Rant about the difficulty and challenge

[Ross_Perot]

Pick your poison, Devs. Placate one jaded late-gamer who doesn’t like his character being a veritable demigod, you’ll have two early-gamers who can’t seem to find a spawn-point that doesn’t have a Hulk and a Juggernaut playing tug-of-war with their corpses.

Zombie evolution needs some serious tweaking, it should be faster, and have more lategame enemies.
Enemies that have several options to fight player. Bone plated, spiked zombies that are both strong and fast, as well know how to fight. As time passes, more and more zombies could become intelligent, so they would not walk straight into fire or traps. Maybe type of zombies that approach you only when there is enough of them, and untill that point they try to hide.
Dodge needs some nerfs too. Maybe encumbrance should be % reduction, where 50 enc on torso and both legs would be -100%. Some kinds of attacks should be insanely hard to avoid, even for your 11dodge manhack grinded OP survior gods of appocalypse. How can somebody dodge bites of dogs or wolves or giant spider so reliably? How could annyone dodge soo easily blows from hulks and juggernauts, when they have huge range and huge arms.

Dodge is fine. If you’re grinding it up to impractical levels and then don’t like being impractically hard to hit then all I can say is STOP GRINDING.

Y’all know the big reason, I think, for why Zombie Apocalypse games with a focus on realism have so much trouble keeping your basic Walking Dead/Romero-tier zombies dangerous?

Because Walking Dead/Romero-tier zombies wouldn’t be very dangerous in the real world either…

…still, something like this could work, I think.

Stronger zombies? Nah. I don’t like making them significantly bigger or faster than a normal human, because then I have to ask myself why they don’t collapse under their own weight, or how they keep their legs from falling off, or how they’re even fueling themselves in the first place, without being perpetual motion machines. And suffice to say it’s best if I can keep the analytical part of my brain turned off whenever I’m messing about with zombies.

I think it would be better to try making them smarter rather than stronger…

…so…

…what if…

…hmm…

…you almost never see anyone do this, and it seems so obvious…

…in fact, I’m wondering if I’m about to commit some kind of blasphemy by suggesting it, but…

…what if you gave the zombies guns?

What if you gave them enough intelligence to keep the guns loaded and maintained? And what if you gave them enough social organization that they could have supply lines keeping them sated with ammunition for their guns?

Heck, what if you gave them tactical cohesion and formal chains of commands, so that after a few years they stop being a Zombie Horde at all and start becoming Zombie Army. You won’t be complaining about lacking a challenge when the undead are calling in artillery strikes on you.

[TheMurderUnicorn]

o_o Please don’t give zombies guns.

[Ross_Perot]

Z Day+3 years. You sally forth from camp in your unstoppable doom-mobile, rolling into the nearest zombie town with plans to completely flatten the place. But their outer pickets notice you heading their way and manage to radio it in in time. Local militia fighters blow your wheel off with a TOW missile, reinforcements are trucked in to set up a cordon and they finish you off with AH-64 attack helicopters.

[TheZoneWizard]

To make a small suggestion regarding Labs. I never enter into a prison because of how many machine gun toting robots are lurking on patrol. Homicidal robots that can show up at the drop of a hat when noise sounds through out the building. That seems like a good start for a balanced difficulty measure. I can scoot past. Be stealthy. Use stealthy weapons. Pop locks. Grab gear. All of that. But those patrols still make me $h!t my pants when I see one come around the corner and I can’t run or make much noise lol

Please consider this. It is easier than a more complex set of functions. =D

Edit:
I am aware that they are sometimes in a lab. But I mean. ALL the time on the move, in all labs like every prison has those mobile machines looking for people to kill.

[dissociativity]

True, a prison being more secure than secret facilities seems awfully odd.

[Medi_Ding]

If you don’t want stronger zombies because they would make you question how they exist without disintegrating, then you should also question how shocker types continue to glow and emit electricity without any means of power generation, how smoker zombies constantly to emit smoke, how zombies are able to return to life an infinite number of times even though body mass is inevitably lost during combat, and a lot more. And if you have already pondered over these questions then you would probably have heard that all of this is hand-waved by the blob entity controlling the zombies somehow providing energy and biomass.

I guess smarter zombies could be a thing, though according to lore the blob is too preoccupied with a lot of other worlds. However, I feel like gun zombies are weird, since the zombies in this game focus mainly on killing as many living things as possible in the shortest amount of time, whereas a gun, despite being a powerful tool for killing, is a product of time and preparation.

If you want to kill people, you can band up with a team of people to slowly hoard supplies to make a Barrett and a few BMG Ball rounds, mark a hidden vantage point with a good view, and kill a few people with a near 100 percent success rate. Or you can just get a machete, take some PCP, and run about, mortally wounding as many people as possible before getting shot down or restrained by the police. I’m pretty sure that zombies would pick the latter, because it costs much less resources and time for a similar amount of dead people.

