More skeletal zombie upgrades

[SirPendrak]

Summary

Content "Three new skeletal zombe evolutions"

Purpose of change

More variety and endgame enemies

Describe the solution

Skeletal slasher - can evolve from skeletal zombie. Similar armor, a tiny bit faster, better melee skill and token 1 dodge. "Attack cost" makes it attack once per turn despite speed lower than 100. Can smell. Has good ammount of cut damage to its attack.

Skeletal executioneer - slasher upgrade. Looses grab and bite. Has very good melee skill, a lot of cut DMG and tries to decapitate you with powerfull "cut_throat" attack. Otherwise has some minor stat upgrades.

Skeletal reaper - the blob got serious. Extreme melee skill and cutting damage. From time to time can perform armor-penetrating stab. Larger, faster, stronger. Probably the longest zombie evolution chain so far. Looses smell due to its nostrills being overgrown with bone. Can push small vehicles.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Fighting Skeletal juggernaut again

Testing

Despite big numbers they are not that deadly for survivor that has at least some preparation. Cutting damage is easiest to negate with armor.

Tested that zombie masters upgrade skeletons into slashers at about 12% rate.

Fought skeletal slasher. Endgame armor can make you impervious to their attacks. They loose fight to a standard Mi-go, leaving it with about half HP.

Fought skeletal executioneer. As long as you have good armor and can block or parry, youre fine. Otherwise you loose your head fast. It looses fight with Mi-go guard, leaving it at 10% HP left.

Fought skeletal reaper. Their speed makes them more annoyig and overwhelming. As above, parry and armor should keep player safe, but melee skill of 9 makes pure dodge builds risky. It looses to a Mi-go myrmidon, but barerly, with Mi-go having about 5% HP left. In bigger numbers, or when they attack with some grabbers or similar they pose true endgame threat if ignored.

Additional context

I am not native english speaker. Any points about zombie descrieptions are welcome

[github-actions]

Spell checker encountered unrecognized words in the in-game text added in this pull request. See below for details.

Click to expand

• skeletal executioneer
• skeletal executioneers

This alert is automatically generated. You can simply disregard if this is inaccurate, or (optionally) you can also add the new words to tools/spell_checker/dictionary.txt so they will not trigger an alert next time.

Hints for adding a new word to the dictionary

• If the word is normally in all lowercase, such as the noun word or the verb does, add it in its lower-case form; if the word is a proper noun, such as the surname George, add it in its initial-caps form; if the word is an acronym or has special letter case, such as the acronym CDDA or the unit mW, add it by preserving the case of all the letters. A word in the dictionary will also match its initial-caps form (if the word is in all lowercase) and all-uppercase form, so a word should be added to the dictionary in its normal letter case even if used in a different letter case in a sentence.
• For a word to be added to the dictionary, it should either be a real, properly-spelled modern American English word, a foreign loan word (including romanized foreign names), or a foreign or made-up word that is used consistently and commonly enough in the game. Intentional misspelling (including eye dialect) of a word should not be added unless it has become a common terminology in the game, because while someone may have a legitimate use for it, another person may spell it that way accidentally.

[RAldrich]

Why is the slasher able to smell? None of the other skeletons do so, and I thought we were reserving that ability for monsters that evolved from things like dogs (or the stalker series of zombies). I think it would make sense to remove that ability.

[Karol1223]

Why is the slasher able to smell? None of the other skeletons do so, and I thought we were reserving that ability for monsters that evolved from things like dogs (or the stalker series of zombies). I think it would make sense to remove that ability.

It's been significantly more restricted than it used to be, but smell is pretty common around the brute-tier of enemies still, including both skeletal brutes and juggernauts.

[Karol1223]

You gotta leave double spaces after periods