PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!

  • A18 Stable is Out!

    Votes: 2 66.7%

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    Votes: 1 33.3%
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Have you thought about how to deal with demolishers showing up and how the 1 kill room will deal with them?
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Junk Turrets reliably set off Demolishers and without relying on off perk weapons the rest of my defenses will be automated too. So basically, if you wanted to only use the weapons you specialize into and explosives you scavenge then INT build is totally ♥♥♥♥ed. In an ideal situation 2 Fully modded fully skilled T6 Junk Turrets can take a Demolisher down to half before he booms. His HP and 60% armor are just not something Junk Turrets can handle. As part of a horde he'll be much more dangerous.

My hope is that collective turret power will kill him, but I'm not going to rely on that as I've seen (rarely) cops explode in base defense situations that should theoretically vaporize them. I'm going to pull out an AK with AP ammo and try to shoot him dead myself. But yeah, I have zero faith in behind able to consistently handle Demolishers even then. Pretty sure I'm just ♥♥♥♥ed. But I'm going to try my best and see if I can disprove that expectation. TBH though, I'm kind of ok with pulling out a different weapon to deal with rare special zombie spawns. I feel like that makes sense and even though INT is basically the only one that would be forced to do this I'm ok with it for Demolishers alone.

In multiplayer though? Not a chance. You can get like 17 demos in a night in multiplayer. It's not a question of if they boom it's a question of when and Int spec is at a large disadvantage in multiplayer due to a combination of this and extremely short range of turrets. Shotgun has short range too but shotguns are short ranged and mobile while turrets are short ranged and static and that's a pretty darn big distinction for multiplayer horde defense.

 
Yes, when I was building my concrete base I also got a couple level ups, but it took me many days to obtain all that concrete, so I think 'construction XP' is about right.

I would also like a separate slider for zombie HP, but for the opposite reason: I actually prefer to double their health without making them hit me harder.

 
I was asking Ralathar44 specifically regarding his single kill room. Is that gonna work once demolishers get inside?
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just try to aim for the head. weapons like a hunting rifle , or shotgun i won't recommend fighting him! (trust me)

but its best to aim for the head with AP rounds or aim for the legs to cripple him.

but if you have to got hand to hand. just hit the head try not to go for body shots.

and for outside your base uses landmines. electrical wires or snipe him!

also mods will help like the burning shaft , cripple rounds(idk the name) and spikes from the bat or club!

also stun batons work great!

 
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Not a terrible idea with the HP thing. I always like the challenge of harder settings, but turning zombies into sponges on the way never felt fun. It should be more about better position and awareness to not let zombies get on you (with higher damage), rather than spending 5 minutes trying to club the brains out of some basic zombie.
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I currently play with zombies running at daylight : it's a new challenge with rage mode. In fact we don't have to raise the difficulty level... to raise the game difficulty.

 
One of the problems with this conversation about junk turret ammo capacity is not knowing the difficulty level people are playing. 50 rounds is pretty good on default difficulty, imo. Increase it and it makes them OP at that game setting. The difference between how many shots it takes to down a zombie in default vs nomad is quite discernible. If you are playing warrior or above I can see the need of having to reload the turrets much more often.
We shouldnآ’t make default difficulty too easy just because people who are playing at higher difficulties want it to be less difficult or inconvenient for them. I think the current capacity is pretty good for the default settings and that higher capacities should be handled by adding a mod to the turret.

At higher difficulties the intelligence build may have to be attempted as an ultra challenge.

That or separate out zombie HP as itآ’s own slider and not have it be included with the General game difficulty slider.
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I still feel that adding an increased magazine capacity, in line with the increased fire rate, to the Junk Turret perk will not make them OP - especially since it only affects those who specialized into them, without making the default turrets OP. Then magazine mods could allow non-specialists to increase the capacity somewhat, while specialists can increase it even more due to the Perk.

