PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

[Locusta]

stealth gets explosive right? horde night. If your atleast good enough you can go with a bow for a while in horde nights. steel ammo and have a xbow with xplode bolts for groups.

Ahh I forgot about explosives...

That might work out ok actually. We only get explosive bolts, not arrows, correct? And is there progression for the crossbows?

Loc

 

[madmole]

Just to clarify a bit. You could not craft a baseball bat at all by going into the intelligence branch since that is the top tier version of clubs which are in the strength build.
By going into the intelligence build you could craft stun batons, junk turrets, and explosives. So maxing out your intelligence you could craft a blue quality stun baton with average stats. You could possibly find a blue stun baton with higher stats or lower stats.

If you max out strength you could eventually craft a blue quality baseball bat that had average stats which means you could possibly find a blue baseball bat with better or worse stats.

This is slightly wrong. Nobody can craft a tier 3 weapon without a book/schematic. Perks let you craft tier 2 weapons like sawed offs, Ak's, hunting rifles, but to craft the top tier 3 weapons like pump shotties, m60's, and sniper rifles you need to find a book/schematic.
Most likely you will find your weapon in loot, but it depends on play style. You can't craft guns without looting because the parts are loot only. I look at crafting as early game and for bad luck random gods. It fills the gaps looting can sometimes leaves. Its good for making a decent weapon for your buddy who joined after you got rolling, or using up spare parts to make some coin.

I know some people might be upset but this is the best version of the game ever, at least TFP all likes it.

 

[meganoth]

So as a mostly single player guy, the agility class doesn’t sound that appealing as you just stated that they are not great on horde nights. Shouldn’t the balance be that all classes are able to handle hordes in some fashion? Especially because the entire game revolves around horde night.
I’m all for a challenge and what not, but I’d hate to see so much work being put into a class that not a lot of players use because it’s inferior to other classes.

This is nothing new. The bow/crossbow specialist had always the advantage of using less and easier to get ammunition when scavenging POIs. His disadvantage was that the stealth multiplier on headshots doesn't apply on horde night. It is diversification, if all builds were alike, why would you replay the game with a different class?

Usually you should have much more (bullet-type) ammo left on horde nights than a non-stealthy guy. This means that each shot with guns does less damage on horde night but you can use that ammo with utter recklessness to balance that out.

There was a long discussion about this about 2 weeks ago (with people on both sides of the stealth/bows too good - too bad fence), and the gist of TFP's response to that discussion was "Working as intended"

I believe you are misreading my request. Instead of just one path up a skyscraper, having a choose route A: slaughterfest (red light clues) with more rush type scenario vs. route B: stealth (white light) route. Right now, all POI dungeons have just one specific path to the top/end. With a skyscraper, there should be no reason why we might not have enough room for two or even three different paths to the top with a bit of variety of challenge depending on the path we take. I tend to stealth by default (love sneaking around with my silenced pistol), but in a group scenario, we tend to go a bit more aggressive as we are able to flank etc. If one path had waves of zombies vs. another path with a trickle of zombies as we wind around corners, etc..
I apologize if I wasn't clear on my first explanation. I'm not sure how else to describe it. Does that make sense?

I'm all for more routes through a POI, but I have problems picturing what a stealth route should have different as a rush route. It isn't the case that people wiith loud weapons want masses of zombies, they want to save ammo and get to the good loot like everyone else. If you present two paths, one filled with zombies, one nearly empty, probably everyone would take the latter path.

 

[madmole]

Yeah, it looks like your prediction will be pretty spot on. 55 Mf's left is the last that I heard. So...yeah.

41. I predict streamer weekend on the 20th.

 

[madmole]

Number One is true, intended, and by design after testing and feedback from A17 showed that crafting the best led to no reason to explore.
Number two is your misconception based on looking at it through A16 and A17 eyes. Intelligence is not the build that represents crafting the best stuff. Each attribute has its own best stuff to craft. Intelligence is for crafting your own vehicles and workstations and traps and electrical components and devices and also gaining xp from traps.

OP meds, you don't even need armor with double healing meds and fort bites give you near immunity for a bit.

 

[madmole]

so we can use them to our advantage?

Please quote whatever I was quoting, or rephrase the entire question. I delete everything read before so have no idea what you are talking about.

 

[madmole]

Why not make demolisher damage scale to GS? Locking them behind 80+ hours seems off.

I'm level 60 ish. Leveling is way slower and way more powerful. Attribute top ranks only cost 3 now not 4 and 5, so imagine level 60 being about like level 120 before or something. Maybe not as many perks bought of course, but more meaningful perks that are not level gated nor as strong as attribute gates, and with schematics to unlock everything, less wasted perks on a lot of things like cooking/workstations/electrical

 

[Zombiepoptard]

Subway would make a killer POI. Would need some extra shapes to pull it off more convincingly, I'd think. We had a community member of ours do a "Fallout" inspired subway which is available on NexusMods along with all our other builds. Here is a screen:
View attachment 29036

Does a pretty nice job I thought, with the shape pallete available. MOAR shapes! Here's hoping the creative/prefab menu gets an insurgence in A18.

Subway would be really cool. All they would have to do is collapse both ends.

 

[Locusta]

This is nothing new. The bow/crossbow specialist had always the advantage of using less and easier to get ammunition when scavenging POIs. His disadvantage was that the stealth multiplier on headshots doesn't apply. It is diversification, if all builds were alike, why would you replay the game with a different class?
Usually you should have much more ammo left on horde nights than a non-stealthy guy. This means that each shot does less damage on horde night but you can use high-damage ammo like 7.62 ammunition with utter recklessness to balance that out.

