RipClaw

What bugged me most was not so much that the properties of the arrow slits were changed but the bad timing. The best time for this change would be the release of A20 EXP since everyone started a new world at this point anyway. However, the change was made with a small update at a time when players had already built their bases. I already had arrow slits in my base to protect my dart traps when the update was released. Fortunately, I had access at the back to refill the darts. Otherwise, I would have had to remove several steel blocks to access the dart traps.

I observed this behavior among streamers like Kage848 or Grand Spartan after the release of A17. Since you can set the XP multiplier, I could no longer observe this behavior. They simply set the XP higher. It is of course understandable that these players want to show their audience something and thus do not want to remain stuck in the early game forever.

No, I was just arguing that the OP didn't play the game normally but simply had the goal of exploiting Better Barter and Daring Adventurer and then to respec. They replaced the whole learning by doing system and didn't "fix" it. In A17, people started farming screamer hordes by lighting campfires. In the end, only one thing made players stop was that you now can change the XP multiplier in the settings. People who want to get to max level as fast as possible just turn it up to 300%. The Fun Pimps rebalance the trader with each new version. I don't know if the current version is the final one or if they still change something. They already nerfed the trader compared to A19 by raising the prices and limiting the quality of weapons and tools. At the moment the trader seems pretty balanced to me. But as I said before you can expoit everything if you really want to.

2 points in Better Barter will only give you better prizes but not a better Secret Stash. For this you need to invest at least 3 points. And 2 points in Daring Adventurer will only give you more XP, more money and 2 additional things to choose from. But what you can choose from depends on the tier of the quest. The design goal of the Fun Pimps, from what I've read, was one level per day on average on default settings. At the beginning it goes a little faster but later you need several days until you get a level. Sure, if you don't use the default settings then everything can go faster or slower. Depending on the settings. So you just leave out important parts of the game and then wonder why it gets boring so quickly? Sure I can fight the zombies on the street. It's even easier than doing it in my small starting base. But that's not why I play the game. I spent two ingame weeks just building my current base and before that at least one ingame week collecting and processing resources. Since then I optimize and reinforce my base after every horde. This is fun for me. There are a lot of mods where you have to deal with extremely tough zombies. Try those. After all, one of the great advantages of this game is that you can mod it so easily. A few days ago the Apocalypse Now mod was released in version 3. And with the modlauncher it is not difficult to install the mods. The base game is what the Fun Pimps would like to see as a game for themselves. But they also put a lot of time and effort into making it easy to mod.

Have fun trying to find a progression system based on player actions that is not exploitable in any way. The FunPimps have tested all kinds of progression systems. First they had a pure learning by doing. In A16 they tested a hybrid system and in A17 they had the current perk system but with level gates. In every case, players have found unfun ways to artificially speed up their progress. Be it spamcrafting, hugging cacti, or farming screamer hordes. If the progress can be influenced by actions of the player, there will be players who will try to exploit that. Most mod developers seem to favor a model that is a hybrid between the current skill system and a learning by doing approach with level gates.

I see it more as trying to get the most fun out of the game. My goal is to build a perfect automated horde base. A base where I just kick back and enjoy the show. Therefore, building is an important factor in the game for me. After all, it's not just a survival game. It's a mixture of different game generes. That's why it's attractive to a lot of different types of players, and that's where these conflicts about what would make the game better come from. For example, I am absolutely not a shooter fan. I hate shooters and therefore I don't like firearms. But I would never say that they should remove all firearms from the game or nerf them into oblivion because I know that firearms are important to other players. As long as the FunPimps leave room to defend yourself without firearms, I'm happy.

