Static Spawn is Terrible

[Fniff]

It really wasn’t as easy as people claim. I think that’s just nostalgia.

Seriously, even with the grace period, it was still really difficult to clear out a town. Even repeated visits with a vehicle didn’t do the job for me: the one time I made a base, it was way outside of town. It had ridiculous numbers of zombies which defied logic.

[applemachine]

Sup guys, I’m new to this game, but I really enjoy playing. When I started playing the game static spawn was being introduced so I didn’t have much experience with the classic cataclysm strategies. I did however, watch a few videos giving me some insight into the dynamic spawn mode. What I saw was that it was very easy to run into the city, steal all you needed, and run out with enough to tackle labs, mines, and other areas that should take a little longer than a day of effort.

When I started I played with static spawn I was getting totally wrecked following the strategies I saw in let’s plays. People I watched were always maxing out negative traits and not getting any skills. I found that without skills like archery or survival it was impossible to get into the city. I needed at least some basic skills to get past the defense of the city boarders. My current build involves archery and survival and traps. Those are 3 points that used to go into stats, but have to be sacrificed in order to secure my successful run. Either I find enough string to build a bow or I disarm a crossbow and head into the town to find supplies. Of course, I just started so I still have a lot to learn about the game in general, but it seems clear that the same strategies used for dynamic spawn don’t work for static.

In any case, I like that you now have the freedom to stay in the forest and fend for yourself. You can spend days in the woods without having to worry about the steep increase in zombie difficulty found in the classic version. In the dynamic version there was a steep increase in the hoard strength which pressured you to race into town every day. Now you can build an XP pool for a few days eating cooked meat, drinking some vodka you found in an outlying house, and smoking some cigarettes. I did have some trouble with the cold weather. Perhaps the sheets in the windows could be more easily used as a way of keeping warm. Maybe sleeping in a bed should add warmth since it requires a sheet.

Certainly there are kinks to be worked out, but I really like the game and the direction it’s heading in. Keep up the good work guys! I always read up on the github to see what you guys are adding each day. It’s fun to watch the developments

[Mantar]

I’m doing OK in my current game with just 1 point in dodge. The mountain man style was my choice for last char, though. Building your own tools and things is great, and archery is awesome. It doesn’t appear to be a must have, though.

[HorrorNerd]

with Dynamic spawn , I couldn’t survive the first day , but with static on I’m up to day 3. You can still play any character type you want to it’s just that its a gradual progression. You can’t get everything you need at the start. you have to work for it/survive to get it.

In previous versions I rarely tried building , but with static spawn I’m able to concentrate on building and getting what I want, but at the same time you have to be careful.

I don’t leave the starting evac shelter until I have gotten enough loot to survive. usually this means making a nail board and or crowbar(usually I have to make a choice as my character can’t carry both) or a few spears. Then I cut a path to the outskirts of town and knock out the window(if I don’t have a crowbar) of the first house I see.

Being able to lure the zombies is great also, nothing like luring a horde into a house ripping off your shirt and burning the house down with them in it lol

[pingpong]

What versions are people trying to play on? I grabbed .2 like less than two weeks ago, and day one it seemed if I was IN houses I could run around for a long time, and duck out to smash into another place, but if I was in the open for a rather short time, two dozen zombies would spawn, then as I would run there’d sometimes spawn a bunch in front of me, etc. Day two I’d be dead, as necromancers, lightning guys, spitters, etc would spawn. Only managed to get some headway when someone would want a really easy task or they’d camp outside with a shotgun as I was fleeing from a spitter shooting at my feet from the only village that wasn’t overrun with 30 zombies already, most of which spawn at least 2-3 MAP spaces outside cities, so I couldn’t even get close after the initial 2-4 house raid with wracking up a spitter and fast zombie and 40 points of pain.

I haven’t tried static spawning, sounded like it’d be lame and easy, but maybe I’ll try it next world or version, whichever comes first. On .3 prerelease I haven’t had any issues getting hosed by 10 special guys spawning when I’m five spaces outside the city, so kudos to that.

[Tankra]

I’m just going to mention that I started playing this game a while back when it was under Whales’ development, and I didn’t really get hooked to the game because of the spawning system. I hate having a random group of zombies spawn on me from literally nowhere because of some completely arbitrary mechanic like making too much noise; that just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s not intuitive. It’s essentially like walking around in JRPG mode. You’re just strolling around in the high grass and suddenly: A WILD ZOMBIE APPEARS. It’s kind of lame.

Having a static spawn means that if you make too much noise and a zombie happens to be around, he and his ilk will start charging you. That’s intuitive. Also, if no zombie is around and you start smashing every window in sight, nothing will happen. It’s a question of causality: we all know there’s a correlation between making noise and getting zombie all up in your shit, but did the noise really create the zombie out of thin air?

