More specialized types of labs?

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I like the recent revamps to the in-game laboratories. They’re gradually getting more interesting over time, which is great given their importance to the mid-end game.

They do however sprawl rather immensely, and a single lab can still provide an awful lot of loot of basically every category in the late game - for relatively little risk as long as you know how to watch for and deal with turrets. It might be nice to see the current monumental ‘Lab’ broken up into somewhat smaller, more specialized facilities with different threats and loot types, such as:

  1. Military Lab - Specializing in cyborg/robotic defenses, military zombies, arsenals, and cybernetic loot troves/installation systems. (currently we have the military bunkers, but those are tiny)

  2. Genetic Lab - specializing in mutated zombies and animals, including a high proportion of the ‘odder’ zombie types, and various examples of giant ants, fungi, triffids, etc. Research focused on mutagens, and chemical equipment.

  3. Dimensional Research Lab - Specializing in weird inter-dimensional oddities. Cthulhu things, burning eyes, mi-gos, portals. Loot leans towards super-science stuff, like laser rifles, nuclear power systems, and weird artifacts.

Each lab having different sorts of decor and layout patterns, and generally being somewhat less massive and with more opponents in them - especially as they go deeper - would be nice to upgrade their risk/reward into the late game, and allow intrepid survivors to target specific facilities depending on what kind of upgrade path they are looking at.

2 Likes
2

This is a great idea, as labs are generally common enough for it to make sense that they’d have the resources to specialize in certain areas of research, rather than one massive complex that has all manner of things lab related interspersed throughout. Or alternatively, divide up the wings of the lab to more evenly focus on different research, which should work with the current average lab size. Denote certain tiles with inscriptions on the wall or placards that give the player their locational information within the lab.