I have not forgotten the starter points. 25 - 4 = 21. One level per day on average would mean that you need 21 days. That is exactly 3 weeks. I never respec because I stand by my decisions. I never rush things and I usually invest points in Better Barter and Daring Adventurer very late the game. What I prefer is a slow steady gameplay. Sure, you can exploit everything somehow, but you can't judge a game by that. When there was learning by doing in this game, there were players who crafted stone axes all night long, hugged a cactus for hours, or mined ore with a shotgun. Was that fun ? I don't think so. Well, that's what happens when you rush things. The Fun Pimps assume a normal gameplay and not someone who is min maxing. By the way, you can make the hordes as hard or as easy as you want. You can adjust the settings or use mods. There is also a difference in how you defend yourself. If you just shoot at the zombies from the top, a horde doesn't seem very hard. But if you try to defend your base with a club and you have the zombies right in front of you then the horde suddenly looks much more dangerous.

Every perk is pretty much OP when maxed out. You need up to 25 points (22 points when using the nerdy glasses) to max out better barter and daring adventure. On average you get one level per day. Which means it takes about 3 weeks to max out these two perks without spending any point to any other perk. That sounds like a very unfun playthrough to me.

Pretty much like this but with dart traps in the walls and electric fences.

They weren't really random in the past either. They ran in a straight line toward the player and spawned somewhere random. So it then looked like they were acting randomly. In general, I'm against complete randomness because you can't plan for randomness and then the bases would actually just be kill towers that you shoot down from. That would be just as boring. As someone who likes to use traps, I have to rely on a certain predictability because the traps are fixed and don't move. Currently, the zombies have already behaved somewhat randomly. If all the zombies would just run exactly where I want them to go, I wouldn't have any damage to the base after the horde. But after the horde I always see destroyed blocks because some of the zombies rather punch against the wall than follow the given path.

There were some quirks with the old AI that made it a little more thrilling. If you currently have a weak spot or a breach in a wall, the new zombie AI will find it. In A15 you could be lucky and the zombies came from a different direction. It was also very hard to get the zombies into a funnel. I had a funnel base in A16. To get the zombies into the entrance I had to dig big pits that reached the bedrock. With the current AI it is very easy to direct them where you want them.

So you had a firearm. That's one of the differences from my first horde back in Alpha 15. I only had a bow with stone arrows. Normally, you didn't have any firearms in the first horde until Alpha 17. If you were lucky, you found a toilet pistol, but without the schematics, you couldn't even repair it. So you didn't use it unless you had to. By the way, the zombies were not harder back then. On the contrary. There was only one feral, which is now called Wight, and otherwise there were only the basic zombies. The most dangerous zombie was the cop.

Strange. @Hated has not published a changelog. Normally this is done at the same time as the new version. Maybe it's an internal test version that accidentally ended up in the experimental branch.

Since A19 we have supersonic giant vultures that spawn when sitting on or in a vehicle. By the way, fighting the horde on foot is not even difficult. All you need is coffee, a point in Cardio and preferably another point in Run and Gun. It's also not a bad idea to have Megacrush on your belt in case you're in a pinch. Set the XP multiplier to 300%. The gamestage will then increase about twice as fast and a higher gamestage means more dangerous hordes. You can also shorten the length of the day from 60 minutes to 50 minutes. That's a whole hour less per week to prepare. You can also modify the gamestages.xml and the entitygroups.xml files. Then you have demolisher in the first horde if you want or radioactive cops or whatever. There are so many ways you can make the game harder for yourself.

It depends on what you mean by "magic". There are a bunch of zombies trying to kill you, you have to fight them off and try not to die. End of story. This has not changed. New zombies have been added to the game, some zombies have been changed and some zombies have been removed. Also the pathing has been changed a lot. But that is all. If I think back to my first horde then this was of course much more difficult than today because I knew nothing at that time. For a new player the horde is always much more difficult than for an experienced player. If someone wants to have stronger hordes then he can play mods. There are more than enough of them and in most mods the first horde is already harder than the horde in Vanilla could be.

The complaints that the T5 quests take too long have been around since these quests were added to the game. With the new Crack a Book HQ the Fun Pimps added a T5 POI in A20 that is quick to do but contains about the same number of zombies as a factory. They also added the new quest menu in A20 where you can choose the quest level. That tells me that they consider, not having the time to do T5 quests, as a valid reason. This is how it is. The WoW players got older. Things like job and family became important. That's why they no longer had the time to invest several hours in a raid. Forcing players to do these long raids would have resulted in even more players quitting the game. The opposite is true in A20. Players go to the Wasteland as early as possible to get 250% loot bonus. And whether it's easier or harder now is hard to say from an experienced player's point of view. There are some videos on this topic that try to analyze this. I think it's harder than A19 but that's just my impression.

