PC Please stop trying to tell us how to play

One problem with the first video.  The narrator said "AFK Base".... those are doomsday words right there for that comptraption :).

Regards,

Rotor
lol your right, someone delete that video pronto!  🧨

If you did afk, I think cops would destroy the blades, and eventually the zombies would get through the electric fence and tear a way into the base. 

 
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Whats the difference in turning horde night off and building a booby bridge?


In RPG games a lot of people save before combat or important decisions and if they don't like the result they just reload that save. A practice I have done as well a long time ago. It is called save scumming. Often there are also ways to manipulate the save game to give you better stats. Which I have never done.

Now if I find a game too easy after doing extensive save scumming or even save game manipulation I would be very wrong if I complained to the developers. Because the developer has balanced the game for people not doing save-scumming or similar out-of-game manipulations.

But if I find an overpowered sword for 10 copper at the first trader I visit then I would have all rights to complain. Because the balance is broken, obviously. 

I can also tell you that creative menue, even though it is built into the game is far outside of any balancing. Get an M60 from CM and forget about talking about balance. Get an M60 from the trader on day 1 and you probably have found a balancing problem that TFP will want to fix.

The developers and many players discussing here are very interested in having a clear boundary so that they know they can do anything **in vanilla** and it will be balanced as much as possible. Anything else, like what happens after you used creative menue, installed a mod, changed an option, reloaded a backup save, ... is just between you and you.

 
options and mods. Use them and let the devs make their game. You bought 1 copy of the million+ sold. They are going to finish this as they intend to.

 
I can also tell you that creative menue, even though it is built into the game is far outside of any balancing. Get an M60 from CM and forget about talking about balance. Get an M60 from the trader on day 1 and you probably have found a balancing problem that TFP will want to fix.

The developers and many players discussing here are very interested in having a clear boundary so that they know they can do anything **in vanilla** and it will be balanced as much as possible. Anything else, like what happens after you used creative menue, installed a mod, changed an option, reloaded a backup save, ... is just between you and you.


Exactly. I dont care, because often times I just want to "build" without zeds bothering me, so I turn off zeds + horde night, and activate DM + CM.

When this makes me bored, I leave SP and go to a Coop PvE with my friends.

 
I pretty much just disable horde night and I don't care if that makes me a scrub. I play solo and horde nights just leave me in an endless cycle of rebuild, get trashed, rebuild. Not fun for me.
And that is 100% ok. That is what options are for.

But if I want to struggle, having easy solutions ingame means I have to restrict myself... and then it is no longer fun.

 
I been giving myself first aid kits and bandages from the CM on my last two playthroughs, though these have been for playtesting changes I am making with my mod as I don't want to keep dying and restarting over if I am trying to find bugs with it or weird looting issues.

One of these days though I am going to just turn off zombies, give myself farm plots and seeds, and just play the TFP farming simulator  😉

 
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I pretty much just disable horde night and I don't care if that makes me a scrub. I play solo and horde nights just leave me in an endless cycle of rebuild, get trashed, rebuild. Not fun for me.
Well if you would stop eating the glue then you would have enough duct tape and with enough duct tape horde night wouldn't be a problem because you could just tape everything back together again.

 
I pretty much just disable horde night and I don't care if that makes me a scrub. I play solo and horde nights just leave me in an endless cycle of rebuild, get trashed, rebuild. Not fun for me.


If it is too many repetitions of the same cycle that you don't like I suggest changing the frequency of horde nights from 7 days to 30 days or maybe a random day somewhere between 20-30 days so that if you typically play 100 days, horde night would be an event that occurs only 3-5 times in your entire playthrough rather than a common cycle that dominates the game. Think about it..

 
Both sides of this conversation have valid points; some the Zombie AI pathing was flawed and exploited and some of the blocks also confused zombie AI and was exploiyed.  But also smart strategic base and trap building were also negatively affected.  If you had a few blades where zed can avoid they just did, metal spike here and not there, they ignored it, demolishers plow through most mid game traps as if they were not there, electrical fences are very effective unless a zed sneezed on it and is goes down.

