The A17 Builder Life - Why It Feels Bad

[BobTheBard]

Hello! Since this is a lengthy post and a lot of people don't like reading lengthy posts, I put a TL;DR a couple posts down. It wouldn't fit in the main body.

 

I started playing this game actively during A16 with a group of friends, and found myself enjoying it. I'm primarily a builder, and that paired well with my friends who tended to be fighters and explorers. I was happy minding the base, repairing weapons, building walls, and mining while they were off scavenging and the like, so most of the hours I've spent in this game have been from the perspective of a builder and gatherer. With that in mind, Alpha 17 has been a huge step down for me. I'm still playing it, mind, because I have a friend who is fun to play with and we still have fun in the game together, but I'd no longer play the game if not for that. Allow me to put forth my perspective on why the builder-gatherer lifestyle, like mine, is so unsatisfying now.

 

As a prologue of sorts, I'd like to just say that I think A17 has de-emphasized a lot of the 'survival' part of this survival game. We might have different definitions of survival, but for me the ultimate goal of survival is to establish a defensible self-sufficient stronghold, to have safety and security in a hostile world. This is presently a tedious and daunting prospect for reasons I'll discuss below, but in short the game's current direction discourages that entire mindset. You're instead encouraged to go on an offensive footing and stay there the whole time, which is the opposite of survival. The ideal playstyle for the current alpha is playing like a raider or bandit, running around looking for targets to engage, taking over a place just long enough to kill everything and loot it, and moving on, only stopping to stash the best bits at a central location you rarely spend any time at. It's shifted from being more like Minecraft to more like Fallout with just one alpha.

 

First, let's talk about the perk system. If you want to go the builder lifestyle you need to spread those points out across four of the five different stats. Intellect is needed for the forge, which is critical in construction efforts. Strength is needed for resource harvesting, except for food (farming is also a key part of the survival archetype I outlined above) which you need Fortitude for. And finally, because you use the most Stamina of anybody in gathering resources, you need to invest in Agility even if you don't need any Agility skills. That's four stats. A good combat character can easily get by with just two with a dip in a third. Then there's the level-gating, ensuring you're going to be using stone axes for a long time unless you get lucky and pull some iron tools out of a Working Stiffs box since you don't get forged iron until level 10 (which requires you to build a more-expensive bellows for your forge, meaning lots of scavenging) and can't make your own iron tools until level 20. The playstyle of the builder is simply the most expensive one out there in terms of XP investment, and it takes the longest to get up to speed giving it the lengthiest early game.

 

Second, let's discuss gaining XP. It used to be that us builder types could scrounge up enough XP by mining and harvesting to get where we wanted to by relying on the passive gains (the learn-by-doing mechanic) from actually harvesting resources, and eventually we'd outlevel everybody because mining was simply the best source of XP in the game. The latter part was obviously absurd, but the correction swung things too far the other way. Escaping the early game (which, as discussed above, is longer for a builder-type than for everyone else) now requires killing zombies. A lot of zombies. And if you are a builder, it requires killing those zombies without investing into any perks that makes killing zombies faster since you need those points for other things. While the combat player only ever needs to build a little bit, thus ensuring they're usually engaged in doing something they enjoy, the builder now has to spend a significant amount of time doing something they don't enjoy just to be able to do what they want to do.

 

Third, the new AI. Complaints about digging zombies aside, the new AI makes base design simultaneously too hard and too easy resulting in it being completely unsatisfying. It's too hard to make an aesthetically-pleasing base because of the zombies' laser focus on weak points and their high block damage, which means it's not worth laying out a base and upgrading it later since they'll just trash the weaker section. You need to make sure it's all at roughly the same strength. However if you want to design something with zombies in mind, this same laser focus on weaknesses makes funneling them into a killzone childishly easy. Slap down a room with a long hallway and fill that hallway with barbed wire and the zombies will pour in, get tangled, and turn into headshot bait. I used to take pride in making bases that were both pleasing and functional, but now in A17 I'm having the easiest horde nights using the laziest designs at any point since I started. Worse, I don't have much of a choice in this - If I don't create a narrow chokepoint the zombies will make their own equally narrow chokepoint, as they did on my first horde night in the new alpha. I'm not normally much of a challenge player, but this feels just as cheap as hiding underground and waiting out the horde.

