HOWTO hordes

[dreamfantasy]

I think the horde now is okay. It doesn’t make sense that one survivor can handle a whole horde of zombie easily without strategy.

In early game I always run away from horde and try not to encounter one. Never staying too long near a city can definitely help you to avoid horde of large size. Just run whenever you see a horde coming. Nomad style is a must in early game.

After acquiring some means of transportation (like bicycle or roller-blades) I can try to go near city and attract some zombies away from the horde and take them down using fire or kill them one by one using terrain.

[Valpo]

If you have the fungus nearby. Make the horde follow you into its terretory. The shrooms will get rid of the horde for you.

[troll_from_behind]

Can zeds destroy the fungal towers?

[Valpo]

Can zeds destroy the fungal towers?

yes.

[TheWumpus]

If you have the fungus nearby. Make the horde follow you into its terretory. The shrooms will get rid of the horde for you.

And so it begins…plants v zombies. Well technically fungus, but I believe Triffids wreck zombie face as well.

And the easiest way to deal with a horde is to lure them to a Thriller. Just uh…just don’t stick around the party in case something happens to the DJ.

[Wally-kun]

I turn off joke monsters every game. Thriller’s cute and all but if something happens to him, just…gg. Literally gg. There’s no way around it.

I like hordes as they work now, but I’m with the general concensus that they appear too often, too quickly, too much. There’s just no way NOT to get a horde started. I had a flash-horde lock me out of my own LMOE shelter multiple times, and they have this weird tendency to trickle into being as I walk through a field traveling from city to city. Just like…really? The sound of my walking will attract them? From where? Where the fuck are these things even coming from at this point?

Hordes are nice. But their senses need to be dulled. Maybe more than a little bit.

Maybe the blob is like better safe then sorry? Humans are intelligent and violent enough to warrant preemptive measures.

This could be what special hordes comprised of specifically designed hunter-killer zombies are for. Feral hunters, those new predator things, acidic doohickeys…THOSE are the pre-emptive measures. The others are just natural movement, or part of some sort of world coverage maneuver. Some kind of agenda that we couldn’t hope to observe from the scale we currently operate on.

(I think it’d be the Old Guard to notice if anyone but even then there’s not much to do about it.)

[Coolthulhu]

Hordes are nice. But their senses need to be dulled. Maybe more than a little bit.

Their senses aren’t that strong, really. It’s just that the can only spawn, never despawn. This makes them accumulate around the player even when they only stumble around randomly.

I think they totally ignore sounds below 20 and are only weakly influenced above that.

[Bumpkin]

Ya, it’s their inability to despawn that seems to be the last real problem with hordes. It makes it impossible to hunker down in a closet and stay quiet and hope not to be noticed as the horde passes by, since you’ll end up eternally besieged. It also allows the cheesiest tactic of dealing with incoming hordes ; cruising around the fields in a vehicle until they’ve all spawned someplace unimportant, then driving off.

[Vorchar]

In my horde games I always get mega horde (hundreds) on my start location. Once I move out of it spawns tend to drop down to zombie here and there to 20 zombie groups.

[Pageman]

It would be nice to have a feature to decrease the hordes spawn rate or how many max zombies it can spawn like there is to zombies and items

[digitCruncher]

I think they totally ignore sounds below 20 and are only weakly influenced above that.

That isn’t my findings. Massive horde descended on my refugee shelter. The amount of gunfire coming from it made it very understandable, working as intended, all that.

Fled for my life, fought only in melee (~12 sound?), lockpicked a door, and looted some stuff. Disassembled a bench. By the time the bench was disassembled, the horde was marching towards me. There was one car that was idling (~8 sound), but that was it. I was being VERY careful to remain silent, but it looks like the hordes are following me.

This is an experimental version exactly 7 days old.

[Coolthulhu]

Fled for my life, fought only in melee (~12 sound?), lockpicked a door, and looted some stuff. Disassembled a bench. By the time the bench was disassembled, the horde was marching towards me. There was one car that was idling (~8 sound), but that was it. I was being VERY careful to remain silent, but it looks like the hordes are following me.

Then they stumbled randomly and weren’t attracted by sound.
Random horde stumbling can look like it is following sounds, but below 20 volume, overmap hordes are deaf. They can spend few “cycles” walking towards a sound source that was loud.
Once spawned, they have only the regular zombie senses, so sound of volume 12 won’t attract most zombies from afar.

They stumble around quite a lot and that could be it.

[digitCruncher]

That would make a lot of sense.

I had another run in with a massive horde when running silent, so I turned on the debug menu.

