Surviving with Hordes

[Litppunk]

maybe the pathing changed then. It would make sense that zoms don’t understand how to use stairs, I mean the sound is over THERE. Why would I go THAT way to get over THERE.
(< …>… <)

[Azrad]

In my case, at least, the gathering point of the horde is in the middle of the road, where the floor underneath it has a very noisy shoggoth luring the horde in - the stairs are far away from that area.

On the other hand, I just remembered this, that a lot of zombies spawned in the middle of an evac shelter basement. Above ground, the evac shelter has collapsed due to the horde swarming upon it, though no holes in the ground are made. In the basement level, the zombies spawned near the middle - not near the stairs.

[Labtop_215]

It seems like monsters and NPC’s don’t really use the stairs so much as they phase through the floor or the roof. I can’t quite confirm that though as I’m not sure if they are actually phasing through the floor or if they are just spawning right in front of me, or if I’m just noticing they right when they are beside me.

[Straume21]

I’ve been playing with hordes since they came out last year.
Personally I use hordes specifically for taking down Military Outposts. If you draw a horde to an outpost, the turrets will use all of their ammo on the horde and take a ridiculous number of hits from zombies and basically aggro enough of the horde that you can get in and get out of the outpost without any real difficulty. Military Outpost = military ID cards = opening up Military Bunkers = the best loot in the game.

Other than that, the main tips I can give you are:

1. Be quiet

Guns are still useful, but I almost never use shotguns unless I want to draw a horde. Suppressors work outside of cities, but for some reason using any gun other than a super quiet .22 will cause the zombies in the city to aggro on you, even with a suppressor.

2. Always have a working vehicle

Vehicles are basically the only way to get out of large hordes that spawn on your position. It helps to have an armored vehicle to plow through, but if your driving skill is high enough and you are in an open area, you can still get out reasonably easily.

3. Don’t let hordes spawn

Just because a horde shows up on the overmap doesn’t mean that there are any zombies there. The horde gets spawned when the player character comes into contact with the horde, which basically just floods a random number of zombies when the player is about 1-2 map tiles away from the horde.

Always drive away from hordes. You can come back later once the horde is gone, and there shouldn’t be any horde-generated zombies there, even though there was before. As long as you don’t see the horde, it isn’t there. The Zs on the overmap that represent hordes are just potential spawns, not actual hostile zombies.

[Arek_PL]

Just because a horde shows up on the overmap doesn’t mean that there are any zombies there. The horde gets spawned when the player character comes into contact with the horde, which basically just floods a random number of zombies when the player is about 1-2 map tiles away from the horde.

Its old way how hordes work, they just create wall of flesh on edge of your reality bubble if you draw them but you are quiet

Always drive away from hordes. You can come back later once the horde is gone, and there shouldn’t be any horde-generated zombies there, even though there was before. As long as you don’t see the horde, it isn’t there. The Zs on the overmap that represent hordes are just potential spawns, not actual hostile zombies.

this is how hordes work in latest experimentals you can even exploit them to clear out areas like hospitals because zombies will turn into a horde

[eternalflame]

[quote=“Straume21, post:24, topic:11545”]Just because a horde shows up on the overmap doesn’t mean that there are any zombies there. The horde gets spawned when the player character comes into contact with the horde, which basically just floods a random number of zombies when the player is about 1-2 map tiles away from the horde.

Its old way how hordes work, they just create wall of flesh on edge of your reality bubble if you draw them but you are quiet

Always drive away from hordes. You can come back later once the horde is gone, and there shouldn’t be any horde-generated zombies there, even though there was before. As long as you don’t see the horde, it isn’t there. The Zs on the overmap that represent hordes are just potential spawns, not actual hostile zombies.

this is how hordes work in latest experimentals you can even exploit them to clear out areas like hospitals because zombies will turn into a horde[/quote]There probably isn’t a very strong incentive for the zombies to guard the hospital though. They are just hanging around where they got turned (or whatever the verb is in Cata lore). If something interesting draws them out, they should just leave. I have not observed this in my game, but it would be one more reason to like CDDA. I might elaborate on this when I have more time.

[pisskop]

Lore wise, zombies tend to drift to the places they were most familiar with. Which is why they hang out at shopping malls, in basements, boomers at hospitals, and shockers and technicians at substations.

[hobophobic]

I have one tip, just a small thing I’ve learned since I’ve very recently began playing with hordes; Don’t bother butchering/pulping zombie corpses unless it’s in the vicinity of your base. Just clear the area, loot and never go back.

[pisskop]

Well no. Pulp small groups and especially dangerous zombies if you have the time/stamina to.

Butcher the shockers when you get the chance. Just dont try to pulp everything, and dont do it with a lightweight weapon. weapons damage is real

[vivat]

my method of how-to fix problem with Hordes of irradiated Wanderers in Vault-city
you need pickaxe. and spear. and small car size 1x1 with bagage box installed.

1 after the wall is horde. wall it is desirable to choose a place to cut through the passage so that the thickness of the wall, and consequently, and the length of the passage, is not less than 2 tiles. less - is not desirable, or you no scratches often is not enough.
2 pick wall
3 grab car to that place and ungrab it
4 pick wall ***@| yes yes last one tile of the wall
5 retreat back to 1 tile. ***@#.
6 before you - small car, which will be as barricade in the very narrow aisle @#…WWWWWWWWW
7 W one by one go to you, you get them one by one with your spear
8 all dead, you live, and maybe not scratched.

this is SPA… err… this is Phermopilles!!!

