Makes loot in military locations more realistic and rewarding #36945
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Significantly upped the amount of loot you can find in military bunkers, outposts, and the missile silo.
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This is a step in the right direction. But without looking up what one could expect to find in a military bunker/ Quonset hut equivalent, and/or doing some math based on the # of personnel in the area (I'm pretty sure mark's mentioned this somewhere) and the density of military installations in NE, duration of operations... etc, this is mostly just a game balancing thing. Which is fine, but shouldn't be the final word here. |
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I did some estimates on that and some research, and all the numbers i came up with were essentially much larger than what is in this PR, to simulate a good 95-99% being gone already by the time your survivor gets to the bunker. Because what exact amount would get used during the cataclysm according to lore, and how much is looted before you get there, is so subjective, i think using real world as an upper limit and balance as a guideline is not a terrible approach. However, if anyone wants to further tackle this, or suggest/make edits in this PR/ feel absolutely free. None of these numbers are set in stone, and the goal for me here was to get the drops closer to a good place. |
if you did research that's pertinent, you should include some of what you based your estimates off of. Otherwise, as far as we can tell, you just made things up and put the "realistic" label on it. |
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https://alu.army.mil/alog/issues/sepoct10/spectrum_smallarms_ammo.html If we assume the military outpost/military silo has about 20 peoples portion of that ammo, we get a starting estimate of about 78500 bullets. If we say 95% is gone by the time the player gets there, this would still be almost 4k rounds for the outpost and 20k rounds for the military bunker. I tried doing some more in depth research, but the data is not easy to find, the real data i want is almost assuredly classified, and much of what you can find online is already conjecture. Some estimations i didn't document all came up with ammo amounts in the same order of magnitude. |
Can we instead use either a marine platoon (43 marines, 7 30 rounders each) or a section? |
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That would actually fit the amount of 5.56 we find really well, assuming somewhere between 85%/95% loot rate. The problem is that the game has a ton of variety in guns and ammo types, most of them assumed to be in use by the military. If you give the military outpost a total amount of ammo for the combat loadout of 43 marines, 9010 bullets, then assume a 95% looted rate and get 450 bullets. It ends up getting spread over 10-12 different calibers, and you only have 30-40 bullets for each separate gun. Meanwhile the turrets above a bunker just dropped 9600 rounds for the 5.56. If you assume the loot rate is lower than 95%, you get back to the same kinds of ammo numbers as you'd find with this PR merged. |
Went to triple check the results of the changes and found the old style bunker was giving more loot than expected. Ran the test a couple of more times after an adjustment and applying the working adjustment here.
There's absolutely no reason for us to attempt to represent all of our guns and ammo types in these locations. It should only reflect the weapons and munitions they would actually be issued, and in the appropriate proportions they would be issued. |
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On a related note: the turrets long-term are going to be depleting much (possibly most or all) of their rounds dynamically before the player gets to them. You shouldn't be focusing on how much they give, when working out how much should be stored in the facility itself. |
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The people that wrote the ammo split of the military itemgroups already tried to make the distribution of the various military rounds make sense, but admittedly the ammo groups have swollen even more since that time and it would definitely not be amiss for someone to have a look at what ammo spawns where, and make sure it all spawns in sensible locations. The military locations currently spawn about 12 of the 43 ammo types for ballistic guns appearing in game. That would be a pretty big project though, crosschecking most/all item groups with ammo in the game and the locations and amounts they spawn in, and then making it so you adjust them without defacto deleting some guns from the gun by removing their ammo from the world. As for what amount we want to be finding in these places, i'll go post a screenshot or two to benchmark what the settings are now, and we can see if we can find where we would like them to be. I'm okay with pretty much any suggestions/adjustments. |
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if the existing item groups do not get you what your research says you should get for these locations, either a) the existing item groups are wrong and need to be fixed to get what your research says, b) new item groups need to be made that match your research, or c) the items need to be specified in the map definitions themselves. in this case, i favor b) as an option, but I'm not one of the map people so don't take that as writ in stone. |
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Contents of the live in bunker
Contents of nuclear silo
As always, item spawns are still semi randomized. it seems the military storage bunker had a low roll this run. |
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I would like B of those options as well. but i would be hard pressed to say what ammo in the above examples should be removed. let alone where they would be moved to. I find it hard to judge what ammo the cataclysm military is stocking partially because of the addition of the rivtech weapons and all it's ammo variants. |
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For comparisons sake here is me documenting my finds in some standard mainline military locations. |
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I don't like 100% chance to spawn magazines and ammo. I think we should always let space for case of absence. |
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You wont please both sides, you can either have realism or challenge here. And that would be even more pronounced if you tried to adhere to the story (ie. 'it all happened within the space of one day') and extrapolate state of military installation supplies from that. |
