HOWTO hordes

[Zero]

That poor slug! What did it ever do to you?

[Labtop_215]

[quote=“Labtop_215, post:54, topic:8282”][quote=“EditorRUS, post:53, topic:8282”]-snip-

-snip-[/quote]

Might leave some corpses to bushes/cars etc etc. You won’t see them. Maybe molotov takes couple zombies behind wall and you won’t see corses and carry on only for them to be reanimated.

You have posted excatly the reasons I do not like current hordes: They are tedious. they are NOT dangerous and they drop so much stuff going to towns becomes irrelevant apart from the car parts (which they have miracelously left alone) It’s not about boohoo Hordes too hard, its about I do not want to go on pressing up x 600, B x 600 for just because. Only zombies that require some sort of care are spitters since I have yet to see any higher tier zombies spawn as a part of a horde.

Out of curiosity does increased spawn rate affect horde zombie count?

PS. Really? Could you not figure this out yourself?

PSS. Don’t go rubbing your opinions to how game should be played.[/quote]

Wow. Okay, so basically the problem with zombie hordes is that there is… like… hordes of them zombies. Man.

Like, these zombie hordes would be the shit if there weren’t like 600 of em dropping their limbs everywhere, smashing every car and truck they come across, steppin on land mines and waking me up in the middle of the night.

In all seriousness, I have come across shocker zombies/brutes, regular brutes and hulks as well as the occasionally soldier, scientist, and technician zombies too. So no, there is an element of challenge to dealing with them.

Lastly, you don’t have to deal with the corpses if you don’t want too. You can alternatively turn of revivification via mod included in the game since chances are you don’t like that element of zombies anyway, you can lure them all to a kill-zone, and then pile all the bodies into a 3x3 area (I have yet to fill more than 2 tiles with dead zombies anyway, although I butcher them so your mileage may vary) and dissolve their bodies with acid (I’m not sure if fire works effectively anymore) and you can make use of spitter zombies to dissolve bodies who’s loot you don’t want in the mean time, and lastly you can just leave the bodies and deal with a little attrition for extra combat experience if you want too.

Nobody is “forcing” anything on you. Geeze.

[KA101]

Yeah, horde difficulty is a function of char stats/skills, etc. Best to stipulate your loadout before opining, I’d think.

[Coolthulhu]

I’m not sure if fire works effectively anymore

I buffed fire effects vs. bodies recently, but you still need to make a raging “funeral pyre” before it has a serious chance of wrecking the corpses.
It’s generally better to just acquire a really good butchering knife and put your survival skill to use. Takes like 3 turns per corpse.

Funeral pyres, dissolving with acid etc. is more of a style thing.

[Labtop_215]

[quote=“Labtop_215, post:62, topic:8282”]I’m not sure if fire works effectively anymore

I buffed fire effects vs. bodies recently, but you still need to make a raging “funeral pyre” before it has a serious chance of wrecking the corpses.
It’s generally better to just acquire a really good butchering knife and put your survival skill to use. Takes like 3 turns per corpse.

Funeral pyres, dissolving with acid etc. is more of a style thing.[/quote]

Oh, okay. Good to know. If the fire destroys stuff, does that usually count a fuel? For instance, do corpses fuel their own fire after a while?

[Arek_PL]

[quote=“Labtop_215, post:62, topic:8282”]I’m not sure if fire works effectively anymore

I buffed fire effects vs. bodies recently, but you still need to make a raging “funeral pyre” before it has a serious chance of wrecking the corpses.
It’s generally better to just acquire a really good butchering knife and put your survival skill to use. Takes like 3 turns per corpse.

Funeral pyres, dissolving with acid etc. is more of a style thing.[/quote]
so only 1800 turns to butcher small pile of bodies?

[Coolthulhu]

Oh, okay. Good to know. If the fire destroys stuff, does that usually count a fuel? For instance, do corpses fuel their own fire after a while?

Yes, most flammable resources can fuel the fire. Though not all of them can fuel a small or medium fire and even a raging fire will have problems without enough “encouragement”.
A raging fire has an one-in-(volume/20) chance of gaining “an extra turn of fuel” from a fuel made of flesh per turn. So you need 12 zombie child corpses just to keep the flames going without extra fuel. With adult zombies, you’d need 24 - much too much to fit in a single tile.
This is after I buffed them. Before my buff (but after zombie corpse volume increase), they’d burn far worse.

Currently aluminum, bones, wheat etc. don’t fuel the fire (except when powdered), even though in real life they aren’t bad fuels.

so only 1800 turns to butcher small pile of bodies?

That’s less than you’d take lining them up, hauling corpses into a pile etc.
If you have a great butchering tool like circular blade (especially if you can power it with an internal UPS), you can cut it down to 1 turn per corpse.

Sometime in the future I’d like to add mauling zed corpses to animal and NPC AI, but that’s the future.