Now you can say, well you build your defenses wrong, sure I'll give you that might be the case for some... but when I jumped on a few Public servers and the majority of bases are large cubes build from a large rock formation with very few traps, you start to wonder...

 
This is likely because you are not playing things safe. For my underground bases I may hear screamers but I never even see them (in the base) because I use doors and trap doors. If you're just digging an open hole of course you should expect things to get to you easily.

I agree with the cost reduction on poles 100%.
concrete with v3 hatches.

 
What is a honest defense without any abuse? A 4side concrete cube with arrowslits? Even the mechanic to lead all of them to 1 side of your base only feels cheese.

There are so much different ways to abuse mechanics its allready a varying gameplay aspect to choose wich exploit you wanna use.

-building underground removes every zombieattack but not hordenights and reduces your attacksurface to a minimum

-lead them all to a specific point where you want them

-fall bridges let them run endless circles

-use electric versions of fall bridges, it opens when they step on it

-1 bladetrap, 4-5 fencewire combos and 10 Darttraps are enough to hold nearly afk max gamestage hordes (standard difficulty)

-zombies dont attack walls because they see no pathblocking obstacles in it

-ladder towers stacking fall dmg over and over again

-gather them in holes and blow them up

-catch the first wave and no more waves will spawn until dawn

-wizard tower with a riddiculous pathway they have to follow just to get punched down at the top and start again

-gather them all behind a open hatchdoor and just mellee forever without problems

-classic kill corridors, all lined up for headshots

-sit on a bike in your base at hordenight and only vultures spawn and 4 bladtraps around a hatch is enough to defend the roof

Yes i feel forced to use any of this mechanics because any "honest" straight defense i can imagine will not work or i will for sure not maintain it.

So it doesnt matter in wich way any player abuse the game, its PvE and doesnt effect my gameplay. Since zombies are "intelligent" the game changed to a only abuse of this.

Undergroundbases are still good and way easier to maintain than overground. The pimps also did not cancel them like noobs, they added a new mechanic to the game. Digging down. Its like the new mechanic to make them crawl under 1 block space now, thats awsome! New mechanics!

A solution for this would be to make just 30% of the horde spawn dumb like before. Just attacking everything in their way and dont care about any path. Oh god the whine will be endless when all hordebases dont work anymore. But who wants to defend hectically 360° around? Thats not fun. Repairing is not fun.

Are there really players out there sitting in their cube and defend all sides of their base manually?

 
in A16  sitting in the base, defeding 360 is exactly what we did.

many many many rows of spikes.  Shoot the cops as priority so they don't blow up.

weaker zeds died to the spikes.

Cleanup/repair/replace was a pain, but... 

 
What is a honest defense without any abuse? A 4side concrete cube with arrowslits? Even the mechanic to lead all of them to 1 side of your base only feels cheese.

There are so much different ways to abuse mechanics its allready a varying gameplay aspect to choose wich exploit you wanna use.

-building underground removes every zombieattack but not hordenights and reduces your attacksurface to a minimum

-lead them all to a specific point where you want them

-fall bridges let them run endless circles

-use electric versions of fall bridges, it opens when they step on it

-1 bladetrap, 4-5 fencewire combos and 10 Darttraps are enough to hold nearly afk max gamestage hordes (standard difficulty)

-zombies dont attack walls because they see no pathblocking obstacles in it

-ladder towers stacking fall dmg over and over again

-gather them in holes and blow them up

-catch the first wave and no more waves will spawn until dawn

-wizard tower with a riddiculous pathway they have to follow just to get punched down at the top and start again

-gather them all behind a open hatchdoor and just mellee forever without problems

-classic kill corridors, all lined up for headshots

-sit on a bike in your base at hordenight and only vultures spawn and 4 bladtraps around a hatch is enough to defend the roof

Yes i feel forced to use any of this mechanics because any "honest" straight defense i can imagine will not work or i will for sure not maintain it.

So it doesnt matter in wich way any player abuse the game, its PvE and doesnt effect my gameplay. Since zombies are "intelligent" the game changed to a only abuse of this.

