PC What's your opinion on the current state of blood moons?

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GlyphGryph

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Just wondering to the extent people are satisfied with how blood moons play out nowadays, whether there are elements they miss that added something, whether they enjoy them more in A20 because of something or other that has changed, that sort of thing. 

For my own part, I think zombie AI is broken in A20 but I don't know if its new, I just know that half my blood moon nights end up trivialized because the zombies seem to break and spend all their time bashing at some walls while I stand two blocks above them and to the left shooting them or even spearing them or clubbing them to death. I think it may be the presence of bars or ladders that renders them ineffectual? Bars I can at least avoid making, but I love to fortify POIs and most of them have ladder elements the zombies just don't know how to deal with, it seems they are equally like to try and climb the ladder or try and destroy it (sometimes bashing through multiple block wide walls behind the ladder to do so)

One night was really funny though, because the zombies just ran in an endless loop hurling themselves out a window over and over again and pretty much ignoring me. Not the most challenging horde night, but it was entertaining trying to shoot the zombie rain to death.

I do really like some of the new POIs for horde nights though, especially for the new Remnant POIs it really sort of feels like they designed them with horde night modifications in mind, which I'm super happy about!

 
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Blood moons are really just about not dying, there's nothing special about em. It's just the same zombies, except they all know where you are and come for you.

If you want to keep the game interesting, you increase the frequency and decrease the loot gained to 75% so it's not too bad but not too easy.

Other than that, I prefer to keep them on. I have no reason to disable them either, really depends on the mood I'm in for that day.

As for the pathing, it's improved greatly and allows for more unique builds, some of which I've never thought about. Really comes down to what you decide!

 
I've kind of lost interest in horde nights, I still have them on but have changed them to every 10 days now.  We used to do big intricate horde bases but now we go very simple.  We build a 5x5 concrete pillar in the middle of a field that my wife stands on, because she likes to snipe and throw bombs and fire, while I run around the ground chugging beers and punching zombies to death.  It feels like a mixture of the weird pathing the zombies have now and how quickly they can tear thru blocks that makes a horde base feel like a waste.  Seems like if you want a horde base you have to use one of the builds that cheeses the zombies pathing AI.  Horde nights are just nights to get some extra xp now.  

 
If you want an interesting horde night, you have to make it interesting. There are any number of designs that break AI pathing and make it boring. Try slowing them down instead and killing as many as possible - that makes for fun horde nights. Eats a lot of ammo though.

 
I normally avoid the bloodmoons (ie:  heading to the roof of a poi and letting the timer expire) or run around and let them chase me.   I play on a harder difficulty/sprint or faster zombie speed and normally find that they just aren't worth the resources/effort and usually result in a net loss in ammo/cement vs. rewards received.

Have tried bases and (at least in A19) only a kill base was really viable.  But the amount of work/repairs and (in the later part of A19) acid being thrown just completely made it annoying to maintain.   Normally on private/personal games, I just disable it or make it once every 30 days or so just because it's not enjoyable to me to have endless waves of enemies.  (If there was a total count per night or something to track progress/rewards, that would be better)

 
My only real complaint about horde night is that it isn't endless. It's far too easy to kill all the Zombies before the dawn, and then there is nothing to do but repair the base and twiddle thumbs.

 
I've found that zombie pathing is more predictable for blood moon hordes - they tend to path where you're expecting them/funnelling them. It's the annoying walking hordes that just go ape@%$# and try to smash a path direct to you even with a dedicated path for them. I don't know if that's because AI is dialled down for BMs so as not to tax the cpu... or it's just not a thing and I'm imagining it :)  

 
Whorhay said:
My only real complaint about horde night is that it isn't endless. It's far too easy to kill all the Zombies before the dawn, and then there is nothing to do but repair the base and twiddle thumbs.
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It seems like there are no biome zombies or wandering zombies on horde night.  Or if there are, they ‘GPS’ to you like the rest of the horde.  I don’t have a lot of data points on this, because by mid-game I’m not killing all the zombies by morning.

But this could be embraced as a real feature.  Your reward for totally slaughtering the entire zombie frenzy is that you are, at last, truly free from zombies for the rest of the night.  It could even apply to screamers and sleepers: no more zombies at all.  You did it, you won.  Go loot that building you’ve been wanting to*.  Drive around in the wasteland.  Fire up your 20 forges.  All worry free until morning, because you’ve earned it.
 

* Okay, probably only up to the highest tier of POIs you’ve been questing so far.

 
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Crater Creator said:
It seems like there are no biome zombies or wandering zombies on horde night.  Or if there are, they ‘GPS’ to you like the rest of the horde.  I don’t have a lot of data points on this, because by mid-game I’m not killing all the zombies by morning.
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I've no clue if this is still in the code but I know some alphas ago all of the zombies that were currently alive when blood moon started would be called in as part of the horde. I don't know if they ever actually counted towards your blood moon horde allotment of zombies though.

 
Tohskrad said:
If there was a total count per night or something to track progress/rewards, that would be better
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There is...... also it is not endless waves. That being said tho I don't play the game to fight horde night either. it's a side item for me so I set it at 10 days and just fight on the street.

