Challenge : 1000 kill Horde Night Fight



We recently scored over 800 kills with this base. It's based on the Wind Turbine from ZZTong. All steel. Awesome.

Anyways, our goal is now to reach 1000 kills. It's very late game for us and we have all the fun toys. Great automatic weapons, exploding arrows, rockets, steel for days. Game stages are in the mid to high 300s. This fight scored 909 kills combined.

Blood moon count set to 32. We are thinking ways to get over 1000. Bumping the blood moon count from 16 to 32 didn't really change much. 

Any ideas?

 
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where are the demos?

some suggestions -> a longer bridge to your entrance, you'll have more time to shoot them down, few blade traps to cut the heads off the zeds, may be a lower entrance to facilitate the climbing for zeds? 

some auto turrets upfront to shoot down the flying bags of rotten meat ? As while they are there there is no spawn for crawling buddies you can shoot.

 
Max Headroom said:
Bumping the blood moon count from 16 to 32 didn't really change much. 
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Parallel processing. If the zeds are waiting in line, their friends are not spawning. Either open another service desk or figure out way ways to take care of more of them remotely.

900 seconds for a 1000 kills, you got less than a second to deal with each, gotta be fast! :)

 
Vampirenostra said:
where are the demos?
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There were demos. Most we killed before they could blow up.

theFlu said:
Parallel processing. If the zeds are waiting in line, their friends are not spawning. Either open another service desk
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Oh good idea! There is an entrance door at the base of the tower (now a steel door) that is currently protected by dart traps on a trigger plate. In this fight it didn't see much traffic. But if I stand in that doorway (drawing some of the traffic) with a couple of fully-loaded machine guns I can do a lot of killing and close the door to reload.

I'll also bump the blood moon count up to 64. Looking forward to day 84!

This is our last play-through before 1.0.

 
Max Headroom said:
There were demos. Most we killed before they could blow up.

Oh good idea! There is an entrance door at the base of the tower (now a steel door) that is currently protected by dart traps on a trigger plate. In this fight it didn't see much traffic. But if I stand in that doorway (drawing some of the traffic) with a couple of fully-loaded machine guns I can do a lot of killing and close the door to reload.

I'll also bump the blood moon count up to 64. Looking forward to day 84!

This is our last play-through before 1.0.
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Along the same lines with using another path, just widening the bridge/stairs to allow more zombies up at the same time would increase your chance to kill them more quickly, and as was mentioned, a longer bridge can help if you're using armor piercing ammo or a .44/Desert Vulture with the book for armor piercing where you can hit multiple enemies in a row.  Having the stairs come up from more than one direction (e.g. have it as a T with the bridge) so they can climb up from multiple directions also can help.  I've even done stairs that surround a platform so they can come up from 270 degrees (3/4) of the way around that platform/bridge to get more up there more quickly.  When you're trying to kill a lot of zombies in a limited time frame like with horde night, it all comes down to how quickly you can kill them and they don't spawn if you already have the maximum number spawned, so getting them within range of weapons more quickly will make a lot of difference.

Having guns on towers (or not) out away from your base to hit the backs of zombies that are coming to your base can also speed up killing until they run out of ammo.

 
Max Headroom said:
Oh good idea! There is an entrance door at the base of the tower (now a steel door) that is currently protected by dart traps on a trigger plate. In this fight it didn't see much traffic. But if I stand in that doorway (drawing some of the traffic) with a couple of fully-loaded machine guns I can do a lot of killing and close the door to reload.
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I wonder if standing down there you won't draw some of the traffic, but all of it instead?

I'm no expert in horde bases as I don't tend to use them, but wouldn't the key to parallel paths be having the distances be equal.

 
zztong said:
I wonder if standing down there you won't draw some of the traffic, but all of it instead?

I'm no expert in horde bases as I don't tend to use them, but wouldn't the key to parallel paths be having the distances be equal.
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Well, two players in the main fighting position and one below ... some sort of split I guess. If it doesn't work well I can just shut the door and go back up to the main position.

