A Nice Cup of Tea
New member
Okay, I admit it. I'm terrible at this game.
Back in A15 and A16 my friends and I used to do quite well. We'd normally play till around day 40ish before getting a bit bored and starting again.
But in A17.2 I don't think we'll be able to get that far.
We've just done the day 28 horde night, and we got utterly trashed.
Our horde night base was a combination base. It was basically the usual central platform with an enclosed cage on top, surrounded by concentric alternating rings of spikes and blocks (so that the spikes were always at "ground level" to the zeds and they wouldn't avoid them). It also had an obstacle course for the zeds to entice them to keep moving and trying to get to us instead of stopping and attacking the platform directly (some would call that an "AI exploit" but I disagree).
This worked fine for horde nights 7, 14, and 21. But on horde night 28 it was just too much for us.
The problem wasn't the design of the horde night base. It was just the dozens of radiated zombies.
The spikes did their job, and so did the obstacle course. But by the end of the night, there were still about a dozen radiated zeds left running the obstacle course and we simply couldn't kill them. They were still there well after dawn had broken, while we were still in our cage having eventually run out of bullets and arrows.
In the end we had to do "suicide by zombie" by leaving the cage and going to melee them, dying repeatedly in the process. It was the only way to get rid of them.
So we're now stuck. A17.2 has more radiated zombies than previous versions and they appear earlier. And we just aren't FPS players so we aren't able to take them out with rapid and accurate shooting. Unless all three of us concentrate on a single radiated zombie (which we can't do in the chaos of a horde night) we just can't do enough damage quickly enough to kill them.
By the end of the horde "night" (which was actually about 8.30am) we're now in a position where we've no bullets, the horde night base needs major repairs that we don't have the resources to make, and we're aware that even if we don't gain any experience over the course of the week (which we will, of course) next horde night will start with us in a weaker position than this one while the horde will be bigger and tougher.
I think the four mistakes we made were:
1) We're not specced for shooting - I've got melee and crafting skills, my wife has a few ranged perks but mostly farming skills, and our friend has; well, I'm not sure what she has, but I think it's mostly crafting skills too. None of those skills do us any good on horde night. The only one of us that can pop heads with a ranged weapon (the only way we have of killing radiated) is my wife, and for her it's only a 5% chance per hit - although she did manage it three times over the course of the horde night.
2) We leveled too quickly - It's only day 28 and we're around level 60 already; so our gamestage is way above what we can cope with. This is partly our own fault, since we've kept doing quests (while I'm not a fan of the quest system, the others like it so I go along with them for the sake of marital harmony) - but to be honest, it seems that in A17 you can't help going up levels far too quickly. The XP "sharing" is actually a multiplier rather than a share, and when people complained that killing zeds gave too much experience the devs increased the xp for everything else rather than decreasing it for killing. Now it's very difficult to play the game and not go up[ levels too quickly since pretty much everything you do gives you XP.
3) We've been playing on the default level that we're used to playing on in earlier alphas, rather than the easiest level.
4) None of us are miners. When I look on YouTube at other people playing, it always seems that they spend all their time mining and constantly have a dozen forges making concrete and another dozen making bullets. We've never had more than a single forge at once, and we find endless mining to be tedious in the extreme (we're not minecraft players!)
I've heard that there's a mod called a "Rad Remover" that you can fit into a weapon to stop the radiated zeds from regenerating, but I'm guessing that it's only available as a quest reward for high tier quests because none of us have ever seen one.
Having just hit 60th level and level 8 in Intelligence (as I said - badly specced), I can now apparently make blade traps and electric fences, but I doubt they will make any difference. Blade traps will mop up the weaker zeds, but we have no problem with them anyway. And although I've never used an electric fence, they seem to be just an upgraded barbed wire fence.
Is either of those likely to help with the "we can't shoot radiated zombies quickly enough to counter their regeneration" problem?
Or should we just start again but on the easiest skill level this time? And this time I berate the other players (and myself) into investing most of their points into Perception and Boom Headshot?
