Alpha 18 feedback and balancing thread

[TopAce6]

i play real conservative with my inventory up to a certain point. as in early mid game im saving up lots of crap, then end game i start using/spending/ stuff up for FunTime©.

also helps to just bite the bullet and go Hardcore mining every other week. usually a full day-2 days of mining (not coming to the surface). gets you crap tons, and then you can go a long time with out having to worry about it. dump everything you mined in your 5x-10x forges, and then go Play/Loot.

I have a Real strong "You gotta Pay to Play" Mentality with this game. you want to go have fun Looting and use up Ammo without worrying about it? then you gotta put in the work to have those resources to spare.

 

Also i have a problem, I am a Hoarder in this game, The more mats i have available to deal with any need/situation that the game throws at me, the Safer i Feel/Am. Need a new concrete horde base in 1 day? then i can do that if i need to no prob. Its about survival and Being Prepared, and Having Mats coming out the Wazoo is absolutely the best way to survive.

[ahawksfan]

Get to day 200 and tell me how much ammo you are swimming in. You'll probably put loot and harvest on 200% to keep up.

Getting to day 200 with tons of ammo is easy (without loot/harvest modifications). There are a few ways to minimize fighting on day 7 (driving, base design, swimming). These were fun initially but really defeat the challenge. To me, it is now only challenging when we fight the zombies head-on for day 7. I agree if you are fighting them each day 7 then you won't have stacks of ammo.

[Laz Man]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]30432[/ATTACH]

 

 

 

yea, there's plenty of parts and springs out there, This is just whats in my backup/Spare Mats Storage box.

 

BTW, Normal Loot Percentage, no weird settings that would affect it.

 

That's impressive. What day are you on and what time setting?

[TopAce6]

Default time, nomad, day 90, that's just one of my Spare chest, where I am putting extra mats that won't fit in their normal chest anymore.

 

Honestly, I've wasted atleast 50 of the 90 days just literally going AFK or derping around the world simply exploring (not looting)

 

This play through I really haven't spent much time gathering like I did in past alphas. I'm spending a lot of time testing out all the new stuff/skills and play styles. I'm playing at a very very relaxed pace.

 

Im trying out the Trader questing play style a lot, but it takes me forever to loot a single house, since I literally strip a house bare trying to find all the hidden loot.

 

 

In last alphas I'd have Chest full of refined steel and iron, I'd just gather and gather throwing everything into 20 forges. (seriously I can't understand why people don't build multiple work stations it exponentially speeds up your resources)

 

This play through, it's just 5 forges, 5 cement mixers, 4, Chem labs and 4 workstations.

 

Honestly have way more mats than I could ever use.

 

Away from my base I just built a 41x41 reinforced concrete slab that I don't even know what I'm gonna do with yet. But I'll just start building up on it and see what I end up with. (I Don't believe in AI cheesing designs)

[Arden]

Increase the rate of zombies. Need more Zombies.

[custom_hero]

Increase the rate of zombies. Need more Zombies.

add heatmap value to each item and block. It was impossible to fart without the appearance of a screamer.

[n2n1]

Well, now i have a stable high fps on the build b6, tell me - what it cost me?

[Hollowprime]

Easier? I have 100's of them and I'm not even a scavenger. I crafted 30 grenades and had plenty to spare. Get off your ass and find some. I've never crafted one in my life and sell 100's at a time to make money. You can get them harvesting about anything.

 

Are you familiar with drawbridges and blade traps? They are in your game yet I haven't seen you using them in your streams.Also Dart traps.

[Gareee]

I would LOVE to see an indicator for my junk turrets on the minimap. I'm stupid and I forget to grab them sometimes, later I have no idea in which of the POIs I left it.

 

They worked on the first a18 experimental, and broke somewhere in updates. I already reported it in the bug thread. Use the bug thread for issues like these so they know about them.

[Gareee]

@Madmole:

 

About the intelligence perk tree...

