Zone Transition Exploit

[MichaelBurge]

If you are struggling in a certain zone against certain enemies, there is a way that you can abuse the zone transitions to get a huge advantage. It goes like this:

1. Focus all of your power using every tool to kill a single enemy, but hang near a zone entrance
2. After killing the enemy, retreat into the next zone.
3. Recharge your shields, psi, health, grenades, etc.
4. Save
5. Go back into the zone with the enemies, and go to step 1 unless all enemies are dead.

This offers a couple advantages:
* They will remain with status effects when you next enter the area, so try to fear, fire, freeze, etc. them before you leave again.
* You can recharge everything you need in between each enemy
* You can save after killing each enemy
* You can apply buffs like food, morphine, adrenaline, etc. before initiating on each enemy.

And one disadavantage:
* It looks like you take a -10 penalty to initiative when you do this. I'm not sure if it's a byproduct of another mechanic or intended just for this.

Even with the disadvantage, this seems extremely powerful so I thought I'd report it in case it was unintended.

[ShadowRun]

Closely related to this "time is frozen for zones I am not in" is a problem with TNT clearing rocks. In many locations, the rocks are right near to the transition zone. So you plant the TNT, its 10 second timer starts, you warp out of the map, wait a minute or two to make sure the TNT has detonated, walk back into the map, and the TNT timer continues. The only way to clear these rocks is to just stand next to the TNT and hope to survive the explosion damage yourself. It's an understandable limitation.

[Scuka]

Zone transition can also be a problem with stealth.

The detection level doesn't reset when you switch zones, so if you're trying to sneak past some enemies to get to the zone transition, they'll get their detection up, and when you get back, they'll be on the same detection level, sometimes making it impossible to sneak back to where you came from.

[ShadowRun]

I think all of this is intended.

There was a time when Styg considered making hostiles follow the player between transitions

I think it's intended too. If you allow NPCs to map transition, that opens up more exploits where players get a train of hostiles to trail them back to SGS to get mown down by auto turrets and use that strategy to painstakingly clear entire maps, naked, at level 1.

As for blowing up rocks near transitions: there should always be corners you can hide behind or enough space to get away from the blast. Plus, you can also use a jackhammer instead of TNTs.

I agree that definitely seems to be the intention of the map designer, but there have been a number where there just isn't space / cover.

As for jackhammers, I was level 10 (with oddity paradigm; play time 1:00:06) when I submitted the drill rotor control circuit board and SGS NPCs immediately told me to buy explosives from Lucas to go out to Hathor and the battery plant. I was level 13 (play time 1:11:09) when I discovered Foundry on my own, with no instruction or mission to go there, and was surprised to find it had extensive content despite having no lead-ins to entice you there in the first place. But yes, once you've found out Foundry exists, you can get a jackhammer (for free). However, between those two points is 11 hours with only TNT, trying to stand out of the blast. On the other hand, if Lucas only sold jackhammers once the tunnels were cleared...

If I can figure out where the insufficient demolition staging areas were, I'll post screenshots.

But yes, freezing the map a player leaves and thawing the map the player enters is completely understandable, if only for computational resource reasons.

[Lightzy]

Enemies can follow you if the zone transition is blue. Which is nice. The few times it happened to me it was a real shock and awesomely fun.

Otherwise yeah, as a pure psyker I abuse zone transition every single fight almost:) Otherwise there's no way in hell i'd win a fight