PC Make BRICKS great again! (Were they ever great?)

Kam R.

Kam R.

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Today I present all you forum fanatics and hopefully some of the developers with a little gameplay/balance issue I have seen in the game since I first played it (A14). It's one of those things that seem to have been swept under the rug; one of those features that that ultimately might just get scrapped in the name of "streamlining" and that would be a sad thing to happen.

Bricks, in their current state are more or less useless. No player EVER bothers making them and for good reasons. Some players don't even know they exist at all!

I did a little bit of testing to get some numbers and make a direct comparison to cobblestone blocks, which as of now are the go-to building material of choice over bricks. The following data is for the making of one block of each.

[table=width: 750, class: grid, align: left]

[tr]

[td]Block type[/td]

[td]COBBLESTONE[/td]

[td]BRICK[/td]

[/tr]

[tr]

[td]Hit points[/td]

[td]1500[/td]

[td]1200[/td]

[/tr]

[tr]

[td]Crafted with[/td]

[td]Bare hands (Backpack)[/td]

[td]Forge![/td]

[/tr]

[tr]

[td]Raw materials needed[/td]

[td]14 Clay

14 Sm. stone[/td]

[td]12 Clay

2 Sm. stone

2 Wood[/td]

[/tr]

[tr]

[td]Time to obtain mats and craft the block*[/td]

[td]ca. 33 s

(obtaining mats - c. 14s, crafting 14 cobblestones - 14s, crafting flagstone block -4s, upgrade from flag to cobble (with stone axe) - c. 1,5s[/td]

[td]ca. 100 s!

(obtaining mats - c. 5s, smelting mats (10 "stone",60 "clay")- 60s, crafting brick block - 35s[/td]

[/tr]

[/table]

*Time measured with 25 quality stone axe/ stone shovel, lowest mining and construction tools skills and no 69er or quicker crafting perks.

Gameplay/ balance wise it makes absolutely no sense to ever bother making a structure out of brick blocks. It's obviously way easier to just go for cobble. More HP, total mobility where to craft and no need for a specific workstation to make. The only argument for cobble having higher HP than brick is that it uses more stone, which takes a bit longer to harvest, but looking at the overall time put in making a block even that argument becomes somewhat void.

IMO a block that takes a lot more time to make, needs you to get a specific workstation first and on top of that is even "riskier" to make as you have a forge running (heat increase) should friggin PERFORM BETTER.

Also, intuitively I'd expect a block made up of densely packed, baked bricks to have a better structural integrity, than one made up of randomly sized rocks clumped together with clay. No idea if that's actually the case realistically. But I don't want to go on a realism tangent too much anyway, this is mostly a question of effort vs outcome.

So what's the fix? Well one obvious, quick answer would of course be to increase brick HP and probably also slightly decrease cobble's. Perhaps just switching their current HP values might already be enough. (But then there's also scrap which goes to 2100 HP and again needs no workstation to craft...)

I'm thinking there could be a little more to bricks even. They could become a separate tier of building block altogether due to them being crafted in a forge. I think it would fit better into the current system of tiers where you have blocks you can make anytime anywhere, but that are weak and blocks you need specialized equipment for that are strong.

Bricks would perfectly fill that massive gap between low level tier and concrete-steel level. So instead of brick being a slightly stronger alternative to cobble or scrap I'd rather like to see it a good jump above them and closer to concrete.

Another thing that would make this new "Tier 3" perfect would be the ability to reinforce it with forged iron (plating?) just as concrete gets reinforced with steel – why skip iron? At the same time obtaining the parts for concrete mixers should be made a lot more difficult and bam - brick tier is a go.

What are your guys' thoughts on this?

 
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Lol, Guppy. I know it's not a super duper important issue or as impacting as "what specs should my new PC have for the game?" or "Can I unscrew that scope from this gun again?". But it's game related and I had it on my mind every now and then and think it shouldn't be overlooked in the long run.

 
I'm confident Gazz did another balance run, but no, I was agreeing with you... Some things just don't make sense.

 
Great post. Agree with both your efforts vs outcome comments and the suggestion that boosting the stats for bricks will improve the building material progression curve.

 
You can place bricks under fire, Coblestone not

And as you allready wrote they are much faster to farm, only drawback is that they block a forge.

I usually use them if i want defenses somewhere i expect to be attacked during building

 
Yeah, but COBBLESTONE is ♥♥♥♥ty to upgrade:) Most of the players stay in a small base for 14-21 days then start building a large one directly from concrete.It takes a lot of time to upgrade a large base made of COBBLESTONE.I use bricks for inner walls/design.When building a large base, bricks also have the advantage of being made in a forge, so you can craft/scrap something else in that time.

 
The OP is correct - bricks aren’t competitive with alternative materials.

When I analyzed the numbers, the outlier was the time to forge the bricks. This is because they’re made solely from clay. The craft time is calculated automatically based on the materials in the recipe, and a unit of clay adds more time than other materials. I believe this is to represent some things requiring a bigger, more complex or precise mold to forge correctly. It can also be a fudge factor to scale up or down when a recipe’s time based on its other ingredients doesn’t feel right.