All the main category perks are gated by the previous perk (bicycles to minibikes, for instance) but ALSO double gated by the main intelligence perk level.

 

Instead, how about removing the first gating and just have then gated by the main intelligence perk?

 

So if for example, if I've purchased a bicycle I don;t need to waste a point on it to unlock the minibike.

 

(This also makes sense if you've found say a motorcycle chassis, and want to buy steel and get the parts to make the rest of the motorcycle instead of having to unlock both the bicycle and minibike perks first, which you don't want.)

[Gareee]

I don't think having 12+ different repair kits would make the game play any smoother.

 

I wasn't in favor of having universal repair kits at first because I liked steel fixing steel tools, and iron fixing iron tools, but after playing using them, I'm glad that I don't need to carry both steel and iron around with me all the time to fix them.

 

(Nerfing all the storage pockets a bit a few exp ago was a good idea.. I was fully unemcumbered early a18 by day 7 or 8... now it takes me to day 30 to be fully unemcumbered.)

[iamnuff]

All good items require parts, we're not letting crafters sit in their base and make the best gear without some looting. The reason they need parts is to take 5 brown ones and scrap them and then craft into 1 blue set.

 

Low quality Steel-tier drops aren't common enough for that to actually work though.

Maybe if you had gun-parts, tool parts and weapon parts, as the three broad categories.

 

As it is now though, you'll find one sledgehammer, one bat, one set of knuckles, a couple of crappy tools and maybe a spear.

As for guns... say you found a pistol, a rifle, and a shotgun.

 

What did you spec into?

Trick question, doesn't matter. You don't have enough parts to make anything, because you only found one of each weapon-type, instead of five of the same type.

 

Then you randomly stumble onto a t4 baseball bat and decide "well, if I can't build the melee weapon I want, I guess i'll just have to start putting points into using this instead."

 

Guns are pretty much fine, because low-quality guns are fairly common, and you use the parts from double-barrels, handguns, hunting rifles and other ♥♥♥♥ty guns to make the higher tier varients, like SMGs, magnums and pump shotguns.

 

Also, if 'parts' are used to stop you from 'sitting on your base crafting everyhthing' then what the hell are mechanical parts, duct-tape, springs and suchlike for?

There are already plenty of crafting ingredients that either can't be crafted or require something else to create that you cannot craft or farm yourself.

All sitting in your base will get you is forged iron, lead and stone. Maybe gunpowder if you get lucky and hit coal/nitrate veins without having to leave.

Brass can't be mined at all, and your best bet to gather it is either Dukes from quests, or hacking up radiators or cars.

 

Duct-tape takes glue and cloth. Cloth is harvested out in the world (from grass if you have the skillbook, but guess what you have to do to find that?) glue is gathered from bones.

You gotta kill animals or find gore-blocks for that. It won't just show up in your mineshaft.

 

Mechanical parts? Even when they were craftable, it wasn't worth it.

Springs? Same deal.

Electrical parts? Go take some houses apart.

 

Seriously, this whole line of thought seems... kinda shallow. Holing up in a base and never leaving hasn't really been viable in... quite a few updates.

 

You could theoretically live on nothing but vegetable stew and fight with only a bow, while living in a cave and never going outside, but horde-night would probably kill you because you don't have any real weapons, armour or the materials needed to make anything worthwhile.

The vast majority of the player-base already seem to split their time roughly 50/50 between base-buildup/upkeep and going out looting, scavenging, hunting or questing.

 

The core point is that we then use the things that we looted to make the things that we want, which we can no-longer do because crafting decent quality steel-tier items requires that we roll that item on the loot-table multiple times.

If you're going to force us to do that, they we might as well just hope to roll a quality five or six version of the item instead, and forego crafting entirely.

It's usually faster.

 

Maybe if low-quality steel-tier weapons/tools were as common as low-quality firearms, then it wouldn't be a problem, but then we'd be flooded with so many parts that they'd fail to serve any purpose anyway.