 
I tend to be the builder for my group so I try to design bases that allow people to use their skills (demolitions) and shoot things. I tend to put down electrical fence posts to slow and I spend the bulk of the bloodmoon repairing things and calling out demos and supporting in between from the base airlock. We don't use a separate bloodmoon base, just an airlocked entrance if we need to fall back and keep defending. I'd love to use more traps but I don't want to get a massive xp gain over them since they won't get the trap xp. In solo I tend to use blade, dart, and electrical fenceposts and let my traps do the killing entirely. I'd like to use more but they can handle the load fine and everything else I could use triggers demos. Overall bloodmoons are only a threat early until established. After that it's just an endurance test that's pretty easy to surpass if you keep ammo and materials to repair stocked. Beyond that it's just not triggering demos accidentally which is entirely in the player's hands. I wish they were more threatening to be honest. Like a diversity of threats. Spitballing here but zombies that shutdown electrical stuff within a radius smattered into the mob would require being focused. Zombies that don't try to attack, but they are tall and they try to position themselves against a base that allow other zombies to climb up them. Zombies that sit back and spit like cops and don't try to run in that will attack players or player structures. Things that require the defensive strategy to be flexible even if the bulk of the zombies will tunnel to the players.

Then again, bandits are coming and maybe they can be the threat that forces players to defend and adjust their defensive tactics.

 
We started setting up horde bases in harder areas hoping to make the horde night harder/longer.  But even in the wasteland we have more exciting "events" by summoning screamers and forcing the zeds to hit max cap in any other zone compared to Horde Night (250 zeds I think is server cap which brings things to pretty low framerate but was fun for a while).  We were able to make them kinda exciting on occasion by using console to spawn in an extra 25 zeds at a time but then you feel guilty for basically cheating in a harder horde.

Basically after the first 60 days we kinda felt like we had "won".  We kept playing for a while but we are out of content again, and waiting on A21.

 
We definitely need a variety of zombies to accomplish different roles. Hunter zombies to seek out the most direct path to player, generic shambles that have a16 ai and maybe a couple of others.

The only problem with tfps approach to solving zombie ai is that they do a one size fits all approach, having different levels of zombie intelligence would make it harder to exploit all zombies. Nothing worse than expecting zombies at your front door but they are bashing every other area instead so you have to leave your main kill room to deal with the rest.

I miss gore blocks that would allow zeds to effectively build a ladder up to the player, if they could do a mountain of corpses thing that could be great, mountain of corpses like ants is pretty iconic zombie stuff

Orclover said:
We started setting up horde bases in harder areas hoping to make the horde night harder/longer.  But even in the wasteland we have more exciting "events" by summoning screamers and forcing the zeds to hit max cap in any other zone compared to Horde Night (250 zeds I think is server cap which brings things to pretty low framerate but was fun for a while).  We were able to make them kinda exciting on occasion by using console to spawn in an extra 25 zeds at a time but then you feel guilty for basically cheating in a harder horde.

Basically after the first 60 days we kinda felt like we had "won".  We kept playing for a while but we are out of content again, and waiting on A21.
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Try make riskier horde bases or harder difficulty and set some rules like cobblestone only, no traps, no bombs etc.

The most fun I have is when the zeds breakthrough my first line of defenses and I need to fall back. 

 
We modded our server to around 12x spawn and 32x hordenight spawn. Also the traders are always open so you can do the hordenight there if you want.

Here comes the point:

THIS WAS ONE OF THE FREAKING BEST HORDENIGHTS I HAVE EVER SEEN AND EXPERIENCED!!!

They start pile up on all sides and can get over the walls with this. You are constantly shooting into the mass to make the tower of zombies fall down. While defending 2 walls with pistol and pipebombs i turned around to the third side and just see they come over the wall. Clearing inside, 1 mate still on the catwalk trying to kill everything that puts his head over the fence ready to jump in.

This feels like World War Z. Defending piling up zombies, throw grenades to crash zombietowers.

I didnt really want to abuse the trader, wasnt my intention. Its just annoying to not be able to use him at night. Then i was just to lazy to care about the cheese hordebase so i just wanted to easy do the hordenight there.

But this way i have seen the most epic and best hordenight ever in this game. Try it!

 
Hordenights need to be endless after the first two bloomoons. That´s my opinion and only complaint about bloodmoon right now.

It makes things way too easy that you can simply just craft a bunch of pipe bombs and end the horde way before 4am on day 35.

Not gonna bother wasting time complaining/discussing about the AI behaviour before the game is finished.

 
pApA^LeGBa said:
Hordenights need to be endless after the first two bloomoons. That´s my opinion and only complaint about bloodmoon right now.

It makes things way too easy that you can simply just craft a bunch of pipe bombs and end the horde way before 4am on day 35.
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Our horde nights start at 10pm and are usually over by 11:30 or midnight if we slack off a little.  We aren't using explosives either.  Mostly just running in the streets using my knuckles to smack the zombies around while my wife snipes the more dangerous ones.  Having it going til the sun came back up with be an awesome change.  Hopefully that will either become the norm or at least become an setting we can turn on later.

 
There is a small modlet for endless hordes. One for a 'trickle' (get a few stragglers annoying you until 4AM, like A18) and one for a never-ending final wave (the hardest wave) at full strength.

 
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