Dynamic versus Static Contrast

[Austupaio]

So Static is harder earlier but ultimately quite a bit easier in my experience.

While Dynamic allows you a day or so before everything goes to hell, if you hit the 2nd day without an Assault Rifle you’re basically fucked.

I often try to enter a town on the 2nd day on Dynamic to find dozens of Shocker, Spitter and even Brute zombies who just rape a newbie character who didn’t get a good weapon or vehicle on the first day.

Classic zombies is fun in it’s own way, you can have more fun fighting the zombies without getting devastated but it gets boring after the first week because classic zeds never get any more difficult.

Basically, I was hoping for a Dynamic with some sort of delay to introduce specials.

Day 1; Classic and child zeds.
Day 2; Cop and Grabber zeds.
Day 3; Boomer zeds.
Day 4; Spitter zeds.
Day 5; Giant wasps take over town homes.
Day 6; Web spiders build nests in forests and other spiders start migrating.
Day 7; Giant bees build hives with their special zeds I’ve forgotten the name of, introduce Brute zeds.

That way the game continues to get more difficult over time without completely overwhelming you with a million shocker zombies before you’ve found a gun store.

[KA101]

Yeah, fighting zeds in Dynamic isn’t what I’d call easy. (I don’t recall them grabbing my character and doing carnal things to him, though.)

FWIW Scarred Zeds aren’t a bad practice partner for low-level Dodge & melee training, so I’d suggest that bringing out the beehives earlier would help rather than hinder.

Martial Arts Training lets even new characters have a pretty good chance; Karate gets good reviews and I like Taekwondo. May be worth considering.

[i2amroy]

There actually already is a time delay on certain monsters appears, based on their difficulty. The speed at which things appear is still extremely quick though, and things that are created as a special instance (wasp/ant/spider nests, child zombies in parks, mall/hospital zombies) still spawn at the start of the game.

[Hyena_Grin]

I think there is a lot of room for making static spawn more interesting and more challenging, some of which the team is working on. Things like roving hordes and the like. I think even static spawn should make some clever use of dynamic spawning to keep players on their toes even if they’d cleared a town. But needless to say, a roving horse of forty zombies waltzing into town one day could make
It an interesting day.

[Ziga]

why stop at forty?

[kevin.granade]

Dynamic Spawning as such is on the way out, the only reason it’s still around was my (correct) concern that it wouldn’t be properly balanced by the time we released a version with it in. At some point we’re going to decide static spawns have feature parity with dynamic spawns*, and dynamic spawns (for zombies at least) as such will be turned off. Having said that, some aspects of monster populations SHOULD be dynamic, for example the giant insects should be able to replace lost individuals as long as they still have a viable hive, and fungal infestations should probably be able to increase by fungalizing nearby creatures**. In other words, there’s no intention to make the game world such that there will never be new monsters.

*Probably once we’ve made the conturs of where zombies spawn more closely match town outlines, added wandering hordes, and reimplement loud noises calling down nearby-but-off-map enemies on you.
**Fungal squirrels, rabbits… bears?

[fartbutt]

[quote=“Austupaio, post:1, topic:1106”]Day 1; Classic and child zeds.
Day 2; Cop and Grabber zeds.
Day 3; Boomer zeds.
Day 4; Spitter zeds.
Day 5; Giant wasps take over town homes.
Day 6; Web spiders build nests in forests and other spiders start migrating.
Day 7; Giant bees build hives with their special zeds I’ve forgotten the name of, introduce Brute zeds.[/quote]

This made me think, kind of off topic maybe but here it is. People in this thread are saying that static is too easy, you clear them out then what, etc. So then what are your options? Roaming hordes are great, but even then it wouldn’t be too much of a challenge compared to dynamic. I like the robots and mutant bugs and stuff but at a certain point it has nothing to do with zombies anymore, and the special zombies are cool but fighting a swarm of 100 brutes on day 10 isn’t that interesting.

This game takes a bit of a realistic stance, so what if as time goes on it becomes less about fighting zombies and more about fighting npc survivors, gangs, and armies trying to reestablish order. There’s already the barest beginnings of a faction system. And that way you could get the satisfaction of killing a bunch of zombies and clearing a town and running the show, but after a certain amount of time (10-20 days? a few seasons? a year?) a new serious threat emerges: the most dangerous game: People. Just a quick thought.

[Nappist]

Game starts with mostly normal zeds, and static roaming hordes and cities filled with zombies.

As time goes by, an increasing number of zeds begin to transform into boomers, zombie masters, zombie necromancers, brutes, etc.

Further, various twisted mutants climbing up out of the sewers after a certain amount of time goes by. Sound should go further. Even 1 unit of noise will slowly, and in a very gentle matter, “tug” all surrounding zombie legions toward you.

This would have the side effect of forcing you to fight increasingly huge hordes if you try to stay in one area for a long period of time, and that difficulty will steadily go up as time goes by.

I would also like to see occasions of zeds swarming over non-human (triffids?) populations and duking it out. The zeds seem like they should generally win with long distance shock troops and the ability to re-raise their own numbers, but their opponents should have the advantage of being able to replicate their numbers instead of just “refilling” their army with re-raised zeds.

With this in mind, “fresh” zeds should always be normal, regardless of what they were before.

[vultures]

Well put Nappist, agreed with you right away. Liked the tugging stuff but it’s this - even with no noise, and Z’s make noises damn right, at 500 yards a window split in two sounds like change in someone’s pocket. Yet, boomers and such come rushing whether it is a high velocity gun, or just some glass being shattered in the dirt.
I’m not sure about side-stuff, cause it requires a whole different class to code. I’m sure they would be called distractions, since the undead are so eager to tend after one another. The only issue I can see is that, if I were to sneak up to the edge of a town and set up a timed bomb there and just dash around to appear at the other end - will it mean that all zombies will rush to that corner and, consequently kill everything that shows its face from a nearby forest?

Anyway, I strongly support forming legions of Z’s since it is the only way to play later on, e.g. with a supercharacter.

[TheRealTenman]

This just got me thinking…

1)Stumble across a large quantity of fungal spires close together.
2)Run like hell.
3)Craft a noise maker.
4)Go to a town.
5)Turn on a radio
6)Repeat 4 and 5 till you get "enough"
7)Herd them into one major army (grab a vehicle and drive in large circles.)
8)Speed to the growth.
9)Drop the active noise maker.
10)Smoke a cigar and watch the show, picking off any that wander near you.

Just think,
Zombies bashing, puking, zapping and resurrecting.
Fungals Bashing, exploding, converting and ultimately getting worse.
You yelling at your computer because now you are even worse off.

Just think of all the !FUN!