Ranged skill more usefull?

[Safavi]

Am I the only one who wishes the ranged and melee skill were balanced? Ammo/arrows and guns/bows were easier to find but a melee character would flat out suck if he/she tried to use a ranged weapon. Where as a ranged character would suck if he/she used a melee weapon.

I dont know it would definitley balance out the skills imo. It would also make guns a more viable option.

[danconnors]

With melee skill you can build a sharpened spear to complement the broadspear/hardened spear in your main hand. The sharpened spear can be thrown 6 or 7 paces, and does good damage when it hits. I'd like to see a sharpened wooden javelin introduced, small enough that you could carry 2 or 3 in one hand (as the Roman pila). It wouldn't have the reach of a bow, but it would probably hit harder than an arrow.

It could relieve the disadvantage melee only players have against ranged characters. In woods the javelin would probably be at least as effective as arrows and sling stones.

[Lin]

Balancing skills differently is an interesting discussion to me, and changes like that are actually very easy to mod into the game and test out. But I'm not sure I'm understanding your position right. Are you saying neither melee nor ranged give a high enough boost? Or that the player should suck more if they didn't have the skill? In grob terms, their other bonuses and tactical uses aside, they basically each give you a 50% boost to the main stat governing them. If you keep in mind that what you get is also what your oponents get, I'm nor sure any of us would want to be fighting against a melee oponent with say a +70% attack multiplier. ;) It would make one-hit deaths a daily occurence and tough a necessary skill.

Or were you thinking of lowering the basic/blank character's skills? Like say, start us all off with a -20% in melee? I mean in theory, I can see why that would make sense, but I feell that balancing that would be even harder. And also I worry that making the power gap even wider would make builds much more rigid, and may make less builds viable. It would definitely hit players like me who usually don't like taking any combat skills at all really hard.

Or did I just completely misunderstand what you were saying?

Still, I'd be interested to hear what exactly you had in mind, because like I said, it's actually a real easy thing to change by diving in the xml for a second, even without any modding skills, and it'd be fun to experiment with it.

[Gamefever]

Huh, I read the comments but.

I've done the melee build and the ranged build in this game. I find this melee build to be the best combat build: Strong, Melee, Tough, Trapping, negative traits metabolism and myopia.
It's main drawback is poor eyesight making you an easy target at night...But sleep in Lit City hex, make a campfire, or carry a torch. Doesnt matter that npc's know just where to find you, they get destroyed. Can take on dog packs or even multiple dogmen with just a spear and torch in hand for lighting.
The real problem is when facing down a ranged oppenent in an open feild which is simple, dont go into open feilds or end turn in open feilds. End turn in forrest, city, or hill tile with a lit torch in hand. See if you have bad eyesight ducking into cover will make oppenent have "hiding" status but its easy to figure out how to aviod that.

Ranged build is harder to play. The only tile that you get some decent range on is "grassland" all other tiles your withen melee distance or rugged terrian which means cover and difficult to retreat or sprint in. Basically if you need to get some comfort distance between you and your target your going to have a high chance to trip which can be fatal...Sorry it just is fatal to lose time in combat.

So for a Ranged character I find that its very hard to take on multiple oppenents, most fights start too close, and the character is ussually not as tough as a melee character.

I find that "hiding" and "eagle eye" help a ranged character more especailly in the early game if you want to go on the offensive.

I find for offensive characters that are going to actively seek out battle these skills are very useful in both melee or range. Strong, Trapping, and Tough. These give a lot of crowd control and sometimes you really need crowd control because you can end up in 5v1 at times.

Complete melee build is very good at handling itself in big crowds compared to ranged. Mostly I find its due to the fact that combats ussually start too close which for me I feel highly favors a melee combat nuke. Start round one got Dogman coat which is armor on top of "Tough". Before long your going to find some pain killers and some alcohol from there you have everything you possibly need to battle it out with a mob.

How I handle it is basically check out all oppenent ranges, pick out the close one. That guy runs up gets attacked cause he is vulnerable and blam he's stunned and bleeding out in one hit. Switch target to next closest if one of the 4 CC's is up for use blam they knocked down, switch target CC, switch target CC or attack. If they really far away at the start I just pop a painkiller before getting into the thick of it so its not likely I will succomb to lucky hits.

IDK its just my opinion that the ranged offensive build is weaker outta the box and probably until they get nightvision at that point ranged build might be better but thats a long ways off.

[Gamefever]

The real problem with range in its simplest form.

You dont start far away.

90% of all encounters start withen 6 to 10 hexes in rugged terrian. Meaning your not getting a lot of distance easily even with "Athletic" chances are your going to trip and fall.
At 6 to 10 hexes your inside of melee range dont kid yourself thats easy to close that distance and easy to just soak the damage from "Tough" skill which is pretty powerful.
Real range is at 20 to 30, this is where a ranged build shines but this only happens on grassland hexes.

