☂️ Gameplay: Monsters

[olanti-p]

From gameplay point of view, monsters have a few spots where they could be improved to make them more interesting or challenging to fight.

• Monsters have little to no coordination. Most of the time, it's just a horde of random zombies attacking the player as a mass, with no thought for tactics like encircling or baiting the player. Monster do have roles (e.g. fast zombies pursue, grabby zombies prevent retreat, boomers/smokers/vivisectors apply debuffs to character, necromancers are slow and apply buffs to horde, spitters/ferals perform range attacks), but it's very easy to get them to separate and leave their "party" behind, and they won't rejoin once they're done pursuing.
• Aggression triggers work weirdly. It's an ancient system that predates NPCs and had been designed with only player character in mind, but with the expansion of NPCs and companions it often happens that monsters with aggression triggers become hostile and then attack the player character instead of the target that caused their hostility to trigger.
• Monsters have little interactivity with the surrounding world. They can open doors, destroy terrain and spread fields, but the world is big and interactive, and there could be more. Possible interactions: monsters stealing food items (Monster item aware behaviour CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA#38303) or other loot, monsters having special relations with certain terrain types (e.g. zombie technicians receiving buffs from substation transformers), monsters being spawned by other world interactions (like how the alarmed door causes an eyebot to spawn, or how you need an ID with proper clearance level in DDA's new labs or the security system will spring robots on you lab monster spawns and eoc CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA#50336)
• Monsters don't have counters for some of the tactics employed by the players. Guns, vehicle ramming, kiting on bushes, climbing roof, running away...
• Minibosses could be more pronounced, e.g. by having more control over other monsters or more powerful / unique attacks.
• Monsters don't have any agenda on the global scale. They can't enter or leave reality bubble (except hordes, but those are broken), organize into large groups (beyond what groups have been placed on worldgen), expand and control their territory.
• Monsters as companions don't have the same degree of tactical play as NPC companions do. Somewhat expected for simple-minded monsters like dogs or horses, but a bit of a letdown for combat-oriented robots and similar.

[RoyalFox2140]

I have been mentioning for a while that monsters need the ability to return to their initial position, do patrols, shoot players at any distance as long as they hold a firearm, and act territorial. This would be more useful for robots like if we used chicken walkers at a military base that would only shoot players who hopped the fence or had a gun in their hands, and would patrol the base but not leave it.

Some level of monsters sticking together could help via a json field to specify a horde leader and followers, or other behavior.

Aggression triggers need an overhaul to be clear, and for the number to represent: Distance from player, damage taken from player, etc. If I could specify a highly dangerous monster to only be hostile when a player is within 4 tiles or on getting hurt it would make it easy to make such monsters fair.