But then you have bricks, where the clay isn’t for molding but becomes the finished product itself. So since the clay serves a different purpose here, the usual calculation doesn’t apply.

In short, I address this in ComSenMod by overriding the auto-calculated forge timers for all brick blocks and reducing them by a third. It looks better on paper, but for those of you that’ve tried it, I’d love more feedback on if bricks seem viable with this adjustment in practice.

Edit: some of this post may be repeating the obvious because I first read the thread on mobile, where the table didn't draw properly.

 
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Personally I think they're 'backwards!'

With that said... Cobble Stone is a 'specific' style of manufacture but so is bricks to a degree... But you can also make 'mud bricks' and 'concrete bricks' too! And basically everything in between...

Its a quandary to say the least :)

 
All i can say is that i had a game where to choose bricks was the logic decision.

Cant really remember but i think i had 5 Forges and couldnt produce concrete.

So i builded my first 3 weeks the Hordetower from bricks. (i started production on Evening of day 6 and started to bild the Defense at around 18 o´clock, so not much time to upgrade/build cobblestones)

 
I think, but can't remember for sure, that bricks were going to go away as their own material but be a paintable texture if you wanted the brick look.

I tried building with bricks once, A14 or A15, and gave up after I discovered that 4 forges still didn't produce them quickly enough to matter. I could build a small skyscraper out of cobble faster than those forges were churning out bricks. That was before I had even realized how soft bricks were in practice on even a low-level horde night.

 
You can place bricks under fire, Coblestone not (...)I usually use them if i want defenses somewhere i expect to be attacked during building
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I guess what you mean by that is you can insta place 1200 HP for defence. Good point, but would probably apply to not too many situations and in most such situations I bet most players would rather just place spikes blocks that not only stop but also kill and again are quicker to craft?

And as you allready wrote they are much faster to farm, only drawback is that they block a forge.
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But that's not what I wrote at all. Farming the mats for them takes less time, but overall production time greatly exceeds that of cobblestone.

Yeah, but COBBLESTONE is ♥♥♥♥ty to upgrade:) Most of the players stay in a small base for 14-21 days then start building a large one directly from concrete.It takes a lot of time to upgrade a large base made of COBBLESTONE.
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Not sure how this is pertinent to the discussion at hand.

An upgrade to concrete takes the same effort/time from any of the current "tier2" materials (scrap, cobble, brick).

And the post is mainly about early game and also includes a suggestion that adresses that immediate jump many players make to concrete (many even just completely skipping the low tier materials altogether even).

I use bricks for inner walls/design.
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I used to do that too. Now we have paint...

When building a large base, bricks also have the advantage of being made in a forge, so you can craft/scrap something else in that time.
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I still would say sacrificing about 30% of your backpack crafting/scrapping time to make cobblestone instead, does not legitimize them being stronger than brick.

You seem to argue from the current metagame standpoint of things where you have your eyes on making concrete from the start, while I want to see a longer progression line where concrete is a lot harder to achieve and (with hopefully more actual threats from zombies in the future) building/reinforcing relatively strong before that is neccessary.

(...)With that said... Cobble Stone is a 'specific' style of manufacture (...)
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There used to be 4 paths to go down on "tier 2" building material choices. I liked it. I liked how different biomes meant choosing different material/ manufacturing choices. But the trend in the game's development seems to go away from that sort of choice. Adobe is already gone (adobe also kinda sucked.) And I don't have the numbers on bricks in older version handy now, but I remember they were similarly not in favor of them. Which is why I'm suggesting to go forward towards the linear progression concept, by introducing bricks as their own tier between low level stuff and high end stuff.

 
Nowadays its all about reinforced concrete or polished steel and paint.

Doing anything else is "not knowing better" or "being nostalgic".

Material progress is way to rapid for anything else, its way too easy to go from reinforcing POI with wood to having concrete base a week later.

 
I remember posting something similar and it fell into oblivion. My guess is they will eventually get rid of it and use your painting skill to draw a brick overlay.

 
Bricks and cobble used to feel pretty even and I loved building with bricks but yeah ever since they changed it in a16 (I think) I've just been using cobble.

- - - Updated - - -

Nowadays its all about reinforced concrete or polished steel and paint.
Doing anything else is "not knowing better" or "being nostalgic".

Material progress is way to rapid for anything else, its way too easy to go from reinforcing POI with wood to having concrete base a week later.
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also this

for most intents and purposes it's better to just tech up in an underground bunker and then emerge with reinforced concrete.

 
As much as I 100% agree with you on this, once painting a block to look like anything you want, it kinda doesn't matter anymore. Plus, I play on servers where zombies on insane, so using anything outside of reinforced concrete or Steel is wanting to get killed... :/ I've been wishing TFP remove increased block damage zombies make as you increase the difficulty - I mean the increased Entity damage and damage sponginess of insane zombies to waste more ammo is enough IMO

 
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