I've seen all the threads moaning about the current state of combat, and a bunch of pretty good suggestions on what direction to go to solve some of the issues. This thread is not one of them. I'm just here to make an observation about something that seems to be a little backwards to me. Today, I want to talk about turrets vs actual living mobs. Now, the way living mobs seem to aggro on to the player, from what I have experienced anyway, is that you just have to be within a certain proximity, regardless of line of sight (LoS). The exception to this being if you are in a doorway, or sometimes the opening of a vent. But onto the observation anyway... It seems as though mobs have a 6th sense almost, and will aggro on to you, even though there is no way in hell they could have seen you, because their back it to you, and even "sneaking" won't stop them acquiring the target. Turrets on the other hand, seem to be pretty slow at acquiring the target. Now its obvious that the turrets would work using some sort of sensor, which take LoS out of the equation for turrets, but it is incredibly easy to bum rush a turret and get underneath it before it successfully acquires you as a target in an average sized room. This seems backwards to me. If anything, because of the sensors that the turrets would be using, their reaction times and target acquisition should be relatively quick, where enemies that have not had clear LoS to you insta locking and starting the chase should behave somewhat like the turrets. Example, if I am approaching say a "nightmare" slowly from behind, I should be able to get to like 10 ft away before any sort of instalock that ignores LoS kicks in. All of this is anecdotal mind, and completely based on my experience in the game on the default difficulty settings. I was wondering if anyone has any similar ideas or stories in this vein they would be willing to share! I bet there are some real funny combat stories out there!
When it comes to combat... my stories go one of a couple ways: 1. I shot it in the head with a sniper rifle at the extremis of my range. 2. I blasted it with a shotgun point-blank 3. I blew it apart with a Plasma blast. Of course there are the occasional "I was turning them into pulp with a shotgun, but 27 of them spawned from who knows where and were suddenly behind me." which seems to happen with Horrors and Scorpions with some frequency. My real combat issues are: 1. Turrets Fire at Whatever, Whenever, Where Ever. There's no way to tell them to focus on a specific target, and the more powerful the turret the slower it turns, the longer it takes to target, and at extremes of range, they will just plain miss. 2. There is no way to quickly change targeting priorities. You can manually set what each and every turret will target, but no way to quick switch them on the fly. 3. Enemies do Cheat. I've been attacked, injured, infected with gods-only-know-what by Horrors under floors, on the other side of walls, or across 1-block wide air gaps, same with Zirax troops, though this seems to have been improved.
1. This really makes the game of ship combat a diceroll of turret randomness. What's it gonna take out first? LOL 2. You can group them and assign different priorites to different groups (Apply to Group button). But this is still fiddly and requires going into a menu during combat...so that stinks. 3. Enemies clip through walls all the time and you can shoot the part of them that clips through the wall. This means they can hit you as well. But why is it they can SEE ME with their arm that is clipped through?!?
This happened with me tonight on stream whilst exploring a burial chamber on the moon of a gas giant! (That was one beautiful moon by the way). A spiders leg clipped through the wall, so I chanced it and unleased 1 shot from my epic shotgun. Bye Bye Spider
I'll never complain when I can use clipping issues to my advantage. I will complain when it's used against me though! lol @PickleJar - check out my revised post in the What 3 Things Do You Want Most thread - I have a great little piece in there about combat and turrets.
I feel this hard! Its awesome when something works out in your favour, but when the game massacres you with the same issue, thats when the rage ensues!
Luckily I'm yet to experience that yet! My biggest rage moment was the first journey I made to space! I didn't take any oxygen or fuel with me, so I was racing back to the planet to go make some oxygen in my base. My small vessel ran out of fuel something like 250m from re-entering the atmostphere, so I naturally try to spacewalk it, only to run out of o2 when I was about close enough to touch the edge of the atmostphere! There is now a small vessel just floating around in orbit of that planet on that save
That's why you gotta A) setup a base camp outside of turret range to respawn from, and B) set your equipment on respawn difficulty options to keep some or all of your gear.
This to me defeats the point of the survival element of the game. The whole feeling of accomplishing something where the risk/reward is so high trumps an easier game experience for me. But different strokes for different folks I guess
You can't play the game without your weapons and tools. That's how death loops happen. Not even Dark Souls takes away your weapons on death. They make you go back for the resources you've collected instead. So maybe a better answer is to only keep a player's latest corpse bag in the world. Having to chose what nine-item loadout to bring has proven to be a LOT more interesting than taking whatever I want and accepting I'll have to retrieve it with F5 drone cheesing. That's one practice I've stopped, instead only retrieving dropped loot by hand. I've also stopped using the Respawn Nearby option in favor of making respawn camps outside of hostile POIs. I usually chose three guns and their ammo, leaving three spots for medicine, demo charges, or various tools. Sometimes I have to take extra supplies for really big POIs. At this point, I argue that planning a loadout like this takes far more skill than cheesing, exploiting, and lucking your way back to a corpse bag.
I don't know if I would call collecting your corpse bag with the drone cheesing it. It appears to be an intended feature. And you are right, you can't play certain parts of the game without weapons and tools, and I'm not saying you are wrong for playing the game the way you do. Simply saying that its not the way for me. If I die and lose my weapons and tools in a place that maybe even the drone can't reach safely, having to head back to the main base and craft everything back up again, or if I'm resource poor, crafting a survival tool in the survival constructor and gathering the resources needed to replace the weapons and tools I lost is all part of the fun for me. I like the idea of the survival camps outside of the POIs though. Definitely adds a bit more realism than just using the respawn nearby mechanic.
I started out with dropping everything on death, but then I got annoyed with how minute the crosshear is, that is difficult to see when you start blasting your shotgun. Some of the insides of POI's are red so that makes it even harder, so I changed it so that I didn't drop everything. When they get round to fixing the crosshair then I'll change it back. I feel sorry for the forum people who are colourblind and can't see red....
I never even considered that. Having the ability to customise the crosshair would be fantastic, cause I agree, it can be a bit small, and being able to change its colour and maybe even add an outline, similar to the CS:GO crosshair customisation I guess would be nice!
I don't have a problem with playing "Fetch my stuff" - your personal drone is great for that. I just get severely annoyed with being dead before the screen fades back in. As for setting up a 'base camp'... I do that when I'm planning a siege, and that's fine. It's when I'm wandering on foot and can't see a distant structure through a wall of trees, that just sticks up slightly over a rise, but has flawless line-of-sight aimbot tracking and pin-point precision some 20 times in a row that I start saying things that makes the devil cover his ears.
It's not so much the corpse run causing problems as the requirement to do it wiiiith this HERRING!!! If the game had a stealth or similar system, that would be one thing. But, since combat is the only existing interaction with hostile NPCs, the ability to fight is all that matters. Retrieving your weapons by maneuvering your drone through gaps in NPC and turret detection feels exploiting in this context. I'd much rather get to fight my way back to recover my loot. Since Survivors aren't trained in CQC, that means guns.