We've also thought of putting a new third stairway like this with an upper fighting position that allows machine-gun fire straight down that stairway. With a well-fitted M60 I can hold back the entire horde till the magazine is empty. It does dig a substantial hole in the ground at the foot of the stairs. 😉
 



 
i noticed a few leapers up on top of your overhang. that just chilled out there most of the time. Maybe a second person a bit above you instead to shoot them off when they leap up there.

So instead of you both being in 1 spot. Stack 1 person on top of the other that way one can shoot down at the zombies and the other straight at them. They should still run that path right to you.

 
Maybe instead of having 2 stairways to get to "the top" to then be shot, make the staircase more "pyramid shaped" (or something) with a big base. In this way, zeds spawning from any direction have a straight line to get to the top (less running around to get to the stairs) and it also widens the area zeds can come up the stairs, so they dont block each other on the way up. I would think that the "top" would need to be larger than a few blocks so they dont all block each other at the top (so like the top is a platform vs a few blocks). Additionally, having 1 person "higher up" that can see down the sides of the stairs and can shoot before they reach the top might help with any weird congestion, and birds (maybe have that person more exposed to be able to shoot birds/birds attack them and bunch up?) and zeds stuck anywhere. 
 

i feel that the more zeds you can take out "as far away as possible" the better, because the time they spend running to the kill zone takes up time for any more zeds to spawn, so the person "up top" would be 1 shot sniping as much as possible (and handling demolishers), and the person below just mowing down anything that makes it to the top. 

 
Like others have said shortening the time from spawn to kill is critical when trying to maximize kill count during a set time period like a blood moon. What I've done that worked well previously was to build in a large flat area where there are no impediments to zombies spawning and nothing keeping them from running a straight line to the players. I built an entrance from each cardinal direction and tricked the zombies into a pit fall to bedrock. The bottom of the pit fall was covered with crisscrossing electric fences. Then we stood above the pit fall and kept filling the pit with pipe bombs and grenades with one guy keeping up a steady fire of frag rocks to light off all the munitions.

 
Today we had our last horde fight on A21 and this play-through. I thought with a few changes we might get over the 1000 kill mark but it didn't happen. Final tally: 910.

So for this attempt we removed the punch turrets to give them the full run to our position. We added the third stairway but they mostly ignored that, making the high fighting position mostly useless. That might have just been a fact of the direction they came from. I did not try fighting at the ground-level steel door for fear of taking all the traffic away from the stairs. Cop-spit was a bit of a problem as it was on day 77. I don't think it changed anything. We were well armored and very well armed. All automatic weapons had rad-removers and cripple-em mods. Made for a lot of flying limbs!

In an attempt to increase the zombie flow I increased MaxSpawnedZombies to 75 and set BloodMoonCount to 64. Could maybe have gone bigger as my FPS stayed mostly above the 20s. 

The original intent of this design was to slow the zombies down. Long stairs and a high fighting position to avoid rage mode from falling zombies. We previously had punch-turrets that would knock zombies off the approach rail if they should survive our fire.

One thing we don't have answer to is the distance at which horde zombies spawn. As you can see in the beginning of the video, it takes a while for the first zombies to reach the kill-zone.

All in all it was quite an entertaining fight. Not sure the exploding ordinance is killing as many as we hoped but it looks cool!

So as we wait for 1.0, we are thinking of designs that might reach that magic 1000.

Enjoy the video!



 
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We had another idea.  We talked about starting the night standing at the top of the stairs back-to-back-to-back which each of us facing down one of the stairs. For some reason one or our team thought that was a bad idea. 😄

But we could hold them off there for a while until we needed to reload. Everyone would have to use a machine-gun (or two). We would be exposed to bird attack. But e could fall-back to the original fighting position.

Maybe if 1.0 is delayed we'll try that. We have play-time on the weekends.

 
We're going to have another go at this. Last night we tested a ground-level three-position base that shows promise. Horde was limited by our test player's relatively low game stages but the base shows potential. Stay tooned. 🙂

 
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