What if Hordes could behave like this with Stealthers?

[FileMachete]

No idea if the engine/AI could do this but that ole 4-letter word "real"... ( 😉 ) would be an excellent mechanic imo.

(not claiming this as original, likely most/all has been offered up before)

 

Horde starts, zeds head to player location. Stealth is irrelevant, player position is saved; think gps point.

Player can stealth to a new location, zeds are focusing on the gps point, trying to path to it.

Gps point is on a timer, maybe 30 seconds? Stealth perks could increase that to maybe 45-60 seconds?

When gps point expires, zeds get a new one from players current position, again, regardless if player is stealthed or not.

 

Gameplay would go, horde starts, zeds get first gps point, player stealths, runs while stealthed, -and- under cover, to a position where they can shoot zeds in the back of their heads, if not one-shot kills zed turns, has chance/time, depending on how fast player can finish zed, to alert nearby zeds to players position. Not all the zeds, that's the gps points job.

 

Further new gps points refocuses zeds attention on current player position throughout the horde night. Player has to break sight lines for stealth to work so they can reposition and fire while stealthed to get the damage bonuses.

 

MP could be simple if not all players tried to stealth, just have zeds focus on the non-stealthed players, but similar to above if a stealthed part of the team drew attention then some portion of the horde could focus on them. Might need a modifier to prevent abuse; only allow x number of stealth kills per game hour, etc. Which might actually be a really nice way to make the stealther a very important part of the base defense. With their stealthed damage multiplier they might be the ones tasked with Demolisher duty. And would need to horde part of their kill count to deal with demos.

 

MP with all stealthers would be a tougher design. Probably couldn't do a simple round robin or random chance on where/who the next gps point would be, too easy to kite the zeds back and forth. Possibly a basic table of the first x number of gps points, then maybe choose one that had the best possible path to that location? And would likely need to have some kind of metric that after x stealth kills (triggered stealth damage modifier) then stealth wouldn't work anymore. Rational being the zeds know all the hidden places players are sniping from so no point trying to hide.

 

Again, I've no idea if this would even be possible, and also it looks pretty expensive, so I'm not thinking this will make it in to 7dtd-1. Just been thinking of this a bit off and on and wanted to get it out there for curiousity/discussion sake.

 

Feel free to go crazy, I'm not particullary invested in this idea but it seems like it'd be fun to play like this