KickStarter Dead State: Reanimated

Find an unique crossbow named Platepiercer located in one of the northern commercial areas*. Max your character's ranged skill so you gain a maximum range bonus that will give the same crossbow enough range to hit zombies looking directly at your PC without them reacting, have some people to build extra bolts in the Shelter in the workshop(crafting bolts doesn't have much in minimum mechanical skill required) and you can pretty much take down almost all zombies one by one without starting combat, preventing you from having to wait turns for each of them. Bows also work, and compared to generic crossbows they are better, specially for high AP characters, but there is a chance two shots won't be enough to take down a single zombie.

That Platepiercer, like all crossbows, can only fire one shot per turn then reload for a character with 10 AP if you have the trait that reduces AP cost for firing so it costs 3 AP to fire it and 7 to reload, but it is seriously powerful because most body armor used by the toughest human enemies is less effective against bolts than it is against bullets. It often can one-shot kill most foes in the hands of a ranged specialist, specially with the traits focused on maximizing damage and crit chance against human opponents. Perhaps it is the best ranged weapon in the entire game, except maybe for the unique .38 antique revolver with less AP cost per shot than any other gun when given to a PC with maxed agility.

*

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

It is located in one of the areas Lane asks you to check where survivors who listened to his post-apocalyptic radio show were supposed to be, shortly after you rescue and bring him to the Shelter. You can stall scavenging the most zombie-infested areas until getting to this point, specially if you have enough fishermen with high survival skills.

 

Use medical satchel items in the field.

Alternately, infirmary plus doctor and nurse.

 

It is a shame they never figured out how to implement "zombies all move at the same time".

 

Depends how much you paid for the game.

 

In general they do, but there are some quircks in the implementation that fuck up some of the orders.

 

The game is On Sale on Steam, at 50%.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/239840/

 

So I failed my first playthru and I dont see any way of salvaging it. Reached day 30 with morale hanging at around -1000 (THOUSAND). I think I fixed out how to gift luxury items too late (I had assumed they took it from the locker)

Q: if I want to get a dude from disgruntled to, say, happy. do I give him what he wants once every day, or a lot of it on a single day. I have no way of telling if giving some guy 5 pills is bringing him to happy or merely content

my main problem with morale was that most of my guys were "UNHAPPY"

I had a shit ton of food and scrap but sadly I dont see a workaround to dave shooting me. I tried maybe killing him in the shelter but I can only talk to him.

i like the game, my only gripe is that ulterior combat really drags the game down, especially in the shelters or hospitals, making turns take forever. fighting humans is really fun.

 

I would venture to say starting over might be wise

 

Ivan - Are you ignoring generic luxury items when you go on looting runs?

My experience was that early on its possible to lose morale on a daily basis. And it is possible to lose a lot of morale at once during crisis events.

But once you start looting a lot of locations, bringing home those generic luxury items builds up a huge bank of morale. Maybe I was just luckier with individual morale not getting too low but I wouldn't think its possible to have very low morale is you're looting a lot.

 

I'm on my first playthrough of the game, and I'm not sure I understand how reanimation in combat works. Now if a zombie kills a KO'd character they will rise up, that I get. But I have had situations where corpses will just spontaneously rise up when a zombie wanders near and combat begins or during a three-way fight some Looters will come back the turn after they died, even if the zombies never touched them. Are some human enemies automatically infected and I can't tell or is this a bug?

 

Some human enemies (and neutrals) are already infected when you encounter them. Keep an eye on your surroundings, as there are usually signs that this will be the case more than usual in an area. E.g. a large portion of those you encounter near hospitals and pharmacies will be pre-infected...that's why they're AT the hospital/pharmacy, they're trying to loot antibiotics. Also happens to a lesser extent at supermarkets that have a drug section.

 

Am I correct in thinking that if I spam "give pills" to X that person's mood will eventually go from OK to Happy? or do gifts only impact their morale once per day?

 

Replaying the game now on Hardcore and fuck, these first hours of the game really are FUN! The atmosphere is great as far as I'm concerned. Really hope this new 'hardcore mode' keeps the game fun throughout and that I can beat it this time. Fingers crossed!

 

Thats what i wanted to read. ill be reinstalling soon

 

What, is that sarcasm? I'm still completely clueless here. The beginning of the game was always highly entertaining, I'm just saying, it still is. The 'struggle' is the entertaining part. Which would go away in the original version of the game. Soon enough you would accumulate a month's worth of supplies or more and the game would become boring. I HOPE this new 'hardcore mode' that they introduced in the 'Reanimated' edition fixes that. Makes the game more challenging throughout. We'll see.

