.8 is definitely harder

[youtoo]

Got my first chance to play yesterday. I am using the September 21st Experimental (day I downloaded it). My start

options

Spawn: 4x
City Size 6 (starts at 4)
Starting Attributes 25 (I want balance out extra zombies)
allowed myself as many traits as I wanted
no skill rust
drop non-watertight containers

build

strength: 14
Dex: 14
Int: 14
Perc: 12 (any value in getting this above 12?)

Good traits:
Fast Learning, Fast Healing, Pain Reading, Night Vision, Quick,Fleet-footed,Robust Genetics

bad traits
UGly,Wool allergy, Trigger happy, near sighted, far sighted, something else that wasn’t bad_

profession blacksmith (starts with a hammer.very good starter weapon).

Start

1. fungaloid spawn right near shelter. first time i got tons of spawns right on top of me when I started (note 4x spawn rate)

2. science lab near shelter, found science corpses(with badges), found military with a gun and some ammo.
   shot fungaloids. bad idea. swarmed near shelter from noise.

3. They dont seem to break doors or windows. however, one got into my house and no doors were open, but killed it. not sure how.
   Ran out of ammo. walk on landmine. didn’t realize the ‘mound’ was a trap. i did look at it and i must have missed it, DEAD

Start Over
respawned same place. ran to corpse. got water, rucksack, a few things, and science bad. went straight for science lab. Fungal spawn still there

Lab Changes: insides appears to have different layout. old one had long corridaors with rooms. this one twists more. harder to find your way around. it will be nice when we get z-levels. its too hard to read the map now. i did find a flashlight so that helps finding my way around.
appeasr to be alot of doors i cant open now. looks like i need good computers
some kind of sci-fi blob behind a window i cant break. probably dont want to kill it.
seems to be less stuff down here, but its harder to make my way around with all the twists.

Plan: I think i need to grease those fungaloids.there are land mines. but i may use the science lab corridor. smash stuff down here and get lots of wood. lay down a trap and lead fungaloids over many rows of fire to weaken or kill. did get a filter mask. wont take out the bloom, but will trim the herd.

comments

1. new science lab layout is cool, but without z-levels its too hard to read the map. its a hassle to make my way around. i do the like the chairs and stuff, but we do need some kind of underground mapper that is better than what we have. Though seeing tables and chairs in the right place, some kind of wierd monster through a glass is cool and zombie sience nerds is fun.
2. not sure if its 4x that got the fungaloid spawn on top of me or game changes. this was ‘neat’. i did see some random zombie spawns in the wood
3. alot less rabbits and squirrels. Id like to see an option to increase this. this is a bit of a hassle. im ok with it, but would like some flexibility
4. in previous versions corpses and spawns changed when you died, but the basic world layout was the same. i like the stay the same, but some people may want the option to change. i have to see what happens if i make another guy in the same world. is it totally shared? If so, could allow for co-op game where you share a world back and forth.

this is as far as i got. exploring new science lab. have a little water and a little food. grabbed some strawberriers

[keldoclock]

Fungaloids are not so bad as far as neighbors go, they have really low detection radius so as long as you are like half a screen away they won’t aggro. Wear a gas mask when you fight them, they are pretty weak, they should only be a minor hassle until day 20-30 when you can go blow up their home.

[jimboblordofeskimos]

Think all of your fiddling is what has made the game harder. 4x zombies may be cutting down on the wildlife spawns as well. The new labs are a bit more of a hassle, but by then you should be fairly badass anyway.

[youtoo]

I wasn’t looking for help… I want the game harder. I like that my shelter is getting crowded. There was no point in securing your shelter before. As far as ‘half a screen away’, uh… i have like 50-100 of them right on top of my shelter. I drew them over with my first guy from using a gun. I’m ok with this, just noting changes in the game.

as far as Science Lab changes, I stated that this was the first place I went. There is a science lab right next to me, I got badges, was surrounded by fungaloids, and i have more zombies. My point about the lab was not ‘how bad ass’ I am. It was the difficulty in navigating it without decent underground maps since we don’t have z-levels. I noted that I liked the layout ,but found it a hassle. I know this won’t get improved until Z-Levels came in.

Question:

raising zombie spawns cuts down on wildlife spawns? I do remember some discussion about cutting down on rabbit/squirrel spawns on the forums. I thought it was related to this. How does the spawn multiplier work?

[kevin.granade]

I think the increased city size has more impact on this than spawn density, what happens is that with the larger cities there is less non-city area, and fungal spires and shelters both spawn in non-city area, so they’re getting squished together by the expanding cities.

Basically to correct for this we need to scale back the number of specials such as triffid hearts and fungal spires based on the available wilderness area.

The fungal spawns are most likely what is supressing regular animal spawns, if there are hundreds of fungal monsters nearby, regular wildlife isn’t going to spawn much.

