Alpha 18 feedback and balancing thread

[NukemDed]

How many layers of concrete makes a 'castle' to you? I'm on two already, but it's barely enough.

Multiple layers of concrete walls with metal bars in the centre two rows, to hold the Z's off for long enough for you to kill them. Even then, you're going to lose blocks all around your outside.

Feels kind of crappy, since there aren't a lot of viable base designs, but I've tried all sorts of stuff like ladder/hatch-only access to my base, or living on the top floor of a tower, living in an underground bunker, windows on all sides, windows on only one side, ect.

 

Now that they zombies can path-find better, they will undermine towers and dig down into bunkers, and attacking from alternating sides on horde-night is a problem if you place all of your defences on one side.

 

Z's block damage is just too high for a regular building to stand up to them for the full duration of horde-night, unless you have enough players with guns (or turrets) to keep the zombies from piling up against the walls.

 

Knocking block damage down to about 30-50% in the settings stops them from just drilling though your cobblestone/concrete walls in seconds, but it lowers the tension in POI's, because they can't get out of locked rooms, and you can just close doors behind yourself as you move about to buy yourself time to heal or reload.

... which makes sense, I guess.

 

Maybe if the block-damage stayed high, but there was some sort of cooldown, preventing multiple zombies from being able to strike the same block simultaneously?

As is, a z-pile grinding against your walls can hit the same block ten or twenty times in about two seconds, which drains the block-hp from max to broken in seconds. Ensuring that they can't pile up like that is absolutely vital.

 

Putting spikes against your walls has them not be able to hit the block behind the spikes, so they break holes through your walls at head-level, which creates a nice shooting porthole, but it's probably not an intentional solution.

 

As-is, we generally ring the base with multiple layers of electric fence, to try to keep them away from the walls as we kill them, but that means spending tons and tons of ammo.

 

Personally, I kind of want to try a five-layer wall on three sizes, to see if that deters the zombies from even attempting to get in from those directions. That'd be a huge pain to gather resources for and upgrade though.

Could debugmode it, i guess.

looks like you're having fun. if it was too easy what would you say?

[meganoth]

...

 

To add my 2 cent:

 

Electric wire traps and blade traps are nearly indispensable items in my experience to save on ammo in later stages. When using a rather conventional melee base it is just economical to create choke points so you don't have to use hundreds of those traps. 2 diametrical or 4 in each cardinal direction can work for example. As funnels into your base or as outer defense as a ring around your inner building

Demos need special attention, sure. I didn't have much opportunity to test ideas of handling them yet. But what I have seen is that they can be handled as long as you can kill most of them without explosion and no two detonate at the same location. Such a convential base must have more than one floor anyway; if your ground floor is breached you should be able to retreat to the first floor. In our current base we got breached twice (at a stage without demos) without any serious consequences

 

A bunker a few blocks below the surface won't work. But bunkers on or near bedrock work (I know for A17, expect the same to be true for A18, proven by others for A18). Fall damage still helps but can't kill them, traps, melee and bullets need to do the rest.

In A17 I had a nice design with a tower in the middle on bedrock. So we could shoot directly down on their heads while they tried to ascend the ladders up the tower. It worked well even though zombie AI at that time did completely avoid falling down holes and we didn't get any help from fall damage. That has changed for the better in A18. And I think this design should work with demos too because you can reliably headshot. But this has to be tested again in A18.

[Laz Man]

How many layers of concrete makes a 'castle' to you? I'm on two already, but it's barely enough.

Multiple layers of concrete walls with metal bars in the centre two rows, to hold the Z's off for long enough for you to kill them. Even then, you're going to lose blocks all around your outside.

Feels kind of crappy, since there aren't a lot of viable base designs, but I've tried all sorts of stuff like ladder/hatch-only access to my base, or living on the top floor of a tower, living in an underground bunker, windows on all sides, windows on only one side, ect.

 

Now that they zombies can path-find better, they will undermine towers and dig down into bunkers, and attacking from alternating sides on horde-night is a problem if you place all of your defences on one side.

 

Z's block damage is just too high for a regular building to stand up to them for the full duration of horde-night, unless you have enough players with guns (or turrets) to keep the zombies from piling up against the walls.

 

Knocking block damage down to about 30-50% in the settings stops them from just drilling though your cobblestone/concrete walls in seconds, but it lowers the tension in POI's, because they can't get out of locked rooms, and you can just close doors behind yourself as you move about to buy yourself time to heal or reload.