[Vorchar]

[quote=“Labtop_215, post:62, topic:8282”]Wow. Okay, so basically the problem with zombie hordes is that there is… like… hordes of them zombies. Man.

Like, these zombie hordes would be the shit if there weren’t like 600 of em dropping their limbs everywhere, smashing every car and truck they come across, steppin on land mines and waking me up in the middle of the night.

In all seriousness, I have come across shocker zombies/brutes, regular brutes and hulks as well as the occasionally soldier, scientist, and technician zombies too. So no, there is an element of challenge to dealing with them.

Lastly, you don’t have to deal with the corpses if you don’t want too. You can alternatively turn of revivification via mod included in the game since chances are you don’t like that element of zombies anyway, you can lure them all to a kill-zone, and then pile all the bodies into a 3x3 area (I have yet to fill more than 2 tiles with dead zombies anyway, although I butcher them so your mileage may vary) and dissolve their bodies with acid (I’m not sure if fire works effectively anymore) and you can make use of spitter zombies to dissolve bodies who’s loot you don’t want in the mean time, and lastly you can just leave the bodies and deal with a little attrition for extra combat experience if you want too.

Nobody is “forcing” anything on you. Geeze.[/quote]

Problem is not 300 zombies (or cooks). Problem is that I spent like next hour of real time and next 7 days of ingame time spamming 5 and 8 on my numpad. Nothing else. Most of spitters miss their acid on you so you don’t even reed to move. So this is the super exciting and dangerous stuff everyone else is getting? Or am I perhaps doing something wrong that my character is needing to smack same button to wipe a horde?

As again I have personally yet to see a single harder zombie in a horde. Many as not part of hordes, but spitter has been the “most dangerous” zombie. Does changing the zombie spawn increase horde spawns? This could be a reason as I have not played hordes with increased spawns.

Biggest problem I have is that THEY ARE NOT A HORDE. They are just small groups of zombies here and there who magically know your position once ONE of them sees you. They might be 300 of them but you will be fighting groups of 1-5 zombies every half a hour (A lot of time to butcher, which I do GASP). Is that a horde to you?

I have no problem zombie rev while you AGAIN seem to make up your ow assumptions. I pretty much always play rev on. I just came up WHY someone might have problems with them (AGAIN you assuming things and going on HOW others shoud so things).

And again I have no problems with hordes I just don’t like to waste my time killing them. I just voiced my opinion on the subject as my personal experience seemd to WASTLY differ from others.

It should not come as a any kind of suprise that I play as hordess off. I’m currently trying out 2x spawns but it has pretty much come to a tedious grind of killing zombies rather than adding more danger to the game. Maybe it is just the zombies that seem to be so weak nowdays…

PS.
Man,really,dude,seariously?
Those words are to add weight to your sentence. Don’t know if you are doing it on purpose but you are making your posts feel more like you are giving a lecture or underrating others.

[Valpo]

Melee is supremely overpowered in cataclysm.

Concerning your hordes.
I get like a screen filled with enemies when i encounter a horde.
The most dangerous thing about that is when i am not carefull and 2-3 spitters attack at once while i am surrounded by 20+ z and then spit on and at the same time shocked by a shocker which parlyses me standing in acid.
Not a problem if i am careful.

[Vorchar]

[quote=“Valpo, post:69, topic:8282”]Melee is supremely overpowered in cataclysm.

Concerning your hordes.
I get like a screen filled with enemies when i encounter a horde.
The most dangerous thing about that is when i am not carefull and 2-3 spitters attack at once while i am surrounded by 20+ z and then spit on and at the same time shocked by a shocker which parlyses me standing in acid.
Not a problem if i am careful.[/quote]

Have you increased the zombie spawn rate?

[Valpo]

Let me check xD.

edit:

Suprisingly enough in my current world i got a spawn rate of 1.0

i usualy play at 5 times normal spawn.

So no i haven t tinkered with the spawn and i just slew a horde of considerable size.

Took me about 2 days to do so .
I had to retreat a bit cause i got tired and injured from acid.
Didn t want to take a risk.

[Vorchar]

[quote=“Valpo, post:71, topic:8282”]Let me check xD.

edit:

Suprisingly enough in my current world i got a spawn rate of 1.0

i usualy play at 5 times normal spawn.

So no i haven t tinkered with the spawn and i just slew a horde of considerable size.

Took me about 2 days to do so .
I had to retreat a bit cause i got tired and injured from acid.
Didn t want to take a risk.[/quote]

So weird
Best I got was house full of zeds. Again spitters as most dangerous. Couple spits later the house was pretty empty though…

I mostly get 5-20 zombie packs coming for me in waves for days. Its pretty easy to take those out

[Valpo]

The fighting system might need an overhaul. Because as it stand i can punch things like bears and hulks to death . No mutations or bioniks needed.
Realisticly it would already be hard to kill a human by just punching him. Considering there are people who can kill you standing with a punch… those are punches directed to the head … which the z are not using to coordinate theire movement(the blob does it). So killing a Z without special maneuvers in melee without a weapon should be extremely difficult.

