Kind of curious how people play.
I've played up to horde night on warrior in the 40's with out using hardly any guns (do have a blunderbuss for random dog hordes).
Are you playing with large numbers of hordes?
Honestly I do wish the regular mobs would get more challenging after each horde stage to keep the game more challenging. I don't run with a huge number of horde night zeds simply because it doesn't increase the danger but I have to spend 2 days fixing all the holes in the ground the exploding mobs create (which gets boring after a while).
Well, when we played without mods we had the highest difficulty (5), had max zombies set to 80 and 16 zombies per player, we were 4 at the time so each 7th horde spawned around 60 zombies. It was too easy as we easily had guns on the 7th day, if not, the 14th we had at least AKs.
We've been increasing difficulty constantly and at the moment it is pretty good, using this mod, tenfolded the zombie health (except spiders, dogs, crawlers and such), but tripled/quadrupled headshot damage. I've also buffed the melee weapons by 50% to bring them on par with the bow, cause you are so close and one misstep usually results in being stunned and probably dead. I've also increased their block damage by about 20%, and I've increased the cost of wood spikes from 20 wood up to 150 wood. And I'd say we've been having a challenge so far, the days aren't too scary though, I mean, you get occasional 8 radiated zombie hordes, but they aren't too difficult if using melee unless you get hit, then you die.
We haven't had the game for too long, we bought it this December I believe for a LAN we had, but we've played it to death since then, I'm around 1.1k hours atm, and as we learned the game we've been asking us why it is easy. Basically for us, the horde nights sucked, you spent 7 days repairing and getting wood spikes, then ran up on your roof and shot at them with whatever you had. So we increased wood spike cost, and after some tweaking we settled at 150 per piece, it feels balanced as we can use them tactically, but too expensive to spam them, unless we want to spend 7 days chainsawing trees.
Still a bit too easy, why? Cause zombies come to your house, you run up on the roof and start hammering them with whatever you had, while having 1 on the inside repairing the walls, so we increased their block damage and doubled the amount of zombies per player so we can't tunnelvision repair a few couple of blocks.
Still too easy, so this time I fivefolded their health and doubled HS damage, it was too easy cause as soon as you got a gun you could easily shoot 5 bullets in the center of mass and bring them down, at least to the ground, which makes for easy execution. Also pulled down loot abundance to 70% and respawn days to 100, which makes the minibike a must.
At this point we also installed this mod, and finally we got a real challenge, only the horde nights which are good. I prefer if the regular days put up a fair challenge, which they do if you enter a house and you see 3 spitting zombies running towards you. However this mod needs a bit tweaking here and there, such as:
Every fallen soldier drop M4A1 and a few bullets
Munition boxes drop a lot of grenades, even at 70% abundance we average about 3 grenades per box.
The sound from the hornet is too loud.
Spiders (Nothing the mod creator can fix) can't climb properly and just serve as a nuisance more than anything else, needs to be removed from default files.
A few items are a bit unclear, we had no idea where to find calipers or welding torch but we assumed cars or traders, it's day 21 today and we have still to find any, we are stuck with the M4s and bow/melee.
NPCs die way too easy, 1 iron arrow to the had at 20 archery and they are dead, they also have a chance to drop their corresponding weapon, be it a spiked club or a winchester, which is good, but a bit too high chance, and they are too easy to kill.
Some of the newly generated houses are too OP, there is one wooden lodge with 2 apache chests inside, 2 munition boxes (I believe), and a gun safe, plus a ton of regular boxes. If you want easy game you just need to run here, break the glass with fists and loot it all, the gas barrel at the munition boxes can be shot and you can enter from the outside. Doing this at the beginning of the wipe usually results in 1-2 Taza's stone axe which is really good, and a few grenades from the munition boxes.
We also found a generated house with a vault, with pre-installed forges and a vault door, we've been using it to day 14 where we started to move out, but we will probably stay here for day 21 as well, it's just too good. It's full concrete all around.
These are just my points on the "difficulty" part of the mod, but it makes it much harder, I really like this mod.
Edit: Where do you remove the spider spawns btw? Can't seem to find it inside the gamestages.xml of the server mod.
^Literally 5 second after typing this I opened entitygroups and found the entry "zombiespider" inside
However I am curious to know how a gamestage is calculated, is it your current level? Or total level of all players? Or hours passed or something?
