Yes, they are useless, you will use club for a maximum of the first week and only against a small number of opponents, if by the end of the first week you do not have at least a blunderbuss and a pistol with a sufficiently large number of bullets, then you were doing something wrong
Now tell me where you will spend your skill points in the first week? Are you going to improve clubs knowing that you will receive a double-barreled shotgun in a few hours? Perhaps you will spend 1 point, then you will take more useful skills. And when you take on vital skills you will already have such an arsenal that you will not pick up either a club, a spear or a brass knuckle. This is what we are talking about.
Spear (and perception in general) has not received the same scrutiny as other attribute trees. I find spear lacking as well, but use all other melee weapons against single enemies even up to end game. Consequently I also put points into the melee perks.
I usually don't play insane though and play what I like, not what is most efficient. Developers by the way have said they will balance the game in difficulty 1 (don't know the name, one above adventurer).
My best advice of the evening: Set loot abundancy to 50% (or even 25%, but be warned this isn't linear, 25% feels more like a 10% setting) and never select ammo if you get offered it as a quest reward (this is one of the things still not balanced in A19). You might appreciate melee a little better.
Mind you, I wrote not only about melee weapons, but you chose this as the most unfortunate example after all, besides melee weapons and bows, there are a bunch of dull weak perks and you know this if you play this game
It was the perks you specifically named, so I used them. When talking about useless perks here on the forum often people mention perks that others vehemently defend as essential to their playstyle. Which is good as the game would not have much replay value if you just wanted the same perks all the time. Though minmax players might have a problem with the game, granted. Strength and Fortitude are the best attribute trees, why have the others? Well, this is an RPG as well, not a competitive PvP game, it seems the devs want to provide different roles and balancing this to the hilt is not their foremost priority.
Lets look at some other perks that are often called useless:
It is obvious that the treasurehunter perk is not worth its perk points, but as I said perception wasn't really balanced yet.
It is obvious that Charismtic Nature is useless in single player. It is a situational perk, you will only use it if you are in a group and that is ok. Lots of the perks are situational. If you have no use for them it might just be your playstyle
Not going too much into armor perks, but heavy armor perk is valuable if you want to stay mobile and it isn't guaranteed that you ever get that convenient book that removes the penalty in combat.
I played DF too and GnaMod. There are very good ideas, but the implementation is so-so. Personally, I don't understand why you mention modifications at all. Very comfortable position. Do you want a feature? Download the modification. Cool and very convenient. This is how you can answer any wish.
Its just the place where you might find what you are looking for. Remember, I don't speak for TFP. I know a lot from having actually read every post in the dev thread since A16, but that makes my word not official. I just can say from experience that many of your wishes most likely won't happen, because of lots of different reasons, compromises and very often because of limited developer time. They simply have to prioritize.
I partially agree, but first of all, the game has quite flexible settings on very many points. This could be one of them. Second, I offered an elegant solution to the problem. Mode with 1 life, but with a save function. Thus, the player will try to survive, but will not be very upset after dying. And he will not be able to abuse death. All goals achieved
As I said they have tried a lot of penalties and I think they called the current penalty "good enough for release". Which doesn't mean that is the last word. If they like your idea, maybe they change it again. That I say that it isn't likely is just some background information for you, it is not to somewhow devalue your idea.
Me personally, I don't care what the death penalty is because I don't exploit death. Though I would not be against making it more severe and even argued for it the last time it was changed. It's just that some parts of the game have been discussed to death already (pun intended) in this forum and it isn't worth talking much about them anymore.
I agree, this is hard work. If it's not possible to make high-quality AI, so you can make them dumb but strong. You can make zombies with 10,000 health, but that's not very cool, right? Therefore, items such as 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 13, 14 appear.
Look at other games, many of them fail with AI, even AAA games with hundreds of devs. Civilization 6 for example. I think Fataal, one of the AI devs, has said there will be an AI setting in the config, maybe that will help you.
This is also one area where some improvements might happen yet, but it largely depends on the current code and what is possible with not too much time investment
I like that the zombie AI is dependable by the way, it makes building complicated trap designs possible. Building for me is interesting because I like to solve the puzzle-like problem of getting the zombies lined up for the traps and my weapons.
Although it seems to me I did not offer anything complicated. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it's not difficult to make sure that all the zombies don't pound into one door.
Well, they actually do not. Fixed. You were absolutely right, didn't take long.
Seriously, I'm not saying it won't happen, but as I said it depends how long it would take to do. And it always takes longer than we from the outside expect. Trust me, every alpha there is a bunch of players coming here and saying "That's it? One year for just these few features? I could have done that in a week".
Easy to fix. Loot drops only from the first summoned horde. Is it difficult to implement programmatically? I don't think
Now people can abuse witches for farming experience in same way. Why didn't experience for killing zombies be removed?
Because a majority of devs wanted to keep it. Because a majority of players expect/want xp for kills. Because the more xp sources you have the better the game is balanced for different activities and killing is a major activity in this game.
My opinion always was that removing xp from kills would be better .and if not that at least removing the xp display whenever you get xp would be good. But I am not a dev.