User:Dan/Laser Sights

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A High Capacity, Low Efficiency Weapon

Rationale

I believe there's room in the game structure for a weapon with higher capacity and lower total AP efficiency than existing weapons. Currently, the outcomes of Mall Tour 2006 seem repeatable: survivors can probably hold Caiger, and zombies can occupy all other malls at will. If the zombies are now sufficiently dominant to be able to take any mall inclucing Caiger, changing that would require alterations more radical than I'm willing to propose.

I would like to see a balance where survivors can probably hold about half the malls, and zombies can probably occupy take half. That requires an advantage that diminishes -- or better yet, becomes a disadvantage -- if survivors try to apply it when spread too thinly over too many locations.

Stored AP can be accumulated at a well-defended mall in various forms -- weapons/ammo, revive syringes, FAKs, or generators and fuel cans -- and then brought to a contested mall to be used. The limitations on this strategy are the size of inventory, and the AP cost of travel. An across-the-board increase in inventory size would ease the limitation, but without any balancing drawback to create a diminishing advantage or disadvantage to scattered survivors. So I propose a high-capacity, low-efficiency weapon: if survivors use it to try to hold more territory than their numbers should allow, they won't have enough total APs to do the total damage necessary to return zombies to the streets.

The Version that got Killed

Here's the suggestion as submitted. Aside from the author vote, it got unanimous kills -- 90% from people who hadn't read it and thought it was just increasing pistol accuracy by 5% without any drawbacks to the user.


Laser Sight / DC Adaptor

Timestamp: 21:09, 5 May 2006 (BST)
Type: Item
Scope: Pistol use
Description: Laser sights would be found only in armories. DC adaptors would be found in hardware stores 1%, junkyards 1%, and warehouses 3%, displacing junk items. You would use a DC adaptor exactly the same way you use a fuel can, only instead of fueling the generator, it would attach the DC adaptor so that people could charge their laser sights. The adaptor would remain on the generator indefinitely. Sights would be found with no charge in their batteries. A charged laser sight would give +5% to hit with pistol rounds. Each pistol round fired would decrease the charge in the laser sight. The sight could be charged enough for 60 rounds, with each click charging it enough for five.

Analysis The function of a sight would be fundamentally similar to that of firearms themselves: to create stored damage, and to increase the speed with which damage can be done during combat. To be a useful addition to the game, the sight must have both advantages and disadvantages compared to all existing items. One obvious disadvantage is that you can fire off ammo without a sight, but you can't fire off the sight's stored damage without ammo. But that's secondary; the sight needs to either be better at storage and worse at creation efficiency, or vice versa. If I ran the numbers right, it's substantially lower than firearms at creation efficiency, while still being a hair better than the axe against targets without a flakjak; and it has higher storage capacity than a pistol.

A loaded pistol stores .65 * 5 * 6 = 19.5 damage (I'm ignoring flak jackets for the moment, since they would have the same percentage effect on sights as they do on firearms). Since you can do .40 * 3 * 6 = 7.2 damage in those combat AP without a pistol, the amount the pistol contributes is 19.5 - 7.2 = 12.3 damage. A sight stores .05 * 5 * 60 = 15 damage, all of which is actual stored incremental damage.

Each AP spent charging a sight creates .05 * 5 * 5 = 1.25 stored damage, as compared to the 1.2 damage per AP spent swinging an axe. But if the target has a flak jacket, the damage contributed is only .05 * 5 * 4 = 1.0 damage per AP.

The sight would not affect the damage/AP balance of the searches in the various buildings: they wouldn't increase it, because they're found with no charges (i.e. all the stored damage is created by the AP you spend charging, and none by searching); and they wouldn't decrease it either, because they displace junk items.

Votes