PC I've Been Playing A16.4 for months now, and I've noticed some things that bother me..

Later stages of the game they feel annoying because the loot doesn’t exceed the ridiculous cost of repairs and ammo. Getting guns when I’m rocking several near 600 quality guns isn’t doing a lot for me. And then when you’re sitting there just unloading into bullet sponges that don’t drop enough loot to even come close to supplementing the cost it took to kill them is also lame imo
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Take the ammo out of the guns and sell the guns / parts to the trader to buy more ammo / etc.

 
Interesting idea.
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ammo? I don't find it appealing when you find 0-100 slugs, when you have to spend 600+
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Your horde nights sound insane. I try to cut down a lot of my ammo costs with wooden spikes, which do a surprising amount of damage to a horde for relatively cheap. Electric fences and blade traps are great non-consumable damage sources as well. Even in later gamestages I try to use my crossbow when possible and stick to AK-47 for radiated cops/wights. Usually I spend about 200-400 bullets on a rough night and make most of that back, plus get some expensive things like guns and rockets and radiation and military gear. 5-figure dukes in a night usually.

 
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Your horde nights sound insane. I try to cut down a lot of my ammo costs with wooden spikes, which do a surprising amount of damage to a horde for relatively cheap. Electric fences and blade traps are great non-consumable damage sources as well. Even in later gamestages I try to use my crossbow when possible and stick to AK-47 for radiated cops/wights. Usually I spend about 200-400 bullets on a rough night and make most of that back, plus get some expensive things like guns and rockets.
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We started with wood spikes 3-4 rows. Then electric fences all around + steel spikes in the middle. The thing is that you have to kite radiated feral cops etc away from everything because they'll simply rip through it all. HP regen being insane is one reason.

2nd was the weird glitching zombies so their heads would go inside the wall, or inside another zombies' body. And non head shots take even longer. (Devs Neverrrrrrrr talk about this bug) Which annoys me very very mucho.

I think at the "final" gamestage all defences were to be crapped upon except some steel spikes. I can't spoil too much or the devs will counter it again. And at the end we had used 200-300 sniper rounds + 200-300 shotgun shells. And we usually use the X-bow to oneshot the weaker zombies.

Aaandd I had jumped down at the near end to smack them with my spiked club. By that time it's usually about 4-5 feral radiated cops running around + some feral radiated wights and some other tough zombies. Doges are the worst though as their hitbox range is huge. So even at the end 1 dog can take you down.

EDIT: X-bow not X-box

 
Yeah the biggest problem with a horde that big is losing bodies because the fight went on so long that some of them got shot or fell and disappeared or replaced another body or just rotted away before you got to them. If you could realistically loot every body it'd probably be worth at least as much as you lost, provided you have a good base design.

I guess it's up for debate if you should earn more than you lose almost as a rule, or if 7th nights exist to intentionally set a player back and test them at the highest level.

 
Yeah the biggest problem with a horde that big is losing bodies because the fight went on so long that some of them snip
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Yeah, you got a good point there. I'd say unless you have several kill zones within your base. 40-60% of the bodies will get shredded by other zombies. The only remaining ones are the weak zombies that died at the first spikes (crap loot) and some special zombies in the end.

That's one of the reasons why my kill bases have to be so huge all the time. + I'm currently trying to make a design that does have somewhat of a multiple killzone thing without pathing of newer zombies overlapping the bodies of earlier ones.

 
I've never died to far, which I think is the main contributing factor. I'm a very cautious player. If I died I know it would go down, but the main thing that's bugging me is the sleeper spawning only looking at GameStage, which I will be adjusted for A17 anyways.

 
I've never died to far, which I think is the main contributing factor. I'm a very cautious player. If I died I know it would go down, but the main thing that's bugging me is the sleeper spawning only looking at GameStage, which I will be adjusted for A17 anyways.
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Eat glass.

It's like getting a haircut. If you don't like it you know that at least it will grow back again eventually.

If you aren't having fun clearing POI's then eat glass in your base, respawn, get your stuff and start exploring again. Your gamestage will have lowered and the POI's shouldn't be packed full of irradiated ferals any more. And eventually, your gamestage will grow back to where it was.