... which makes sense, I guess.

 

Maybe if the block-damage stayed high, but there was some sort of cooldown, preventing multiple zombies from being able to strike the same block simultaneously?

As is, a z-pile grinding against your walls can hit the same block ten or twenty times in about two seconds, which drains the block-hp from max to broken in seconds. Ensuring that they can't pile up like that is absolutely vital.

 

Putting spikes against your walls has them not be able to hit the block behind the spikes, so they break holes through your walls at head-level, which creates a nice shooting porthole, but it's probably not an intentional solution.

 

As-is, we generally ring the base with multiple layers of electric fence, to try to keep them away from the walls as we kill them, but that means spending tons and tons of ammo.

 

Personally, I kind of want to try a five-layer wall on three sizes, to see if that deters the zombies from even attempting to get in from those directions. That'd be a huge pain to gather resources for and upgrade though.

Could debugmode it, i guess.

 

Multi layer walls does help with funneling the zeds where you want them. You will most likely need multiple funnel points if your base is too big. On day 56, and my current design funnels the zeds no problems and my walls are only 1 voxel thick for the most part (inside is hollow).

[dcsobral]

I finished my Strength and Fortitude playthrough, here are my balancing thoughts.

 

Strength by itself seems weaker than Fortitude by itself, because they are both close range but only Fortitude has protecting perks. At that, having automatic weapons on Fortitude and shotguns on Strength feels inverted to me.

 

The sledgehammer is very good at all game stages, whereas the club can't compete with it until mid game. It also occurs to me it's the only attribute with two different melee weapon choices, which seems fair for an attribute like Strength to be honest.

 

I used a pole base, because I wanted to fight zombies. Finding out zombies do six times as much damage to poles as to any other block came as a nasty surprise. I died the first two horde nights, but, to be fair, it was the SMG reload animation's fault the second time (and zombies ragdolling through poles, which I don't mind), and I was playing at Survivalist level, so I doubt it would have happened at all on default difficulty.

 

I was very happy that I could actually fight the whole horde night with melee weapons for the most part -- grenades and molotovs were used to give a breather, guns against cops and demolishers. Electric fences were important, but I bought them instead of putting points in Intellect. I lucked out on finding the moonshine recipe as well, which helped a lot.

 

Good balance overall. I'd invert their guns, but the combo felt comparable to perception/intellect, my last playthrough.

[beerfly]

I finished my Strength and Fortitude playthrough..

 

Can confirm that. It is pretty cool, the best part is Pimps will keep adding more experience to late game, which we all would love.

 

Gold version is gonna be core.

 

 

P.S. Ah, stop complaining on these flying robot things, you haven`t even seen them guys..

[JaxTeller718]

Can confirm that. It is pretty cool, the best part is Pimps will keep adding more experience to late game, which we all would love.

 

Gold version is gonna be core.

 

 

P.S. Ah, stop complaining on these flying robot things, you haven`t even seen them guys..

 

Dont need to see them. Its a robot, and it flies. Thats all the info i need.

[Laz Man]

I finished my Strength and Fortitude playthrough, here are my balancing thoughts.

 

Strength by itself seems weaker than Fortitude by itself, because they are both close range but only Fortitude has protecting perks. At that, having automatic weapons on Fortitude and shotguns on Strength feels inverted to me.

 

The sledgehammer is very good at all game stages, whereas the club can't compete with it until mid game. It also occurs to me it's the only attribute with two different melee weapon choices, which seems fair for an attribute like Strength to be honest.

 

I used a pole base, because I wanted to fight zombies. Finding out zombies do six times as much damage to poles as to any other block came as a nasty surprise. I died the first two horde nights, but, to be fair, it was the SMG reload animation's fault the second time (and zombies ragdolling through poles, which I don't mind), and I was playing at Survivalist level, so I doubt it would have happened at all on default difficulty.

 

I was very happy that I could actually fight the whole horde night with melee weapons for the most part -- grenades and molotovs were used to give a breather, guns against cops and demolishers. Electric fences were important, but I bought them instead of putting points in Intellect. I lucked out on finding the moonshine recipe as well, which helped a lot.

 

Good balance overall. I'd invert their guns, but the combo felt comparable to perception/intellect, my last playthrough.

 

That sounds like some good feedback. You didnt give the most important feedback though......was it fun? 😂

 

Also, curious what GS you ended each playthrough on?

