PC Open Letter to TFP's...

[Laz Man]

"the zombie horde survival crafting game"

Nope, don't see tower defense game anywhere in there.

Tower defense is mentioned in the first few seconds of this video from 6 years ago. 

Also in the games description on its steam store page...

"7 Days to Die is an open-world game that is a unique combination of first person shooter, survival horror, tower defense, and role-playing games. Play the definitive zombie survival sandbox RPG that came first. Navezgane awaits!"

 

[RipClaw]

But I disagree a bit on the devs intentions being oracles. Solomon might not know because he isn't on this forum for long, but you and I surely have read enough of Madmoles opinions about the game and seen enough changes to the game (usually with the main reasons explained by the devs) to have a fairly good idea.

Honestly, I have no idea. Madmole has decided in a blink of an eye that the demolisher will have an explosion block damage of 5000 when two demolishers exploded in his base and the chemistry station was not destroyed. Someone like that is unpredictable for me.

I also see that his defense is always the same. It consists of shooting from a tower down on zombies and throwing grenades. If that's his vision for how players should defend their base, then I see a dark future for players who prefer funnel bases with electrical traps.

One time he tried something with electrical traps and you could clearly see that he had no experience with them. In general the Fun Pimps do not seem to be particularly interested in electrical traps. Since Alpha 16 no new traps have been added but several new guns and other weapons.

 

[Raestloz]

Reinforced concrete yes, but I don't think they are adapted for cheesy tactics. What is a cheesy tactic for you? A kill corridor? But that would

The zombies are adapted for cheesy tactics, that's what the AI fixes do these past few updates. I'm saying that playing normally simply cannot cut it anymore. The basic AI is designed to be as effective at day 7 as it is day 70, therefore you're going to need a base design that works against day 70 damage levels, but with day 7 materials. The difference is you don't see demolishers, which can be killed without exploding anyway

Based on the limitations, you need to cheese, i.e make up for lack of materials by way of exploiting zombie pathing: Herd them all to one place, make them faff around as you shoot them, stuff like that. For his specific example that'd entail cutting off the path upstairs so the zombies will faff around trying to go upstairs, failing 100% of the time, and he has to do that because his other defenses (the outer walls, moats and whatnot) clearly were insufficient. I'm not an AI pathfinder expert so I don't know what the AI is supposed to do at that point, but he said that if all else fails he will resort to floating base so I guess the AI hasn't got around to deal with that yet.  Since he couldn't sustain a kill corridor, it seems that either their team didn't spec into weapons (stupid) or they didn't progress enough.

Another thing I'd like to add is it is possible that his focus on killing them with traps is ironically the problem, at least at that point in time. Laying out traps around the base is inefficient because not only do traps not grant xp, the zombies are virtually unlimited, so the traps will break sooner rather than later, costing resources for quite literally no gain at all. They had to spend time digging the ditches, laying out traps, gathering the resources required to build them. Meanwhile, cheesing the AI pathing is much cheaper and since there can only be so many zombies at any time anyway, the danger level is always constant: the only enemies are the ones you see.

The time they spent building all those overengineered and completely worthless defense systems could've been spent leveling up to raise the gamestage and looting houses to gain ammo and whatnot that would've secured more kills faster during blood moon

 

[Solomon]

@Solomon obviously did not figure out the weaknesses and solve them. They left the weaknesses in place and just tried to fortify more against the zombies reaching the weaknesses. 

Its not that easy to identify the weaknesses when it boils down to a calculation in the AI saying "This exact point here has the least amount of total hp so storm here".

The Ai works in a pretty easy way if you play long enough, its basically searching for the least resistance to reach me so the best way to play is to cheese this behaviour but if you try to play in a legit manner like as if you dont know the AI behaviour you are going to have a bad time. They gonna smash throught your 3 lines of wall and swarm you.

 

[Solomon]

Imo his group didn't do anything "wrong", they simply had no idea what the game was going to throw at them.

