SunshineDistillery
commented
3 years ago Winged bugs should make way more noise. You could change them to their own species, give them different move noises, and add the flag for noisy movement. You could also give them a parrot attack to make buzzing sounds.
Not every bug has to be a threat or super interesting. Flies, moths, fireflies, butterflies, could be peaceful animals.
You can mimic cocoons by making immobile pacifist creatures with no sense tags.
The ant Queen's hardcoded attacks are really dumb and easily exploitable for infinite food. Any replacement would be an improvement.
Venera3
Xpyder
LyleSY
Resok
kevingranade
actual-nh
slimeboy460
stale[bot]
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
The game has a wide range of insects and assorted creepy crawlies which are universally pretty boring. This comes from a few places, ranging from possible oversights ( all arthropods are blinder than a flashbanged bat ) to not utilizing later additions ( most of their special attacks are hardcoded, nothing uses the spell system) and generally bland flavor.
Describe the solution you'd like
I'm planning on redoing all members of the spider/insect json and any other neglected monsters I feel particularly strong about and/or figure out something cool for. This will all be JSON, but I'll make some notes below in case an actual programmer wants to help out. Generally I'm aiming to give each species/group a lifecycle with at least one reproductive form to make the world feel a bit more alive and to make pacifying large swathes of land less trivial. If it makes sense I'll try to include predation/interspecies hostility, but aggroing is an all-or-nothing deal, so we'll have to see how that shakes out in game.
Concepts so far, with ideas that would require coding behind "//":
[x] Dragonflies: the naiads (larvae) are aquatic hunters with a reach attack, the adults are fast predators in medium-sized swarms, dangerous up until mid-late game with high armor piercing and a grab attack. Mega variant lays eggs, hits like a truck but can be outrun easily.
//Some pathing tweaks to make them lay eggs in water[x] Centipedes: small, frightened young that grow slowly into the most dangerous predator of the swamps with a deadly venom and high enough damage output to threaten endgame chars. Mega variant is a centipede mother, slightly slower from carrying her young which fall off and join the fight as it goes on. //A monster spell trigger at low health would make the spawning nicer
[x] Fireflies: small, incidental critters lighting up the swamps at night, mostly useful to get chased around by the rest of the gang.
[ ] Mosquitos: large swarms of hard to hit, low-damage annoyances to keep earlygame characters entertained and to give the predators something to hunt. Mega becomes a blood-gorged spiky ball that spawns smaller mosquitos (+maybe a ranged attack?).
[ ] Bees: add queens and drones, queens lay eggs that have a small chance to spawn a drone and a miniscule chance for a new queen. Workers grow larger with age, but are relatively docile until you mess with them, they also drop wax. Drones have good vision, aggro readily and have a pheromone sting to "mark" you ( if scents work, will need some testing). Queens are mean in a fight, but the main difficulty should come from numbers and the venom. // Custom wandering hordes to simulate swarms and building new hives, monfaction-specific charm spells for Insect mutants to suborn them, intrahive fighting to simulate a nascent queen
[ ] Wasps: egglaying queens+worker growth like in the bees, add a small chance for worker wasps to drop balls of flesh (randomly clean/mutated/tainted) to simulate them hunting. If dermatiks don't become flies they'd get a small chance to spawn from the eggs. Agressive from the get-go, camping out near a wasp nest should be suicidal for any non-lategame character. // Gametime swarming and nest building
[ ] Flies: are pretty boring, so they also become mostly prey animals. Adding dermatiks into their evolution line might make sense from the resemblance to IRL botflies, but I find it hard to make them interesting. Maybe turn them into fireflies to make the swamps light up a bit.
[ ] Spiders: since they are pretty similar anyway turn them into social hunters (some spider species form communities to cooperate in the hunt IRL). Common egg that can be laid by all and can hatch any of the group or common large egglayer evolution. Wolf spiders have good vision and are fast, jumping spiders get longer leaps and web spiders get a thrown web. Also make the spider pit actually spawn, make you scared to go in those webbed forests and maybe rehabilitate the trapdoor spider.
[ ] Crayfish, slugs, other assorted forgotten animals: my knowledge of cool animal facts is pretty insect-centric, so for these I'll need some suggestions.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Accept the fact that Cataclysm is a zombie survival game. Never.
Additional context
The dragonfly rework is already up as PR #44779 , as well as a followup draft to liven up swamps a bit ( #44997 ). Feel free to discuss both + the ideas above and make suggestions.