A word of warning about “trimming back” fungal populations. When you interact with them, fungaloids release spores, which grow into new fungaloids in under a minute. When you leave the area, these new fungaloids are re-added to the population of the spire, so to successfully trim fungal populations, you have to kill them faster than they spawn.

[youtoo]

“Basically to correct for this we need to scale back the number of specials such as triffid hearts and fungal spires based on the available wilderness area.”

NO DONT DO THAT. This is so cool. I have played this game for a long time. I like it hard. Do you have any idea how fun it is to leave my shelter and be surrounded and have to actually be worried constantly? If your new to the game, you don’t want that cause its too hard.

About the animal spawns. Maybe we can add options so that we dont cut back on animal spawns when monster spawns come out, so you can get both? Eventually someone can make a mod or something where say fungaloids attack animal spawns (there is a Skyrim mod called ‘skytest’ that has animal interaction like this you may want to look at).

I only increased the city size from ‘4’ which is the default to 6. So a 50% bump was enough? That kind of makes sense since there are alot of towns anyway. I do like the increased fungus. The downside to less rabbits is more of a hassle factor. Harder to get throwing up. Harder to get food. But its not that bad.

Please dont make this game easier. Try to kill me. Been playing a Roguelike called ‘elona’ recently. There are 2 english lets play videos (japanese game with english translation so bigger in japan). First video starts with ‘this game will kick you in the balls’, the second starts with ‘this game hates you’. Make the game hate me.

[FunsizeNinja123]

I love a challenge…

[GlyphGryph]

Basically to correct for this we need to scale back the number of specials such as triffid hearts and fungal spires based on the available wilderness area.

Better solution - don’t limit their spawning to wilderness.

[An0n3]

Uhh, I think it’s more a product of you quadrupling the spawn rate and increasing the city density 50% there.

Just a guess.

As far as “challenge” I would say you like big fights with tons of stuff, sort of “epic scale” encounters…but I’m not sure I would call that an increase in difficulty? You gave yourself more stuff to fight but made yourself start out really good at fighting it. You tipped the scales against yourself, but then gave yourself some more weight to balance it out. See what I mean?

[kevin.granade]

I take it to mean, “0.8 CAN be harder, yay!”

Good point GlyphGyph, smushing fungal and triffid stuff into the cities would also do it, I’m not terribly excited about implementing those interactions though <_<

Overall though there are a lot of knobs we can twiddle in world builder, like enforcing certain wilderness/river/swamp/city area ratios.

[vache]

Swamp Ratio: 0%

[An0n3]

Can you make those ratios options in the world menu?

HELLO SWAMP WORLD

OH GOD WHY

[Darrus_Dreadtiger]

Fungaloids are not so bad as far as neighbors go, they have really low detection radius so as long as you are like half a screen away they won’t aggro. Wear a gas mask when you fight them, they are pretty weak, they should only be a minor hassle until day 20-30 when you can go blow up their home.

I, too, thought they might be nice neighbors. I once wanted to occupy a public works 10-15 tiles away from a fungaloid home. At that point i wasn’t quite well equipped, so I just hoped they’d be disposable easily enough. My primitive arrows didn’t pierce their bark, my combat knife took them down okay. However, fighting about 12 of them mixed with fungal zombies left me quite injured.

It was my personal luck that there was a flatbed with a bit of fuel left on the lot, so I made for a daring escape… and the moment I crashed through the fence I was suddenly surrounded by about ONE HUNDRED fungal zombies… I must have killed 30-40 of them by driving into them.

…so yeah. Fungal grounds are way off limits for me for now… at least on newer chars.

[youtoo]

@an0n3: agreed, but I have had that choice for a while. I’d argue its still harder, since skills are more important that a few more stats and traits. you dont have any skills at first. once i get the hang of adding more stuff to kill me, Ill tap it down. I thought it was alot of fun to start the game and be surrounded. in the past, even though I would start with just 6 points to pass around, i could hang in the wilderness and get strong. yeah I could get in trouble if i ran into a few wolves and such, but it wasn’t too bad. being surrounded to start a new game, gives more of a survivalist feel.

liked it. just pointed out about the rabbit spawn. I wasn’t sure if it was intentionally lower or if this was a consequence of the options.

it is ALOT of funny with more bad guys coming after me early. i plan to progressively jack up the spawns. with current .8, I think ill keep cities at 4x and then jack up to 8x mobs for my next start and see how it goes. plan is to increase spawn rate every game week to add to the challenge. forces me to secure my shelter and make decisions on which skills to train. since i dont have time do be good at everything.

i do like keeping spawns the same with this new world. i like that i came back to the shelter and was surrounded because of the bad decision i made a few minutes before to use my gun and draw the fungaloids in. ongoing consequences to my actions… makes for more of a challenge. These kinds of thing are probably only fun to those of us who have played vast numbers of games and are looking for new stuff.

[An0n3]

Oh I have no doubt that it’s tons of fun. Any area attack melee weapon or high Capoiera skill and you’re having a literal BLAST.