While a zombie army would be hard to beat, I think an army is usually meant to cripple an opposing country’s military force so that that country listens to the demands of said army’s leaders. The blob wants all living things to be under its control, so a nuke won’t accomplish much, as those killed will probably be vaporized and therefore not suitable for control. Smart zombies could make toxic gas, or an extremely big bloated zombie could just fart, but then again a lot of human survivors have gas masks or at least most people playing this game have obtained one though various means. The blob could take the form of a virus, but apparently it can’t take control of living lifeforms, nor can it act as a fatal poison. A gun and a lot of bullets could work, but people would probably learn to run away from the sounds of gunshots, and again, bullets and missiles are expensive in terms of time, both in manufacturing and safely transporting all of the ammunition. We usually don’t use guns to kill indiscriminately (and when it is, the deaths are often for intimidation), but to solve a specific problem quickly and without opposition. There are probably a lot of other ways of doing genocide while leaving the bodies of the victims intact, but it would probably take time and brain power that the blob just doesn’t have to spare since it is fighting a lot of other battles on different worlds.

However, I think it would be cool if zombies had upgraded versions of their ranged attacks. A corrosive zombie could adapt to have a much longer ranged spit attack, a shocker could create bigger fields of electricity, etc.

[TheZoneWizard]

Electricity can be found in living beings as a tactic to hunt via bio-luminescence.

Firefly

Smoke doesn’t expressly mean being on fire. There are chemicals that can produce smoke or a smoke like emanation.

Seems to me a reanimating reagent. Would provide a rather dumb zombie. Which we have. Reanimating the instinctual faculties of a sophisticated brain would be amazing enough. Having high brain functions would negate control over that being.

[crazykiddeath]

You could do something like more Lab like areas, I remember crapping myself when I was exploring some big vault place and ran into a couple of chicken walkers underground. You could also look at more enemy types that aren’t zombies in line with Grackens (but hostile), Mi-gos and such, maybe armed, to populate such areas. Gives vets somewhere to test their skills without throwing new players to the wolves.

[TheZoneWizard]

Would be nice if the effort was also sometime worth the gain. I tend to avoid national guard bases. So difficult getting inside, only to get nothing. I expend more resources getting inside than I get out of going in lol

[latogato]

Nice, i made similar rants every year in the past.

In '14 i complained how even simple clothes can protect us and how armors turn the apocalypse into a theme park.

In '15 i wrote again how armors just made us invicible and in '16 how the new monster evolution just turned the game into an arms race where the monsters still losing badly because there is always a new armor and weapon to kill them with ease.

Monster evolution was a good idea, but the player outpowers the monsters so badly it just turned the game into a levelling game… where the monsters desperately trying to keep up with the player…

A stopped to play for a while, but i see it is still a problem. The good thing i saw a lot of things in the game got better, they came up with better solutions so one day it will be much better than now.

[Axema]

a shocker could create bigger fields of electricity

Shocker fields are okay right now. That attack always hit the player with 3 blocks AOE electric dmg, so it doesn’t need tweaks at all. (maybe nerf?)

[Fris0uman]

Complaining every year

Reporting bug and balance problem is a good thing, opening issue on github about specific balance problem helps the dev to locate them

Contributing and offering solutions to those problem is even better, obviously it’s not easy for everyone but there’s a guide on the forum (by mlangdorf) on how to contribute. It’s well made and offers a good overview on simple things anybody can do to contribute.

[latogato]

I did.
and it seems the (Post must be at least 20 characters)

[Tripleight]

Hey, thanks for the reply. Thank you all for replying, it’s good to see this is a relevant topic in the community. This is a game I am looking forward to repeatedly pick up in the future and I am absolutely assured that the game is will be going in the right direction. Kevin, you like addressed pretty much all the important things, it’s really nice to hear. The game is amazing, I was like so thrilled at the challenge at the beginning when the learning curve provided that sense of “oh shit, will I survive tomorrow?”, but it simply got frustrating to experience the hype of advancing your character and surviving fall off, just to become a notion that after a certain point, without a doubt you are going to do well, because the game doesn’t provide the challenge for your developed character you were so enthusiastically building up to see how he perform and overcome difficulties.

I guess I have to just tweak the existing settings for more difficulty, artificially enhance it by own made rules and someone already here mentioned a mod or two I could try. That’s better than nothing.

[TheZoneWizard]

In a world gone to $h!t. Why at any point would you feel the world lacks challenge? Rebuilding a world after you crest the event horizon of survival is a life long challenge there after. No matter how powerful 1 person is.

It becomes the Super Man scenario. No one person can fix every problem and make a world a better place alone.

Hope you still play when you get bored of it though. =)

[Medi_Ding]

Smoke doesn’t expressly mean being on fire. There are chemicals that can produce smoke or a smoke like emanation.