 

Fourth, land claim blocks. I'm not much of a large-scale builder myself so I can't speak from personal experience, but many who are now have an issue where their single allowed claim block can't cover the size of what they want to build. I can see the appeal in building huge-scale projects - I've more than once wondered if I could totally renovate a huge POI or even one of the smaller towns. With the changes to claim blocks there's no more wondering because I know I can't do it. This dampens my enthusiasm knowing that even once I do hit the endgame and get to the point where I am akin to a god I still have limits on what I can do.

 

Fifth, the value of being a builder has largely been nullified. Because zombies target weak points and tear through most blocks in a hurry there's little value in having a fortified base. Gone is the satisfaction of building a wall that can stand up to hordes long enough for my panicky friends to get their brains in order when a random horde appears and start shooting. Because quality no longer affects damage or protection the only thing high-quality gear is good for is mods, and those are capped. Gone is the satisfaction of getting my skills up to another quality level so I could give all my friends weapons that do more damage, tools that harvest more resources, and armor that protects them better. Now, without a good supply of mods, that Tier 1 axe they looted from a box is just as good as the Tier 6 I can't even make yet. And with the requirements for crafting mods being so high, requiring both perk points and schematics, it's much easier to just get them by putting those perk points in Daring Adventurer and doing trader quests. With all this taken into account a combat-heavy player can get most of what they need through other means, rendering the builder's role largely pointless apart from converting resources into forms the combat player needs to repair his things.

 

Sixth is a simple one. The changes to tools, specifically the claw hammer and nail gun, have made building take longer. I'm honestly not certain why this was, since the 'combat' aspect of this - repairing things - doesn't seem any slower. All this change does is slow down the speed at which buildings can be placed and upgraded. This means that larger projects and renovations now take a lot longer to do, and I for one can't figure out a reason why this change was made in the first place. The beauty of construction and renovation is in the planning and the finished product, not the actual placing and upgrading of frames. Making the most boring and tedious part take several times longer has not done any favors to the builder playstyle.

 

Finally, let's talk stamina. Stamina is mostly an early-game problem, yes, but what an early-game problem it is. When I started out I remember toggling my second monitor on so I had something to read while waiting for my stamina to regenerate all the time. Resource-gathering would put me to sleep, not because of the repetitive activity (I rather enjoy that) but because of the sheer amount of time spent doing nothing at all. Resource-gathering is an exercise in idling until you build up a large, reliable stock of coffee or beer, which might not happen for a while if the RNG gods aren't kind to you. This gates the entire playstyle more than anything else and was responsible for a large chunk of my initial hostility towards A17.

 

All this adds up to make the A17 changes really painful for a builder-gatherer type like me. The game has gone from being in the Minecraft genre, where you can choose to build or fight as suits your style, to being something more like Fallout, where building is a minigame and fighting is the primary objective. All of the elements - The spread-out perks, the XP gain being tilted in favor of combat, the AI tearing bases apart, the land-claim issues, the much longer build times, and the changes to stamina - combine to make the builder lifestyle totally impractical. This is disappointing to me, both because I dislike combat as a style and because I think the raider life goes against what I feel a survival game should be. I'll continue to play for as long as my friend does, but a large part of the game's appeal for a player like me is gone. I hope that this post helps the developers understand why they're losing players like me and the things they could look into improving to make sure the builder playstyle isn't a casualty of the development cycle.

[xXBadDreamXx]

im a builder and would love to read this but its such a massive wall....>No political references, please -- OzHawkeye<

[OzHawkeye]

Bob,

 

Stamina is a real PITA early on, and that's for everybody really, not just builders. I hope it'll be further tuned, to be somewhat less of an issue early on - though, that said, I definitely like the early difficulties and overcoming them.

 

I agree to, having harvested the resources, actually building them should be quicker.

[OnlyMeiya]

I skimmed and read through most of it, and these are really good points.

 

As a builder myself I came up with a choke design to deal with horde nights but I am not at the stage of electricity in the game yet but I will work this build into a purely horde structure type deal.

[OzHawkeye]

I skimmed and read through most of it, and these are really good points.

 

As a builder myself I came up with a choke design to deal with horde nights but I am not at the stage of electricity in the game yet but I will work this build into a purely horde structure type deal.

 

Yes, gone are the days of passive defenses being able to keep a base intact. Currently you need to design the base to take advantage of zombie AI and feed the horde into a choke point where you kill them (or get them to loop their pathing).

[BobTheBard]

TL;DR Version:

 

If you approach survival games as a builder rather than a raider, Alpha 17 broke that playstyle entirely. Here's why:

1) A builder needs too many perks spread across too many stats, giving them a long early game.

2) With the removal of learning by doing zombies are the only source of early experience, forcing builders to fight.

