bloodmoth13

I know real towns dont look like that in real life smh my head. Must be a16. /s

Thanks. Using decoys is good stealth gameplay in general imo, and it gives more to do than just headshot sleeping zeds. I also think we need more patrol zombies, or if thats too hard just zombies that wake up and wander around the house, it would be more fun having to hide from a zombie wandering around than zombies that are hiding from you. Even if the zombies in the end of a POI that they want you to engage in wake up but dont sense you, so you need to lure them away and take them out one by one. I think the current stealth is pretty much just missing those two elements, patrols and distractions, put those in the game and the stealth gameplay would be much more entertaining. patrols would increase the challenge while distractions would allow an element of control. the distraction element is already there, they just need to make distractions wake up zombies without alerting them to you. patrol paths might be beyond the scope of their interests but awake unalert zombies already exist that could just wake up as soon as you enter a poi and wander randomly. that should be fine too.

That should be a perception perk tbh. I think we need patrols, and perhaps have thrown rocks wake zombies up.

Its relevant because i think the only real problem with the item sets is that they edge into what should be bonuses for tools. An intellect set that allows me to place 3 turrets, grants armor per nearby turret and reduces charge of stun baton wouldnt be something you need to swap out between rooms, but you might swap out between days. A set that gives 50% bonus to ore harvesting would feel mandatory between harvesting a car and harvesting a node. A mod, a special pick axe or a candy however wouldnt feel bad to use before doing the task. Candy, mods and tools should be where those types of bonuses should exist. So long as those bonuses are on mods or candy then i dont see any problems with the item sets. If it is role defining combat effects or quality of life effects i think the gear will feel great. For example a strength set with a waffle iron that allows you to craft campfire good on the run without a campfire, or an intellect set that allows you access to a built in workbench. You dont NEED those bonuses out in the field but they would be NICE. It really depends on what those bonuses are. Bonus to shotgun damage or damage when using scopes would be perfectly acceptable, bonus to harvesting though would just be tedious for anything other than a single item. My only real rule for the system would be no harvest bonuses. Quicker harvesting, weapon perks and defensive bonuses are perfectly acceptable. So long as there are no harvesting bonuses i think the system will be successful as emphasizing differing combat playstyles could be a lot of fun especially for replayability.

What were the bonuses again? quicker harvesting? better harvesting? you can ONLY harvest with correct gear? The current gear system doesnt really work with the models and such, everything clips and looks awful, i will miss more armor slots for the sake of collecting and progression but i dont mind otherwise. I think stating you will NEED 5 armor sets when roaming is a little extreme, no bonuses are mandatory, and if you really want to keep the perks of armor sets you are trading bag space for those bonuses and have to consider whether it is worth the tradeoff. Also if you are trying to loot an entire city 5km from your base and you really want to do a thorough job perhaps building an outpost and taking your bonus sets to that outpost and setting different tasks per outing would provide more variety of gameplay than just burning through everything. you dont HAVE to loot everything you see as you move past them, you can have different trips for different material. IMO it just depends on WHAT the bonuses are, collecting more resources would feel mandatory, while collecting them faster wouldnt. Armor sets that give bonuses to certain weapons would feel good as you use all weapons in basically the same cases, but armor for different tools would feel clunky because you would feel the need to swap between tasks. Personally i think armor sets should be bound to combat or QoL bonuses, not resource gathering, we have tools and mods that already cater to that and being bound to tools already basically grants that swap out functionality. For example it is common to walk around with a knife, an axe, a pickaxe, a prench and a shovel for harvesting animals, chopping trees, nodes, cars or cement. that is already 4 slots for those different tasks, and we already have talents like miner 69er, salvager and huntsman for increasing gathering to differentiate players. On top of that we have gravedigger mod, bunker buster and wood splitter mods that add further bonuses. adding another layer to harvesting wont make the game better, it is about at capacticy for bonuses tbh. For combat though, an armor set that grants bonus armor if using a sledgehammer or gives you movespeed or a dash when attacking with a knife would be fine as it would double down on selecting a specific role. A bonus to pistols or rifles would feel fine too. It accentuates what you were already trying to do. Im open to the concept, ill just wait to see what they do with it though.

Nobody can have an opinion on this before TFP actually implement it. Next major patch i believe will be model updates, gear updates and bandits if im not mistaken.

This. You dont have to play optimally, in fact you might find things are better than you thought trying out other styles. For A20 i made a concious choice to play differently from how i normally would, my first game i played pure perception, my second pure fortitude. For single player i think int is the best as you end up drowning in coins and ammo from quests, but i found the other playstyles enjoyable too. Just because perception isnt the best (idk if that is even true) doesnt mean it is unplayable.