So where do ranged characters sleep at night? Would it be safer to just make a camp out in the feild? I mean heck at some point mobs are going to creep up on you, may as well be at a good starting distance for a fight afterall perhaps setting up a tarp tent out in an open feild with noise traps would actually be safer for ranged characters.

I mean heck with "Metabolism" negative trait you need 4-6 hours of sleep, spend the rest of the dark hours crafting, and then go hunting for more stuff.

Nightvision on a ranged character well now, just sleep in the day, and blast away at blind targets at night. That's when ranged would likely pay off. Not sure never got that far with it.

[Safavi]

Originally posted by Lin:

Balancing skills differently is an interesting discussion to me, and changes like that are actually very easy to mod into the game and test out. But I'm not sure I'm understanding your position right. Are you saying neither melee nor ranged give a high enough boost? Or that the player should suck more if they didn't have the skill? In grob terms, their other bonuses and tactical uses aside, they basically each give you a 50% boost to the main stat governing them. If you keep in mind that what you get is also what your oponents get, I'm nor sure any of us would want to be fighting against a melee oponent with say a +70% attack multiplier. ;) It would make one-hit deaths a daily occurence and tough a necessary skill.

Or were you thinking of lowering the basic/blank character's skills? Like say, start us all off with a -20% in melee? I mean in theory, I can see why that would make sense, but I feell that balancing that would be even harder. And also I worry that making the power gap even wider would make builds much more rigid, and may make less builds viable. It would definitely hit players like me who usually don't like taking any combat skills at all really hard.

Or did I just completely misunderstand what you were saying?

Still, I'd be interested to hear what exactly you had in mind, because like I said, it's actually a real easy thing to change by diving in the xml for a second, even without any modding skills, and it'd be fun to experiment with it.

I was saying that they should balance out the "combat" skills so both melee and ranged or viable options. For example say I have the ranged skill, I will be less effective with the melee skill by some percentage unless I have the melee skill in which that doesnt matter. A ranged character will have greater sucsess in finding bows, guns, ammo and arrows to fight where as a melee skilled character will find "melee" weapons like crowbars and meat cleavers alot faster. If a player has neither of those skills they are not affected by it what so ever.

As you know finding ammo and a gun is hard unless your farming DMC guards and even that is a pain. So a character with a ranged skill instead of maybe finding the 3 or so rifle bullets with maybe a gun if he/she is lucky in a few hours might find a shotgun, rifle and revolver within say an hour and plenty of ammo for them.

[Gamefever]

Ah I see.

I was pointing out that, for combat thrill seekers. A character build that focuses on all melee skills is the most powerful build at the moment.

I'm not sure that the game doesnt caiter to specific skills though. I have this build right now, Melee, Range, Tough, Trapping, Hiding, - Metabolism, and - Myopia. I found a .38 and 8 bullets for it withen 5 turns. So I'm not sure, I think you do tend to find stuff based on skills but I could be wrong.

Mostly though ranged vs melee has always been tough to balance. I think that for ranged the "eagle eye" skill should be reworked to be more beneficial by providing a better loot chance and better ranged hit chance. I am aware that this skill can be gained in game which seems to me to be the problem.

Perhaps if the corrective eye surgery only removed myopia instead of also giving "eagle eye" which I think is imbalanced and too easy to solve. I think the 5,000 dollar mark for the special surgery is the right price point for this correction plus skill.

Another way to balance the game for ranged offensive characters would be to increase the starting distance in fights for characters that have "ranged" or "eagle eye" skill in any hex type by at least 4 distance units. This would go a long way to making it more plausible in comparison.

[Kaaven]

Just to clarify - the game does not adjust the loot, based on abilities or flaws. The only thing that can affect the loots are skills and tools used during scavenging.

[BanDHMO]

If you were to balance the melee and ranged by making ammo common, you'd be removing a very interesting dimension from the game. Fights would become one-dimensional skill vs skill, with a lot of luck mixed in.

Right now fights are about skill, luck, and RESOURCES. You can tilt the odds heavily in your favor by pulling out a shotgun and spending half a dozen shells, but you can only do that infrequently and then you have to solve another challenge of getting more shells.

So, no, please don't balance everything. It's a survival game, it shouldn't be about playing fair. It should be about finding every material advantage you can to win.

[Gamefever]

Uh, never said add more rounds.

I think ranged is really a weak skill to take.

For one, everything, everything has weight.
1 arrows weighs like .03 kg or .60 kg for 20
2X running shoe, .70 kg
Kakki Pants .35 kg
Shirt .15 Kg
Skope .5 Kg
Dog Coat, 2.00 Kg
Hide Glove .15 Kg

Eh I dont want to write it all out, point is that a ranged character can hardly get around carrying all that ammo. So basically you cant travel much at all and with all the extra "burden" a single fight will tire out the player all because the carry weight is too low for non-strong characters.

Anyway I think the starting "distance" could use a tweak for perceptive characters.