Turns out the second run in was caused by an antimaterial turrent drawing every horde within the nearest two cities. And it makes sense, everyone draws into the tiny little spot where all the noise was being made, and then they explode outwards (in a random walk pattern), when there is no sound anywhere.

I guess I will continue to walk the earth…

[Soyweiser]

Using the debug you can spot hordes right? Is the ‘nr of Z’s in this horde’ counter broken? iirc it always lists just one.

[deadmerits]

Since hordes either walk around randomly or chase noise, its pretty obvious they’ll find you. The only noise that’s made is around the player.

[pencho123]

Hordes seem to home in on my location. I ran away for 3 nights without sleep and they would still find me AND endlessly pour on me. The thing is, the horde should effectively cover only like 10x10 tiles at any time, not 50x50 in practice.

If I’m hiding in a mansion and I kill a couple of zombies that doesn’t mean suddenly all the 500 zombies “in the vicinity” would magically swarm me FROM ALL SIDES. They NEED to come from a single side. Zombies don’t have the strategy to outflank people.

[TheWumpus]

[quote=“pencho123, post:122, topic:8282”]Hordes seem to home in on my location. I ran away for 3 nights without sleep and they would still find me AND endlessly pour on me. The thing is, the horde should effectively cover only like 10x10 tiles at any time, not 50x50 in practice.

If I’m hiding in a mansion and I kill a couple of zombies that doesn’t mean suddenly all the 500 zombies “in the vicinity” would magically swarm me FROM ALL SIDES. They NEED to come from a single side. Zombies don’t have the strategy to outflank people.[/quote]

It’s very easy to outflank someone when you already surround them.

[Taraq]

[quote=“pencho123, post:122, topic:8282”]Hordes seem to home in on my location. I ran away for 3 nights without sleep and they would still find me AND endlessly pour on me. The thing is, the horde should effectively cover only like 10x10 tiles at any time, not 50x50 in practice.

If I’m hiding in a mansion and I kill a couple of zombies that doesn’t mean suddenly all the 500 zombies “in the vicinity” would magically swarm me FROM ALL SIDES. They NEED to come from a single side. Zombies don’t have the strategy to outflank people.[/quote]

That second example isn’t even horde behavior, right? Those are just the normal zombies in the mansion. They hear the fighting and come running. That’s always been the case. Find a doorway or something.

[pencho123]

[quote=“Taraq, post:124, topic:8282”][quote=“pencho123, post:122, topic:8282”]Hordes seem to home in on my location. I ran away for 3 nights without sleep and they would still find me AND endlessly pour on me. The thing is, the horde should effectively cover only like 10x10 tiles at any time, not 50x50 in practice.

If I’m hiding in a mansion and I kill a couple of zombies that doesn’t mean suddenly all the 500 zombies “in the vicinity” would magically swarm me FROM ALL SIDES. They NEED to come from a single side. Zombies don’t have the strategy to outflank people.[/quote]

That second example isn’t even horde behavior, right? Those are just the normal zombies in the mansion. They hear the fighting and come running. That’s always been the case. Find a doorway or something.[/quote]

They come from outside the mansion in numbers that are not found in mansions. We’re talking 20+ zombies, initially, from each cardinal direction, several brutes and hulks. As I’ve seen mansions have usually 20-30 mundane zombies inside them, and that mansion was already mostly cleared.

[pencho123]

[quote=“TheWumpus, post:123, topic:8282”][quote=“pencho123, post:122, topic:8282”]Hordes seem to home in on my location. I ran away for 3 nights without sleep and they would still find me AND endlessly pour on me. The thing is, the horde should effectively cover only like 10x10 tiles at any time, not 50x50 in practice.

If I’m hiding in a mansion and I kill a couple of zombies that doesn’t mean suddenly all the 500 zombies “in the vicinity” would magically swarm me FROM ALL SIDES. They NEED to come from a single side. Zombies don’t have the strategy to outflank people.[/quote]

It’s very easy to outflank someone when you already surround them.[/quote]

Why does a zombie horde surround a location that it has NOT found any threat inside? If you sleep in a gas station bathroom or an indoors mansion room the horde should not be able to find you and they should pass by, but you get sieged every time. You can’t wait out the zombie horde away, you have to run, because the horde will saturate the area with zombies.

This makes any area that doesn’t have a sewer or large forest effectively a deathtrap. Once you sleep somewhere you have to abandon the area permanently early-game.

The horde should come from one side when ambushing you, or not at all. If you sleep in a safehouse, it doesn’t make sense for the horde to surround you in your sleep 50% of the time.