3) The new AI is simultaneously too destructive and too easily exploited, robbing a builder of satisfaction at a clever design.

4) The one claim block limit renders large-scale construction and renovation impractical.

5) There's no real point in being a builder due to high block damage and the removal of quality level mattering beyond durability.

6) Building takes much longer due to the use speed changes to the hammer and nailgun.

7) The stamina changes hurt builders more than anyone else, especially in the early game.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

im a builder and would love to read this but its such a massive wall....

 

I'd be a poor builder if I weren't good at building walls.

[Guppycur]

Yes, gone are the days of passive defenses being able to keep a base intact. Currently you need to design the base to take advantage of zombie AI and feed the horde into a choke point where you kill them (or get them to loop their pathing).

 

Or, just place some quarter poles flat on the ground making two distinct paths, and just walk from one to the other every so often, watching the Zed's go BACK to their starting point to take the new path you just moved to...

 

Tons of ways to game the ai.

[Druga Runda]

I am not a builder, and I agree.

 

It is not even a question of balance - it is a question of basic design direction. In current iteration of the game, we moved from world building in fully destructible sandbox with zombies, to a zombie hunter in a fully destructible world.

 

To be a builder, you have to kill X number first (will have to play more to understand what is X, but it is probably north of a thousand, ie 50 levels or so, or quarter of a game in) and then you can build, as building from the start is killed through the new setup, either stamina management (which is fine for zombie hunters), XP gains, and most importantly the perk tree/requirements to enable some basic capabilities, tool wise or otherwise (food/health management).

 

It just does not work, most of the game was effectively removed/turned into an amazing grind, if you still insist on doing it another way (grind XP with your little stone axe, if you dare), in order to focus on zombie hunting early game. Zombie hunting gives most XP, uses no stamina, gives you yellow bags with goodies, poses no threat (you focus on finding and eliminating them, so they cannot surprise you while you are doing something else), while hunting them you also hunt for food automatically - the game is almost arcade in its current iteration.

 

This setup affects all playstyles, zombie hunter is all that's possible now - really obvious with builders, but try being a miner, nomad, farmer, trader - you have to be a zombie hunter first and then after you kill enough, get basic capabilites so you can diversify as a "reward". This alpha iteration is upside down.

 

So many great additions in A17 otherwise - but the rule changes have overshadowed all the rest. I see zombies, and I see pointzzz now.

 

*off course new players will not know what was possible in this game world, and even as is, it offers a lot more than usual games regardless, however it is a big step back from what was already available in previous iterations, and I thought A16 was "on rails"

 

**We are at old rules/new rules stage basically, hope that it will still be possible to implement old rules via mods though, for us who prefer to play with other game elements from the start and build our character that way.

[JCrook1028]

Or, just place some quarter poles flat on the ground making two distinct paths, and just walk from one to the other every so often, watching the Zed's go BACK to their starting point to take the new path you just moved to...

 

Tons of ways to game the ai.

 

That's been fixed already as soon as it was brought to Faatal's attention.

[Menace312]

I'm a builder.

 

I agree with OP's sentiments, that the old builder playstyle is gone. I need a buddy or two now to make it viable, and the zeds are easily exploitable.

So not as fun as before...

 

I get that it's a new perk system and that it needs tweaking. But I had hoped, that more care would have been taken in this regard.

 

I consider designing/building/progression to be the games strongest points! But that's just my opinion...

 

The builder class issue, together with other game imbalance issues, has me on a hiatus right now.

I'm in no way leaving this game, but I'm not in it for the pre-alpha experimental testing.

[Randomdude]

I consider designing/building/progression to be the games strongest points! But that's just my opinion...

designing/building/progression WERE the games strongest points

 

but I'm not in it for the pre-alpha experimental testing.

This isn't pre-alpha experimental anymore... this IS stable... :/

[OnlyMeiya]

Yes, gone are the days of passive defenses being able to keep a base intact. Currently you need to design the base to take advantage of zombie AI and feed the horde into a choke point where you kill them (or get them to loop their pathing).

 

Oh its very easily done, I experimented with a few builds in creative and came up with what I think is an amazing, yet simple design that if zed do not cheese me then it could very well passively still defend the base, in fact, it will stop them before they even get too it, All I have to do is flick a switch.... nay.. I don't even need to do that.

 

I'll share the design once I complete it; right now Im exploring all the new content.

 

Its not really needed for me to deal with BMH, but once its done, BMH will fk off and let me build lol.

[Guppycur]

Yeh the weighted pathing is easily gamed, I'm glad they're fixing it.