Im imagining some poor sod playing on your server, just unlocking the workbench and having a mental breakdown when they realise they need a beaker. Those things really are crazy rare, along with acid. @%$# acid.

Literally nothing stopping you from playing the way you want, they just tweak the risks and rewards of those style, if you want a base that zombies cant destroy just set zombie block damage to zero, If you never want hunger to be an issue just change the xml. This is an incredibly customizable game, you can play however you want, but thats not what you are asking, you are asking for your specific playstyle to be the best and to never be rebalanced because you dont want to adapt to dangers and only want to recycle the same tried and proven methods over and over. Stop being dishonest. The Fun Pimps have rebalanced things to allow other playstyles to be playable, nerfing your particular playstyle because its too easy is just game development. You can still do it but you will need more investment. you can still have infinite farms you just need living off the land, you can still build strong bases but you might have to use the basic blocks that lose out on some added benefits. Alpha honestly only means its not at content lock, they are running beta balance at the same time which is number tweaks and polish. i dont think the modellers, engineers, writers and artists are getting pulled aside to change the value of pole blocks, and a few minutes to change pole block values isnt delaying bandits.

for a second there i misread that as 'i added a beaker to the workbench recipe' and i just couldnt imagine what kind of evil would do that...

honestly it doesnt really seem like we are disagreeing on anything, i get your point of view and the reasons for it and dont necessarily disagree. I think all the game needs is to guarantee a ridiculously hard level POI that is the final skill test that people can say they beat and move on.

I wasnt comparing the entire game to doom, just the final map, a 'level' where you go from start to finish and see the credits roll. Thats great and all but does that suddenly end your game and delete the file? or can you just boot it back up and go back to your base? In that case... then what? the game isnt over is it? if you have the option to come back then it is NEVER over, if you want closure YOU need to put your foot down and say exactly where you want to finish. You can say after doing every T5 POI. The only definitive end would come from a story mode which i imagine wouldnt be cutscene heavy in a game like this, it would probably be event driven and involve a final POI to beat. I think having a single mega complex where the zombie virus originated that is like the final difficulty, which would essentially be what you are asking for, but it would be up to you to call it quits afterwards.

Im gonna say no. It would just be gamed, people go out, clear POI, knock out back wall, wait for night, go loot everything. Gotta be careful about things like that, people will always game things and you dont WANT people to play in awkward but optimal ways. Having crap loot for 18 hrs and good loot for 6 would feel silly. I also think hiding things behind pictures is a bad idea, it just means everytime i explore somewhere i destroy every picture to find loot. Or with getting skill points for crafting, it makes sense but making a thousand stone axes to level up tools was bad gameplay. Not every risk needs a reward, not everything is meant to be an intentional challenge. It would be like higher loot for being hungry. Some things just drive decision making, for example having the runs makes you look for goldenrod, broken leg makes you prioritize wood, glue and cloth. Night time is meant to be a time to go crafting and add a break to constant looting, if you cant handle the risk you dont get the loot. Thats enough. AS

yeah but that doesnt allow me to hit a foe with a power attack without the risk of completely losing my spear if i miss Yeah it was. You dont need to use the power attack, i do most of my poaching using left click. The range is very helpful for solo play to keep distance and backpedal. Headshots tend to stun enemies so its generally pretty safe. I tend to only use power attacks for downed enemies, but i have been trying to use it more frequently in general and it does the job very well. Spears are great for cheesing enemies too, like poking them through small gaps or from roof tops where they cant get you back. Stun baton is garbage without perks or mods, its a mid game weapon designed for late game, but once you get all of the bonuses for it it can be very formidable. Its just too unreliable early game though imo, low base damage, range and only really works with the stun, and at that point other weapons would have killed it already. With the candy, books and mods it just blows up crowds. Might be worth toying with it in a cheat game just to see its potential.

I think your idea is a little niche tbh. Like, i get it, you want to have your final hoorah and thats cool, but idk why bother with something like that when players will only play it once. Though thinking back to oldschool shooters like doom you only needed to do the final boss once. T5 PoIs should already function as that... i do like the idea in many ways and wouldnt protest it being added as it would be fun to have a niche use for those niche items, I do think that using the 'edge of the map' though would come with issues as those areas are generally barren. Maybe just one single final tier POI in the game that is underground or something? like resident evil? that could function as the final story level too... you could bring the whole irradiated stuff into that zone to stop people popping in early game just the same, pretty sure those biomes existed in previous alphas. Honestly that is kind of antithetical to the sandbox mode, by the sounds of things you actually WANT the story mode because THAT is exactly what it would bring, closure... I think you just need to set goals for yourself, tell yourself you have to have X by Y day and defend a horde on max settings on that day and start a new game. My current playthrough is mostly pure perception because i wanted to test if it was viable and it has worked out plenty fine (i always turn my playthroughs into in games and respec with all the coin i get) Putting my own limits on made the game more fun for me, and now im ready to try another playthrough after my next horde night.