I didn’t say smokers were on fire. I’m saying that smoke is made up of matter. No matter what chemical reactions are going on, if it is emitting smoke, then it is losing mass, and therefore chemicals for the reaction are being used up. Eventually, under normal circumstances, there will be no way to produce more smoke since most of the chemicals required to pump out the smoke will be gone. These aren’t normal circumstances, so the blob is providing the materials to continue this constant production of smoke.

[Wayticus]

The smoker zombies are obviously processing rubber to make the smoke, where do you think all the tires on cars go, the zombies gather them up for the smokers to eat.

[TheZoneWizard]

Nah. Makes more sense to assume the base materials are replenished by whatever(whoever) they eat acts as a fuel source.

Logical in game terms.

[Ross_Perot]

If you don’t want stronger zombies because they would make you question how they exist without disintegrating, then you should also question how shocker types continue to glow and emit electricity without any means of power generation, how smoker zombies constantly to emit smoke, how zombies are able to return to life an infinite number of times even though body mass is inevitably lost during combat, and a lot more. And if you have already pondered over these questions then you would probably have heard that all of this is hand-waved by the blob entity controlling the zombies somehow providing energy and biomass.

I do, and it does. To a point.

I’m not saying that the others don’t have problems, just that the big guys are the really obvious ones.

(I mean, if we really want to write citations for violating the square-cubed law, then how did all those giant insects come about? I don’t think anything could get that big without developing some kind of lung-analog, and that would impressive if it happened since, as far as I know, they don’t have any blob-like teleology driving their evolution.)

You could probably handwave those two if you tried hard enough. I mean, a Hulk or a Juggernaut is no bigger and probably not much stronger than, say, an elephant… and elephants manage to exist in our world. So what does it take to take a human corpse and re-engineer it to be of elephantine proportions but still be able to move around and not collapse under his own weight? I really don’t know, but I do think blob would reach a point of diminishing returns where it’s better off reactivating brain matter rather than trying to add on more biomass.

[quote]I guess smarter zombies could be a thing, though according to lore the blob is too preoccupied with a lot of other worlds. However, I feel like gun zombies are weird, since the zombies in this game focus mainly on killing as many living things as possible in the shortest amount of time, whereas a gun, despite being a powerful tool for killing, is a product of time and preparation.

If you want to kill people, you can band up with a team of people to slowly hoard supplies to make a Barrett and a few BMG Ball rounds, mark a hidden vantage point with a good view, and kill a few people with a near 100 percent success rate. Or you can just get a machete, take some PCP, and run about, mortally wounding as many people as possible before getting shot down or restrained by the police. I’m pretty sure that zombies would pick the latter, because it costs much less resources and time for a similar amount of dead people.[/quote]
Point. Zombies (and their Blob handlers) are never shown to have much in the way of time preference, and that’s something you’d really need to have even the primitave makings of a military.

Then again, chimpanzees are able to stockpile ammunition for expected conflicts, and they’re able to produce weapons for hunting and war. Could probably use firearms if they had the right physical properties. Zombie necromancers and zombie masters exist in-game, and I always had the impression that they were at least as smart as chimps.

While a zombie army would be hard to beat, I think an army is usually meant to cripple an opposing country’s military force so that that country listens to the demands of said army’s leaders. The blob wants all living things to be under its control, so a nuke won’t accomplish much, as those killed will probably be vaporized and therefore not suitable for control. Smart zombies could make toxic gas, or an extremely big bloated zombie could just fart, but then again a lot of human survivors have gas masks or at least most people playing this game have obtained one though various means. The blob could take the form of a virus, but apparently it can’t take control of living lifeforms, nor can it act as a fatal poison. A gun and a lot of bullets could work, but people would probably learn to run away from the sounds of gunshots, and again, bullets and missiles are expensive in terms of time, both in manufacturing and safely transporting all of the ammunition. We usually don’t use guns to kill indiscriminately (and when it is, the deaths are often for intimidation), but to solve a specific problem quickly and without opposition. There are probably a lot of other ways of doing genocide while leaving the bodies of the victims intact, but it would probably take time and brain power that the blob just doesn’t have to spare since it is fighting a lot of other battles on different worlds.

There’s another reason for an army: occupation and enslavement of a hostile, defeated population until the time that you’re ready to fully assimilate them…

…didn’t something like that happen in one of those Vampire TV Series? They give up on the masquerade, take over the world and set up their Vampire Occupation Government, pretty much enslaving/farming what’s left of humanity, with the vampire hunters assuming the role of freedom fighters/terrorists?

[Ross_Perot]

The Strain

It was this, I think. Never actually saw it; no idea if it’s any good.

There’s another case of “smart zombies” who were able to create something of an organized force: Evil Ash and his skeleton minions in Army of Darkness. They had CATAPULTS, IIRC