Its meant to augment an assassin, dagger type play, not swordsmen.
Books are coming to enhance spears, brawler and junk turrets.
But in every single other respect, the machete is a knife but better. They benefit from all the same perks (except this set of skillbooks) but have better stats.
It's not like the difference between a bow and a hunting rifle, which is two different weapon types.
If you want knives to be some sort of 'stealth weapon' that gets extra bonuses from sneak-books and the machete to be a 'sword weapon' then there should be a steel version of a knife, and an stone/bone and iron versions of a sword.
Hmm... Actually, that could work. Differentiate them like clubs vs sledgehammers.
They could share bleed but swords would dismember more reliably, and knife sneak attack better (from the perk, not just the skillbooks)
Hell, I'd be down for a sword weapon-tree. Stone swords (or would it be bone?) would look really cool.
If they're part of the same weapon-type though, then they should benefit from the same skill-trees, and from the same books.
If it were the other way around and the final version of the weapon got a bonus that the iron-version didn't, then it'd be fine. Extra decapitate chance on the machete from a skill-book or something. But the knife?
Iron quality tools or weapons should never be able to do something that it's steel-version can't do. The steel version should be a
straight upgrade. Otherwise what's the point of even having them?
Like, the steel knuckles can also harvest meat, (and, IIRC, have bleed damage?) but also do everything the iron knuckles do, right?
... actually, speaking of knives and bladed knuckles (and spears) have you considered rolling all bladed weapon parts into one set of 'parts'?
I mean, the steel knuckles look just like iron knuckles but with knife-blades and corkscrews strapped to them, and the steel spear is clearly just a knife on a stick (then again, so is the iron)
I assume that the 'spear parts' are just a bunch of knife-blades to use as a spearhead, though that does make me wonder what i'm doing with all the forged steel in that recipe though, I'd assumed I was casting and forging blades, like you (presumably) do with the iron spear.
Part of the reason I never liked the 'weapon parts' system is because i can't quite understand what they're supposed to represent in-setting.
I know their intended function, mechanically, but... if I'm forging a sledgehammer out of 60 bars of forged steel, then presumably i'm making the hammerhead and steel shaft myself, so i'm not sure where the 'parts' come in. A steel hammer isn't much more complex than an iron one.
... anyway,
You could have bladed parts and blunt parts as broad groups to go with 'tool parts' and ' heavy/light armour parts' and the different types of gun parts.
That might alleviate the issues with gathering enough of the same type of parts together to make a specific type of melee weapon, and put stuff like the machete on the same difficulty-level as making a piece of t3 armour, a tool or a gun.
Tools would still be annoying, because you need to make three steel tools for each person (pick, axe, shovel) whereas you generally only need one steel weapon and one of each type of gun, but you could just make drops for brown versions of steel tools a little more common in balancing.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This was intended to be a separate post, because the last post was already long, and I got a lot of unrelated musings about weapons to ramble about. Forum auto-merged the posts though, so you're now subjected to
this long-ass text block.
I feel like the final weapon in the clubs tree should be a solid steel club, or a lead pipe. Or like... an actual old-timey spiked mace. (... no, a
smoothheaded mace, so you could add the metal spikes mod to give it big ole spikes.)
Going from an iron reinforced club to a wooden baseball bat feels like a downgrade. You've basically made a wooden club, but a little bigger.
Also, the stun-baton feels more comparable to the burning shaft mod on a low-level club, than a weapon in it's own right.
It's basically a weak club with a chance to cause a status effect (chance boosted by an int perk)
Don't get me wrong, the stun baton is a really cool idea, but kind of boring in practice, since it doesn't go off with every hit, it just feels like you're hitting Zeds with a stick most of the time.
You could keep all the current weapon's mechanics (charge up by attacking, then deliver a shocking hit) but turn the weapon itself into a mod (Shock Pack, a weaponized battery pack) and have the mod be slottable in all melee-weapons or tools (or maybe just all
metal weapons and tools) and then have the stun-baton perk unlock the mod-pack, do all the stuff it does now, and maybe boost electric fence damage or something.