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I think absence might best be done by making a separate "looted" military location, like the evac shelter now. Some alternate ideas that were discussed was to make the military locations have a decent chance to not spawn with enemies, but filled with a small group of armed, hostile npc's. (soldiers still bunkered up from before the cataclysm gone crazy, or raiders.). I understand some of the realism/balance concerns, in that this is probably still quite low to be "realistic" while still being a lot of loot. And i think it won't be that much of a problem, because the military installations are already one of the harder locations to raid in the game. the military installation in particular is a rather fun little challenge, with turrets surrounding it and secubots, dispatch drones, and zombie bio operators inside. If you can handle that, you are already solidly at cataclysm's endgame, so this would give characters that have reached that level an alternate activity to raiding labs for the lab barracks. and would hopefully somewhat expand the range of weapons available to use. having players use heavy weapons, grenades, and some of the other weapons wouldn't be much stronger than having players use a .556 rifle and a .50 sniper for everything, but would add to gameplay variety a decent bit. |
mlangsdorf
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43 marines is fine. 210 rounds for each of them is not. That's what they (ideally) carry in a mission, as I understand, not what they have stockpiled in a base, bunker or even FOB. Bunkers like these would likely have a nearly outrageous ammo stockpile target, at least before any wars or the cataclysm itself making so that most of it get used or carted off somewhere else. While the results might end up likely, I feel it's better to assume the about 4k rounds per person (let's say 43 infantrymen), and reduce it from there to whatever percentage we find reasonable to still be remaining, instead of starting from 210 rounds per infantrymen. |
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Realistic ammo amounts seem crazy generous because zombie numbers are "unrealistically" low. And making them "realistic" (i.e. tens of thousands per town) isn't even an option because there just isn't enough tiles to place them all. |
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If i were to formulate an amount based purely on balance, setting realism aside this is probably the approach i would take: Currently the player mostly gets their ammo / weapons from turrets and the lab barracks, both found in the lab. setting aside the turrets, the lab is currently the one stop shop for almost all high end loot in the game, and one lab will contain a couple lab barracks. A military outpost or bunker would need to have a decent amount more military loot than the lab barracks for the player to find it worthwhile to raid. I would suggest 3x and 5x for the outpost and bunker respectively. I'll go ingame now and run some quick tests to see how much ammo is currently spawning in lab barracks and see what that might imply for the amount in military locations. Looted 3 lab barracks, averaged results rounded up: Which might suggest Any less than that and the player will probably continue to ignore military locations. Even with these number players probably will still avoid them because of the ammo source that is turrets, which would be significant from labs even if each turret only held 50 rounds. |
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So, numbers we could end up adjusting to: This PR is calibrated for 1500 rounds right now, but if we decide on another number i can calibrate it to those settings. |
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In a perfect world labs wouldn't have barracks and military bunkers would be proper locations instead of 1 tile loot shops, but this is not a perfect world. |
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@Amoebka According to the “background” page of the design doc, 12 years before the start of the game a DARPA lab doing portal research was completely destroyed by a creature from the netherum. I always figured that since then, portal research facilities would tend to have a garrison to protect the facility from threats like that. Therefore, I think lab barracks ought to stick around, though perhaps not with such a large armory. (I do think they’d benefit from a little rework) |
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A good idea. But a 100% spawn chance is too simple. One bunker and you are the king. I think it would be better if the chance were say 5-10% with 3000+ rounds in a mil location. |
…Raven#36945) * Makes loot in military locations more realistic and rewarding Significantly upped the amount of loot you can find in military bunkers, outposts, and the missile silo. * Loot adjustment Went to triple check the results of the changes and found the old style bunker was giving more loot than expected. Ran the test a couple of more times after an adjustment and applying the working adjustment here.
Summary
SUMMARY: Balance "Increases military location loot"Purpose of change
Military bunkers/ military outposts used to contain <100 rounds of ammo on average, while the turrets protecting it carries thousands of rounds. Players almost never took the effort to raid military installations other than boredom because they were not a good location to raid for ammo and gear, which is unlike both gameplay and real life expectations.
Describe the solution
Significantly upped the amount of ammo you can find in military bunkers, outposts, and the missile silo.
Raiding a military outpost, bunker, or the silo will now be a major turning point in a run like raiding a lab is.
Before this change military bunkers would mostly contain <100 bullets, while the turrets protecting it had 9600 rounds of .223. Raiding the bunker should now give you somewhere between 1-2k of ammo of various calibers, a good amount of grenades, but maybe more importantly, a reliable way to get ammo for heavy weapons.
Amount was based on some ballpark estimates of what a real life depot of similar size would hold, and assuming somewhere between a 90-99% depletion rate during the cataclysm. It's a lot more than it was before.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Waiting for someone to completely rework the military locations.
Making the military locations a more challenging place to raid before increasing the loot. ( I would have loved to do this right away but it's not something i have experience with yet)
Leaving military outposts and bases as mostly obsolete content.
Testing
Loaded up the world with the changes and checked out multiple military bases and outposts to check if things are working correctly.
Additional context
Makes the military bunkers feel a lot more like this:
And less like an empty hole in the ground.
The first bunker in bunker.json uses a different loot spawning method than the others. i didn't feel comfortable trying to update it to the new standard so i adjusted the values of the old one to make it feel right. If someone would like to convert it it would be a good small project.