There was a long discussion about this about 2 weeks ago (with people on both sides of the stealth/bows too good - too bad fence), and the gist of TFP's response to that discussion was "Working as intended"

Some good points there. I didn’t mean all builds should be alike. I meant that all builds should have some way of killing for horde night, but in a different style. One build has big guns, another traps, etc.. I’m probably just worried for no reason only because of how things can be interpreted on these forums.

If the build is TFP approved, that’s good enough for me until I play it.

Loc

 

[Ti2xGr]

This is nothing new. The bow/crossbow specialist had always the advantage of using less and easier to get ammunition when scavenging POIs. His disadvantage was that the stealth multiplier on headshots doesn't apply on horde night. It is diversification, if all builds were alike, why would you replay the game with a different class?
Usually you should have much more (bullet-type) ammo left on horde nights than a non-stealthy guy. This means that each shot with guns does less damage on horde night but you can use that ammo with utter recklessness to balance that out.

There was a long discussion about this about 2 weeks ago (with people on both sides of the stealth/bows too good - too bad fence), and the gist of TFP's response to that discussion was "Working as intended"

I'm all for more routes through a POI, but I have problems picturing what a stealth route should have different as a rush route. It isn't the case that people wiith loud weapons want masses of zombies, they want to save ammo and get to the good loot like everyone else. If you present two paths, one filled with zombies, one nearly empty, probably everyone would take the latter path.

When we go as a group, we get shared XP so we want more zombies to kill. If we have over three people in a Raid party, we search out the more difficult POI's (like the large Shotgun Messiah, Skyscrapers, etc.). If we have a tougher route with a crap-ton (technical term) of zombies on the way to the top of a skyscraper, we'll go for it knowing that we're going to up our XP faster and risk it. However, if I or a smaller group want to attempt the same Skyscraper, I would tend to go a slower more methodical traditional dungeon (tighter, but longer) path where stealth is better. Both paths could exist at one POI.

 

[Xtrakicking]

Shoot them anywhere but the bomb and they die doing no damage. Shoot the bomb and he blows up. He will certainly cause action from the players, if left unattended he'll punch a hole through your defenses, if you shoot the bomb while he's near your base your base will take a lot of damage. The strategy will be to waste ammo on his head, or lure him away and shoot the bomb. Either way it gets players out of their comfort zone and is balance IMO.

I was skeptical at first, but with these conditions and the fact that it's a late stage zombie makes me think the demolisher is a great idea to bring something interesting to the late game again.

 

[Axe13]

Its a real pain in the ass trying to just answer questions when I have to sift through pages of debates.

Maybe have tags or "flairs"...whatever it is that denotes serious questions on forum.

 

[Thecolours]

This is what we've done. To craft nice shotguns you buy the shotgun perk rank 5. Its still inferior to the best looted ones. To craft good light armor you spec into light armor. INT still unlocks more crafting than any other perk tree but its not like it used to be. Int is no longer the guy who crafts the best everything except for junk turrets and batons, and the ones in loot are better. The int build excels at medicine, bartering, and can basically craft all the vehicles, workstations etc without finding schematics. He gets crafting speed bonuses. Its a decent new play style, but its not like it used to be, where it was needed and all the other ones were optional.

Oh, I didnt know you could find electric baton and Junk turret from looting. I thought only int guys could use it.

 

[Axe13]

41. I predict streamer weekend on the 20th.

So probably definitely not the 20th...but hopefully?

 

[Aurelius]

The special boulder on the surface tells what you will get digging down. However as I've dug in my mines I often run into a 2nd ore so its like a nice bonus. My original iron mine in my back yard turned into a coal mine recently, I loved that!

Will we be able to mod the frequency and type of veins via xml?

-A

 

[Trankitas]

But you havent said anything to me yet

I love you.

 

[Trankitas]

41. I predict streamer weekend on the 20th.

Let's cross fingers then. Hope you don't find more nasty bugs, you know, those that are a pain in the ass to fix.

Edit: My birthday is September 16th, any presents for me? DeVega don't do it.

 

[unholyjoe]

So probably definitely not the 20th...but hopefully?

congratulations you noticed it

most might remember this.. back in 1999... there was a Prediction of the world coming to an end in 2000 and or the worlds computers were going to stop because of old calendar system.... neither happens but seriously... this time he made it bold and underlined it...

as Trankitas stated... cross fingers

 

[Aurelius]

Number One is true, intended, and by design after testing and feedback from A17 showed that crafting the best led to no reason to explore.

You can have your cake and eat it too. Make the best gear craftable, but with components you can only get by scavenging.

With that being said, I believe the best gear should be found. Crafted gear should only be there for when all the pre-apocalypse, top notch gear has been all scavenged out.

-A

 

[sillls]

Players want to feel rewarded and find a substantial loot cache. Piece mealing it would be like when we removed the payload harvest at the end, it wasn't good.

We've talked about several ideas, heres a couple that need to percolate a bit.

Add a boss to the level area who's hard to kill. He drops a keycode which unlocks the super chest at the end. Super chests will become invulnerable and the keycode would be the only way to get in.

Could involve some kind of switch that opens the box, or turns on power to read on a terminal the key code or releases the kraken that has the code.

Could hide the code on a corpse in the map somewhere randomly.

Auto turrets could help protect the loot area. Find kill switch to disable them or fight them.

We're still thinking about it, its an a19+ thing.

You know, if you want. You could make it so these super chest blow up if you try to force them or make them have a chance to blow up if you don't use the code.

Could made it so players know it will blow up if they try to force it with a sign or the look of the super chest.

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