PC Thoughts on Demolishers

I really don't get the angst against "cheese" base designs. Where is the motivation to make it easy for the zombies?
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There's cheese and then there's cheese..If you make a choke point / bridge you need to defend yourself, that's still giving the zeds a good chance.

If you make a wooden base where the AI literally just runs in circles without even trying to damage it, you've beaten the game. Congrats, find a new game? Or design a new base :)

And no, I don't care if people cheese and by how much, a choke point base isn't even cheese in my book. Intentional AI-loops are, and the actual problem there is that they are boring.

 
And if we're able to kill them before they explode that's a good thing!
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We are, they just have a ton of health. Plenty of youtube clips with the red lights on on dead demos. JaWoodle's tests and I think Reach Gaming's recent 170 shotgun turrets clip.
Just .. keep .. shooting .. :)

 
I'm willing to bet faatal will achieve this exact thing....*evil laughter*
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I'd love to see a temporary alternative AI response kick in after a drop resulting in them trying to take a direct route to the player for a period of time even if that's trying to scale up walls. Then as they pile up, if there are a certain number of zombies above them, say 3 blocks high, have the bottom block be 'crushed' into a zombie body block killing the zombies in the space. This will result in the blood moon spawner generating more zombies to replace those killed and it closes the gap from the bottom to the top. Afterwards we have zombie meat blocks that we have to get rid of which double as a source of rotten flesh. That kills two birds with one change, exploitation of the AI's response to cheesy fall obstacles and the very limited rotten flesh that should be everywhere in a zombie game.

 
We are, they just have a ton of health. Plenty of youtube clips with the red lights on on dead demos. JaWoodle's tests and I think Reach Gaming's recent 170 shotgun turrets clip.
Just .. keep .. shooting .. :)
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With the spread of the weapons, the explosion is often triggered accidentally. And you don't have a lot of time to aim.

Mr. Reach thinks it's fun to trigger the explosion but there's a difference if you build the base in creative mode or if you do it in survival mode.

 
And no, I don't care if people cheese and by how much, a choke point base isn't even cheese in my book. Intentional AI-loops are, and the actual problem there is that they are boring.
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Standing on a tower, shooting zombies and throwing grenades is also boring. At least for me. I never understood the hype about weapons and explosions.

It's much more fun for me to test the limits of the AI and build bases that kill zombies fully automatically.

My current base is a funnel base with dart traps, electric fences and blade traps. The blade traps are placed in a way that they hit the demolisher only on the head and not on the chest. The disadvantage of this base is that I need a lot of iron for the dart traps.

 
My current base is a funnel base with dart traps, electric fences and blade traps. The blade traps are placed in a way that they hit the demolisher only on the head and not on the chest.
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I was trying to do that myself but I could not find a placement for the blades that either did not miss them entirely or ended up triggering the bombs. A "filter" for tall zeds. I am about to give up on it and just stick with a treadmill staircase or just ditching horde night all together. Eventually you just get sick of replacing hundreds or thousands of concrete blocks when you made almost 0 dent into the horde night gang.

Of course at that point you have to wonder why you are still playing.

 
I was trying to do that myself but I could not find a placement for the blades that either did not miss them entirely or ended up triggering the bombs. A "filter" for tall zeds. I am about to give up on it and just stick with a treadmill staircase or just ditching horde night all together. Eventually you just get sick of replacing hundreds or thousands of concrete blocks when you made almost 0 dent into the horde night gang.
Of course at that point you have to wonder why you are still playing.
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If you place 1/2 blocks on the floor and the blade traps at 3 block height then the blade trap just touches the head of the demolisher.

 
If you place 1/2 blocks on the floor and the blade traps at 3 block height then the blade trap just touches the head of the demolisher.
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Yea thats what I was trying. I think I might be off on my height though because it is hitting everything and set off the first demolisher to go through. Going to raise it a block and try again, one more friggin time.