[evilexecutive]

dont try 50x until you try 1x hordes

I play on 25x. Can confirm that it requires a totally different lifestyle than what’s normally expected in Cataclysm. I usually also vastly crank up the item spawn rate for ultra-horde worlds, and have even once done a world with 50x spawn and 10x items(Which I don’t recommend, 5x works just fine). Regardless of it, I still find myself gravitating towards finding an area outside of the city, and fortifying it with double-thick trenches of pits. My favorite spots seem to be Mansions, because of how much living and storage space they have, as well as their distance from any sort of civilization. Extra points if they’re near a swamp or ant-mound for easy food.

Easily the most important trait too is SCOUT. So you can increase the distance at which you spot hordes on the overmap. Also loot Pawn Shops for obtaining binoculars, which increases it even further. The more you know about where the hordes are on the map, the better you are at planning safe routes through cities to loot. Challenging a 50x/25x horde is suicide until you’re quite far into the lategame, and have stuff like deathmobiles and power armour with arbitrarily high amounts of bionic energy.

It might seem like a horrible idea because of how big a Mansion is, but successfully fortifying one over the course of a season can be a greatly worthwhile investment. My own mansion is surrounded by pit-traps, and blade traps, and every single door in the entire mansion is Reinforced. The most heavily reinforced central tile of my mansion has multiple layers of reinforced doors, and my own bedroom has its walls replaced by Reinforced Concrete that not even a hulk can smash through.

Across from the bedroom is a well stocked kitchen with over a thousand ant eggs, and various comfort foods. Below that is my crafting room, containing a ‘vehicle’ with a vortex generator, and a bike pedal generator, which powers all my crafting shit. And to the right of the crafting room is the Armory and chapel to the Holy Slavshit trinity.

[baldamundo]

Honestly never found hordes caused a problem with making permanent bases, although admittedly I don’t play with a huge spawn rate like some of y’all. As long as you don’t do anything stupid, don’t go out in the daytime until you’ve thinned the numbers, and periodically explode or burn down a house on the other side of town, you shouldn’t have serious issues.

The big horde problem I find is when I get up and move on to my second town and find practically every single overmap tile has a horde in it. Still not worked out what the best way of dealing with that is (even abusing the tank mod only gets you so far…)

What actually is the deal with horde spawning in the latest experimentals though? If I kill all the hordes with loud explosions, am I only making my problem worse by spawning infinitely more hordes, or am I just attracting and killing all the preexistent hordes? And how far can they hear anyway?

[Azrad]

I think it’s possible to remove the horde in an area. Butchering or pulping could be an issue, but it’s something that I didn’t have a problem with.

Basically, I went to one area of city with a vehicle that has a mounted hypervelocity driver. Took a couple of trips but I basically turned every zombie showing up into a red smudge on the road. After that my survivor could basically loot the buildings in the area meeting only laughable resistance. Was more or less able to move around at night with lights on.

Granted, doing this took some time. Making steel rails, enough steel rails to kill thousands of zombies takes a lot of time. Then there’s lugging the damn things into the cargo carrier and then the time it takes to kill everything in sight. After the first few hundred zombies or so, the mind kind of tunes out to the one-sided carnage.

[pisskop]

the issue with hordes isnt removing them. Okay, so it is if you try to shack up next to a ‘horde maker’. Like a prison, hospital, or city.

But the issue is the hordes coming back. Which they will, if you lead them or if you are near a horde maker.

The answer to that is to throw up bulletin boards whereever you want to reduce the spawn rate of hordes. Things will still trickle in but the vast majority of the hordes will tends to ‘shy’ away from the area around a bulletin board.

inb4 they fix it.

[COS_Cecillian]

Is it even possible to build a vehicle on 25x hordes + without being interrupted? I would assume every time you did something, the work station would be swarmed with the undead.

[Arek_PL]

Is it even possible to build a vehicle on 25x hordes + without being interrupted? I would assume every time you did something, the work station would be swarmed with the undead.

yes, with large enought city spacing your base should be that far that only zombears or zolf will interrupt your crafing

and pulse lasers powered by sun can be usefull too, i can deconstruct vehicles in cities when my MRCT give me covering fire with its lasers

[COS_Cecillian]

Well, you would also have to assume that you would need to clear out the masses of zombies already in the city in which you plan to build in, which creates noise, which brings more zombies from within the city.

[Arek_PL]

yea, living in cities is harder since they changed that hordes are hordes not mobile spawning pools, in old experimentals and stable builds hordes just created wall of flesh on edge of reality bubble, zombies rarely wandered next to my liquour store but after hordes started to move after spawning they quickly destroyed walls and killed my guards attracted by my stereo

[evilexecutive]

Is it even possible to build a vehicle on 25x hordes + without being interrupted? I would assume every time you did something, the work station would be swarmed with the undead.

Usually my method is to locate moderately intact car(Enough to drive a good distance), and drive it back to a mansion in the middle of godforsaken nowhere, then disassemble it directly in front of the mansion. I make sure to disassemble it so that all of the parts end up in a single tile.

Once a given city runs out of cars, I’ll usually have what’s called a “retrieval kit” stored inside a shopping cart. It consists of 4 tires, jack, battery, and jerry can of gasoline. I walk up to a car in the dead of night, and fix it. Then pop all my stuff in the trunk and drive off to disassemble it back at the base. So long as you drive the car fast enough on an electric engine, the hordes can’t follow you that easily. It also helps if you have a fortress in the middle of a forest that they can’t reach you in.

[Arek_PL]

my strategy is diferent, i create cars from scratch or from solar car what i found outside of city

for parts i raid at night armed with tools and i harvest car parts from all sources and i load parts into small bike created from scratch