Mine rewamp idea

Onarr

Onarr

Refugee
I recently saw documentary about land mines and it was stated, that most of them were designed not to kill, but to injure as many people as possible, to slow down enemy advancement through casualities.

That got me thinking. As it is now, mines are next to useless and are almost never used in player builds. Also, the mines in the PoIs if you manage to overlook them giving you instant death is pretty bad from gameplay perspective, so they cannot be widely used as hazard.

So I propose a change. Make mines dismember zombie legs and break players bones instead with some reasonoble damage. Higher tier mines would have large radius. Just imagine a horde of zombies instead of running at you they are reduced to crawling husks. Not getting insta killed by mine would be pretty nice too, and broken leg would be still massive downside.

 
For players, it could work.

"Instant death is bad" pretty much automatically leads to "mines need to be easy to avoid" in design.

Having less deadly but still damn annoying mines, could possibly lead to more harder-to-spot mines placed in the world, bu I dunno.. is that a better design? You're blowing up more, but they don't really harm you?

For zombies, esp horde night; they don't want players able to easily generate crawlers from zombies. Why? Well, if you play with say 8 max alive, and you get all 8 into crawling state, you can just walk around them, build your base, do whatever while the swim team tries to catch up with you.

 
Right now, they're pointless for the player to use and just lead to rage moments if we hit them(for me at least).

Stun and injure the player to make us use up resources to heal and repair armor? For the Z's, knockdown and stun plus some damage?

 
Mines are good for protecting your base against players tho. It's just that they require a lot of materials to be useful when they are dirt cheap to make in real life.

 
Making them is very expensive and the perk to pick them up in the wild is locked behind perception 10 which few players would bother with (lucky looter only needing perception 7 and spears being mostly useless at high levels). I tried to do a build around perception but it ended up being too frustrating by the time demolitionist show up. By comparison STR build starts strong and stays strong forever.

I really wanted to do a perception as secondary for sniper rifles and mines but by the time I hit level 40-50 getting the exp needed to get past the exp wall was just insane. Mines not being that useful in the first place should have infiltrator as a Perception 7 for max level on it honestly. With perception 10 required i'm not sure why anybody would bother with it. Heck I get the magazine to not trigger mines within a few days anyways.

 
For players, it could work."Instant death is bad" pretty much automatically leads to "mines need to be easy to avoid" in design.

Having less deadly but still damn annoying mines, could possibly lead to more harder-to-spot mines placed in the world, bu I dunno.. is that a better design? You're blowing up more, but they don't really harm you?

For zombies, esp horde night; they don't want players able to easily generate crawlers from zombies. Why? Well, if you play with say 8 max alive, and you get all 8 into crawling state, you can just walk around them, build your base, do whatever while the swim team tries to catch up with you.
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well you can also hop on a bike and wait it out. Also bloodmoon is huge XP farm, why would you avoid it?

 
well you can also hop on a bike and wait it out. Also bloodmoon is huge XP farm, why would you avoid it?
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Two oft-repeated points of an age old debate. That discussion boils down to: "The Fun Pimps want the horde fight to be actually fought and they are doing their best to make it so." Log spikes were removed partly because they were crippling zombies too effectively etc.

I'm not bothering to rehash that debate. I'm pointing this out Only because your idea, as described, is going against that philosophy - I personally wouldn't have anything against it :)

 
Two oft-repeated points of an age old debate. That discussion boils down to: "The Fun Pimps want the horde fight to be actually fought and they are doing their best to make it so." Log spikes were removed partly because they were crippling zombies too effectively etc.
I'm not bothering to rehash that debate. I'm pointing this out Only because your idea, as described, is going against that philosophy - I personally wouldn't have anything against it :)
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Well the thing is, spikes lasted for ages, whereas mines are consumed.

 
Well, sure, it might be possible to balance it to a point where you can't "exploit" it for horde nights. For example, enough damage so the crawlers will quickly die as well in later explosions (although, this could be easily worked around with proper mine placement). Or the crawlers just getting "replaced" with new ones before their deaths. Or just make the crawlers for BM to have a good speed on their bellies.

I'm mostly replying to your original description of "Just imagine a horde of zombies instead of running at you they are reduced to crawling husks." That's explicitly against the recent design trends. If you achieve that description, TFP doesn't want it in. If you don't, then I don't know what we're supposed to be talking about..? :)

 
well you can also hop on a bike and wait it out. Also bloodmoon is huge XP farm, why would you avoid it?
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It's an xp farm early on at least.