 

TLDR: Guns let you get the parts to make 'steel' guns like SMGs out of 'iron' guns like handguns, but tools and melee weapons don't.

No matter how many iron shovels you manage to loot, you won't be any closer to a steel one, until you either stumble across five steel tools, or happen across one that's actually worth keeping.

 

For machetes, I've done pretty well, but I've found zero steel knuckles, one bat (t2) and one spear (t4)

Oh, and maybe... I want to say two steel fireaxes, both found in cars?

That's not even enough parts to make a pickaxe. At my skill-level it takes IIRC 15 parts to make a single tool. I got six.

 

If I can make t5 iron axes, and I have tons of steel laying around, and I already went out and hunted down the steel tool schematic, then I should be allowed to make myself a steel tool.

I already put like 10 levels worth of skillpoints into this, I spent hours in the mines getting my iron squared away and looted myself a crucible after hitting a string of big POI's day after day.

I even got lucky enough to find the tool schematic at a trader.

 

The fact that all that isn't enough and I need to rely on RNG to get what I want feels like bullcrap, and it's all set up in such a way that if I happened to roll a decent quality pickaxe so that I don't even need to craft one anymore, I'll just be even more upset because all that time and effort was totally wasted.

 

The effort=reward part of your gameplay loop is broken.

[Bashtiks]

I was messing around old alphas today and I have question why old zombie rage/attack from a13 got removed?????

 

I was rly surprised when approaching zombies too close they kind of raged towards me with this evasion + attack move, like in boxing - evade + uppercut That was simply awesome, looked good and made close combat rly fun again, why the heck it got removed???

 

Also blizzard in snow biome was looking very nice, in fact felt way better then now.

[madmole]

I play with friends 3-5 people on my dedi server (7dtd I played 1500+ hours). There are people who like to dig. Dude after 30-60 minutes of work will bring you 60k shales (this is 600k fuel). And everything on this fuel is removed from the game. No one is returning to the issue of fuel production

 

by the time you have 4x4. You have an auger and a mined skill of a miner.

 

try to play after you reduce the amount of fuel that shale gives at least (from 10 to 5)

 

i play with parameters (2 instead of 10), but I feel comfortable.

 

At first you said 3 minutes now you say 30 to 60 minutes, that is a huge difference. I agree with 30-60 minutes of mining and you are set for a while. To me that seems about right but I'll be cooking some fuel and testing it when I get later game and might nerf it a bit more, we'll see.

[madmole]

i play real conservative with my inventory up to a certain point. as in early mid game im saving up lots of crap, then end game i start using/spending/ stuff up for FunTime©.

also helps to just bite the bullet and go Hardcore mining every other week. usually a full day-2 days of mining (not coming to the surface). gets you crap tons, and then you can go a long time with out having to worry about it. dump everything you mined in your 5x-10x forges, and then go Play/Loot.

I have a Real strong "You gotta Pay to Play" Mentality with this game. you want to go have fun Looting and use up Ammo without worrying about it? then you gotta put in the work to have those resources to spare.

 

Also i have a problem, I am a Hoarder in this game, The more mats i have available to deal with any need/situation that the game throws at me, the Safer i Feel/Am. Need a new concrete horde base in 1 day? then i can do that if i need to no prob. Its about survival and Being Prepared, and Having Mats coming out the Wazoo is absolutely the best way to survive.

 

I mine from 12 to 4 and I'm out of there lol. Unless my ammo is weak then I'll spend whatever it takes to get 6k of everything and then get the bullet factor going before I go out. I repair my base immediately now too instead of waiting, and this works in my favor because the air drop at noon shows up closer to home, vs in the wasteland or right after I went into a POI and will have a full inventory.