I recently started a game that centered around the spear. its not a bad melee weapon with its range, if your in a group though just mobbing and CCing zombies would be more useful than the safety of a spears range. Being able to attack through fences (power attack) or from safe places makes it useful, i used it extensively on a horde night, and i am uncertain that any other weapon would have worked (havent tested, i will try it after my next horde night) I rarely use the power attack, started 'forcing' myself to recently and it has worked good. Honestly one of the things that held me back though was not knowing this exact information. Knowing that i dont need to fully charge a power attack is VERY helpful as a spear user. I think if TFP added an option to not release your spear on power attack that would help it a lot, make it so you can pick functionality through the radial dial when you hold R. Hey thanks for doing the leg work! really appreciate that, i am doing a perception playthrough atm and fully invested in spears and wasnt sure the entire time.

Not a fan of the changes personally but i do understand the 'why' I think there could be a sweet middle ground where it doesnt feel awful to turn 5 corn into 1 seed for 2 corn, that seems like its never a good deal. Turning corn into a seed should always net more corn than not turning it into seed, you are trading immediate food for future resources, and you shouldnt need 'living off the land' to get that. living off the land should be a boost but not mandatory. Non fortitude specs should be able to farm without losing resources. The problem is that food scarcity needs to be a problem, but when you get exponential gains from farming you will quickly reach a point where you have an infinite amount of safe food that doesnt require ever putting yourself in danger. Bring back fertilizer as a solution The problem is farming only requires seeds as a resource. If we reworked farming to require fertilizer every time we planted seeds we would still have to farm resources for fertilizer. Fertilizer could be crafted with some bones, rotten meat, nitrate and plant fibers (compost) and it increases the yield by enough to make seeds viable. This forces the player to farm and collect resources outside of his base to replenish his food supplies and puts a limiter on how much free food a player can get based on other activities. Not sure exactly what ratios the new system would have, with this you could have 2 corn per seed no matter what but fertilizer increases the yield by 2 (3/4/5 depending on LotL rank) and seeds replenish naturally after farming, (so it would take 3 harvests to regain your initial investment but only 2 with fertilizer) or we retain the current chance back for seed and increase fertilizer harvest or reduce cost per seed. either way i think reintroducing fertilizer as a limiting resource back into farming would benefit the farming resource management system as it was too easy before and now its too unreliable.

Yes i agree we need a variety of zombies. There will never be a 1 size fits all zombie for a game like this. You cant just dumb all the zombies down to avoid ramp exploitation and you cant just smarten them all up to avoid wasting a whole horde night beating on the wrong house. a mix of ai that do different things would create a chaotic atmosphere on horde nights, needing to attend the main killbox while also having to check on the back entrances etc.

Lockpicking needs a rework in general, getting 14s with one pick then 14 picks on the last .2s is ... infuriating. the lockpicking skill tree is just a QoL timesaver for players who would rather spec into useless perks than tool perks. Each pick should minimum reduce the overall timer by 1s so that you are guaranteed after 16 picks but on average 8 for people who havent specced into it. Picks do need more general use tbh, opening doors should be fine, maybe if certain doors operated more like safes where you can bash your way in or lockpick? i think having some poi rooms with locked doors is fine, but distinguish them from doors that arent meant to be opened by calling those doors 'jammed' with boards across them and the other ones merely 'locked'. honestly they should just combine lockpicking into one of the other niche perks like treasure hunter or even lucky looter. They all kind of do the same thing in different ways (lowering time taken for very niche loot) and they all kind of feel bad to invest in. At least combine lockpicking with treasure hunter, they are both niche skills that only save time in rare cases as early game you cant craft lockpicks. mid game you can craft iron tools that are generally very useful as opposed to lockpicks that only might succeed even with perks, and late game you just punch safes apart with little effort. Basically combine treasure hunter and lockpicking.

