Horde Night feedback - less smart zombies

[bdubyah]

Yeah, having them a bit dumber and more direct on horde night would mean you gotta defend all angles instead of easily funneling them using their "intelligence" against them. It's just jarring to see multiple groups going ham on a wall, only for all the other groups to join whichever one weakens a wall first as soon as they detect the weakness.

[faatal]

41 minutes ago, bdubyah said:

Yeah, having them a bit dumber and more direct on horde night would mean you gotta defend all angles instead of easily funneling them using their "intelligence" against them. It's just jarring to see multiple groups going ham on a wall, only for all the other groups to join whichever one weakens a wall first as soon as they detect the weakness.

They are only going to get so dumb. You build small bases and you limit their choices. Build bigger bases and since distance is a path expense, they will tend to not go the long way. One solution is just adding some totally stupid filler zombies.

[hotpoon]

1 hour ago, faatal said:

They are only going to get so dumb. You build small bases and you limit their choices. Build bigger bases and since distance is a path expense, they will tend to not go the long way. One solution is just adding some totally stupid filler zombies.

@faatal long pathing is the biggest issue for me.  Last time I played (few months ago), I saw a wolf coming at me so I popped a block on the side of a building and hopped onto it (with my parkour skills) to shoot at it from safety.  Instead of trying to break stuff down beneath me, it ran around to the other side of the building, broke through the door, ran up stairs and into the room behind me and started breaking through the block of the wall directly behind me.  I could expect that cleverness from a construction worker zombie, not a normal zombie, and certainly not an animal.

I really love how stupid the average zombie is in Dying Light.  It makes it so that you can easily lure them into traps and then have a good laugh. I'd love that same fun in 7 Days to Die where we have access to even more traps.  For me, the danger of a zombie apocalypse should always be the sheer number of zombies rather than their intelligence.  I understand some people have different ideas, but why not both? Super dumb average zombies, and clever specialized ones?

Just editing to add on to the above...
You could take away the jump ability from the zombies who used to be sedentary in their previous lives (like the business man etc) and give the jump ability to those that were active like the stripper, the skateboard zombie, and dogs.  That might make horde night less predictable, or less easy to find a meta if different zombies are different in their physical abilities.

Edited October 8, 2021 by hotpoon (see edit history)

[bdubyah]

14 hours ago, faatal said:

They are only going to get so dumb. You build small bases and you limit their choices. Build bigger bases and since distance is a path expense, they will tend to not go the long way. One solution is just adding some totally stupid filler zombies.

I just mean, specifically for BMs, that when a wave spawns from the west, they run straight at your location and start beating on things. Not run up to the wall, realize one block on the far corner of your wall copped a stray rifle round and therefore has less HP, so they go to it instead. As Roland was saying, keep them as they are for normal, day to day POI clearing as it keeps it interesting. But it hurts BMs more than it helps, I feel.

 

Even on bigger bases what happens is once one zed damages a block, all zeds from that general side end up there. And small bases, as mentioned, they will run all the way around it just to find that weak spot, which is just jarring. I know we don't have the massive numbers of zeds people would like, but with higher BM counts it would get hectic pretty quick if you had to constantly check every corner of your base because they weren't so easy to herd around. Zeds being "smarter" here actually makes them simpler to deal with. You could always keep a certain amount as the current "smart" zeds, but the majority should just be dumb, straight line running zeds that start hitting whatever they come into contact with. Seems it could help with CPU usage as well since every single zed isn't doing advanced calculus to reach you.