and just focus on adding some pretty pictures. I know ASCII is better if you want fast development, what I was saying is that graphics aren't totally bad.

[Angle]

Personally, I actually have a vast preference for ASCII, to the extent that I probably would not play the game unless there was an ASCII option. Tilesets are just too ugly.