If you're getting attacked by dogs inside a building 3x in a row and dying maybe you need to pick your early loot choices better? Were they all the old western stores for eaxample? This is a new game. No longer should you just willy nilly head into any poi you want and expect to live. As Joel has stated many times already since the drop, stick to the smaller poi's at first. Build up strength and perks/skills.
I'm on D5 and haven't died yet. Played the first 2.5 days on adventurer then went up to nomad. 110ish zombie kills and lvl 16. Have a few guns to sell cause they're too weak to use early game. Have iron axe and pick both from loot. Got a chainsaw and sold it too from a zombie loot drop. I think I've only looted 5? poi's so far? Much more cars/trash piles outside stuff etc. KIlled 3 wolves and a few vultures, 2 wild and 2 that spawned up out of a new campsite type poi (got a TON of cloth out of the tents there, VERY handy). Shame the chem station there wasn't working but found a good chem station at a trader and a forge house with a working forge nearby. (Funny thing that same trader the forge was working too so decided to move close to it, nearest house the forge was working)
Play smart! Just my 2 cents for what it's worth.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/940585896189522092/F3EE4B43C2A7DB3A4F82DE32B486F149A2A1D36F/
Well, maybe.. Looting houses in the early game is the only thing fun about sleepers. Once I have a gun with enough ammo to waste or a good melee weapon, sleepers are no issue anymore, and dogs won't make a difference, particularly with additional stamina and wellness and ammo on top of the gunz. So I "fear" that I will rob me of a substantial fun part if I stay out of the prefabs in early game.
And if Joel says so, I accept that it's an intentional design decision, to "gate" looting these buildings. So people have a more meaty mid game. I'm not hating it, I was a bit frustrated when I made my post, you know, the ole storming straight to the forums after I died the third time to let the world know. But... for early game, I think it's hard enough with just the zombies, while with dogs, it's not just "very hard", it is literally impossible. I believe that everybody, or maybe 99.9% would have died in the situations that killed me. No way to escape, no running backwards, no health, no stamina, no weapons. It was three different buildings, btw, (and I saw dogs in at least two more) and the third time the dogs were the scheduled wandering horde. The AI was funny too, I was inside a building, the pack came through the front door and I could only back into a storage room. Closed the only door, jumped up on some block and started going through the ceiling. That fortunately was made of wood. The dogs broke the door quickly, which is nice, good threat, I like, but the fun part was that when I broke through the ceiling and made it up to the upper floor, two dogs were already waiting for me. Ha ha. So the AI send them to that spot above me. Outsmarted by virtual zombie dogs, I had a bit of a chuckle.
However, while not hating, I think there are better approaches to provide a meaty mid-
and end-game. Have zones. Have biomes with different difficulties - as it already is the case, just that the difficulties are not substantial enough. In "my mod", the wasteland has very fast running zombies, many with ranged attacks, it has tons of dogs and vultures and bears, so you know to stay out of it if you ever come close. At some point, you're strong enough to go in, and then it has "towers of death", that you will avoid. That's skyscrapers filled with crazy op (modded boss-) zombies, that you basically can only survive if you have crazy op (modded) weapons and (literally) tenthousands of rounds for these. And you get to that.. I'd say not earlier than maybe after 50+ days. And before, you have biomes that are mid-game difficult, not as hard as the wasteland, but you mostly don't want to go there in the first one or two weeks. Other biomes are mid-game, also too difficult for the first one or two weeks. Maybe you can sneak in every now and then, to grab the biome-specific loot - stores, for example, only spawn in the more difficult biomes, the crazy op modded weapons only in the wasteland. And such. I haven't looked into modding much, but if it's eventually possible to set the player's spawn point, I'll make a ring world (hoping that's still possible -.-) where you spawn at the outer border and have to make your way to the center, with increasingly difficult biomes. Anyways, I digress. It's what I do. :-D
tl;dr: Having to fear dogs in every prefab in every biome, I don't know.. Maybe I'll try that out sometime, but at this point, particularly after waiting for the update for so long, I want to thoroughly enjoy the game.