In other words, if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear, does a zombie spawn?

But above and beyond that, having a static spawn means that you can accomplish something in the game, as opposed to merely being stuck in Sisyphus’ never-ending toil. You can set out to clear a small town of all its zombies and actually succeed - although I’ve never actually even gotten close to achieving this. How much more satisfying is that than living in an MMORPG-like world where the monsters constantly respawn? You keep rolling that stone up the hill, but it just keeps coming back down.

That’s just my two cents. And for the players who are used to the old system, I totally understand how this changes all your strategies and makes you feel like you suck at a game in which you’re actually quite good. I get how that’s frustrating, and I would totally be on your side if the change wasn’t for the best. But sometimes change is good, even though it’s hard to adapt to.

[Shades]

Just to point out under dynamic spawn you could clear an area too, the spawns where from the groups that covered that section of the map and where limited in total number.
They also should have only ever spawned out of your sight radius (although this might have broken)

[Sep]

In other words, if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear, does a zombie spawn?

in the future triffids and fun-galoids could fight each other and the swamp and netherworld beasts and you’ll have to take out specific items to make them stop. now, noone spawns, noone comes, nothing takes over after you bring down the numbers.

so rather than looking at the spawn of one population, i would want the total number of hostiles on a large map to remain constant. … so if you kill 1k zombies you would get 1k [triffids,fungs,swamp,nethers] to make up for that … if there were 10 allocators for each kind, random number of spawns would go to random allocator #x. if you had taken out that allocator, you would have in effect gotten rid of the baddies for good.

So, Static Spawn is Terribly Cool. But its not an issue. the silence is. and nearsightedness. something happened to the zombies and i’m terrribly concerned about them they can almost not see you anymore.

[Iosyn]

Someone had a suggestion about radio broadcasts now and then-- e.g, locations of supply crates, mayday from downed helis-- and warning of zombie swarms. This last one would be pretty rare (maybe, once a month) and essentially be a repopulation of a few towns-- or half a repopulation. Just enough to keep you on your toes, as a full repop sounds a bit extreme (what, my drunken master can’t barricade a liqour shop? :P) Also it would be a nice use for radios instead of just chucking them away as a distraction.

As for the reduced sight range, I like it. better than rotting corpses with their eyes falling out having 20/20 vision and laser-guided instincts. Also, fresh zombies that replaced fast ones have a sight range more in line with normal sight range in 0.2 (i.e as soon as you spot them, they spot you-- which means they’ll be dragging normal zeds behind them.)

[Sep]

now about sight, its off-topic, but i used to like new-moon and thunderstorm raids for the ambience. now i throw up a 60x60 viewport and pull individuals with rocks. they seem to see about 40ish now and they can’t smell me farther than that either. so the challenge is gone completely, but someone said that already.

repopulating, whatever, you can have that and stand there trading collectibles. i’d like to turn the swamps into parking lots … and in so doing strengthen the triffids and fungies so that i have to keep an eye on my headquarters on that map. no offense.

i see the zombies as just the entry level mobs in a far more interesting game.

their total life-energy should get pushed around so that more of the other kinds of mobs spawn at their ‘portals/centers/spawning grounds’. these we can destroy so that any energy pushed into them would drain from so map. this would serve to have other mobs assert more of a presence as you change the world beginning with us clearing out the towns and labs to level up.

simple example… say there are 3 each river/triffid/fungaloid centers. … 2 of them are near my fortress. mobs constantly run into my turret defenses ‘for that lived in look’ while in the yard i build some ueber car.

now i go out and take out all the spawn centers closest to me. if i ‘leave them open’ then much of the life has already drained from the map and the battles at my fort will slowly cease. if i ‘plug’ them, i remove the spawning center from consideration, no more life-energy will be lost
and i can have some background action on ‘the home map’ as i take the mega-mobile on the road to the next map.

i recognize that all this is fantasy but Cataclysm is strong enough to let one enjoy failing at zombies while having the conceptual depth in design (the archeologist in me says) to support exactly the game-play i’ve outlined in a multi-player universe. so yeah, i guess its fine that the zombies have become a bit short-sighted.

tl;dr? that’s fine.

[Fox]

I think what is needed is to eventually have a hybrid system where there are zombies that are preset at the start - of the normal varieties but not hulks and such - and new zombies generate over time out of a pool (a small one, not a couple thousand zombies). After a certain timeframe, the static spawns for the tougher monsters would be enabled. Something along those lines.