We effectively tried to play with the excpectation that the horde night will spawn us a bunch of raging zeds who will try to run straight to the house and try to get in and not with the idea that they will all funnel to the one point what was not as reinforced as the others and from that on run straight up to the roof and eat us.

I also think Solomon's group did quite well and 3 attempts before succumbing to the youtube sirens is more than most would do. 

To be honest i still havent watched any youtube base building videos, i only know of the exploits from talks about them. The idea for the ramp base came from observing how the zombies always path towards the least resistance.

The current base essentially looks like this (please excuse the paint quality.



Edit: Someone please show me how do you ping people here so i dont need to quote everything.

 

[katarynna]

Its not that easy to identify the weaknesses when it boils down to a calculation in the AI saying "This exact point here has the least amount of total hp so storm here".

The Ai works in a pretty easy way if you play long enough, its basically searching for the least resistance to reach me so the best way to play is to cheese this behaviour but if you try to play in a legit manner like as if you dont know the AI behaviour you are going to have a bad time. They gonna smash throught your 3 lines of wall and swarm you.

The weaknesses you should have identified from your first try were 

a) wooden walls are no good for hordes;  b)keep your important stuff out of the fighting area; c) do not leave easy access to your fall back position; d) have an escape route

which are the same weakness my friend and i identified from our very first horde with no outside info regarding hordes. We had a similar setup to yours, and honestly had no idea what the bloodmoon horde was or that it was coming for us at 2200 on day 7.

This was back in a15. We restarted, and by day 7 had metal walls with gaps to shoot through (not ideal as i know now. iron bars or hatches would have been better. screw arrow slits). Our goodies were in the basement and we had metal walls and 4 iron doors to break through to get into that area. We started shooting through the gaps we left, but had 2 fall back positions on the first floor so that if the walls were breached we could go through an iron door, close it, and make another stand from there. This led to a stairway to the upper floor, set up like the first but mostly just wood since we were out of materials. From the upper floor, we had a ladder going down outside a window in our final fall back, where we could make a run for the mining tunnels and hope for the best. We didn't have to use it though.

You identify the weaknesses in your failed bases, make a plan to overcome those weaknesses, and continue to refine and experiment. Or you watch videos on indestructible bases. (not fun for me, but you do you). Or if you find the bloodmoon to be no fun, leave your feedback for the developers and turn them off.

 

[RipClaw]

This was back in a15

The AI in A15 was a completely different one. This AI had no idea which block had how much HP. So a single block did not make a big difference. And also the pathfinding was much more primitive.

For example, take a look at the comparison between the AI of Alpha 16 and Alpha 18 in this video from @Vedui:
 

You can see the different behaviour regarding which block has how many HP starting at 10:20.

Furthermore the painting system was not implemented yet. You had to know exactly from each block what material it was made of. Now you have blocks that look like concrete or steel but are just wood.
 

 

[katarynna]

You are absolutely right, @RipClaw.

The point was, however, identifying weaknesses in your failed bases and overcoming them. That is still valid.

If your first horde is in a building with single-layer wood and stone walls, some spikes outside, and a clear path for zombies to reach the roof you are fighting from if they break through and it fails, identify the problems and don't repeat them on your next horde night.

Double layer walls at the one point that they breached on horde one is not an answer if you still have single layer walls made of wood/flagstone on the ground floor. The problem wasn't that one wall space. It was weak walls that you couldn't adequately defend from where they were on the roof. So you make much stronger walls for your next try, all the way around on the ground floor, and make sure you have good sight lines from the roof where you are fighting from so that you can defend your walls.

If they break through anyways, you learned on your first try that leaving them direct access to the roof where you are fighting from means you get slaughtered. So don't leave them direct access. You can remove the stairs, you can completely wall off the stairway, filling it in with blocks to simulate barricading yourself from the zombies, you can put your strongest walls at the top of the stairs with places for you to shoot through to make a final stand, or anything else you can come up with.

They died on the roof in their first try. They should have learned that they needed an escape route, even if that meant they took the horde on in the street with melee for the rest of the night. Some people do that by choice. It is certainly a better option than just dying in the corner you backed yourself into.

