3 hours ago, Vaeliorin said:Basically this. It's too easy to manipulate the AI now. Heck, it's hard not to manipulate it. In A16, I could try different things to try and get the zombies to go where I wanted, and I never knew if it was going to work (it, admittedly, usually didn't). Now, I always know where they're going to go, so there's no more excitement any more in trying out new base designs. It honestly feels like a waste of time trying to come up with new base designs, because unless you intentionally do something to make your base suck, they all end up working the same.
I agree that most base designs you see nowadays tend to always work kind of the same and that is a bit of a shame. However I'd still say that what we have now is an improvement over what we had back in A16.
Before the zombie AI update, all my horde base designs were pretty much big fortifications with multi layered 360 degree defenses and some kind of platforms for me to move around and attack the zombies wherever they were. You could make some variations on the theme but the overall principle was still always the same, just tank the night and then repair the damage. IIrc There was not much else that worked reliably, barring maybe some quirky cheese builds that used specific exploits. Zombie AI had some exploitable characteristics like iirc they were attracted to doors so you could use that but it was not super reliable and they always ended up swarming a bit everywhere and punched whatever was in front of them. I am sometimes nostalgic of the chaos and destruction that such hordes made but overall I would not go back.
Bunker style bases can still work nowadays but tend to be less efficient than pathing bases so have fallen out of fashion, but some players still like to use them.
This being said I feel like pathing bases allow for more flavour and creativity than straight up bunker bases. You can make some tower defense trap labyrinth, some kind of basic funnel and kill zone. You can make a setup using drawbridges and swtiches to make the zombies change directions and waste time. You can make a setup that make zombies fall in pits. You can make pits shallow for easy kill or alternatively make the pits deep for added fall damage. You can make base designs that make melee a viable option for killing the horde. You can put robotic sledges at clever places to make funnies happen etc. I typically try to vary from run to run.
I see suggestions to add more diversity to zombies AI. Like some take the path of least resistance like they do now, but some others just swarm, some other go around etc. While this seem to be a good idea at first glance, I suspect it would just make all the pathing designs unreliables and usher their disapperances and because of unpredictible AI we would just be back to big bunkers like before.
By the way, zombies do still make some random damage here and there so there is still a little bit of the old AI that lives on. But if you add too much of this randomness I suspect you will eventually hit a threshold where pathing base designs are kind of not really worth it anymore.