A shocking machete, or sledgehammer would be more vicerally satisfying than a puny baton. Ooh, ooh!
Taserfist!
They'd have decent base damage in addition to having their shock-chance, just like how a weapon with Burning Shaft still does it's normal damage, but has a chance to set a zombie on fire. (putting the taser-pack and burning shaft on a machete would let you hit them with three burn, bleed and shock, for that big DoT)
Hmm... Or maybe split the difference. Keep the stun-baton as is, but near the end of it's perk tree (level five?) you unlock the shock-pack mod for crafting, and can slot it into other stuff to make it function like a (weaker?) stun baton.
But the shock-pack still benefits from the stun-baton skilltree, even if you slot it into another weapon.
Making one and giving it to your non-int using teammates would give them a minor boost, but you as a stun-baton build would get the best mileage out of it, or you can add the shock-pack to the stun-baton itself, giving it even more shocking chance/halving it's charge-up time, but keeping the same low base-damage from the stun baton.
The battery pack would be made out of stun baton parts, obviously. Maybe that would be the 'next level' of stun baton?
Every other tool/weapon besides the baton and the junk turret has stone/iron/steel versions. I totally get that stone versions of these electrical tools aren't really very sensible, but the stun baton could be the iron version and the stun-pack could be the 'steel' version. (or rather, the stun pack on another weapon, giving you either double-stun, or stun+ another melee weapon)
Not sure about turrets, tbh. They're useful, their ammo is really cheap, and the ability to pick up a turret and use it as a weapon is absurdly good, but they're kinda magical, aren't they?
We already have gun turrets but they all need motion sensors and to be plugged into the electrical grid to work, these ones seem to just... run off the player's bio-electricity, and track their prey via magic.
A turret that
isn't automated would be interesting.
You can fire it while carrying it, but if you place it on the ground and actually sit behind it to control it, it shoots much better.
I dunno, you get iron-sights and full-auto while it's placed, to make up for it being immobile? Maybe it reloads faster too?
Oh, idea!
You could
turn them automated by plugging a motion sensor and a car-battery into the mod-slots! Or maybe you could wire it up for power while it's at your base, so you don't need to spend two mod-slots on that?
Then again, if you use batteries/wires to power them, it makes it hard to use them when away from your base. and it'd have them directly competing with shotgun/smg turrets.
From the way the turret moves/sounds, I figure it's probably supposed to have an engine in there, right?
It rumbles like one, anyway. Maybe once you automate them, they run on gas, like a minibike?
That'd make them a lot more portable than needing to be plugged into your base's electrical system, and refilling an engine with gas is a lot easier to do while out-and-about away from your base.
So, couple of ideas. Turrets that require a player to sit in and man them but can be upgraded with an engine and a sensor into something more like the current junk turret.
Maybe a blunderbuss version of the junk-turret? They both fire non-bullets made out of scrap, and the blunderbuss is a badass idea that's kind of wasted where it is now, since it's overshadowed by other shotguns.
... wouldn't a blunderbuss turret just be a cannon? Cos i'm
totally down to defend my base with an actual honest-to-god cannon.
Also, if the blunderbuss fired junk ammo instead of blunderbuss ammo, it wouldn't require gunpowder, and thus would be much easier to craft than even shotgun shells, thereby making it the easiest firearm to obtain and use, as I expect was intended.
If the blunderbuss/cannon turret is t1 (pipe/tape) and the manual turret is t2, then the automated junk turret would be t3.
I wouldn't make it take 'turret parts' to build, I'd just have the players either plug in the motion sensor and generator as mods (What mods even work on the junk turret? What would they be competing for slots with?)
Or you could craft the automated junk turret in the workbench, but the only ingredients it requires are an already made junk turret (like, the whole weapon is an ingredient for it's upgrade) and the sensor and generator.
Maybe a smattering of mechanical and electrical parts, if that seems necessary.
I'd even say that the end result auto-turret is the same quality as the turret you used as an ingredient.
