PC Demolisher balance

@Hollowprime, I think it was Vedui, or JaWoodle (both?) who did a good youtube vid exploring various Shotgun Turret placements vs setting off demolishers.

And I'd bet one of them has experimented with how to set up Blade Traps to work against demolishers.

My experiance from earlier alphas led me to try elevating the path zeds walk on by half a block so blade traps only hit taller zeds, demos/cops/wights/etc, in the head.

Which so far has worked well against demolishers. Though I think if zeds start stacking up on top of each other, then it would be possible for the blade trap to set off a demolisher.

Just my .02 cents: horde nights have become more Win/Fail, with a narrower gap between the two than previously.

Which can/has resulted in bases becoming 'overpowered', so they're less likely to Fail, so there's less drama or excitement.

Something seemingly not worth noticing is impactful; the Nailgun firing slower than previously, making keeping up w repairs more challenging.

So bases get designed/built that don't even expect to be repaired during horde night.

Wasn't & isn't a huge deal to design for Cop puke & gut bombs; protect switches/traps, be able to back up, etc.

Yet while cop damage is non-trivial, and needs to be respected, having a couple few get through & go Boom! doesn't generally mean your base will fail.

Demolishers take Boom! to a whole new level, and, maybe, it's a rung or two too far.

While the design adjustments due to cop puke were mainly location tweaks, designing to endure multiple demolishers going off can be radical.

Of course, there are lots of very basic base designs that can easily endure demolishers (just a number of 5x5x4 r-concrete pillars will do) but where's the fun?

If there's very little chance of a base failing then, to me, there's less fun to be had, and less satisfaction in surviving the horde.

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Was looking through old ss's & came across this. One of the largest bases I ever built in 7dtd.

If someone is motivated enough they could build something like the perimeter of this 16.2 base & soften up demos before they reached the chewy center :)

Alpha_16.2_2017-08-18_10-30-44.jpg

 
Liesel Weppen said:
Did you even take into account that some people WANT to play rogue like, so after some time they reach a point where surviving ist NOT possible anymore?
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As both a fan of roguelikes and tower defense games, I'd say that the inevitable end where things get too hard to continue mechanic is about equally prevalent in both genres. In other words, asking for better Tower Defense does not mean asking for less sharp difficulty spikes.

Liesel Weppen said:
Your personal WHINING is not required anymore. Your analysis is not constructive, but highly subjective. Even less construcitve because you just WHINE and haven't made a single suggestion on how it could be made better.
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It's common for game developers to value their player's feelings on a subject a lot more than the things players suggest to fix the problems.

 
meganoth said:
My group had built a horde base with a large staircase (3 blocks wide) coming up to our level, with a platform half way up and turrets behind). It was something like this (P = platform, T = turrets).

       T

>>> P <<<

       V

       V

[upper level]
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Do you by chance have a screenshot of this so its a bit easier to visualize? Thanks for the ideas in advance.

Also, as many other people have posted, I drew a small stair design in paint(its very basic, and from a bilateral view) incase anyone in the future is having trouble visualizing what some people mean with putting turrets so zombies are shot from behind.

The graphic has zombies chasing the player upstairs while the turrets shoot them in the back. You could possibly add electric fences near the stairs to slow them down(perhaps when they come within view of the turrets for maximum efficiency).

Blade traps seem like they only hinder late game base design(due to triggering demos) unless you apply a zed filtering system, or make it on the third block height to only target demo heads. Hopefully they add more traps in the future( i know they are adding a melee turret in A19, which is pretty unique), as the "Advanced Engineering" does feel a bit underwhelming in terms of unlocks, but its still a good tree overall.

layout.PNG

 
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The point for me is, that bases are built now to handle demolishers and the demolishers alone. Thats what people are afraid of. Nobody other than pure beginners really care about the other zombies and thats sad. All you do from day one is focusing on building a defense that is focused on that one zombie. This for me is a negative thing, since the only purpose of the demolisher seems to be to make life harder for the veteran crowds, who else would be bored to death by now since they play for a long time and know how to handle the rest of the zombies.

The creativity of basebuilding was taken away because of people playing this game for so long, that they need more and more challenges. Like junkies waiting for the next kick. This is what I see for too long now going on in the forums and it hurts the game in my opinion very greatly.

 
Sellsents said:
The point for me is, that bases are built now to handle demolishers and the demolishers alone. Thats what people are afraid of. Nobody other than pure beginners really care about the other zombies and thats sad. All you do from day one is focusing on building a defense that is focused on that one zombie. This for me is a negative thing, since the only purpose of the demolisher seems to be to make life harder for the veteran crowds, who else would be bored to death by now since they play for a long time and know how to handle the rest of the zombies.