Back in A15 and A16 my friends and I used to do quite well. We'd normally play till around day 40ish before getting a bit bored and starting again.
But in A17.2 I don't think we'll be able to get that far.
We've just done the day 28 horde night, and we got utterly trashed.
Our horde night base was a combination base. It was basically the usual central platform with an enclosed cage on top, surrounded by concentric alternating rings of spikes and blocks (so that the spikes were always at "ground level" to the zeds and they wouldn't avoid them). It also had an obstacle course for the zeds to entice them to keep moving and trying to get to us instead of stopping and attacking the platform directly (some would call that an "AI exploit" but I disagree).
This worked fine for horde nights 7, 14, and 21. But on horde night 28 it was just too much for us.
The problem wasn't the design of the horde night base. It was just the dozens of radiated zombies.
The spikes did their job, and so did the obstacle course. But by the end of the night, there were still about a dozen radiated zeds left running the obstacle course and we simply couldn't kill them. They were still there well after dawn had broken, while we were still in our cage having eventually run out of bullets and arrows.
In the end we had to do "suicide by zombie" by leaving the cage and going to melee them, dying repeatedly in the process. It was the only way to get rid of them.
So we're now stuck. A17.2 has more radiated zombies than previous versions and they appear earlier. And we just aren't FPS players so we aren't able to take them out with rapid and accurate shooting. Unless all three of us concentrate on a single radiated zombie (which we can't do in the chaos of a horde night) we just can't do enough damage quickly enough to kill them.
By the end of the horde "night" (which was actually about 8.30am) we're now in a position where we've no bullets, the horde night base needs major repairs that we don't have the resources to make, and we're aware that even if we don't gain any experience over the course of the week (which we will, of course) next horde night will start with us in a weaker position than this one while the horde will be bigger and tougher.
I think the four mistakes we made were:
1) We're not specced for shooting - I've got melee and crafting skills, my wife has a few ranged perks but mostly farming skills, and our friend has; well, I'm not sure what she has, but I think it's mostly crafting skills too. None of those skills do us any good on horde night. The only one of us that can pop heads with a ranged weapon (the only way we have of killing radiated) is my wife, and for her it's only a 5% chance per hit - although she did manage it three times over the course of the horde night.
2) We leveled too quickly - It's only day 28 and we're around level 60 already; so our gamestage is way above what we can cope with. This is partly our own fault, since we've kept doing quests (while I'm not a fan of the quest system, the others like it so I go along with them for the sake of marital harmony) - but to be honest, it seems that in A17 you can't help going up levels far too quickly. The XP "sharing" is actually a multiplier rather than a share, and when people complained that killing zeds gave too much experience the devs increased the xp for everything else rather than decreasing it for killing. Now it's very difficult to play the game and not go up[ levels too quickly since pretty much everything you do gives you XP.
3) We've been playing on the default level that we're used to playing on in earlier alphas, rather than the easiest level.
4) None of us are miners. When I look on YouTube at other people playing, it always seems that they spend all their time mining and constantly have a dozen forges making concrete and another dozen making bullets. We've never had more than a single forge at once, and we find endless mining to be tedious in the extreme (we're not minecraft players!)
I've heard that there's a mod called a "Rad Remover" that you can fit into a weapon to stop the radiated zeds from regenerating, but I'm guessing that it's only available as a quest reward for high tier quests because none of us have ever seen one.
Having just hit 60th level and level 8 in Intelligence (as I said - badly specced), I can now apparently make blade traps and electric fences, but I doubt they will make any difference. Blade traps will mop up the weaker zeds, but we have no problem with them anyway. And although I've never used an electric fence, they seem to be just an upgraded barbed wire fence.
Is either of those likely to help with the "we can't shoot radiated zombies quickly enough to counter their regeneration" problem?
Or should we just start again but on the easiest skill level this time? And this time I berate the other players (and myself) into investing most of their points into Perception and Boom Headshot?