I think it would be great if we could have mods for the Junk Turret specifically. They already can use the Drum Magazine mod (which felt like more of a bug than a feature, but maybe that is by design, and the description just needs to be updated). I know more mods are in the works, and with the Junk Turret and Stun Baton being so new, I'm sure they have not had time to implement new mods yet. I could imagine a few mods for the turret: Slag - shoot molten scrap (chance to catch on fire), Razor's Edge - shoot sharpened scrap metal (chance to cause Bleeding), Roller Ball - shoot hardened scrap (increased Knockdown chance), Nailed It - shoot hardened nails (penetrates armor, or removes armor per hit). Just a few ideas (I'm sure they have their own).

 
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I would also like a separate slider for zombie HP, but for the opposite reason: I actually prefer to double their health without making them hit me harder.
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These options were available in the past. I admit that I prefer the opposite: zombies with a standard constitution but lethal. It does not matter: it was good options :)

 
Why was the decision made that the double barrel shotgun should always be sawn-off? Would it not have been more logical to have it have a full barrel too so it can share the sawn-off modification with the pump shotgun? This way the 2 shot shotgun can have a bit more range and a sawn-off mod would have its use in close quarters. I am also curious if a tier 3 shotty is planned, I find the blunderbuss as tier 1 a bit odd (despite it being a shotty). It has to much problems fitting in, since it needs to much precious ingredients to build to be viable early game and cannot be looted either. The sawn off double barrel is crap for a tier 2 weapon atm.
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I have to agree. The blunderbuss is completely worthless. I have never attempted to make one let alone use it.

There are different types of pump shotguns that could easily be categorized between tier 2 and tier 3

 
@MM @faatal

Has anyone encountered such a problem? On (HALF) textures, everything is just ugly. Everything was fine on b143, but everything was just awful on b 149. the graphics are so soapy as if I’m 1/8 texture. Developers, please help me!

 
So, since Madmole got a chuckle out of our friend screwing us by spending two full 120-minute game-days soloing around on the server with nobody else around, I present the consequences of his actions... Day 28 Horde Night.
We got rekt. :D

So we had no choice but to reuse the same POI (the radio tower one) and repair the defenses that remained. Our friend who caused the issue wasn't playing tonight (the rat), so there was four of us. Computed gamestage was 204, 279 spawning per wave, 63 alive according to the logfile. That means wave one started out with radiateds, and it went downhill from there. We were doing okay, but I could already tell only a couple minutes in that we weren't going to quite have enough ammo. We've got that issue fixed moving forward now, but yeah. Then Wave 2 started.

Oh. My. Crap.

Demolishers. SEVENTEEN OF THEM. Do you know what kind of hole SEVENTEEN DEMOLISHERS punches through a defensive perimeter? I'll tell you. There were literally no spikes or barbed wire left on our south side. we started them nearly 15 meters out from the wall (I think 10 out from the fence). They managed to get into the building. They took out THE BUILDING.

Naturally we all died in new and horrible ways. Some observations:

1. I was the highest level I believe, at 38. (Finished at 41.) We're on adventurer and were just now getting to the point where we're getting purples in loot on a semi-regular basis. Also we're on Adventurer, so I think that the scaling may be a wee bit out of whack for MP. Or maybe not, and we just need to beat our friend to a bloody lump and use him as bait for the zombies.

2. After respawn, our home base (which was a good 4-500m away) had a Radiated at it almost immediately. I don't know if it was spawned in as we were dying, or what. kiting it into spikes killed it and seemed to keep the BM avoidance intact. (Note: seemed.)

3. Killing zombies by driving them down with the 4x4 does not seem to restart the BM horde. One of us jumped in ours and managed to take out the stragglers that way. They're showing up in the logs as "Entity X killed" instead of "killed by &lt;player&gt;".

4. After a few minutes, we made our way back over and got our bags, started finding our junk turrets, standard post-battle chores. The last death was at 21:39:18 in the logs. At 21:51:05, the horde resumed right where it'd left off, with count 70 of 279, and rekt us all over again. No zombies were near enough to have spotted us, no kills were made by anyone. The only thing that happened immediately prior was that I had spotted a junk turret partially buried, and I broke the block next to it. This caused it to "float" up out of the block it was half-buried in. Immediately after that someone called incoming.

