sbaker10

To follow this up, I bought a GPU and have been playing A20 for 3 hordes now and while they still really like doors they seem to act a bit more chaotic and don't act like they have quite as much of a hive mind compared to A19 and while it's entirely possible the difference has just been luck I've enjoyed the way they've acted so far more than I did their behavior in A19

They've pretty much always, or at least since 7 or more years ago had the capacity to dig horizontally at frightening speeds, and I think to some degree they'd dig down within reason too, though I can't really remember, but if a zombie could dig it's way through 200 yards of soil and wind up under your base during a single horde night because it fell in a hole, it'd make little sense and beyond easy if they couldn't dig down at all. I do find it somewhat annoying when you're 100 feet down and have dug several hundred yards horizontally out from your mineshaft and yet you still have screamers and wandering zombies constantly homing in on you, just because it's more annoying than challenging, but on horde nights being underground shouldn't make you invincible.

Specs: Intel 4790K @ 4.5Ghz, 8GB RAM, EVGA RTX 3070 XC3 Ultra For some reason I've noticed particularly it would seem when playing online with a few friends, my FPS will just absolutely tank in the city areas of the game and especially in large POIs located there. I'll go from a 85-120FPS with everything mostly set to high to 25-30FPS upon entering the city and especially when entering large buildings, turning shadows off entirely does help somewhat and seemingly bumps me up to 40-50fps in those areas and sometimes relogging can give me a significant framerate boost as well. I realize my rig is a little dated however I've also seen people talk about getting 50-60 frames on ULTRA regardless of location with nothing more than a GTX 1060 and a 3770K. I am not hosting the game so that's not a potential cause either. More importantly it's not just me experiencing the issue, my friend hosting the server was experiencing around 20fps in the same area with a Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB of RAM and a RTX 3080 until I told him to turn shadows off and there were only 3 of us total on the server so he shouldn't be experiencing any potential bottlenecking issues. We did occasionally experience the same issue in Alpha 19 as well when we both had 2080s which is why I knew to turn shadows off. Are there any settings or ini tweaks to pay special attention to, could some setting be pinging every sleeping zombie in a square kilometer or something perhaps? Even horde nights don't induce the same FPS drop. Perhaps we need to try running on Vulkan?

They definitely are programmed to prioritize to target doors alone over weaker points to a certain degree, I had a room set up as a killzone with iron bars and unreinforced concrete blocks making up the wall in between where I was at and where the horde was entering, to access where I was at by going through the doors you had one fully upgraded steel door that opened into a small hallway before a second fully upgraded steel door opened into the room I was in.

As a player since 2013, I don't necessarily mind the changes between alphas that force people to figure out new strategies but in the case of A19, I found the programming initially feel extremely cheap and unfair up until the point you figure out their AI and then they become so easy to manipulate that it practically removes the sense of danger completely. I feel like the most dangerous thing about the horde and what's kept it exciting for hundreds of hours over the years is that their AI was utterly unpredictable, you had no idea where they'd try to come through at or what they might end up doing and their occasional stupidity made them more dangerous, years ago I remember being somewhere in the day 40-60 range and I and a couple friends had gotten lucky on RNG that game and built up a completely steel plated fortress with numerous escape paths and support walls, after spending the night picking off the horde from the roof I went down to inspect the damage and found that they'd dug under the base and hollowed out a massive cavern right underneath and that it could've collapsed entirely had that managed to dig it out just a bit more. It was that sort of chaos that's made the game fun enough over the years that with A20 released I'm ready to shell out the money for a new GPU so I can play again. However compare that to my experience in A19 where we decided to reinforce the entrance to the base just a little too much only to see them instantly fixate on a exact spot right where we are at and have them tear through the steel plated concrete wall in literally a couple seconds, sure they're more dangerous than before in that instance, in fact so much so that it was the first time it ever just felt un fun and I've been playing since 2013 back when every single night every zombie in the area would start demolishing whatever you're hiding in, by the next horde we'd figured out you could simply bait them with a door or even a series of doors and they'd line up in a nice tight group for you to unload on and would completely ignore the much weaker iron bars in-between you and them and if you don't take advantage of their AI, then horde's new psychic ability to instantly identify and target the weakest point of your base with pinpoint precision means they'd tear a path to you within seconds every single bloodmoon. So I'm curious if their AI has been tweaked a little for Alpha 20 or if horde mechanics are largely the same, either way A20 is still making it tempting to buy a new GPU now rather than waiting a bit longer for prices to drop but honestly defending the base with friends and trying to predict the horde has always been one of the most fun parts of this game so I'm hoping it's not going to be the exact same A19 mechanics again, what's been everyone's experience so far?