[Hollowprime]

I finished my Strength and Fortitude playthrough, here are my balancing thoughts.

 

Strength by itself seems weaker than Fortitude by itself, because they are both close range but only Fortitude has protecting perks. At that, having automatic weapons on Fortitude and shotguns on Strength feels inverted to me.

 

The sledgehammer is very good at all game stages, whereas the club can't compete with it until mid game. It also occurs to me it's the only attribute with two different melee weapon choices, which seems fair for an attribute like Strength to be honest.

 

I used a pole base, because I wanted to fight zombies. Finding out zombies do six times as much damage to poles as to any other block came as a nasty surprise. I died the first two horde nights, but, to be fair, it was the SMG reload animation's fault the second time (and zombies ragdolling through poles, which I don't mind), and I was playing at Survivalist level, so I doubt it would have happened at all on default difficulty.

 

I was very happy that I could actually fight the whole horde night with melee weapons for the most part -- grenades and molotovs were used to give a breather, guns against cops and demolishers. Electric fences were important, but I bought them instead of putting points in Intellect. I lucked out on finding the moonshine recipe as well, which helped a lot.

 

Good balance overall. I'd invert their guns, but the combo felt comparable to perception/intellect, my last playthrough.

 

Wait, zombies deal 6 times more damage to poles??? Where did you get that info from?

[Laz Man]

Wait, zombies deal 6 times more damage to poles??? Where did you get that info from?

 

I think it's in the XMLs. I also heard about that recently while watching one of JaWoddles videos.

[Gareee]

I had hoped to see a December update with a little content, but I don't want to see the devs working through the holidays and they obviously missed the December window, so I'm wishing them all happy holidays and signing off for the year.

 

See you guys next year!!

[Hollowprime]

I think it's in the XMLs. I also heard about that recently while watching one of JaWoddles videos.

 

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?139400-Zombie-block-damage-on-poles&p=1079038#post1079038

 

Madmole I'm speechless. I've played over a thousand hours of 7 days to die and only now have I realised I was using walls made out of sticks.

 

How could you possibly miss such a huge and important info? Poles are the bread and butter of any serious defensive base plan.

 

This is a base made out of steel poles and they have LESS durability than normal bricks.

 

https://imgur.com/a/PUfzFQq

[meganoth]

I think it's in the XMLs. I also heard about that recently while watching one of JaWoddles videos.

 

I just now looked through some zombiehand definitions, especially the one of the demolisher, and I looked up any blocks with the word "pole". Haven't found anything. Could you quote the relevant lines in the xml?

[beerfly]

Dont need to see them.

 

Oh, Jax ! Just shoot it down and move on.

[faatal]

I had hoped to see a December update with a little content, but I don't want to see the devs working through the holidays and they obviously missed the December window, so I'm wishing them all happy holidays and signing off for the year.

 

See you guys next year!!

 

We have not given up yet. Next exp is very close, but there are some issues being worked through.

[graphite]

I just now looked through some zombiehand definitions, especially the one of the demolisher, and I looked up any blocks with the word "pole". Haven't found anything. Could you quote the relevant lines in the xml?

 

I had a look and couldnt find anything either.

 

I tried a quick test with a zombie hitting a block vs pole but couldn't see any difference but it was a quick test and its not that easy to get accurate results the way i did it, someone smarter will find a better way of doing it.

 

It maybe a bug and not by design.

 

What i did spot with poles is you can glue on the side with air inbetween and if you stand on top of glued pole zombie pathing does not target the supporting block and goes round in circles.

 

So i guess the assembly mesh is for a full block even though the collision is smaller.

 

This is possibly known so just ignore it if it is.

[Jay_ombie]

We have not given up yet. Next exp is very close, but there are some issues being worked through.

 

 

 

Hope yet then for some experimental 7 days Christmas chewiness ...

[agrastiOs]

Question: is it intended that if all players die at the same time, horde night stops? Was kind of anticlimactic when I played with a friend and we both died, everything stopped.

[Evilracc0on]

Heyo!

 

Game is awesome. just a few tweaks needed:

 

1. Zombies: I know its easy to work with a set team of zombies, but all em zeds seem to be shopping at the same graveyard. Can we get some variation to zeds please? Just re-skinned or something. A few new zeds would be nice.

