PC Confession Time

Just a note - as a rule pistols ain't gonna do much for you. They are semi ok for emergency "I got jumped" scare moments out in a POI but that's about it. Learn to not hold the trigger on the AK and use that and the Marksman if you wanna even make a dent on zombies hp on horde night.

 
We were using pistols, because we generally don't like the automatic weapons - they waste far too much ammo (one or two shots will hit the zed and then the rest will go over their head due to the recoil). I think part of our problem is that with so many zombies running at us and circling round the obstacle course, we didn't have chance to concentrate on any single one of them before it was out of sight and running back around for another go.

I don't think any of our pistols had any mods on them at all. My bow had dye and a grip, and one of the others had dye on their bow too, and we had a couple on our melee weapons (which weren't any use) but that's about it. We really haven't found many mods at all - certainly not enough to have four on each of our guns.
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There is a mod to make the automatic weapons semi-automatic called Trigger Group Semi. Excellent mod for the AK.

As I said book stores and book towers probably are the best bet if someone of your group can craft mods. And it is better to have one gun stuffed with mods than distributing the mods to all guns, because one person can easier concentrate his fire on one zombies, coordinating three people to shoot the same zombie isn't as easy. A pistol can get quite good with the pistol perk (and I like the pistol for its handling or "feel"), but an AK or marksman rifle does enough damage per second for irradiated zombies (and cops before they explode and destroy all the traps and barbed wires) even without perks.

 
Well, we played again last night. Since we have lives and families we only get to play for an hour or so a couple of times per week - that's why our A17.2 game that started when it was released is only just past day 28.

I suggested starting a new game, and my wife suggested turning down the difficulty, but our friend wanted to continue as we are quite strongly, because she wants us to get to see the higher level perks and items for once, so we acquiesed and that's what we're doing. We've abandoned our old horde base and we're building a new one with a different design inspired by ones we've seen on videos (one that will let us use both melee and traps, including meganoth's two-blade-traps-by-the-entrance idea, not just all shooting all the time).

Since there's quite a short time limit on this one - we're having to build it from scratch before the next horde night - we've agreed to put quests on hold while we all gather resources for it.

 
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Use your old one for the next Horde night. It’s okay if it gets destroyed. That will give you more time for the new one. In the morning just run away. You are faster than any of the enemies and will be able to ditch them once the bloodmoon gps ability is gone.

 
Use your old one for the next Horde night. It’s okay if it gets destroyed. That will give you more time for the new one. In the morning just run away. You are faster than any of the enemies and will be able to ditch them once the bloodmoon gps ability is gone.
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The issue wasn't the stability of the old base - it held up till the end of the night - but the fact that the only way it lets us kill zombies is to shoot them and we don't have the accuracy/ammunition to kill the radiated zombies.

I suppose we could spend another horde night in it and run away if it all goes tits up, but we can equally do that in the new base.

We've got another three or four in-game days to finish it, so I'm reasonably confident we can do it if we work together.

 
Yeah, Kage's last maze defense or JaWoodle's ramp/hatch trick will be your friend.
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Dart traps dont take as much iron as you might think. And the darts seem to last forever.

If your going to be using any kind of single line pathway defense dart traps are a must. They ate so worth it. The save you gun powder for bullets and iron for traps. They are fantastic.

 
The issue wasn't the stability of the old base - it held up till the end of the night - but the fact that the only way it lets us kill zombies is to shoot them and we don't have the accuracy/ammunition to kill the radiated zombies.
I suppose we could spend another horde night in it and run away if it all goes tits up, but we can equally do that in the new base.

We've got another three or four in-game days to finish it, so I'm reasonably confident we can do it if we work together.
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I was thinking in terms of repairs. Using up your old base one last time could save you costs and time for repairs. Then your following week would be for pimping instead of recovering.

 
I mean, isn't the latest design philosophie to make us all terrible in regard to fighting..? I'm actually pretty good with my aim and whatnot, but A17 has me crippled so hard, that I cannot apply those mad skillz anymore anyway. So the way to go if you want to engage and survive horde nights is to exploit the ai, sent the guys through mazes and kill them dead with traps.

And while I as well find endlessly gathering resources very boring, it does not require any skill.

 
I was thinking in terms of repairs. Using up your old base one last time could save you costs and time for repairs. Then your following week would be for pimping instead of recovering.
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Like mentioned earlier, lowering difficulty or changing settings could be the "temporary" crutch your group needs while other methods and strategies are utilized. No shame in that. Personally myself I have turned off all runners except ferals and BM hordes and that works for me while I relearn the game.

Edit: this was supposed to be a reply to cup not roland lol

 
I'm fully Int/Builder/Miner spec'd so I get where you're coming from Tea.

