Nonsense. Play a traditional tower defense game some time. Tower defense depends on enemies who usually go along fixed paths where the player distributes his traps and turrets, one main game element is to add traps at chokepoints. So A17 is the true tower defense, independent from advantages and disadvantages of that. Now I would immediately agree if you said you don't care for nomenclature, the more important thing is whether one of the two is more fun.
That is a very, very narrow interpretation of a tower defense game and it is also a poor excuse to justify bad design choices.
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@Vedui said pre-A17 defenses had to be layered and cover more than one angle of attack like -gasp- an actual tower defense scenario.
Now players are forced to use some variation of a cattle chute design to manage the flow of zombies.
Even the youtube videos are boring now. Instead of running around and actively defending, people just stand in one place and shoot at the conga line.
And in my view pre-A17 you had a slightly more active role as you were shifting positions while shooting the zombies, and I would agree that it might be more what you would expect from traditional zombies though I would hesitate to term that "realism". The disadvantage though was that it was an attrition game where it made no sense to have differently designed sides on a building. You always built a pillbox and it only mattered how long each side withstood the zombies and how much you could distribute the damage by walking around or the luck of zombie direction changing.
The most serious problem was that all bases got damaged all around which made repairing a long and boring task. I remember in A16 many players complaining that the repair time became a weekly grind
Active defense was the fun part! Actually having to move around and fight from all sides and rushing to repair a breach in the defenses between waves only to realize they are attacking the south wall now instead?
What you guys seem to be missing is that for a lot of people the building and maintaining their base IS the game and that is way more "tower defense" than -waves vaguely- whatever it is you guys are currently trying to do.
On the other hand A17 and later you have to put much more brains into building, it is more interesting to try out different designs, you have more variation and possibilities. And traps suddenly make sense to add them, they have a much higher effect. And I strongly prefer those advantages to the 20 brain cells you need to use in a A16 horde night to see that some part of the wall is near braking and doing a few steps to the side.
From A17 on I actually have build all sorts of horde bases that all had in common that I (tried to) direct the zombies along paths, I was the architect of their doom, not the passive observer of which direction the zombies might come this time: "Oh, they spawn in the south, let us go ... mmmmh, let me think, ... let me think ... to the south wall then".
Do you really think that!?
I think anyone who does a lot of building would agree the AI changes made base building almost comically easy.
You can AFK a max zombies day 7000 horde with the current AI.
Actually it is not even base building anymore. It is crowd control.
The zombies are so amped up you can't afford to let them touch any surface for more than 10 seconds, so all the designs just run them through some variation of a cattle chute.
A16 hordes were much more fun and challenging.
Pre-A17 it was an attrition game where it made no sense to have differently designed sides on a building. You always built a pillbox and it only mattered how long each side withstood the zombies and how much you could distribute the damage by walking around or the luck of zombie direction changing.
The most serious problem was that all bases got damaged all around which made repairing a long and boring task.
At least the buildings had different sides. Now it is completely linear. You have the cattle chute and you stand in one spot and shoot/swing your weapon in one direction until they quit coming.
Once you build your base which is always a variation of the same basic design now, horde nights are literally boring.
The time crunch of getting your base repaired between attacks
is was a major factor in playing the game, that created a need for resource management, time management, shoring up weak spots, planning additional defenses...
Now you dust off your horde base once a week, run a bunch of zombies through and forget about it until next week.
Maintenance is down to 5 minutes touching up chipped paint and topping off ammo.
Is that really the plan?
We did get a bigger backpack.
And a bigger tool belt.
And things like raw iron/scrap iron, animal hide/leather, bricks/cobblestone etc. were combined, resulting in fewer types of things to carry.
And we got vehicles that hold more inventory.
And drones that increase that further.
And cargo mods that increase that further.
Some people are insatiable. They're going to keep asking for bigger backpacks until they never, ever have to think about an inventory limit.
Almost as if players have been pushed, and pushed, and pushed into a more loot-centric Murder Hobo playstyle that requires cramming as much as possible into your pockets as you locust from one POI to the next.