Our server is standard settings, default difficulty, zed #, ect.

We are over a month in and we had our 35th day blood moon, we had to close up the bridge and throw in the towel about half way through it. There were 4 of us from level 15 to level 40, we had about a thousand rounds of various ammo appiece and we had a poi outfitted to be an obstacle course to line up shots with hopping 1 block variant path (1 up 1 down over and over across a bridge to us). Secure door with shocking wire and 2 blade traps running. We all completely ran out of ammo at about 2 am. By 2:30pm we had already lost 1 member due to zombie mosh pit overrunning the bridge and wrecking the blade traps and another got chased off the roof to his death. Me and the last survivor closed up the secure door, collapsed the bridge and let the horde tear up the building till 5am when we ran around and tried to clear them out with melee and we lost both dudes again doing that. Horde was nothing but glowing-zeds/whites/cops/spiders. Took half a clip to kill any one of them. One person from that group do not even want horde nights turned on any more, just turn em off and turn the game to minecraft. He's done. The others could go either way. Note if demolishers show up the plan is now just to bicycle around or hide on a big poi all night (or just eat glass and be done with it), demolishers are essentially game ending until you can afford to build a filtration system to get them out. Our group can not build enough ammo to take out the demolishers that will show up all night so most of them will not even bother.

The exp is meaningless. You could get an auger and mine dirt all night and make twice as much exp if that is all you wanted. The resource drain has gotten insane at threat level ~90. The combined threat rating for having a group together of some high and some low level is just not working right. The low level guys just end up throwing everything out of whack. Its worse now since you can have a miner/builder who is high level, but useless for combat and now he's an albatross around your neck on horde night making things way worse.

 
Well, sure, it might be possible to balance it to a point where you can't "exploit" it for horde nights. For example, enough damage so the crawlers will quickly die as well in later explosions (although, this could be easily worked around with proper mine placement). Or the crawlers just getting "replaced" with new ones before their deaths. Or just make the crawlers for BM to have a good speed on their bellies.
I'm mostly replying to your original description of "Just imagine a horde of zombies instead of running at you they are reduced to crawling husks." That's explicitly against the recent design trends. If you achieve that description, TFP doesn't want it in. If you don't, then I don't know what we're supposed to be talking about..? :)
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Yeah, but why put limb dismemberment into the game when it does not have any purpose? Its missed opportunity

 
It's an xp farm early on at least. Our server is standard settings, default difficulty, zed #, ect.

We are over a month in and we had our 35th day blood moon, we had to close up the bridge and throw in the towel about half way through it. There were 4 of us from level 15 to level 40, we had about a thousand rounds of various ammo appiece and we had a poi outfitted to be an obstacle course to line up shots with hopping 1 block variant path (1 up 1 down over and over across a bridge to us). Secure door with shocking wire and 2 blade traps running. We all completely ran out of ammo at about 2 am. By 2:30pm we had already lost 1 member due to zombie mosh pit overrunning the bridge and wrecking the blade traps and another got chased off the roof to his death. Me and the last survivor closed up the secure door, collapsed the bridge and let the horde tear up the building till 5am when we ran around and tried to clear them out with melee and we lost both dudes again doing that. Horde was nothing but glowing-zeds/whites/cops/spiders. Took half a clip to kill any one of them. One person from that group do not even want horde nights turned on any more, just turn em off and turn the game to minecraft. He's done. The others could go either way. Note if demolishers show up the plan is now just to bicycle around or hide on a big poi all night (or just eat glass and be done with it), demolishers are essentially game ending until you can afford to build a filtration system to get them out. Our group can not build enough ammo to take out the demolishers that will show up all night so most of them will not even bother.

The exp is meaningless. You could get an auger and mine dirt all night and make twice as much exp if that is all you wanted. The resource drain has gotten insane at threat level ~90. The combined threat rating for having a group together of some high and some low level is just not working right. The low level guys just end up throwing everything out of whack. Its worse now since you can have a miner/builder who is high level, but useless for combat and now he's an albatross around your neck on horde night making things way worse.
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I feel ya, the resource drain on higher lvls are insane. Thats why I opt for melee defense with addition of blade trap, dart trap and electric fence, located conviniently close enough that I can repair them as night goes on. It makes things much easier and lessens the resource drain considerably.