 

I didnt struggle at the beginning of the game, always found the underlying mechanics good but the gameplay itself too easy and boran. Hardcore mode should fix that.

 

Undead can crit for 60-70 in hardcore mode (not a lot of armor). Handguns funnily enough do a little bit less damage, but still a lot if you got no armor to speak of. Also factor in the reduced healing by resting rate (no infirmary), im guessing it is around 10% of remaining health right now (?). I found myself using the tried and tested "let the undead and humans fight it out and ill get back when they are finished" tactic a bit more in hardcore. Still a horde of rockhard critting undead is also not easy without noise makers.

 

Yeah, it'll work, no need to wait.

I'm playing on hardcore. Got to about a week's worth of food around day 30. Then it stayed about the same until I looted Austin on day 55 and got another week's worth. Never felt like I'm in much danger of running out, but I couldn't just sit on my ass either.
Then I got bored of clearing yet another zombie filled area and stopped playing. Over 1000 zombie kills at this point, in very sluggish turn-based combat, it gets old.

 

Sorry, but it won't.
Not nearly enough content to fill the days (very slow start and it again loses momentum after about 3 weeks in).
Events triggering at fixed days was an extremely bad idea.
I lost interest in the game around day 26 or so, dunno. At that point I read some NPC wiki entry and there it said sth about event x triggering on day 80 or so and in some other entry there was sth interesting happening around day 60. I was already disposing of huge gangs of looters and coyotes with extreme ease and sleepwalking through zombie hordes (ironman, hardcore and that third option whatever it was all activated). Morale was constantly improving, just as food supply. There's just too much stuff to find while looting and travel speed gets too fast way too early in the game.
And I was a bit disgruntled that there was no way to figure out how that mechanic where infected people give a daily mood penalty works. I still don't know if it lowers everyone's mood or just their own (in addition to shelter morale penalty, that one is shown at least) because they seem to lose mood on a daily basis anyway and it's all very mysterious.

I hate it when games are that obscure.

But then again I had a lot of fun in the second and third game week and your tolerance for rote gameplay might be much higher than mine so maybe you can make it to the end.
I just wished it hadn't those fixed dates for event triggering and that there was more stuff to build at the shelter (or at least that it would take longer to build it).

 

Yeah NotAGolfer is right Im afraid. Game starts really nicely but eventually becomes a chore of cleaning up areas with 100s of zeds(which hogs up the computer and your time) and waiting until the events trigger. It's really unfortunate cause I really loved the first part of the game. But after I've built everything, have all supplies in excess and I'm just passing days, it just aint fun anymore. I unfortunately never finished it either, might try sometime..

 

Dead State man... this game could be so good! I really like the shelter management part, but why does the combat have to be so atrocious and sluggish? The Zombies are a chore rather than a challenge, and the fact that the best way to approach them is frontal instead of from behind, and the only zombies that are potentially dangerous are those facing a wall really bothers me. There is no strategy involved. Just pull aggro, move 7 tiles away in triangular formation, goonsquad 'em, rinse and repeat. Battles against humans are slightly better, especially against those with guns. But their AI is so ridiculous at times its not even funny. I'll continue for now, but I have a bad feeling that I've already seen the game's best parts already.
Are there actually some kind of 'Dungeons' in this game? Everywhere I've been so far has been a Site with 2-4 small single-storey buildings and whenever I was dangerously low on hp/resources, I had no problem just heading for the next map exit, go home and replenish.
Oh, one more. I don't quite get the link between AoD and Dead State (haven't played the former yet, nor will I before its release). Do they only share the same engine or is there more to it? Since quite a few people here speak of AoD like it is the one true RPG Savior we're all waiting for, I have a hard time believing those two have too much in common.

 

I think it is the same engine.

Also i wouldn't review AoD based on DS. Two entirely different approaches to design.
If you mean graphics then yes don't expect fireworks from AoD

 

I actually don't mind the graphics. I'm happy about each inde game that doesn't come with retroindiepixelgrafx, although DS's resourcehog-ness is hardly justified by its visual quality.
I was talking about combat mechanics, weight of combat (i.e. does combat make up for 90% of the stuff you do like in Dead Space), how does the AI compare, are the maps of similar size, is overland travel also part of it (something I really like in Dead Space - or in any RPG, for that matter)... stuff like this.

 

Careful bro, two times Dead Space is a bad sign :p

 

They're very different games. There's little freeform exploration in AoD, it's more focused on heavily scripted quests with a lot of branches and skill checks. Combat is mostly a part of these scripted scenarios and so each fight is different, not much random skull bashing there.
They share the engine and some of the developers, but they're led by different people (Brian Mitsoda for DS, Vault Dweller for AoD).