 
Eat glass.
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What an advice for a survival game! As if you had told someone playing an RGP that he should just reload until the dice throw come out the way he wants. :crushed:

But back to topic. tldr; The balance only for scavenger might be askew in late game, not the game generally

I really can't judge if the balance is wrong in end game because I haven't played a SP in A16 long enough, but I had an idea why it might be looking unbalanced only for some after talking to the builder player in my group who didn't have problems with the weekly rebuild:

If you are a scrounging player, you have a field day for the first few weeks as you find better weapons, armour, recipes. Usually (in vanilla at least) after 3 to 4 weeks you have nearly everything (and any holes plugged by the trader). Later weeks are dominated by just replenishing ammo and repairing your base which is 80% things you don't really want to do on that scale. Even scavenging becomes stale as you concentrate on brass and ammunition and most other stuff is useless.

A builder/digger hasn't the same problems, his art is relevant the whole time, he doesn't mind (as much) the repair grind or the hunt for underground ore veins.

I might also have a solution: There should be an alloy or plastic that can only be extracted in small amounts from household appliances (making kitchens great again ;-). For unknown reasons (or just because it is especially sturdy) zombies can't get through that stuff as easy as even through steel. With that material you can build spikes that don't make more damage, maybe even less, but the spikes last 10 times longer. Maybe blocks can be upgraded too

A scavenger should be able to get the material for maybe 10 spikes or 2 blocks in a week. Not enough to replace the miners work but enough so his scavenging gets him more time away from the building/mining stuff he doesn't like that much.

 
What an advice for a survival game! As if you had told someone playing an RGP that he should just reload until the dice throw come out the way he wants. :crushed:
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The OP is playing SP and isn't having fun because of the high gamestage. Taking one death on your own terms for the specific purpose of having fun again isn't the same as not surviving. I don't think "survive your loathing of the game" is within the intended scope of a survival game. You are supposed to survive the threats within the game and not just keep playing forever even though its tedious. By that definition, quitting the game would count as losing because you didn't survive by continuing on with that game. If he can eat glass one time in his base and respawn with a lower gamestage that is in essence the same as toggling a setting to make the game more fun. What if he goes to the option page and changes the setting to Scavenger? Is that "not surviving"?

That being said, I wouldn't do that myself. But I'm also not one of the people complaining that the difficulty eventually ramps up to where it does. When I stop having fun in a world for whatever reason I just start a new world. The early days are my favorite.

So my advice remains. Toggle the gamestage setting by eating glass. Go to the options menu and toggle the difficulty setting.

Or start over.

 
I really like when my gamestage goes high and you really find a challenge on every POI. Ferals, Cops... everything increase the fun (Except for the spider zombies, I hate those bastards) and makes the game hard. About "empty jars and cans", well, it's a gamble game... sometimes you win, sometimes you loose. If the threats is only specific to a respective loot quality, I'll never loot a house with regular Z's because there is no prize inside...

 
The balance in this game is really off... you can just easily dig down a few blocks and be completely safe with no guns or skills. I think the worst thing about this game is you have no reason to explore or go anywhere, all you need to do is smelt steel and trade it at the trader. I honestly hate the direction this game is going with superzombies and all that nonsense. All I want is to explore and scavenge, but it kind of sucks to not have any guns and you are just trying to find some scrap metal and suddenly you are running into monsters straight out of DOOM. The game just needs more balance. Right now it's trying to push us into a tower defense, and you have to deliberately leave yourself vulnerable by not going underground.

 
The balance in this game is really off... you can just easily dig down a few blocks and be completely safe with no guns or skills.
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And lo and behold this gets addressed in A17. You wanted to say something about the direction the game takes ? :smile-new:

 
And lo and behold this gets addressed in A17. You wanted to say something about the direction the game takes ? :smile-new:
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I don't know, I haven't seen alpha 17 or any news about it. If it's getting fixed, I'll be very pleased.