[Chiko]

It does for players with the hiding skill. If you manage to stay hidden, when entering battle, you get the choice to start combat closer ot furter away than usual. This option also presents itself to characters without the skill but is a lot less often.

Even though ranged combat seems like a bad choice, it allows you to soften or kill characters before going into melee, which is a huge advantage, IMO.

[Safavi]

Originally posted by BanDHMO:

If you were to balance the melee and ranged by making ammo common, you'd be removing a very interesting dimension from the game. Fights would become one-dimensional skill vs skill, with a lot of luck mixed in.

Right now fights are about skill, luck, and RESOURCES. You can tilt the odds heavily in your favor by pulling out a shotgun and spending half a dozen shells, but you can only do that infrequently and then you have to solve another challenge of getting more shells.

So, no, please don't balance everything. It's a survival game, it shouldn't be about playing fair. It should be about finding every material advantage you can to win.

I didnt say give the player an armory and an ak-47 im saying make ammo slightly more common so say if I had a shotgun I could find half a dozen shells in maybe the equivlant of 30 minutes or an hour.

More to the point alot of skills are practically pointless im suggesting at the most making a combat skill a more viable but riskier option seeing as guns and ammo are slightly more common if you do.

Having unbalanced skill is a bad thing. :P

[Lin]

We haven't had one of these chats in the forum in a while, this is fun. :)

Here's one point we disagree on though:

Originally posted by Robb_Stark:

More to the point alot of skills are practically pointless

See, they aren't really. I think what you mean is that they are pointless to your prefered ways of playing the game, or from a combat perspective - which some of them may be, but then again they have other uses. More likely is that their benefits and effects are not obvious/visible enough (or even not well enough explained maybe). But all skills have benefits that allow you to mold strategies around them, and they do allow for very very different ways of playing the game. This game allows some very weird and uncommon builds to be viable if you know how to play them, which I very much enjoy personally.

But that's another discussion completely. Back to the point:

Like Kaaven said somewhere up there, skills don't really affect the actual loot tables, except when they are used as scavenging tools. I'm no modder, so I don't really know if it's possible, but I imagine that in theory one could potentially mod ranged into a "scavenging tool" that allows you to find a small percentage of ammo in certain types of hexes. It wouldn't be realistic, imo, but would it address the issue you're talking about?

However, the question is: why would you want that? There are thousand of shooters out there that allow you unlimited ammo. Managing very limited resources is part of survival games, and the challenge then becomes to come up with alternate viable strategies for solving the problem of missing resoruces.

That aside, I think the reason you may find some of us disagreeing here, is because ranged can be actually super useful: it combines well with hiding, like Chiko explained, it allows crafting a broad spear (which is a brilliant weapon even for non melee characters provided you keep your distance), it makes it easier to avoid infectious diseases if you do find a gun+ammo, but, most importantly, it doubles the distance at which slings work. ;) Slings are by far my ranged weapon of choice for all types of builds, whether they have the skill or not. They're easy to craft, ammo is ubiquitous and their great stun chances make them fantastic both for softening opponents and for giving you a chance to run away, so they play well with all types of characters. Ranged + sling, together with some careful, strategic choices during combat, actually allows you to fight many oponents that are much more powerful than your build may be.

The other thing to consider is the fact that the skill system kinda doubles as a difficulty setting in NEO. A grob and oversimplified way of thinking about it is: choose melee and or tough/strong for an easier run, choose ranged for medium difficulty, avoid combat skills alltogether to make it even harder, etc etc. If all the skills were balanced equally (and is that even possible in games, ever?) it would not allow more seasoned players to play at harder difficulties, which would be kinda a loss to the longevity of the game, imo.

[danconnors]

Excuse me. You said a broadspear doubles the range of a sling??? I've never heard of this before, and I've played quite a bit. If it actually does, what is the mechanism that allows this?

You must have meant ranged skill doubles the range of a sling...Sorry. Just for drill I made a sling and grabbed 5 stones. A dogman conveniently showed up, so I went after it (for a change) with my new sling. The first ranged shot available came at around 20 paces, which surprised me. I took the shot, but missed. On my next turn, though, at around 19 paces, I hit it and stunned it. The next 3 shots also hit, as it closed to 9 paces.

Out of stones, I had to pump 4 arrows into it before it finally expired. It managed to rip out and ruin 2 of these (ticked me off; they had been 100% arrows). I was impressed by the sling's accuracy. I don't normally open fire with an ATN bow till I'm around 15 paces.

Slings, much more useful than I thought.

[Chiko]

Slings and stones can be heavy to carry around but blunt damage has better chances to stun, break limbs and can cause concussions if you hit the head, which is a lot more useful than the bleeding condition from cutting weapons/ammo, IMO.

Slings have no armor penetration but luckily, there are not many NPCs with armor and the ones that do have good armor are friendly.

[danconnors]

Talk to Goliath about heavy armor and slings. His forehead wasn't armored, and that's where the shepherd landed the stone.