[Jamey]

I’ve found a huge amount of building resources from POIs I have cleared. It’s day 4 and I have around 100 rebar frames (half purchased from a trader), 1500 concrete, and several thousand cobblestones. I cleared a stone foundation cabin for my storage and crafting and plan to build a defense base in a big wide open field nearby. I’ve also been gathering at night and have over 3k wood and about 2k stone (including some from brick piles at POIs) plus who knows how much clay in my forge.

 

I don’t feel like you can’t get the resources to build, I just feel like the path to that early game is through zombies and POIs rather than hitting rocks and trees. I personally like the new setup, but I understand that it is a change that not everyone will prefer.

[rcuhljr]

I don’t feel like you can’t get the resources to build, I just feel like the path to that early game is through zombies and POIs rather than hitting rocks and trees. I personally like the new setup, but I understand that it is a change that not everyone will prefer.

 

It's at the very least unexpected. As some background I have 600+ hours played and I've been playing since Alpha 8 and have bought several copies of the game for friends. I normally only play with friends but waiting for them to get free I had to try out the new alpha, and I completely bounced off by day 8. I looked over the skill tree early on and saw forging was in the Int tree and since I've favored builder I figured I would pursue that. There was either no sign that forging was level gated or I couldn't spot it in the UI because I then spend 8 levels cranking Intelligence getting more and more pissed each time that I STILL couldn't make a forge. I pretty quickly realized that harvesting and building gave no experience and killing zombies was the only way to progress so I had to abandon most of the fort I was building to try and grind to 10 to get a forge. I wasn't willing to exploit gamma to gather at night because of old habits and going out into running zombie time when you can't see anything seems like a terrible choice. I figured I'd see if I could start digging, but two swings of the shovel emptied out my stamina bar and I set aside that plan and just spend nights hiding on a roof alt tabbed reading forums.

 

With one pack mule and no combat boosts I cleared through 5-6 houses and a crack a book over the next couple of days. I had a few deaths to bleeding from wolves jumping me and a boar drive by. I hit 10 by day 7 but the forge was useless for anything I'd want so I made one rebar grate and set about fortifying my base, I upgraded 3 height wood blocks and surrounded the 7x7 base with a layer of wooden spikes. I put up a ring of wood frames around the top and planned to swap one out with the rebar when I saw where the horde was coming from, and kill the zombies that survived the spikes with my bow through the grate.

 

Needless to say the zombies had punched an entry way into the underside of my base before I could swap in the bars and to prevent a base collapse from eating all of my work I was forced to run around my base on the ground in a circle for the 6 hour night, which was... super exciting.

 

If I can get my friends to play again I'll give it another try, but I just can't motivate myself to log in and play right now. Maybe I need to change my play style more to accommodate these new changes but it's very counter intuitive that if I can barely get wood and stone with my crappy axe that I'm going to get tons of high end materials with it beating up things at a PoI.

 

On the plus side, the new structures and PoI's are more interesting, sleepers are still a little obvious and it's weird when kiting 3 zombies out of a kitchen to kill and returning to the kitchen fully refilled with zeds. It felt like there was less loot in houses but it may be because I'm not used to the change to make empty containers mostly unlootable.

 

Crack a book also went from one of the best value PoI's to one of the most terrible early on. Magazines are hugely burdensome and terrible for hoarders.

 

Temperature swings also seem really high, kind of reminding me of when temperature was first added. A few scavenged pieces of looted clothing and the rest plant fiber clothes and I go from freezing to overheating inside my base in 20-30 seconds within maybe 15 feet. This may be partly that the game started me up in the hinterlands and I fled south and built a base maybe 100 meters from the edge of the snow line.

 

There's some changes I really like, but this is the first time in 4 years of playing this game that a new alpha hasn't had me eagerly wanting to play more.

[Guest]

I’ve found a huge amount of building resources from POIs I have cleared. It’s day 4 and I have around 100 rebar frames (half purchased from a trader), 1500 concrete, and several thousand cobblestones.

 

It's true that you can easily get these resources like this, but that kind of begs the question why they're gated behind high level perks in the first place?

 

Personally I've always preferred fighting and looting in the early game over mining and building, but I understand why builders feel like this update gutted the game for them. They're left with the "choice" to either go fight zombies and harvest bags of cobble/cement, or do the things they actually like and remain gimped forever.

[Bubo]

OP pretty much covers it. All I can say is, I've modded the hell out of my A17 game to my builder-liking. Never have to this extent.

 

Thank the Gods for all the creative folks out here =)