The creativity of basebuilding was taken away because of people playing this game for so long, that they need more and more challenges. Like junkies waiting for the next kick. This is what I see for too long now going on in the forums and it hurts the game in my opinion very greatly.
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I'll post a picture of our current base later today. It is the exact opposite. We built a square base with completely different defenses on each side - electric fence with water trap on one side, maze and dart traps on another side, shotgun turrets and fire traps on another side, and blade trap and spikes on yet the other side. We purposefully don't build defenses base on various known bulletproof defenses shared/discovered. I honestly think it's one of our most creative bases yet and we're not done yet. I was wandering our map the other day and came across another base design that I had never seen before and was enthralled by it. We don't design for a specific zombie. We build semi-organically and watch to see how the zombies handle it and adapt accordingly.  Mind you, we have thrown in a few custom zombies from Snufkin's Custom Zombie pack which has forced us to re-think some of the defenses anyway. 

There are different ways to play the game. We're not playing to win. We're playing to live in the world, experiment, and explore. 

 
To OP's original question before the thread started debating the completeness of a 7 year old game still in Alpha or that it was advertised as having tower defense elements on Kickstarter...

The way I balanced Demo's for my group was changing the zombie referenced from army soldier to fat zombie. This kept the HP but removed the damage reduction and armor. I then increased the detonate time by 2s and made it stop counting down on death so that it has parity with the cop. There was also an additional damage reduction mod (if I remember correctly) that I removed as well since it looked like it was double dipping on damage reduction.

Everything else remains as is. This keeps it as a fast moving, spike mowing juggernaut with serious block damage capability that you have to deal with quickly. It has plenty of HP to soak bullets but TTK isn't too high especially in a crowd. Weapons required to quickly kill one remains broad instead of being reliant on an M60. The base building tactics of shooting one from behind to avoid triggering it are still there. 

Oh, and I changed the XP mod to be inline with a cop since it was lower for no good reason for such a threat. 

 
I have had no issues with demolishers. I'm usually higher than they are so its much easier to hit them in head. With metal bars at least 2 blocks out so if attacking my base i have no worries about setting them off, by shooting them from behind. When i do use shotgun turrets, i place them away from my base to shoot incoming Z's.

 
Ti2xGr said:
A few observations after adjusting to Demolishers (and some modlets with other new zombies).

Yes, it is not balanced out of the gate for some. Adapt - Where you would put one block thick, do two. Relatively easy solution. 

You can change the gamestages, limiting the rarity of these particular zombies if you so desire. Heck, you can edit them out if you want. 

You can adjust how much block damage they do in a variety of ways. You can even adjust if they plow through spikes or get damaged by them and how much.
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You CAN adapt to a lot. If it's fun is an entirely different story.

I for one spend horde nights in temp bases or just floor level with an M60 and mow it all down. It feels so pointless to build a beautiful, strong base and end up not only with the mentioned destroyed steel blocks, but with a crater landscape of swiss cheese at my front door - all the while doing what I do at ground level as well, hold an M60 and shoot. 

The base serves little purpose these days. It costs a lot of energy and basically doesn't really add much. Frankly speaking, the demolisher doesn't add to the game, it just makes you go for a sepcific playstyle. And I don't want to have to resort to cheese bases or dart trap armies only. 

To me, the variety of playstyles possible makes 7D2D what it is. And the demo doesn't add here, it takes away. 

 
Blood Moon is easy to survive by climbing any brick POI, busting out ladders or stairs that reach you, and simply shooting down as zombies mass on the floors underneath. Buildings with open floor designs like the church or theater work the best as you have a clear line of sight all the way to the ground floor from a high upper level. It honestly feels so cheap, but effective and I've never had a POI fall even when using the same building multiple weeks in a row.

I finally built a fun base closer to the ground after day 60 something... and by the second demolisher it was breached and overrun. I think the explosion damage is reasonable, but they have waaay too many hit points for that kind of role. A suicide bomber type enemy should be easy to spot, easy to hear, and easy to take down with a few good shots. I'm shooting a level 6 marksman rifle with full mods and 4/5 perks and it feels like I'm just tickling him with headshots right now. Maybe I just suck, but it isn't very fun and feels extremely unfair.

IMO change the demolisher character model into a berserker enemy. Keep the same HP but he attacks individual blocks with a club for massive damage. Maybe he's intelligent enough to target support blocks and weak walls. Then make the suicide bomber enemy a nice weaker target, with lots of flashing lights and beeping so players keep alert and prioritize them, and get punished for not paying attention if they get close to your walls and explode. That seems like it would be a more fair system, even if you throw a steady stream of bombers at the player to increase the challenge. 

