In my MP game, we have a very large POI Wasteland base.
I find it to be a bit of a mixed bag. That first night we started to work on it, we were constantly under attack. I had to stick and move, build and shoot the entire time.
Eventually we managed to fortify the walls enough to make it not worth their while to hit. I had to personally build diversion walls, lined with wooden traps stacked on
top of each other. Occasionally, a demo will show up, and put a big hole in something. Eventually we fortified all the doors into vaults. We have two main entrances in and out through the front and the back, but we also have a bunch of different parkour related escape routes.
The Good: If you have shotgun turrets monitoring your entrances and you modify your entrances to be more viable as breaching points for zombies, you can actually chill inside for longer than 5 minutes if you need to. It's not the most efficient, because there's usually loss of rounds as sometimes the turrets just pound away until the corpse disappears. Which sucks, but if you need a breather, its the best defense you will have. If you build in a wasteland metropolis, there are often a lot of working vending machines that will sell rations and peas, making some endgame recipes a bit easier to get your hands on. Trust me, you'll need those.
The Bad: It is a nightmare at night if you don't have proper base defenses. It's a constant stream of rando zeds and they sometimes get outta hand if you have a very large base like we do. If your POI base is connected to another building, you better come up with a better place to lay low. Zombies will often tunnel their way through adjoined buildings so they can climb up stairs and then beat down on a roof to get to you. It blows my mind the level of tactical thinking they will go through to find the easiest way to you and circumvent ALL of your base defenses. I had to reinforce several nearby structures to avoid them pathing this way. Not only did a few of us have to lay down a series of LCB's in a specific pattern to suppress sleeper spawns, but there was a lot of filling up hallways, reinforcing windows, knocking out stairs. Hours of work just to keep the zeds from finding alternative passages into our base from higher than our roof. We built a garden on top of a parking structure across the street (complete with bridge from our rooftop) and wow was that a mistake. I had to completely demo out large sections of the inside of that POI, reinforce walls, and make sure there is no way they could tunnel upwards within walls or corpse ladder their way towards the garden itself. And when I mean reinforce, I mean all the way up to steel. I hated the amount of work needed to complete, and I was disgusted by the amount of resources I blew through doing these renovations. It took more resources to fortify the neighbourhood this way than it did with the base itself. *throws arms up in frustration*
The Ugly: Simply put; If you want a base in the city in the wasteland, be prepared to deal with a multitude of logistical problems. Most are solvable with enough time and resources, but you need to be extremely mindful of how the zombies will path through to get to you, and many of your defenses will require daily maintenance. One of the more frustrating issues is hearing my shotgun turrets running 24/7. After a while this sound starts to drone in my head, and I have to turn down the appropriate volume just so I can hear my friends on Discord.
I think if I have to do it all over again, there are plenty of inner city POI choices that would be a fraction of the headache I had with the one we chose. The new Cathedral, for instance - has a small house unit off to one corner that would have taken significantly less work to fix up and maintain for long periods of time. At least we learned enough about the wasteland that finding a good spot for a Horde Base was much easier. In a pinch, those bridge overpasses can be built upon and walled up in such a way to make them worthwhile. It also took a lot of resources, and ours uses every kinda trap there is, including land mines. Luckily, cooking pot mines can be very cheap and quick to produce. One word of caution however is be careful not to place them in rows or in clusters. It's best to spread them out, or else runners will gleefully run across several of them in row before the explosion catches up with them. Use barb wire or wood spikes in between them in checkerboard like fashion, and you will end up replacing far less the next time you need to use the space again.
I'd have to say that honestly, I don't actually recommend it unless you have the manpower and the resources to build and maintain it. Not only am I the builder, but I'm also the primary miner as well. The benefit here is that I was able to keep up with my own resource demand. It's actually much more worthwhile to build on the cusp of a city, then build downtown. It's also less costly and demanding if you build strategically just outside of the wasteland biome and then just go into the wasteland city when you feel like going after jobs or loot. In one week, I've blown through entire stacks of stacks of mineable materials. I want to also state that this was a setup for six people including myself. A single player or a duo will require less work and materials, but you'll also need to be on higher alert at all times. For example, if you're mining solo in the wasteland, be prepared for Bears and Dogs that will block your mine shaft exits, and may not always announce themselves when they arrive either. You may also want to forgo using an auger altogether, because the noise and the heat will definitely complicate things.
To end this little novel I've written, I should just say that If you're something of a masochist - everything in the wasteland will seem like a paradise.
And if my friends decide to do this again, I will make an attempt to persuade them to choose either the Desert or the Snow biomes.