 

2. Loot: Trader quest loot vs poi loot is so unbalanced. tier 1 quests give good starter loot. The Poi has better loot than the traders, Tier 2 loot rewards either are worse than tier 1 or endgame loot. A better suggestion would to be have loot spawn according to player level. I find ak's faster than i find pistols. ammo in low amounts and low tier weaponry as you level, higher loot.

 

3. ammo types and creation: Using a work bench to make ammo makes sense, but from the get go, you can pretty much make ammo. which is sort of nice but realistically, you wanna implement an ammo bench. this way you can craft ammo faster and customize your ammo as you go. I would love to see an incendiary ammo type and explosive ammo type. this also allows hordes to be more present in game world. early game ammo can be made at a workbench (eg, crude hand made shot gun shells or, defective bullets causing jams in guns.

 

4. Throwables: I love the spears but i hate them. Nothing better than yeeting a spear into a zombies face. I just hate finding the spears i missed. sure the glow red, but the size of the prop is to small. Please increase spear size in game to the size of an actual spear. Spears should also have a chance to cause bleed. Molly's on the other hand, i have started using less. the cost for early game is to much. also, you cannot throw them through small gaps, or you'll be toast. Pipe bombs/ timed charges do not pose a threat to players. you can drop them at your feet and not take any damage.

 

5. horde nights: randomize horde waves at different interverals lulling players into a false sense of security.

 

6. Dead zones or high tier loot areas: Instead of having random loot in poi's depending on luck of the draw, some areas will require a hazmat to access. radsuits will protect player from radiation damage but offer little damage from physical attacks, No Armour can be worn with it. High risk, high reward.

 

7. Poi no build zones: prevent players from going straight to loot viva building there way there.

 

8. components: all components should be able to be scrapped. Gun parts included. Blood bags are useful for med kits, but i should either be able to use it as is for meager health boost or scrap it for plastic.

 

9. schematics: some rare parts should be found in loot, others should be bought for dukes. steel tools should be rare but chainsaws and augers rarer. steel tools should be accessible from level 40. augers and chainsaws in high risk poi's. They should not craft-able but can be repaired with steel for high cost.

 

10. guns: to wide spread and frequent. Finding a gun should be difficult. Special non craft able guns should be obtained in way of loot.

M60 should be non craft able. a Thompson would be nice as well. Some attachments like the laser sight is to weak to use. i'd rather scrap it than use it. enlarge laser. Nerf dynamit and bring back mining charges please.

 

Thats my 2 cents.

[faatal]

I had a look and couldnt find anything either.

 

I tried a quick test with a zombie hitting a block vs pole but couldn't see any difference but it was a quick test and its not that easy to get accurate results the way i did it, someone smarter will find a better way of doing it.

 

It maybe a bug and not by design.

 

What i did spot with poles is you can glue on the side with air inbetween and if you stand on top of glued pole zombie pathing does not target the supporting block and goes round in circles.

 

So i guess the assembly mesh is for a full block even though the collision is smaller.

 

This is possibly known so just ignore it if it is.

 

Zombies do x6 damage when stuck and they decide to attack what is blocking them. Those are generally block colliders that only collide on the edges, which are not seen by pathing.

[faatal]

Hope yet then for some experimental 7 days Christmas chewiness ...

 

We have a build going that they are going to test tonight.

[faatal]

Question: is it intended that if all players die at the same time, horde night stops? Was kind of anticlimactic when I played with a friend and we both died, everything stopped.

 

Yes, that is how it currently works. Each player gets blood moon immunity, so a zombie would have to see you to resume their assault.

[quyxkh]

We have a build a going that they are going to test tonight.

 

I felt myself drool a little.

 

TMI? In a zombie apocalypse?

[NukemDed]

We have not given up yet. Next exp is very close, but there are some issues being worked through.

 

mate, i am working up to xmas eve. the damn world just wont stop. i feel for you still working when you look around at so many who are on breaks. and i appreciate it.

 

saying that, mine is by choice as that way i get to take time when the fishing is at its peak :-)

[faatal]

It is released:

 

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?139458-Announcement-A18-3-b3-Experimental-Languages

[agrastiOs]

It is released:

 

https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?139458-Announcement-A18-3-b3-Experimental-Languages

Fantastic work TFP, y'all even working on weekends. Hope you get a great rest on the upcoming holidays that you deserve.

Yes, that is how it currently works. Each player gets blood moon immunity, so a zombie would have to see you to resume their assault.

Yeah, but we couldn't resume it because all the zombies disappear when we both die at the same time. We tested that twice.