 
Were it not for the demo boys, A18 would be an absolute snooze fest seeing that they're pretty much the only zombie that threatens any sort of purpose built horde base.  Course I have yet to convince my friends to let me set zombie movement speed to nightmare at all times... 😛

That said, I do find the challenge they provide a bit of a massive jump.  A17 the biggest threat to a base was irradiated cops exploding, which would barely dent reinforced concrete, let alone steel.  It also sucked to have some of our fav non-cheese strats taken away; shotgun turrets having such a high chance of setting them off pretty much caused our first A18 horde that featured demos to pretty much bring half our base down as a result.

Pretty sure the devs want there to be something that scares the @%$*#! out of bunkered down players; while the demos do kinda come across as a cheesy way of accomplishing this, they at least make higher gamestage hordes something that's a bit of a challenge, even if many find it a cheesy way of doing so.  It's not like we players haven't had all sort of cheesy things we've been able to do in A18.

 
Yeah, honestly the Demolisher has become a demoralizing 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' entity. I understand the reasoning, but the implementation is not working.

I propose a subtle change to it's behavior. Remove the explode on death. Make it only explode when it can't path to a player. I should not lose a section of my base, because I succeeded in killing it before it kills me.

 
Hey all. I'm kinda new here, just started playing with alpha 18 on PC however I was a console player since that launch.

Was the behemoth more or less replaced by the Demolisher? I remember when the behemoth was announced & I was super stoked about it. Then saw they dropped it & then here's this demolisher zombie. 

He looks pretty cool & I get the idea but I also see the frustrations people have with them. I personally haven't dealt with one yet so don't have a direct opinion of them. 

At least the behemoth would be a huge target that players could plan on/focus all fire power on when they show up.

Think they will give the behemoth another shot?

 
The issue I have with demolishers is that it renders like 95% of the end game content of the game, pointless unless you cheese/exploit it.  Turrets?  Blade Traps?  Not viable end-game.  In terms of game design, the existence of demolishers contradict a lot of the skills and end-game trap design.

From the casual player's point of view, and not the person who is insanely good at video games and plays on nightmare difficulty with zombies at 3294x speed at all times... Instead of investing in guns, you can choose to build a base with lots of traps and such.  Some people have fun doing that, and seeing their hard work pay off on horde night.  Oh sweet.  You can build a base full of traps and let the traps do most of the work for you... a lot of the content of the game is designed for that.

Only... none of that is true, because demolishers exist.  It renders a lot of the Intelligence skill trees effectively pointless.

I mod out demolishers; I have a lot more fun with the game that way.  :)

 
Kazgrel said:
Were it not for the demo boys, A18 would be an absolute snooze fest seeing that they're pretty much the only zombie that threatens any sort of purpose built horde base.  Course I have yet to convince my friends to let me set zombie movement speed to nightmare at all times... 😛
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The point made ist that it's easy enough to shoot yourself through horde night without any base. Actually ground level shooting in the street might be easier than in a standard base, as your standard base will be breached and due to structural issues, surviving horde night then ois easier with no base than with a regular base (not counting cheese or specific demolisher bases here).

For me, something is wrong, if survival in a base is more complicated than survival in an open field. 

So no, demo's don't scare any sh*t out of me. Actually when the horde follows me and I set of the demo, it's just gonna take a big part of the horde with it. I just do it somewhere in the street where I don't mind swiss cheese. No base required. 

Purpendicular said:
The issue I have with demolishers is that it renders like 95% of the end game content of the game, pointless unless you cheese/exploit it.  Turrets?  Blade Traps?  Not viable end-game.  In terms of game design, the existence of demolishers contradict a lot of the skills and end-game trap design.
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That is the point. The demo doesn not add to the game, it reduces viable game content by a large margin. 

 
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Purpendicular said:
Only... none of that is true, because demolishers exist.  It renders a lot of the Intelligence skill trees effectively pointless.
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While it can seem that way, there are ways to 'safely' use Blade Traps & Turrets. By 'safely' mean that there is a very low possibility of the traps themselves setting off the Demolishers.

Set Turrets to shoot them in the back. Use Half blocks to raise Demo/Cop/Soldier/'Tall-zeds' so only their heads get hit by Blade Traps. See earlier in this thread.

And not saying that I personally 'like' the Demos & just, "git gud". Fully agree that Demos wind up accounting for too much effort/time/skill(?) and they dominate base design more than I'd prefer, But conversly as a long time player the demos have encouraged/forced base redesigns (depending on what kind of bases you build) and that's not a bad thing by itself.

 
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