I was just explaining our thought process regarding identifying weak points and fixing them after our first newbie horde back in a15. While the weak points and fixes may be different, the thought process is the same.

 

[Solomon]

If they break through anyways, you learned on your first try that leaving them direct access to the roof where you are fighting from means you get slaughtered. So don't leave them direct access. You can remove the stairs, you can completely wall off the stairway, filling it in with blocks to simulate barricading yourself from the zombies, you can put your strongest walls at the top of the stairs with places for you to shoot through to make a final stand, or anything else you can come up with.

To be honest we learned quickly that if the foundations are out structures simply collaspse, removal of the stairs would mean that the zombies have absolutely no way to get up to us on the roof other than beating down all the walls so it collapses.

The inside area of that particular spot where they breached throught was a big living room so we gone and replaced all walls with cobblestone ones and put spikes next to all wall lines there. The upstairst point all had reinforced doors too to make reaching us a bit harder.

They entered the kill corridor (i admit it was not the best made, we had level 2 junk turrets, some mines and bullets to kill things piling up there), from there they circled around the house to the lowest hp spot (they breaked several cobblestone walls just so they can directly enter the upstair areas), broke down the walls/doors and reached us on this garage roof, day 14 had these jumping guys, some vultures, the big dead. 

 

[katarynna]

To be honest we learned quickly that if the foundations are out structures simply collaspse, removal of the stairs would mean that the zombies have absolutely no way to get up to us on the roof other than beating down all the walls so it collapses.

The inside area of that particular spot where they breached throught was a big living room so we gone and replaced all walls with cobblestone ones and put spikes next to all wall lines there. The upstairst point all had reinforced doors too to make reaching us a bit harder.

They entered the kill corridor (i admit it was not the best made, we had level 2 junk turrets, some mines and bullets to kill things piling up there), from there they circled around the house to the lowest hp spot (they breaked several cobblestone walls just so they can directly enter the upstair areas), broke down the walls/doors and reached us on this garage roof, day 14 had these jumping guys, some vultures, the big dead. 

Honestly if your first base completely fails, you are better off restarting completely. While you are still trying to figure out how to deal with the horde, they are getting stronger and stronger if you continue that save.

You may want to try fighting from the ground floor initially and saving the roof as your last stand. create fall back positions on the ground floor so that if they breach the outer area, you retreat inward to your next fall back and continue fighting. Make the roof your last stand, and when you retreat there, break out or barricade the way up to you. If they have breached all other layers, you have nothing left to lose. And if you have an escape route from the roof, just make a run for it and fight in the streets. That way they will stop destroying your base and chase you.

While i find spikes to be of minimal use, you may want to investigate barbed wire. It slows them a lot so you can kill them much easier. And if you perk into electric fences or buy the stuff needed to get them up and running, they are amazing.

If you want to fight from a height advantage, you can make a solid cobblestone block base. Start 5 x 5 and make it as big as you can afford to and upgrade to concrete on the outer layers and any inner layers you have to repair asap. That should hold until demolishers.

Try things out, experiment, and have fun. Having a base fail is an opportunity to figure out why and how to prevent it in the future.

 

[Solomon]

Honestly if your first base completely fails, you are better off restarting completely. While you are still trying to figure out how to deal with the horde, they are getting stronger and stronger if you continue that save.

You may want to try fighting from the ground floor initially and saving the roof as your last stand. create fall back positions on the ground floor so that if they breach the outer area, you retreat inward to your next fall back and continue fighting. Make the roof your last stand, and when you retreat there, break out or barricade the way up to you. If they have breached all other layers, you have nothing left to lose. And if you have an escape route from the roof, just make a run for it and fight in the streets. That way they will stop destroying your base and chase you.

While i find spikes to be of minimal use, you may want to investigate barbed wire. It slows them a lot so you can kill them much easier. And if you perk into electric fences or buy the stuff needed to get them up and running, they are amazing.