[Coolthulhu]

[quote=“Valpo, post:73, topic:8282”]The fighting system might need an overhaul. Because as it stand i can punch things like bears and hulks to death . No mutations or bioniks needed.
Realisticly it would already be hard to kill a human by just punching him. Considering there are people who can kill you standing with a punch… those are punches directed to the head … which the z are not using to coordinate theire movement(the blob does it). So killing a Z without special maneuvers in melee without a weapon should be extremely difficult.[/quote]

Most zombies have 0 armor, which means you can easily punch everything to death.
Then there’s the issue of amazing skill scaling and leveling - shank 5 zombies to death and you’re a good fighter, shank 50 and you’re a killing machine.

[Valpo]

Well i think theres definatly room for improvement on several fronts still ^^

I think most enemies need more armour.
There should be some more maneuvers in melee. (an option to push away a z for example)
Dmg bonus on melee skills should be hardcapped at some point.
Dunno how to handle progression … as i hear people complaining about skill rust a lot… seems they think they still do not progress fast enough?

[Coolthulhu]

Dunno how to handle progression … as i hear people complaining about skill rust a lot… seems they think they still do not progress fast enough?

Skill rust isn’t bad because it slows down skill progress, it’s bad because it’s pure tedium. It only slows down progress if you don’t stop once in a while to craft simple stuff, punch a zed etc. and during sleep. It also makes rarely used skills (construction) really annoying to keep up.

Current skill rust uses tedium to “balance” the game. It simply makes optimal gameplay less fun.
You can easily defeat skill rust by having an “anti-rust ritual” you do when skills start rusting. It’s just that doing “the rituals” is boring.

[Arek_PL]

for nerfing mele look at rogue survivor, character get tired after few atacks more if using big weapon
adding something like that give not only nerf but alslo place for new mutations or bionics

skill rust is not bad if capped

[Valpo]

Hm …
you ve got a point.
You can play with caped or intcap meaning you can ignore the rust mostly because you won t loose lvls. Still you would forget progress if you did not invets more time into a skill in development to a higher lvl. making it somewhat more realistic. Like when i learned how to summate i ll proly not forget it … ever. But if i was in the process of learning how to multiply i might forget the progress i made… So if i resume learning i d have to relearn what i forgot about the matter. Once i learned how to multiply it ll stick with me for a long while.

Its the best i can think of for now.

Still the progress system:

Don t you think people might complain about it beeing to grindy if you simply prolonge the time they need to gain a lvl? Maybe we should find a similiar system for melee combat like we have in place for crafting. Meaning we d need sufficient challenge for your survivor to make him progress after a certain time?

edit:

[quote=“Arek_PL, post:77, topic:8282”]for nerfing mele look at rogue survivor, character get tired after few atacks more if using big weapon
adding something like that give not only nerf but alslo place for new mutations or bionics

skill rust is not bad if capped[/quote]

As it stand we do not need to wield a weapon at all .
The only time i see myself compelled to wield a weapon is when i am fighting a shocker z.

edit2:

Didn t wanna say that adding fatigue is a bad idea… to the contrary your right its a good way of nerfing melee while also making it more realistic.

[Vorchar]

Going a bit (lot) off topic but oh well.

I used to play with skill rust to tone down character progress until I noticed that you can get to 0 -> 6 in a day with melee and crafting goes in two days. At level 8 your progress rusts like 50% progress a day with 8 int once skill starts rusting so you need to jump from level to level or keep doing minor things to keep rust away (quite hard with some of the skills).

Combat fatigue might be a good idea as long as you could not prolong it forever or for extreme amounts of time. If drugs/drinks/stims prolong getting fatigued it would just become norm to have stims with you. Much like how gas/filter masks became part of every character with fungal infection being airborne only. Now with anti-fungal drug and fungal infection being contact parasite masks aren’t “you cannot live without one” item anymore.

[Coolthulhu]

for nerfing mele look at rogue survivor, character get tired after few atacks

Fatigue separate from sleep is planned. It could actually help, but it would require the fatigue to affect all weapons, not just the heavy ones. Combat knife is one of the best weapon in the game and it’s tiny. Fists are another great weapon, once enough skill is acquired.

Don t you think people might complain about it beeing to grindy if you simply prolonge the time they need to gain a lvl? Maybe we should find a similiar system for melee combat like we have in place for crafting. Meaning we d need sufficient challenge for your survivor to make him progress after a certain time?

It could be adjustable (in world options), based on intelligence or limited by target. Intelligence could use a buff, because at the moment there are only 2 stats really worth getting: strength and dexterity. And dexterity is worth about 2x as much as strength.