Well we are so different we are practically the same. I think for me, cheese is everywhere, unavoidable and you just have to decide how much you are willing to accept. To you, chees is unacceptable but very restricted, solely to what i would just call cheating. Its really just a matter of choosing what you believe is optimizing vs cheating. If everything is cheese, nothing is cheese.

yeah i agree with this. I think this should be the default tbh, losing everything just sucks so hard, and only having what is loaded in your guns is already enough of a drawback. Making the game more punishing can give that sense of dread and fear that really makes it fun to play, but it can just make you ragequit. This game has probably given me the highest highs and lowest lows in gaming. Looting a fresh city, getting all the t6 loot you wanted and running back to base only to get sniped by an enemy player is aggrivating as hell, 2 hrs or more wasted in a second. But when you are the one sniping someone and stealing their loot damn does it feel good. Keeping what is most important on your toolbelt though is probably the best middle ground so you dont just revert to the stone age, but you dont just suicide to teleport back home. Manage your stamina better, there are risks associated with blowing all your stam on melee fighting vs using it to run. the tradeoffs exist to drive decision making with the resources you have. You used your stam to save ammo and time and gain xp, the tradeoff was not being able to run away when you needed to. Thats entirely on you though.

to a degree yes. any point where you can kill them but they cant hurt you is cheesy, of course that isnt vs players its vs zombie ai so cheesing zombies doesnt hurt anyones fee fees. for example, you run through a corridor, a wight turns up, you box him in with building blocks and melee him while hes trying to get through. he cant hurt you and you can kill him. its cheesy. Or you hang low on a ladder with zombies clamoring at your feet, they cant reach you but you can melee them. cheesy. most things are acceptable since the design of the game isnt making things fair between the player and zombie. building forts that keep you safe for a long time so that you can kill many zombies without them being able to hurt you is essentially the design of the game. some people dont like certain designs because it exploits the ai, but everything you do is exploiting the ai. thats how you get an advantage against hordes of dumb zombies. Thats why i said you have to choose what kinds of cheese you are willing to live with. if you think being able to melee enemies without them retaliating to kill hordes for 'free' is cheesy then dont do that. if trap corridors are cheesy then dont do that. OP draws the line at slits and infinite ramps, thats fine. Me personally, i avoid using the pipe machine gun because i think its OP and generally play very conservatively only using ammo when i am surrounded or desperate even when i have an abundance of ammo. There is a fine line between playing optimally and cheesing the game. Another one is skipping to the end of a POI, its cheesy but its optimal. why screw with wasting ammo on zeds when you can just get straight to that sweet sweet loot. At least that is how i think of the game. One cheese i do is opening doors that zombies are attacking, hitting them with a power attack and closing the door before they can retaliate. You can time opening the door right after they hit it and strike them during the recover animation. If im honest thats cheesy but screw fighting zombies fairly when i have HP to maintain.

At some point we have to ask ourselves just how much cheese we can live with. Everything where you put an obstacle between you and a zombie where you can kill them but they cant kill you is cheese. Without cheese you would die every night. What is acceptable to you? one of the more basic methods is going to any given 2 story building and knocking out the lowest level of ladder. That should be enough to survive a night as the zombies wont be able to reach you while you can potentially melee or shoot them. Go up to 3 blocks high for extra safety. Thats my typical gameplan, roam for the first week and on day7 just defend a random house and let the zombies tear it down. Alternatively you could build a few horde forts, 9x9 bunker with the best material you can muster with a roof escape, when they tear through the walls bail and run to the next one. Cheap and fairly easy to do. My advice is just knocking out the stairs on any random poi.

Whatever point of interest is closest to the trader so i can dump things before i sell them off. Havent done any serious building yet but i should give it a shot with the new building system.

just loaded up a cheat game to compare it with other weapons and stat-wise it was identical to the club and not far off from other weapons so i might have been misled. I tried a couple of new games, one on lower difficulty where i had a pipe baton and one on warrior when i coulldnt find one and only used a spear, so my PoV was probably skewed by that where the baton was gibbing zeds on easy while the spear was fairly useless on hard mode. imo the pipe baton is a little redundant in that regard, its a more expensive wooden club like someone else said. Its not bad, and you seem much more likely to find decent quality ones when looting, so i think it functions good as the melee weapon for players who dont spec into melee weapons early/mid game. It doesnt function at all as an early game intellect weapon as it has none of the benefits and is really just a reskinned wooden club. I think TFP could have been more creative with early int weapons but the intellect tree as a primary skill tree suffers a bit as robots and batons are lategame. stun baton has a ton of support but it needs it since it kind of functions as a mid tier weapon with low tier base damage and everything it offers comes from effects and is only effective late game where it begins to match its competitors. Though i could be misled as i havent compared stats and i made a bit of a fool of myself before by not doing the research XD