If you want to fight from a height advantage, you can make a solid cobblestone block base. Start 5 x 5 and make it as big as you can afford to and upgrade to concrete on the outer layers and any inner layers you have to repair asap. That should hold until demolishers.

Try things out, experiment, and have fun. Having a base fail is an opportunity to figure out why and how to prevent it in the future.

Death is just an answer to the question of whenever this will stay or fail. We continue on, things will get harder but we will get better. Do you have some suggestion on our new base?

Its full concrete and only reachable by the dead throught the ramp, has multiple bunker doors to keep them in check along with a free and easy ways to attack them. 

The top part was not illustarted properly on this pain but its essentially a 4 block high reinforced concrete wall what we can easily get onto but they can only do that if they breach more doors or try to pile.

 

[katarynna]

I am not good at visualizing things from diagrams lol. It sounds like it could work though.

I don't play a lot of multiplayer, so i am not sure how the multiplayer gamestage calculation is working for a19, but i know it ramped up the horde difficulty very very fast in a18. If this is your 4th horde, you may start seeing demolishers which are gamechangers for horde bases. If you do get demolishers and your base fails, it won't mean your design was bad. It will just mean you guys were still figuring out how to deal with all the other zombies and got demos before you were ready to tackle that challenge.

If that happens, you should seriously consider a restart so that your base can scale along with the hordes now that you have more of an idea how to build one to start with.

 

[NBornkilla]

May I suggest you take a long walk off a short plank? When I first started a few months back thats what I did, but recently I fended off a 64 per wave horde on day 126, WITHOUT a cheese base. git gud scrub..

by riding a 4 by 4 running around   geee  i most admire that bravery.

 

[FileMachete]

@Solomon not sure if this is what you mean by "ping". And I'm not 100% sure these new forums Notify a player when their name is used in a post.

To do so put in AT character, @ then start typing the users name. A list should start to propogate as you type.

No idea if I can ping myself and get a notification, or if I'll just wind up going blind... don't judge me! It's for Science  @FileMachete

Edit: nope. no notification for self pinging. ... but vision in my right eye seems a bit blurry now... 0_o

 

[meganoth]

Death is just an answer to the question of whenever this will stay or fail. We continue on, things will get harder but we will get better. Do you have some suggestion on our new base?

Its full concrete and only reachable by the dead throught the ramp, has multiple bunker doors to keep them in check along with a free and easy ways to attack them. 

The top part was not illustarted properly on this pain but its essentially a 4 block high reinforced concrete wall what we can easily get onto but they can only do that if they breach more doors or try to pile.

View attachment 12348

You said your fallback is on the left tower further down. This could work but you need a ceiling where you can shoot or even melee through. Not that easy to achieve, you normally want the height advantage. And if the zombies break into the tower on ground level they shouldn't be able to go up the tower, while you should have an emergency exit on first floor.

The zombies will dig. The gap between ramp and tower looks very narrow on this picture, zombies can jump a bit, running zombies even farther. If it is a narrow gap put up iron bars, cobblestone blocks or similar to hinder them from jumping over. I assume you are normally standing on the wings and shoot them from the side while they run up the ramp? Don't forget to have material with you to repair doors, they'll last a LOT longer. It is important to slow them down, so add barbed wire in front of the ramp and maybe even on some steps you add to the ramp. They won't be slowed down by the ramp, but barbed wire will do that.

Important info about barbed wire and spike traps. If you have their tops flush with the ground they are much more effective.

If I misunderstood and you have a high wall between ramp and tower where you want to stand on top of then that wall must be 2 blocks thick at least, but it can be made out of any block shapes since all blocks of the same material have the same HP. I do often use other shapes with gaps to allow melee.

 

[meganoth]

Honestly, I have no idea. Madmole has decided in a blink of an eye that the demolisher will have an explosion block damage of 5000 when two demolishers exploded in his base and the chemistry station was not destroyed. Someone like that is unpredictable for me.

I also see that his defense is always the same. It consists of shooting from a tower down on zombies and throwing grenades. If that's his vision for how players should defend their base, then I see a dark future for players who prefer funnel bases with electrical traps.