Undergroundbases are still good and way easier to maintain than overground. The pimps also did not cancel them like noobs, they added a new mechanic to the game. Digging down. Its like the new mechanic to make them crawl under 1 block space now, thats awsome! New mechanics!

A solution for this would be to make just 30% of the horde spawn dumb like before. Just attacking everything in their way and dont care about any path. Oh god the whine will be endless when all hordebases dont work anymore. But who wants to defend hectically 360° around? Thats not fun. Repairing is not fun.

Are there really players out there sitting in their cube and defend all sides of their base manually?


I don't know why kill corridors for example are so often listed as cheese. The developers themselves made the changes so that you can do that, it is also how tower defense games work in general. While there were changes to combat zombies endlessly running in circles they never tried to make kill corridors fail.

Blocks being misclassified and the zombies doing the wrong thing with them is a bug and Faatal has mentioned at the start of experimental that he expects many new cases of this happening in A20 because so many more blocks became available to players

I can think of 2 changes that together will make the bike exploit much harder to use: A bike standing around or being inside should make normal zombies spawn. And the vulture spawning should never go on for more than say one or two minutes at a time even if the player is on a bike.

This game is not finished and they still have time to fix many of the things they see as exploits. But it is also very likely that there will be a lot of cases where the AI doesn't work well even at release of the final version. That is unfortunate but most players will know of those exploits only if they look for them on the internet or watch a streamer who specializes in finding exploits. Thats okay, no one will object to what they do in their back yard.

 
in A16  sitting in the base, defeding 360 is exactly what we did.
Except that in A16 everything was different. The pathing was different, the zombies didn't do as much damage, barbed wire and log spikes still existed and steel blocks degraded to reinforced concrete blocks and these to normal concrete blocks.

 
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Both sides of this conversation have valid points; some the Zombie AI pathing was flawed and exploited and some of the blocks also confused zombie AI and was exploiyed.  But also smart strategic base and trap building were also negatively affected.  If you had a few blades where zed can avoid they just did, metal spike here and not there, they ignored it, demolishers plow through most mid game traps as if they were not there, electrical fences are very effective unless a zed sneezed on it and is goes down.

snip...
The secret to effective use of electric traps is keep the most important ones close to where you defend from and place the end of the line where you can easily repair them throughout the night. Generally, only the last one gets damaged from use, like building material, keep some electrical parts on you for quick repair. 

 
if there were a way to chose between old (dumb horde) and new (intelligent tower defense) A.I. that would be the dream.

Because I absolutely loved the horde A.I.
It got better over time, but kill corridors will now always be a thing. I will no longer be scared because I know how the Z's will react to any obstacle.
They are "intelligent" but predictable.

fataal said he worked on zombie dumbness, and sure there are no conga lines anymore, but on horde night they all find the entrance 100% of the time and avoid spikes and other traps like the plague (yes because they are coded like a block, but they shouldn't be. They should be considered airlocks by zombies)

I really dislike that change, but sadly this won't ever come back.
Thing is: with "intelligent" zombies, you will always be able to abuse them because they follow a set of rules that can be abused.
If they did random stuff like hit support pillars even though they have a clear path, things would get interesting quickly.

But instead with age a counter-less demo zombie that just blows your base up... YAY fun 😕

 
I don't know why kill corridors for example are so often listed as cheese.


PREACH IT BROTHER! Although I have been reliably informed that any base which affords the player a defensive advantage - i.e. the zombies have a harder time hitting the player than the player does the zombies - is "cheese". Only going mano-a-mano...mano-a-undead?...in a barren field is non-cheese.

What on Earth is the point of a blade trap or a dart trap or an electric fence or...*waves hands around* any of it...if not to try to get zombies to walk into/near them? The big "plot" point in this game is "a crapton of zombies are coming for you in 7 days, better be ready" and then they give you all of these murder machines and base-building features. Oh no! I built an effective base to keep my cranial goo out of the mouths of the undead! I AM A CHEESER!!!  :rolleyes:

 
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