Cube 1/2 Thin Window has similar properties regarding repairing and connecting electrical traps. The slit is larger but all in all it works as a replacement for the arrow slits.

T5 buildings are no harder than most T4 buildings. It's just that they are so much bigger than T4 buildings that you need more time to complete the quest. The zombies that spawn in a quest POI do not depend on the level of the quest but on your gamestage. For example, I get radioactive cops even on a T1 quest. Many players don't like T5 quests because they take so long. In A18, T5 quests were guaranteed to give you Q6 items. But that's not the case anymore. It's sometimes ridiculous what you get as a reward. The only T5 quests I currently do are the ones with the new Crack a Book HQ because it's done fairly quickly.

Electric traps behave very weird in A20. I have electric fences and blade traps in my base in the front area and dart traps and trip wires in the the back area. Normally electric fences get damaged when zombies walk through them. But a single electric fence was not damaged. But instead the dart traps were triggered although no zombies ran over the trip wire. It's almost as if the electric fence suddenly became a tripwire. There is also the bug that electric fences connect to a point in the distance. After restarting the game everything is back to normal. The problem seems to occur frequently when playing for several hours at a time. Kage848 had for example this problem (starting from 23:00 and 27:20)

I would say "no." You don't even need to put points in Better Barter to get the schematics early on. Within the first two weeks I found the Auger schematic in a bookstore, and the schematic for the crucible in a secret stash. But it took more than 70 days to find the schematics for the bellows and the anvil. In the next game it might be the other way around.

What is cheese ? How do you know that you are not cheesing ? Cheese is often just a word to say "you don't play like me" or "you don't put as much effort into your game as I do". Someone who puts a lot of resources into base building and also needs a lot of resources to keep the base up and running could say that someone is cheesing that picks a POI, makes a few holes in the roof and shoots down at the zombies. From the perspective of a base builder it is pretty cheap to use a prefab.

Do you play with a mod ? Dart traps need 10W of power and they don't allow you to select the target in vanilla. They just fire as soon as they get power. EDIT: Is there a motion sensor in the direction you are pointing on the picture ? A motion sensor needs 5W and allows to select a target.

Spikes are recognized as blocks by the zombies. The best way to use spikes is to dig a 2-3 block deep trench and fill it with spikes. The zombies walk over it and when one spike is destroyed they take the spike next to it because they don't like height changes.

Not everyone enjoys the same thing. That's why you will always spoil someone's fun. There are players who like to build small bases that don't need many resources and if possible the base should still stand after the horde. That's why they use something like the zombie force field to protect for example pillars that the zombies would destroy if they fall down and then go into destroy everything mode. I do the exact opposite. My bases are usually huge, consume massive resources and would still standing even if the zombies would destroy half of the blocks of the foundation. But that's only because building is the most fun for me and a few destroyed blocks here and there are no big deal for me. The zombies had consistent pathing in A17. You could build a huge maze and they traversed it perfectly without damaging a single block. And you could make them run in circles using a ramp and a jump. But then the fun pimps decided that the zombies get angry when they fall down or are so lazy that they'd rather punch through the wall than take a longer path. As time went on, more and more "features" were added and the zombies became more and more inconsistent in their behavior. By now you have to take so many variables into account when building a base that you sometimes lose interest in base building and just stand on a roof and play the game as a stupid shooter.

I find a lot more 8x scopes than 2x scopes. This was also the case in A19. So I'm not surprised that @ElCabong hasn't found a 2x scope yet. There are always items that you would think would drop regularly but for some reason you just can't find them in the current game. For example, I'm on day 74 and looking for anvils. So far I've only found or bought 4 of them. I have not yet found the schematics either.