One time he tried something with electrical traps and you could clearly see that he had no experience with them. In general the Fun Pimps do not seem to be particularly interested in electrical traps. Since Alpha 16 no new traps have been added but several new guns and other weapons.

But the demo was generally no surprise since they were talking about boss zombies for a long time, starting with the behemoth.

I'm not talking about the ability to design a horde base now that works perfectly for late game A20, but generally be able to guess their view about what is a valid horde base and what is an exploit. Also a lot of decisions are driven by the opinions of the team as whole, especially the testers, something that is seen by how often madmole says "the testers complained about x, so we changed it".

As you yourself said you know there probably won't be new electrical traps until gold, you might not like it, but you can predict it quite well.

 

[FileMachete]

@Solomon , sry but even after a brk I can't really follow your sketch. A couple screen shots would likely be enough to build a mental picture.

Sounds like you may be using Ladders. Not sure what you've learned about them so I'll put this in a Spoiler, but it's not a big secrect or anything. Just a helpful qol thing, once you understand the basic pros & cons of ladders in 7dtd.

Spoiler

Adding a Plate or two below where the ladder ends prevents your toon getting into the annoying, "can jump but can't grab ladder!" loop.

Best I can tell, and been doing this a long time, it hasn't screwed up zed pathing. But a19's new so... (the red painted blocks are Plates below the ladders)

 

[RipClaw]

But the demo was generally no surprise since they were talking about boss zombies for a long time, starting with the behemoth.

I wasn't a fan of the behemoth either.

What shocked me was not the demolisher. It was known that he will be in A18 but at that time it had more entity damage than block damage.

Madmole switched entity damage and block damage just from a gut feeling apparently without a deeper thought process behind it. I'm not someone who makes decisions based on gut instinct. I always weigh up everything. That's what makes some people's decisions so unpredictable for me.

I'm not talking about the ability to design a horde base now that works perfectly for late game A20, but generally be able to guess their view about what is a valid horde base and what is an exploit. Also a lot of decisions are driven by the opinions of the team as whole, especially the testers, something that is seen by how often madmole says "the testers complained about x, so we changed it".

Valid is not everything. It must also be viable. For example, there are players here in the forum who think that the zombies are too predictable.

If the team is of the same opinion, they might decide that the zombies should be more unpredictable and then someone who mainly uses traps could have a problem. A kill corridor may then still be seen valid but is no longer viable.

A shooter player can simply change position if a zombie decides to attack a random block instead of running towards the player. However, the traps are static and cannot change position. Therefore, the viability of a kill corridor depends on predicting what the zombies will do.

As you yourself said you know there probably won't be new electrical traps until gold, you might not like it, but you can predict it quite well.

So the shooter player get new toys and the base builders get nothing. Why am I not surprised?

 

[Dracula]

So the shooter player get new toys and the base builders get nothing. Why am I not surprised?

The base builder gets new zombies that destroy their bases and blow up everything they build; base-building is actively discouraged more and more with each alpha.

 

[JCrook1028]

I agree that from a role playing perspective this would be true of the first horde night. But then LBD kicks in and we say, “They came up the stairs. Let’s barricade/ chop those down and use a ladder with a hatch to access the upper floors”. That is perfectly acceptable role playing because your character gained the knowledge after the first time. 
 

What is ridiculous is to ignore chopping out the stairs and then say that your only option is to go to exploits like floating bases. 
 

0 to 100 anyone?

Really? Usually the busty pretty girl in mine....

It should be noted that every single encampment or base built by any faction in The Walking Dead eventually gets breached. 

Yep, usually by people tho, not zombies...

Would a person playing 7D2D for the very first time, without any instruction from a friend, without having seen a video ever, and without any externally gained information about the game, even know what was happening on day 7? Are there any indicators anywhere that the player should be preparing for something the 6 days prior?

Granted it is "external" but the Steam Store video on the buy page lays it out. I know I've never bought a Steam game w/o watching at least the page video.