On mining: there's a modlet that swaps out the sand+1-ore blocks to a full ore block. Can't recall authors name, sry.

Haven't seen a mod for this but was thinking that the average car would yield hundreds of pounds of mild steel, so maybe mod a big bump in 'iron' from wrenching cars?

Personally glad to hear your team is going to push on as-is, cause I'm betting you all will 'adapt & overcome' and have a ball doing so :)

-- and hoping you'll have a good story to share with us!

As others have said combining Dart Traps with Electric Fences works very well.

Add a way to channel z's into a conga line and even multiple radiateds can be dealt with.

Simple design in pics is wired so that Dart Traps are always 'ready' via trigger plates.

Electric Fences are on a manual switch for now. Will likely splice in trip wires near top of the stairs later on. But as-is, besides lights on Timer, this draws -zero- watts when idle.

(this is my go-to starter base now. built w flagstone then upgraded along the way. used wood spikes on path for 1st horde night.)

Second pic was with 5 radiated soldiers spawned in, E-Fencing On but Blade Traps Off.

On first circuit darts & fencing killed 2. Other 3 finished on second go around. Without help from me.





Edit: just ran day 28 horde. used ~1150 darts. so 700 raw iron (3500 Iron) to restock.

GS ~220. Ran at 200% xp till lvl 100 (hadn't been past 70? yet, so...). think i was lvl ~115 for horde?

Weren't all rads by any means, but usually 1 or 2 rads in the mix?

Had quite a few dogs, and none of the traps are set at their height, so i spent about 50% of the time sniping cops, z's that got frustrated and took to beating supports, & dogs.

The first E-Fence took about 50% damage. Blade traps only a few damage; didn't bother to repair. Couple columns were almost taken out. That was the only serious damage.

 
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Well, it's now the evening of day 33, and we've got the new horde night base mostly finished. It's only concrete, rather than reinforced concrete, and there are parts that are still brick (but they're parts that the zombies shouldn't be going near) but it should hold together. Assuming it works, the zed won't be hitting it much anyway - it's designed to channel them along a path where we can both melee and shoot them rather than to block them by brute force.

We've got a couple of blade traps at head height too - although I'm still unsure how useful they'll be. Do zombies walk through blades like they do barbed wire? Or do they treat them as an obstacle and avoid/attack them like they do spikes?

 
Well, it's now the evening of day 33, and we've got the new horde night base mostly finished. It's only concrete, rather than reinforced concrete, and there are parts that are still brick (but they're parts that the zombies shouldn't be going near) but it should hold together. Assuming it works, the zed won't be hitting it much anyway - it's designed to channel them along a path where we can both melee and shoot them rather than to block them by brute force.
We've got a couple of blade traps at head height too - although I'm still unsure how useful they'll be. Do zombies walk through blades like they do barbed wire? Or do they treat them as an obstacle and avoid/attack them like they do spikes?
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In our base the blades at the entrance didn't dissuade the Z's from entering, it seems to have worked. We made sure that they wouldn't consider the wall by making it 2 concrete blocks thick, that seemed to be enough.

I you want to make sure you could post pictures and see if anyone finds a loophole the zombies might try to utilize. A crude self-test approach ist to put lots of torches on the wall and use 2-3 augers simultaneously augering in the air to generate screamers. Then use this mini-horde to test your base (especially pathing).

I found it difficult to make a path where you can hit them and they don't want to break through at exactly that spot. In our first base such a plan only worked for a short time. And you had to be careful not to miss the time you had to vacate that exposed position and retreat to an inner sanctum.

 
From what I can tell it depends on if the blade traps center is in their path. If it is then they'll attack it.

If you offset the blade trap so that only the blade, not the center 'motor' bit, is in the path then testing showed that the trap takes less damage, but also deals less since the z is only in it's effect 1/3 as much.

Set up like this testing w Feral Marlene/Darlene/Nurse showed 1 trap alone almost killed them.

Trap took 48 damage per feral z.

You can slow down the z's with e-fencing or barb wire in that one blade swept block to help maximize the time/damage.

Tested w an e-fence and the combo of 1 head-height blade trap (bt) & an e-fence killed most single ferals first go.

Another option to consider is placing the blade traps so the z's walk over/into them (on ground or flush w ground).

May be a bit of a trade off; trap will effect a 3 block long area, but not hit the head. Question is, -is- there a head-shot multiplier for traps? No idea.

My best guess as to why you hardly ever see bt's at ground level is due to the previous alphas where we wanted all the loot bags and corpse blocks. Bt's at ground level chewed those up so folks started mounting them higher.

I also tested putting one bt at knee height and another right above it (hanging from above like a fan, not stacked on top of bottom). That 'double' was a real chum maker, heh.