 
Mines are a flash in the pan. Even if you set them up at choke points so they're all hit, what percentage of a horde night do they remain effective for?....< 1%? Even if they killed every zombie within their range, they only provide the tiniest fraction of the protection you'll need.

They cost resources, you need to craft them and place them every time for that < 1%. Too much of a pain in the ass to be worth it.

If you want me to use mines, help me out and automate the process a bit....

1) You can build mines as 1, 10 or 100-use devices.

2) This is NOT to say that a single device can actually explode 100 times....it just means that by "crafting" it, you're setting aside sufficient resources to cover the replacement costs of the mine 99 times.

3) After the mine detonates, it's automatically replaced at the end of the bloodmoon horde (dawn), or at midnight the following day....whatever, so long as you don't actually have to go and re-craft and replace the things manually.

4) You can presume that the same guys who scrap brass radiators while your'e running from a bear and popping pain-killers at the same time are the ones replacing the mines for you.

-Morloc

 
I dunno, I haven't used them in ages, don't really use spikes either.. but, plenty of people make fields full of spikes, which are around 40 iron a pop, and they kill what, 1-2 zombies each? I would think mines would perform about the same, based on how effective they seem in the world when they happen to do anything. Especially behind some decent breach points (wood pole fences blocking a corridor or something similar), so there is some time for several targets to group up.

 
Mines are a flash in the pan. Even if you set them up at choke points so they're all hit, what percentage of a horde night do they remain effective for?....< 1%? Even if they killed every zombie within their range, they only provide the tiniest fraction of the protection you'll need.
They cost resources, you need to craft them and place them every time for that < 1%. Too much of a pain in the ass to be worth it.

If you want me to use mines, help me out and automate the process a bit....

1) You can build mines as 1, 10 or 100-use devices.

2) This is NOT to say that a single device can actually explode 100 times....it just means that by "crafting" it, you're setting aside sufficient resources to cover the replacement costs of the mine 99 times.

3) After the mine detonates, it's automatically replaced at the end of the bloodmoon horde (dawn), or at midnight the following day....whatever, so long as you don't actually have to go and re-craft and replace the things manually.

4) You can presume that the same guys who scrap brass radiators while your'e running from a bear and popping pain-killers at the same time are the ones replacing the mines for you.

-Morloc
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That is a good point. But if you create 360 perimeter with mines, you could take out a lot of zombies if they come from various directions and you have large field. Then you just pick cripled zombies one by one with sniper rifle. Or with some clever building you could use this to your advantage. Create chokes, place barbed wire and electric fence to stack the zombies at one place, right after place mine and BOOM. they are all half dead, crippled or have dismembered limbs, easy pickings with just bodyshots.

I had also idea for claymore mine. Perfect for sniper build. Place it, start picking off zombies, and if any get too close claymore will cripple and knockdown zombies in large area in one direction.

Mines would be useful even in current condition if they actually gave XP

 
Mines would be useful even in current condition if they actually gave XP
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Yea without them giving exp they are more than useless. Too expensive to build, too many points invested to scavange, too unpredicitble and you get nothing rewarded for them killing zeds anyways. That last bit you mentioned kinda puts a final nail in their coffin.

 
I really like the idea of rebalancing the mines. Such explosives in current state bring more of a frustration factor and a quick death penalty.

Mines should rather shutter the bones and grant bleeding out effect. This item can be balanced in a way the icon of hazard could pop out near the proximity of an explosive etc. (HUD icon or small indicator over the mine) and also friendly mines planted by friends would not trigger the explosion - making the game more friendly for newcomers and more tweakable for experienced community.

Also I have in mind explosives that could be only activated under motorcycles and 4x4 trucks and having by that timed/repair stage immobility effect on vehs (sitting duck impact), that would be interesting in multiplayer in case of vehicular raids etc. Idk why vehicles have to be repaired with the use of repair kit, several repair kits is a resource draining blunder - Im speaking here for myself. Instant repairs of vehicules in PvP is usually OP and having a tool that repairs vehicle in stages would bring more game balancing impact in dynamic battles.

Sniper class with explosive perk can become a great combo. Claymores are a great addition and I hope they wont be auto generated in the worlds environment - rather craftable items and seldom to be found. Simple traps that could set zombies on fire, so much stuff to be explored.

 
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