[madmole]

Getting to day 200 with tons of ammo is easy (without loot/harvest modifications). There are a few ways to minimize fighting on day 7 (driving, base design, swimming). These were fun initially but really defeat the challenge. To me, it is now only challenging when we fight the zombies head-on for day 7. I agree if you are fighting them each day 7 then you won't have stacks of ammo.

 

Well yeah, but that isn't playing the game so much. Sure I can nerd pole up somewhere and be safe or drive around all horde night but that isn't fun or challenging. The only thing that keeps me going is the thought of giving the z apocalypse a finger after each horde and improving my base/weapons/gear to better deal with the next one. I fight every horde, 16 alive, nightmare speed so my ammo is severely challenged. I don't use it clearing POIs for this reason, and its a challenge using fists to clear POIs. I will if I get overwhelmed but I'll bang with 3-4 guys at once with just fists, but when my health hits 50% or there are too many not getting knocked down I pull the big guns out.

[madmole]

Default time, nomad, day 90, that's just one of my Spare chest, where I am putting extra mats that won't fit in their normal chest anymore.

 

Honestly, I've wasted atleast 50 of the 90 days just literally going AFK or derping around the world simply exploring (not looting)

 

This play through I really haven't spent much time gathering like I did in past alphas. I'm spending a lot of time testing out all the new stuff/skills and play styles. I'm playing at a very very relaxed pace.

 

Im trying out the Trader questing play style a lot, but it takes me forever to loot a single house, since I literally strip a house bare trying to find all the hidden loot.

 

 

In last alphas I'd have Chest full of refined steel and iron, I'd just gather and gather throwing everything into 20 forges. (seriously I can't understand why people don't build multiple work stations it exponentially speeds up your resources)

 

This play through, it's just 5 forges, 5 cement mixers, 4, Chem labs and 4 workstations.

 

Honestly have way more mats than I could ever use.

 

Away from my base I just built a 41x41 reinforced concrete slab that I don't even know what I'm gonna do with yet. But I'll just start building up on it and see what I end up with. (I Don't believe in AI cheesing designs)

Hahah just 5 workstations... lol. I use 2 forges at most, 1 work bench and 1 chem lab. My first fort build (the video guy) I did later on graduate to 2 cement mixers, 4 forges (still only used 2), and 2 work benches for double ammo production and that was a lot.

[madmole]

Well, now i have a stable high fps on the build b6, tell me - what it cost me?

 

You can send me a check if you want

[madmole]

Are you familiar with drawbridges and blade traps? They are in your game yet I haven't seen you using them in your streams.Also Dart traps.

 

Apparently you don't follow my twitter or youtube.

[madmole]

@Madmole:

 

About the intelligence perk tree...

All the main category perks are gated by the previous perk (bicycles to minibikes, for instance) but ALSO double gated by the main intelligence perk level.

 

Instead, how about removing the first gating and just have then gated by the main intelligence perk?

 

So if for example, if I've purchased a bicycle I don;t need to waste a point on it to unlock the minibike.

 

(This also makes sense if you've found say a motorcycle chassis, and want to buy steel and get the parts to make the rest of the motorcycle instead of having to unlock both the bicycle and minibike perks first, which you don't want.)

 

No because that isn't how the system even works, and you have to learn to crawl before you can fly, or unlock one before the other can even be considered for purchase. Buying a bicycle doesn't make you a bicycle mechanic, which is required to become a minibike mechanic. Plus there will be some added skill bonuses coming to the perk.

[madmole]

 

The effort=reward part of your gameplay loop is broken.

 

We're still balancing things. It wasn't fun grinding hundreds of steel and mechanical parts to craft a gun in A17, or whatever it was. But it was a grind and you could do whatever you wanted. That isn't good either, we want players out looting. If you shop at various traders you can buy several brown/orange/yellow items for a reasonable amount of coin get the parts you need to craft that blue item you want. I'm level 50 and have 12 steel knuckle parts and have a pair of purple brass knuckles. One more set of crappy steel knuckles comes my way and I can craft a blue set. I think that feels about right, you shouldn't be mass producing knuckles, but crafting 1 to 3 pairs through the life of your character.