 
Roland is right in that it's me being too good at the game and thus not making it fun for myself. I've hit true late game where it's more about endurance and persistence rather than my war chest and skills. I restart when I get to day ninety eight most of the time anyways, because by that time I've learned what I can from my base design and the character build I made. This thread's OP was mostly about issues I had specifically with A16's new systems and changes and not game balance itself. It's in alpha. It's less than forty percent complete. A17 is going to introduce new issues, and the balance of the game will change yet again because of it. The sleepers aren't finished yet. I know this. I provided a suggestion for area-specific sleeper spawns that ignore gamestages hoping it would be discussed. There is no real block damage balance. I know this. The team hasn't included all the materials or enemies they want yet, and so all we have is a rough outline for that balance so they can change it without it screwing up the entire order. I gave my thoughts on something they should look at when balancing the game after it enters beta. We're basically watching the artist paint the portrait in real time. The game's not finished. I'm just here to give suggestions and discuss what I feel the painter should include when he's brushing the final few strokes.

 
Area specific sleeper spawns that help to "complete the scene" rather than just automatically be dependent on gamestage is something I would be in favor of.

 
Area specific sleeper spawns that help to "complete the scene" rather than just automatically be dependent on gamestage is something I would be in favor of.
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a regular house full of scoobycops just makes no sense to me. The doors are locked, the house is intact, but somehow all those scoobycops got in there and supposedly died of radiation or something? Every house becomes a boss encounter.

This aspect of the game completely put me off wanting to play a16.

Once you hit gamestage 3k+ you get mostly HP sponge spawns as sleepers which pretty much makes it pointless trying to scavenge and loot.

Enemies need something other than tons of HP and regen to make them interesting.

 
- Block health indeed doesn't matter. We also make huge megabases with 1-4 players. But if you don't rush towards them on horde night. It will take about 2-3 minutes before the first wall is down. That's why I suggest very kindly that they either reduce zombie attack speed VS blocks or rude the damage the special zombies do vs blocks.
- The game stage on the one hand makes sense, because you are lvled and have better equipment and guns etc. However that is not always the case. And when you don't have a blue shotgun or higher, it will get very hard to kill a feral radiated cop because their HP regen is just plain silly.

I like the idea of more spawn specific locations though. And to not have feral fat cops spawn inside a random shack. I"ve had 8 of them spawn inside a cabin once. Was quite the blast.

I love the idea of feral radiated stuff. But their hp regen is off the charts. That's why most stuff can't kill them. Just give them more raw base hp instead.

You're right about the music box figurines. It's very annoying and hard to combat such an AI. Whereas normal melee combat is very ezmode.

That's one of the biggest flaws I see in running zombies (IMO) the twirling zombies.

Batman,

EDIT: Welcome to the forums!
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I agree the rad regen needs to be toned down, its far to fast.

<buff id="zombieRadiatedBuff40" duration="0" icon="ui_game_symbol_fire">

<modify id="0" stat="health" amount="40" rate="3" />

</buff>

<buff id="zombieRadiatedBuff80" duration="0" icon="ui_game_symbol_fire">

<modify id="0" stat="health" amount="80" rate="3" />

</buff>

So they regen either 40 hp every 3s or 80 hp every 3s.

 
Roland is right in that it's me being too good at the game and thus not making it fun for myself. I've hit true late game where it's more about endurance and persistence rather than my war chest and skills. I restart when I get to day ninety eight most of the time anyways, because by that time I've learned what I can from my base design and the character build I made. This thread's OP was mostly about issues I had specifically with A16's new systems and changes and not game balance itself. It's in alpha. It's less than forty percent complete. A17 is going to introduce new issues, and the balance of the game will change yet again because of it. The sleepers aren't finished yet. I know this. I provided a suggestion for area-specific sleeper spawns that ignore gamestages hoping it would be discussed. There is no real block damage balance. I know this. The team hasn't included all the materials or enemies they want yet, and so all we have is a rough outline for that balance so they can change it without it screwing up the entire order. I gave my thoughts on something they should look at when balancing the game after it enters beta. We're basically watching the artist paint the portrait in real time. The game's not finished. I'm just here to give suggestions and discuss what I feel the painter should include when he's brushing the final few strokes.
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Very good points. I was about to respond to your OP until I saw this. I was curious why it mattered since gamestage 1500+ you should no longer be looting crap POI's anyway, but that is simply brushing off the original problem. You are very correct that regardless of gamestage, simple POI's need to get fixed.

As for this game ever reaching Beta, I personally hope that never happens. The most interesting aspect of this game has been its evolution. Each alpha has provided a challenge for me to solve. Find the most efficient endgame. And with each alpha, the rules change so that I need to find new solutions.

 
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