 
With the spread of the weapons, the explosion is often triggered accidentally. And you don't have a lot of time to aim.
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All true, I was just replying to the misconception that the explosion can't be stopped, I wasn't trying to claim it's easy. And I don't think it should be, just point your shotgun elsewhere... :)

It's much more fun for me to test the limits of the AI and build bases that kill zombies fully automatically.
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I find that fun too, and by no means do I consider a well designed trap setup a cheese. Just the designs that make the AI completely nullify itself running in circles or piling up doing nothing. Like Z-Nation's door setup and JaWoodle's monkey bars..
 
I certainly don't like the demolishers - spike proof and explody is bad enough but do I understand correctly that they do excess block damage with their regular attacks as well? Gah. Hopefully their just a short term place holder for a more balanced base threat. Having said that, I know from watching and reading that there are at least 4 viable anti Demolisher horde ideas with varying degrees of cheese.

I've seen the stairway-walkway-drop in front of a tower you shoot from, which is an exploit - but seems safest.

I've seen the downward slope into a tunnel with upper and lower blade traps, where you turn the uppers off for demolishers, with electric fences and barber dire to hold em while they get chopped.

I've seen the half block step under a 3 tile high blade trap that prods the Demo and Biker heads up where they get hit, but not shorter zombies.

I've seen the turrets behind where the zeds enter so they shoot them in the back.

I've also seen players not try to kill the horde, but with bases designed to hold 'em off, with either open and shut doors to let small groups in - to isolate and kill the demolishers when they show - or running / driving between places as they get broke.

Seems like a good few different options, only one of which constitutes an exploit, and only one of which is 'gamey'.

AM I right in my understanding, or am I missing something?

 
AM I right in my understanding, or am I missing something?
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Correct and I have heard/seen the same information. I have also seen none of these tactics work effectively on our server. Period.

The best one out of the bunch seems to be the stairway drop off that at least works for a while until one of the demo's gets hit at the wrong time by a player or another zed and blows up the staircase, then horde night is just watching the horde tear up your entire structure for the rest of the night if you do not have a secondary or tritiary staircase. We can sometimes get to almost 3 am before the staircase gets the crap blown out of it and becomes unusable. All the rest of the designs on our 4 person server have failed, spectacularly so. From the turrets blowing them up repeatedly to the blade traps detonating them on first contact. Nothing else seems to work. Like at all.

 
Correct and I have heard/seen the same information. I have also seen none of these tactics work effectively on our server. Period.
The best one out of the bunch seems to be the stairway drop off that at least works for a while until one of the demo's gets hit at the wrong time by a player or another zed and blows up the staircase, then horde night is just watching the horde tear up your entire structure for the rest of the night if you do not have a secondary or tritiary staircase. We can sometimes get to almost 3 am before the staircase gets the crap blown out of it and becomes unusable. All the rest of the designs on our 4 person server have failed, spectacularly so. From the turrets blowing them up repeatedly to the blade traps detonating them on first contact. Nothing else seems to work. Like at all.
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That seems like great feedback - I'm planning on testing turrets behind their entry point to shoot em in the back and will report back in the balance thread; but I may start hunting for people having successes.

The confusing thing is they SOUND really broken; yet the forum isn't full of huge numbers of players all saying the same thing (ie - enough of an outcry to suggest this is utterly unworkable for everyone); so I PRESUME some people are managing it somehow - or else just haven't encountered them yet...

 
I don't care if players cheese the AI or not, though I would not do it myself. However everything added to the game that rewards cheese (A17 AI, Demolishers etc) simply means a whole load of base designs just became impractical at best, useless at worse. This removes player choice and thus is not something I can get behind. Demolishers remove a huge number of base designs from the table, they also massively restrict the player's use of traps and turrets too - you know, all the FUN stuff - and thus I think they are a poor addition to the game.

A huge nasty top tier zombie that does increased damage to blocks and makes an old-school B-line for the player (or destroys player-built blocks at random around itself it it can't get to the player) would be far more satisfying to fight, I think, and would make fun bases a thing again.

But a must-kill-immediately enemy that is must-not-damage-in-the-chest at the same time is appalling design imo.

 
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Correct and I have heard/seen the same information. I have also seen none of these tactics work effectively on our server. Period.
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This has been my experience too. When I'm playing in creative and testing the blade traps at head height seem to work, but in actual play on horde nights nothing seems to work. with 30-40 zombies on the screen even just shooting into the pack with a rocket launcher sets them off reliably.