The A17+ AI still sees going through the -blades-, -not- the center as a valid path.

Pics show the final setup I tested today. Added in the flush-with-floor bt & 2nd e-fence to deal with the 20~30%(?) of z's who get their legs chopped off right away.

This setup handled 5 stacked up radiated wights at a time with only 1 occasionally getting through alive. Usually due to getting knocked off the path. Did have 2 come through once but one cheated by jumping onto the others back to skip the ground lvl bt.

** Each radiated wight caused ~200+ damage to blade traps. Spread across all three somewhat evenly.

So it's possible that after just 7 or 8 of these guys the blade traps may start to fail.









 
From what I can tell it depends on if the blade traps center is in their path. If it is then they'll attack it.
If you offset the blade trap so that only the blade, not the center 'motor' bit, is in the path then testing showed that the trap takes less damage, but also deals less since the z is only in it's effect 1/3 as much.

Set up like this testing w Feral Marlene/Darlene/Nurse showed 1 trap alone almost killed them.

Trap took 48 damage per feral z.

You can slow down the z's with e-fencing or barb wire in that one blade swept block to help maximize the time/damage.

Tested w an e-fence and the combo of 1 head-height blade trap (bt) & an e-fence killed most single ferals first go.
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Excellent research. Prompted me to check wiki and xml and the values there confirm your experimental findings. It seems the blade trap is doing 5 times the damage it is receiving and it damages zombies for 1500 of its 2000 hit points.

So one single blade trap is good for 7500 damage or about 60 normal or 32 feral or 16 radiated Darlenes. In reality a little less for radiated because of regeneration.

That FeralDarlene with 237 HP was good for 48 damage (237/48=~5) surprisingly either means there is no headshot multiplier OR that the 50% more damage to the zombie also does 50% more damage to the blade trap. Either way we can simply ignore headshot multiplier for most calculations.

So blade traps on the ground seem better for the simple reason you can shoot the zombies easier while they are "in" the blade trap. IF you also want to keep them in the trap for a longer time you have to use electric wire instead of barbed wire though.

 
Very cool :) & thank you for the additional info!

Just now thinking about it another possible advantage of placing the blade traps on the ground would be you could run an e-fence at the front and back, leaving middle open, and maybe keep z's on the trap even longer.

Except one bit I forgot to mention earlier; I couldn't find a 'perfect' height so the e-fencing over a blade trap on the ground would reliably shock a crawler or amputee crawling over the trap.

Would likely still be an improvement over a single e-fence, but might take a weird, 3-over and 1-up kinda thing to make the e-fences slant across the crawlers center.

And you bring up something well worth testing; will a Dart Trap firing through the edge, or blade only area damage the blade trap? And same for player fired bullets.

 
And you bring up something well worth testing; will a Dart Trap firing through the edge, or blade only area damage the blade trap? And same for player fired bullets.
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Quick check seems to indicate that the blades are not damaged by shooting at them. Did not power the blade trap for the test, I assume it won't change the result.

 
Quick check seems to indicate that the blades are not damaged by shooting at them. Did not power the blade trap for the test, I assume it won't change the result.
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ahh, that's good news indeed :)

 
In our base the blades at the entrance didn't dissuade the Z's from entering, it seems to have worked. We made sure that they wouldn't consider the wall by making it 2 concrete blocks thick, that seemed to be enough.
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I've put them at the entrance like you did, so hopefully I'll find the same. They're on the end of walls rather than the side, so wall thickness shouldn't be an issue - the zed will never find the hubs in their way and would have to turn ninety degrees to attack them rather than going for us, so I doubt many of them will (unless the occasional zed gets angry and lashes out at the nearest block).

[i you want to make sure you could post pictures and see if anyone finds a loophole the zombies might try to utilize. A crude self-test approach ist to put lots of torches on the wall and use 2-3 augers simultaneously augering in the air to generate screamers. Then use this mini-horde to test your base (especially pathing).
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It might sound stupidly paranoid of me, but I'd rather not post pics here. The layout relies on two quirks of zed behaviour that I've not seen discussed here - and which might be considered "exploiting the AI". Assuming they work (I've tested them in Creative mode against zed of different types, but on Horde Night with a mix of zed something might go wrong) I wouldn't want to bring them to wider attention and then find that the AI has been "fixed" in the next release to stop them from working.

I found it difficult to make a path where you can hit them and they don't want to break through at exactly that spot. In our first base such a plan only worked for a short time. And you had to be careful not to miss the time you had to vacate that exposed position and retreat to an inner sanctum.
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The basic idea is that it's a horseshoe shape with us in the middle. Obviously it relies on them seeing the path the horseshoe as "easier" than breaking through the wall to get to us. While that's the case, they won't try to break the wall between them and us and come at us directly.

 
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