I think you’ve brought up some really good points @Mytheos
I’ve been tracking all confirmed content for A17 closely and most of what @mytheos and other have brought up has been addressed or changed in A17 so we’ll just have to wait and see how it turns out.
To summarize,
zombie artificial intelligence and path finding is much smarter now, so everyone’s comments about AI being no good are irrelevant.
Dogs can now dig down and all zombies can be modded to have the same capability.
There is another way to avoid BM hordes that you missed, going for a drive all night on the minibike. There are no zombies that can easily immobilize vehicles yet.
How can people be allowed to move around the map with a Nomad playstyle?
Player placed blocks and items could have a "Value" rating, and that could raise horde difficulty...more established bases get hit harder in a way that matches more closely the player's progression based on blocks, traps, chests, forges etc placed in an area.
This would cause any horde attack on a "new" area to be lessened so nomads would have a chance, and players could choose to move around a bit over time or if their last based was mostly destroyed beyond being repaired.
The trade off being Nomads have an easier time vs the hordes, but will progress slower overall and have to deal with a sometimes higher risk and different risks from not having a well established base.
I think you bring up a good point here and I don’t think TFP have addressed this yet and I’m sure they’ll think of something when they get to it.
I imagine they’d use the already implemented map heat system. Players in an area with high map heat have bases, players in areas with no or low map head are nomads.
We need to start having horde "types" or having them specialized vs certain types of defenses...which can be random.
Hordes may be mostly heavy hitters to break down fortifications and wear down heavy trap setups.
Hordes might be mostly swarm/high mobility types such as dogs/spiders/vultures to chase down fleeing players as well as dig/climb/fly over walls and traps more easily. ( Spiders should take minimal damage for climbing over spikes etc )
Balanced hordes to present an overall challenge.
Maybe even a situation to where survivors or raiders attack on horde night before a horde in desperation to find shelter from the oncoming tides of undead, with random specialized setups.
Essentially players might think they have it figured out until they randomly hit the right kind of raid or horde combination to overwhelm their defenses...or progress far enough into the game to where new horde types start showing up.
You will always have to fear what may come and never know exactly what you may be facing while always trying to optimize your base to handle new varied threats and horde/raid combos.
I like this idea a lot, it has potential and much room for expansion.
You should read my post on my thread here:
I think this is missing another question:
Which rewards can hordes offer making it worth fighting them?
For me, the reward is always the XP from the zombies, as well as any good loot they drop.
I think this is partially addressed in A17. Roland has confirmed that zombie loot won’t get lost anymore. There weren’t much specifics but I imagine this means corpse blocks that break or de-spawn will transfer loot to a nearby adjacent corpse block or something similar. I’ve seen talk about special zombies having more unique loot lists but I’m not sure if that’s made it into A17 but if it has that means more unique loot deliveries on BM from zombies.
"They eat up so much ammo/ other resources and barely give anything back for the week-long preparation put in."
Correct. I agree. This is because high “game stage” BM hasn’t been balanced well and I think TFP will revisit this too. I go into more detail on this in my comment on my thread here:
A talk about "high game stage" blood moons
In that post you will see my modded solutions to this issue.
My favorite being minable minerals to smelt brass and increase to nitrate and coal yeilds.
I think some people see hordes as a condition for survival...like eating food, you dont get a grand reward for doing it, you just survive to play the game longer.
I agree.
Personally I think the hordes should be more focused towards being an aspect of survival, as they are at the top of the list on things you have to survive, and without them, most of the challenge of the game evaporates.
I agree
You can eventually work on ways to make people face them, I suppose thats the concept of this post...in your example of Multiplayer with people logging out you can always have the AI process at a lower level and cause various random levels of damage to bases that were "active" recently, as a quick example if people log off for horde night
I have an idea that is a potential solution for this. I planned to post it in my thread but I haven’t yet so I’ll write it here.
A configurable timer for quitting/closing the game to prevent combat loggers. Receiving damage should interrupt the timer. If the game is forcibly closed the avatar should remain in game until the timer is finished.
I have no issue with adding a reward system to defeating them however, and if the game calculated a value for how well you did and had a plane drop a supply crate on your location based on zombies killed, how they were killed, number of player deaths etc, that would be fine as well.
They could even have the traders offer quests, discounts or special inventory that last a week based on it as well.
However giving out various rewards for the horde is going to be something to sort after you sort their survival aspect first, and a much easier prospect to be honest.
I don’t believe in any extra rewards for BM hordes. The reward is the XP and LOOOOT.
Personally, I think they are going too far with a whole bunch of things. They have a map that is so big that it becomes almost impossible to explore it properly.They're making buildings so risky to explore that any looting or quests will take an age to tackle, or will have to be done with a 'do it and die' attitude, which is contrary to the purpose of the game.
They're making hordes more threatening and destructive, so you have to waste more and more time and resources on defending and repairing a base.
They're essentially squeezing survival out of the game by making it too hard to survive. Progression and exploration will slow to a crawl as so much time gets lost to defence.
As for the trap of break out floors - I think its a lousy strategy. Might as well just spawn a cop on top of the player if you want to be that evil.
Disagree entirely.
If they gave each player placed block etc a value this would also help out MP, to where you have a single new guy in a small base getting less powerful hordes while a 5 person party in a well established huge base would get a massive one.
Just thought of another issue it'd help mitigate/solve.
This is already a feature in A16. It’s called game staging. Game stage is a value that is the sum of days survived and player level. So a level 100 who hasn’t died for 100 days has game stage of 200.
BM hordes spawn for each player and scaled based of game stage.
So 1 new guy will get 1 weak horde.
And a party of 5 guys with a well established base will get 5 horse that are likely to be higher game staged.
This topic is always so controversial because of the community split with people who don't want to fight the horde and those that do. It's fine to take away all the ways to avoid the horde but if they do then give people who don't want to fight them the option to turn off 7 day hordes.
I Agree
The game's performance is also bad. Large hordes destroy FPS, especially if in a city unless you have an amazing PC.
A17 sounds like it’s going to have amazing performance optimization coming from a variety of places in the code. But currently, in A16, I have an enthusiast top market top generation PC build, 1080ti OC, 8700k CPU, 32GB DDR4, R/W 3500MBps/2300MBps SSD. I can’t run the game at max graphics. And I drop to 10fps sometimes. It’s an alpha.
If you could turn off the warning weather and make horde days random they might be kind of interesting.
I’m always for more configurations, even if it’s xml exclusive.
You want realism? Go try punching a concrete wall with your bare fists and tell me, how much damage you've done to it.
I´m all in for more varied horde tactics, but concrete is concrete and rotten flesh is rotten flesh. Same goes for the radiated Z's. Show me that type of concrete that gets damage by radiation over a short period of time. It simply doesn't happen.
It seems you forgot that zombies have sledge hammer hands. But yeah I think their block damage could use a nerf so that we could have bigger hordes, I miss those old days.
More type of zombies // more complex gameplay.
Agree