It seems like one of the game's perennial debates, which can be phrased many ways but one way is: should the zombies be effectual? There are (at least) two camps, and it's difficult to satisfy both of them.
People in the first camp, which has included me at times, bemoan the structural engineer zombies that know the weaknesses of a base, sometimes better than the player that built it does. The usually offered solution is zombies that just beat on random parts of your walls, because, y'know, they're just zombies and we don't expect them to behave overly analytically.
People in the second camp accept the traditional "tower defense" mentality that zombies will take the path of least resistance, and build their bases accordingly. They make funnels, mazes, choke points, kill zones, and what have you that specifically depend on the zombies taking a predictable and "exploitable" path.
This strikes me as a possible zero sum game.
For every step towards zombies that just beat on random parts of your walls, you annoy someone in the second camp. This is not theoretical. Already, one can find plenty of forum threads where a user describes this thoughtful path they constructed for the zombies to march to their doom, only for the zombies to ignore it and beat on something else seemingly at random. I don't know what Vedui is calling tower defense but it requires enemy pathing you can rely on. That is to say, predictability. Otherwise, if the zombies were dumb and just beat on random blocks, base design would be pointlessly trivial. Any blocks you lay down in any configuration would be as good as any other, in a world where zombies beat on blocks at random.
And yet, for every step towards zombies that can reach you and take an efficient route to do it, you annoy someone in the first camp that, again, thinks such zombies are conceptually "too smart for their own good." Immersion is lost, because it's not very zombie-like behavior to them. Maybe I'm not describing the grievance some have here well, but suffice it to say this conflict is not easy to resolve to the satisfaction of both camps.
I can see why, if you're the AI programmer, you'd go with maximally effectual zombies, at least as a draft before making further refinements. You want it to be possible for the zombies to reach the player, which (current bugs aside) they definitely couldn't do before A17. And zombies that deliberately go to sub-optimal places to attack unimportant blocks - that, compared to structural engineer zombies, are there for show, to create the appearance of danger - are wasting resources that could be given to a zombie that's going to do something that matters.
So my thinking on this has evolved. I don't like structural engineer zombies, but I accept the premise that they must be generally capable: effectual at their goal of eventually reaching the player, if the interventions the player puts in the way are insufficient. At least until we get bandits, I see it as a necessary evil.
First, thank you for a well reasoned response.
For the record, I am firmly in the zombies should act like zombies camp. They should not be laser guided structural engineers.
But it is not a completely black or white, zero sum game as you put it.
If you recall from A16, yes zombies would come from different directions and kind of randomly "test" your defenses. They would get stuck on spikes, beat on the closest wall. Typical zombie behavior.
But what happened if they breached the wall or broke your door? Now that there was a path, all the ones nearby would go for it and pour through. Now, as a defender, you have a problem.
My point is, the pathing was already there, A17 just cranked that pathing up to 11 and gave them the magical ability to target the weakest wall from orbit.
Now, if you recall, A17 also drastically increased block damage at the same time. Which in combination effectively turned the zombies into guided ordinance that would find and exploit the weakest part of your defenses faster than you could say "Oh @%$#!"
This completely negated about 75% of static defenses, spikes, moats etc. are nearly useless and the only good wall, is no wall at all because they would just drill through anything you put in front of them in 10 seconds flat.
This essentially forced players to to channel them down a path or they will make their own.
It went from defending your base, to defending a single linear path.
Oh and A17 also took away barbed wire.... which let's face it, was a total @%$# move.
Which brings us to Tower Defense
Since people keep randomly invoking the concept of Tower Defense (as if emulating @%$#ty browser games is some kind of holy grail to be aspired to), I will put it in those terms.
I would submit, that having to defend your entire base, which often includes literal towers, from attacks coming from all sides is more like defending a tower, than exploiting obnoxiously linear pathing to kill a conga line of zombies.
Yes, some pathing is necessary, but we are way up in the "too much of a good thing" territory in terms of the AI pathing, especially if you give them the ability to flawlessly detect and hone in on the path of least resistance.