[Rutilant]

Seemed to me the game was more about surviving after the fall, scavenging what you could knowing that almost all of it was a limited resource. If you got good loot in the beginning of the game… so what? That was the first 30 minutes of what may be weeks of trying not to succumb to the apocalypse and learning to adapt and become a better survivor.

For some reason, static spawning just felt like a very pointed step away from that direction.

Why does the city need to be ‘end game’? why does it need to have a huge amount of zombies that you must ‘conquer’ to ‘earn the loot’?

It’s not about loot, it’s about survival until something incredible and stupid happens to kill you off like everyone else. Or I thought it was supposed to be, anyway.

Feeling a bit disillusioned if static spawning is going to become mandatory; I’ve had enough of waiting for a skill number to grind high enough to grant me access to a new dungeon or whatnot over the last decade, personally.

[HorrorNerd]

You can still go into town and loot shops , you just have to be careful. The reasons for cities being a hotbed of activity is to mimic reality(I figure this to be the case). In a zombie outbreak cities would have the most people in it and thus why lots of zombies are there.

[Vexification]

You can still go into town and loot shops , you just have to be careful. The reasons for cities being a hotbed of activity is to mimic reality(I figure this to be the case). In a zombie outbreak cities would have the most people in it and thus why lots of zombies are there.

Yes, but zombie hordes on the very most outskirts is ridiculous. It needs to get nerfed.

[GlyphGryph]

I don’t know what you are doing to find zombie hordes on the very most outskirts. That certainly happened all too often in the old system, but most people don’t seem to experience that with static spawns.

(Though the spawn code is a bit borked at the moment, in that the smaller the town, the heavier the zombie presence at the outskirts thanks to proximity to town center. This is being worked on, though)

[Benedict]

[quote=“HorrorNerd, post:73, topic:546”]You can still go into town and loot shops , you just have to be careful. The reasons for cities being a hotbed of activity is to mimic reality(I figure this to be the case). In a zombie outbreak cities would have the most people in it and thus why lots of zombies are there.

Yes, but zombie hordes on the very most outskirts is ridiculous. It needs to get nerfed.[/quote]

On the contrary. There’s basically never zombies on the outskirts. You can sleep in the outermost houses of medium-large towns, and never get disturbed.

I usually have to go at least 2 map squares in to start meeting stuff in a town.

There needs to be more stuff in the outskirts, not less (although, yes, some gradation of specials from less>more, outer>inner would be cool)

[DeepBlueMax]

[quote=“Vexification, post:74, topic:546”][quote=“HorrorNerd, post:73, topic:546”]You can still go into town and loot shops , you just have to be careful. The reasons for cities being a hotbed of activity is to mimic reality(I figure this to be the case). In a zombie outbreak cities would have the most people in it and thus why lots of zombies are there.

Yes, but zombie hordes on the very most outskirts is ridiculous. It needs to get nerfed.[/quote]

On the contrary. There’s basically never zombies on the outskirts. You can sleep in the outermost houses of medium-large towns, and never get disturbed.

I usually have to go at least 2 map squares in to start meeting stuff in a town.

There needs to be more stuff in the outskirts, not less (although, yes, some gradation of specials from less>more, outer>inner would be cool)[/quote]

I’ve had some problems with zeds on the outskirts. If you pass over the “safezone”, which is pretty small, you’ll be instantly swarmed by Zs, instead of being “warned” by one or another Zed.
But I think this problem is mainly in small cities/towns (as Glyph said).

[Sep]

I’ve had some problems with zeds on the outskirts.

at the risk of making your game a boring one, consider messing with FONTDATA, half the values you find in there and set your viewport, in options.txt to 60x 50y. now restart the game and tweak the settings again so they work for you. (some odd numbers in the font-size will mess up the rendering, so if things look diagonal, make the numbers in fontdata even numbers)

the point… you can now see zombies from farther away than they can see you. get some rocks that you don’t care about and throw them at one of them. it will come to you. don’t run to it, don’t run after the rocks. just let it come and kill it.

i dont think its fair to play ‘the downtown game’ this way, but if you’re looking for string or something like that to get started, just go ahead and pull the Z to your npc without getting yourself killed. rinse and repeat and you won’t have any trouble at all taking a house at the edge of town.

make a folder for the original versions of options.txt and fontdata - and another for your tweaked versions. then copy them around as needed. use the 60x50 for overland exploration and switch to a smaller one for labs. make another even setup with an even tinier font to make snapshots of your map. ymmv, but i like seeing what’s out there, especially turrets. these can hit you from 24 squares away, so aim for a viewport that lets you see at least that far.

hth.

[DeepBlueMax]

stuff

Wow, nice. Thanks.

[GlyphGryph]

Even with a smaller screen, the compass and the peel and look around keys will make things a lot easier if you aren’t using them.