I was excited when I first heard about these demo zombies. In general specialized zombies that add more design considerations to you base design are a good thing, kind of how flyers and jumpers make you enclose areas you're going to stand in so they're not constantly in your face. turns out I was naive yet again, these are apparently designed to just obviate your base defenses. I'm totally on board with some zombie that destroys blocks but the problem with these is that they turn all your defenses into liabilities. can't use blade traps, that'll set them off. turrets and junk turrets set them off. it takes 30 seconds of head shots from a dart trap to kill them, it's going to be boring if it's just electric wire and dart traps from here on out. rather than rewarding more intricate base design they punish it.

There's another issue with them, which is lag. Something this sensitive to aiming doesn't mesh well with multiplayer where you might be dealing with latency. I wonder if this accounts for some of the reason we just can't avoid triggering them on our server.

I've never built bases to cheese the AI because that's boring but now I'm actively looking for a way to do it for the first time because they're just not fun to deal with.

 
But a must-kill-immediately enemy that is must-not-damage-in-the-chest at the same time is appalling design imo.
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It honestly would have been better if they came guaranteed to explode but with a long fuse time. You'd still have to deal with them specifically since they have so much health and armor, but your traps wouldn't become liabilities and you wouldn't have to play this ridiculous headshot only minigame

 
They are still going to explode somewhere though - somewhere outwith your control.

I see one fix which would be to nerf their explosion's damage down to that of a cop. Still serious but not guaranteed to destroy pretty much every non-Steel block around it. Right now they deal 5000 damage to everything in range when they blow. To put that in context, a re-enforced concrete block has 5000 HP and Steel has 12000 HP. Iron Bars and Blade Traps have 2500 so they die instantly.

On my latest play-through I will try one more approach in base design.... I will organise some sort of deep, Steel block-walled pit that I can somehow funnel all zombies into on horde night, while I can stand above it on some platform and chuck explosives down there while shooting down in a fish in a barrel way. The idea is I am shepherding the Demolishers to a place where it doesn't matter if they blow up; there will be nothing nearby them that I care about. Steel blocks are easily replaceable and beyond them will simply be earth as this pit will be quite deep. So basically an old school sunken kill-box that is simply made out of Steel (no traps, nothing fancy - some spikes probably) to hold the horde in while we kill them with bullets and bombs from above.... old school.

If that fails or proves no fun, then we will mod them out of the game (which is actually pretty easy).

 
We had our 18th horde night a few hours ago and the jumping tower worked pretty good until about the 5th wave of demolishers and they took out the base of the stairs. Went to staircase #2 and opened the door/rang the dinner bell. That one lasted a couple minutes and the second or third demolisher blew up the bottom of it (all reinforced concrete). Nothing to do but wait out five minutes till morning at that point.

We are trying a couple new base designs as well, we might even try your "kill pitt" @Gh0ostlight to see it works and not just makes a quickly expanding tunnel to the earths core. But at this rate we will be joining the group of people simply modding the demolishers out of the xml files pretty soon. I hope they knock the explosion damage down to something manageable at some point in the future, as they are this is just stupid.

 
my plan for demolishers is just reinforced plates on my walls (makes it seem 2 blocks thick from the outside, so less chance of surprise zombies digging through)

once I can go reinforced with steel it'll be steel plates and steel walls (huge investment, but damn demolishers can eat through concrete if you don't aim properly)

Steel has a 30-40% reduction to explosions doesn't it? (asking because im not 100% sure)

 
I hope TFP don't read this, but we've noticed that shooting a beeping Demolisher excessively even after they die prevents an explosion. I assume it's much like when you shoot an animal 20 times with an M60 and it just disappears. Granted usually two of us are shooting the snot out of it but it's worked so far. Handy trick if they're at a sensitive point in your base and about to blow.

 
I hope TFP don't read this, but we've noticed that shooting a beeping Demolisher excessively even after they die prevents an explosion.
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They changed that a few builds ago. A dead demolisher does not explode anymore.

 
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