Utterly Mad

I have discovered a cool and yet interesting... bug? in cataclysm. Perhaps it existed before and perhaps it's been fixed by now. I call it the "counter cascade." Say you have a single zombie fighting you. You have at least 2 unarmed combat, have the brawling style set, and the zombie attacks you. You get the message "You catch the zombies attack and hit back!" and the zombie takes a hit. The counter takes a step though, if the zombie is quick enough you might get a second counter or nothing and then you may take your step and attack or run.

The cascade comes into play when more than one zombie comes into play, at that point it can become lethal for you. A zombie attacks, you counter, another zombie nearby takes the one step opportunity and attacks, you manage to counter that one by chance as well. The more zombies their are, the more likely a cascade is to occur as zombies pile on and the chances of countering rise with the number of zombies. It gets to the point where you have no control as each zombie takes a swing and a counter attack procs or not for each zombie. Each counter takes a step, opening you to more attacks and more counters. This continues without your input until all the zombies are dead, you are dead, or you fail a counter check against all the zombies within attacking range from you.

Out of interest, I scummed my save and turned on debug invincibility. I then ported to the center of a massive horde and began fighting. The cascade I triggered killed the entire horde with the exception of 6 zombies. The cascade also caused a time jump which made it look like a huge group of zombies suddenly vanished and was replaced by a 3X3 square of red %. My character gained 3 levels in unarmed and broke his weapon long before the cascade ended. It's taken so long to pulp all the corpses, some of them have gotten back up.

Final note, if you have high encumbrance, debug invincibility, and the thing you are counter cascading is a zombie child or some such, you will crash the game as a counter cascade is totally possible at high unarmed levels against a single opponent.

SIDE NOTE: Lol, I found a maxed out cash card among the dead. I'm gonna burn all this shit and use debug to lower my skills though. It feels fine to save scum this, but keeping all this crap generated by my testing doesn't feel quiet right.