After that the horde did not ever actually finish spawning. Last one was 113 of 279, and we cleaned up (by running over with a 4x4 again) wrapping up at dawn. It was great fun, and now we go off to figure out how to make disposable horde bases, because we can't quite figure how we're going to keep 17+ Demolishers from wrecking anything we throw in their path.
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Awesome. We'll look into the horde respawning.

 
When it's stable. Experimental version is not supposed to be advertised.
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They used to, I was getting ready to play & I needed to wipe my files,

I guess I'm gonna have to leave it at latest unstable & uncheck keep game up to date...

Should be able to know when to wipe without coming here,

I never had to come here to know when to wipe the game...

 
They used to, I was getting ready to play & I needed to wipe my files,
I guess I'm gonna have to leave it at latest unstable & uncheck keep game up to date...

Should be able to know when to wipe without coming here,

I never had to come here to know when to wipe the game...
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Because experimental is a new step between development and release since Alpha 17. It wasn't the case before. But you seem to really need to complain, so enjoy.

 
@Madmole
Do you think we will ever see the return of rg caves some day?
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Its not on the roadmap.
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Makes me sad. The generating was awesome, the exploring was exciting and slightly dangerous. I found some ponds in there underground, was a epic szenario. Was the way to find ores in some patches.

I have good memories with it, wish they come back as dungeons or underground poi.

 
Madmole, what if the signature weapon of each attribute build, (Junk Turret, M60,..etc) could only be unlocked and used by getting to tier 10 of their respected attribute?

You could still loot the items, scrap them for parts, sell them for dukes, but you couldn't use it unless you 'mastered' it. I know theres pitfalls behind this idea, but I think it would reward people more who specialize. As it is now, I can go full intellect build and still use an purple M60 fully modded. Yeah, it might not do the most damage possible, because I'm not fully spec'd into it, but the damage will still be really good.

 
After that the horde did not ever actually finish spawning. Last one was 113 of 279, and we cleaned up (by running over with a 4x4 again) wrapping up at dawn. It was great fun, and now we go off to figure out how to make disposable horde bases, because we can't quite figure how we're going to keep 17+ Demolishers from wrecking anything we throw in their path.
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Just be careful with how you shoot them. Carefully shoot them in the head and avoid hitting the explosives and they wont take out your base. If you do happen to start the charge you have a few seconds to quickly unload on them and kill them and if you do they also wont explode.

 
I have good memories with it, wish they come back as dungeons or underground poi.
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I just started a new game and spawned right in front of a building I had never seen before: a coal mine. Once in the corridors of the basement, I began to regret my incursion with just a spear. This is the kind of POI that I love and that replaces in a good way random caves.

 
When I first heard about them I assumed that they would be used to augment your own personal damage within the vicinity of where you are and that overall base defense would continue to be handled by the regular turrets we’ve had for ages now. Why anyone would abandon the regular turrets and try and use junk turrets for base defense instead is something I’m struggling to understand. If junk turrets are to be elevated to the same level as regular turrets then why have regular turrets? Or am I misunderstanding and people are complaining about the regular turrets on horde night?
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The regular turrets as well as traps and walls are the backdrop that all classes/attributes use for their base. They handle some specific percentage of the horde. Unless you want to sip a tea on horde night (there is that one exception on the forum) you usually try to kill or control the rest. Now does the INT player have advantages with stationary traps and turrets so that he doesn't need to kill or control as many as other classes?

Off the top of my head he has easier access to the recipes and gets xp from them, but his perks don't boost stationary turrets or traps directly. Right? Then the damage and crowd control he has to dole out personally (through weapons and his mobile turrets) is comparable to the damage and crowd control every other class has to put out, not less.

Now my point was: DPS doesn't need to be comparable with other weapon specs (as they provide different features), but their use cases on horde nights (as **mobile** turrets) to get some more load off you is hampered if you constantly have to refuel them. (If you don't use them at all on horde night and just shoot with an AK you would need the DPS of a fully perked AK again.

 
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