[Locusta]

I'll bang with 3-4 guys at once with just fists...

 

Lmao had to!

 

 

Loc

[MelT]

Played A18 for some days, and these are my thoughts up until now:

 

- graphics are excellent now; personally, I think the Fun Pimps can call it a day here

- performance is very good for me; I can max out everything, just have to choose "Half" textures, as I don't have a 6 GB (or more) graphics card (yet)

- bridges in RWG?!? how cool is that?! well done!

 

 

Still trying out many things, but what has become very noticable to me is this:

 

- Antibiotics should be a bit easier to get in the early game stages, as infections are not exactly scarce, and you end up searching for real-time hours for honey and antibiotics, without really finding anything. I feel they only need a little bit of adjusting, not being abundant or something, maybe just increase the loot chance for them / honey a teeny weeny little bit. Doesn't have to be much, I'd say, but a little bit more.

 

- Lockpicks should be able to be used on generic doors as well; make them more likely to break on doors, if needed, so the player has to compensate with a specific skill level just for doors, maybe, but doors should really be pickable; when playing, lockpicks are very nice and cool, but it feels annoying not to be able to pick doors themselves.

 

- The skill and loot system has improved a lot; I really like the idea with the books, and it turns out well when playing. However, what doesn't really fit now is the skill point system.

Thing is this: You get a single skill point for levelling up. So far, so good. However, some skills feel overpowered at skill level 1, compared to the remaining skill levels, so you end up just putting a single point into a skill and get books for the rest (I don't have time for specific examples at the moment, but I can probably revisit this at this weekend). This is all fine and good, but things don't really feel as rewarding this way.

Furthermore, the looting system with the books is great. This, however, leaves the skill point system a bit moot. Example: You have to earn your experience points all of the time the hard way (kill zombies, do things, etc.), just to get a single skill point for a new character level. Now, I have experienced this a lot of times: While going out and looting, you find great stuff and really cool books (which is good), but this way, you can immediately get your skill to craft a 4x4 (e.g.), and for the same in skill points, in comparison, you have to do LOTS of stuff to get the needed character levels, as this takes a lot more time than looting, as strange as this may sound, but it's like this since starting to try out A18 for me and a friend of mine.

Also, finding books to compensate for skills not having invested points in is great in theory, but while playing, this redundancy feels, well ... a bit unrewarding. Somehow, I feel it would be much nicer to learn certain skills either with skills *or* by books, but not both. So you'd still have an incentive to go looting *and* level up your character in the long run. While playing, I often feel dissatisfied, because it's like: "Yeah, the looting is great, but, well ... why should I even level up?"

 

As mentioned, the looting system is great, and the skill system has improved, but I feel the skill system still has to be worked on. Personally, in this constellation, I'd really like the learning by doing system from before best (yeah yeah, I know, it won't come back^^, but just stating how I feel about it while playing).

 

Just my two cents. Keep up the good work, and congrats on A18 so far!

[Hollowprime]

Apparently you don't follow my twitter or youtube.

 

I do follow your videos on youtube that's how I know you don't use traps . I dare you to prove me wrong.

 

Edit: You do build traps. But you avoid combining a lot of them together:

 

 

You make very simple designs dude...and they come straight into your face. Maybe that's why you keep buffing firearms . Because you don't know how to properly build defenses

[SittingDuck]

I do follow your videos on youtube that's how I know you don't use traps . I dare you to prove me wrong.

 

Edit: You do build traps. But you avoid combining a lot of them together:

 

 

You make very simple designs dude...and they come straight into your face. Maybe that's why you keep buffing firearms . Because you don't know how to properly build defenses

 

or MM just doesn´t mix them to see how well they work.... because he is kind of a gamedesigner? ;-P