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Zombie Proofing & Dude, Where are my arms?


Ben2150

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TLDR: No materials should be invincible, some just take damage slower than others/have more HP. Zombie body parts have HP/chance of breaking, so it is a matter of what breaks first. If it is the zombie, then gore blocks pile up, making a base's vulnerable to being overrun. If gore blocks are cleaned up, but blocks are not fixed, then the wall will eventually break down. This encourages a player to care for their wall. With all of the talk about zombie-proof building materials in the Dev Diary I got to thinking about how that could work. I didn't want to take up more space there, so I figured that I would share my ideas here. First off, I want to say that I am not proposing invincible structures. I am simply suggesting that materials at certain levels do damage to zombies. Considering that there will be selective limb loss in the future, I was thinking that a zombie could lose their arms while beating on stronger materials. When their arms are broken off, they use their head. Depending on the materials, their head would also take damage at different rates. When enough damage accumulated, they would die, eventually leaving a gore block behind to advance the next zombie up your wall. This could work one of two ways. 1. Each body part has HP. which is diminished with each hit against a solid surface. Different surfaces would diminish the HP at varying speeds. Dirt and (unmodified) wood would barely do any damage to a zombie. While stone and reinforced wood would do more damage. 2. Each hit against a wall has a certain chance of breaking an arm. This would not require keeping track of HP, if it isn't already tracked, hopefully being less resource intensive. Different materials increase the chances of a limb breaking off, or a zombie dying from hitting their head one to many times. Wood and dirt would have a 2% chance, while stone and such would have 10% on up. More so if they had some sort of spikes or other defenses. Imagine seeing zombies break through your reinforced wood wall with only their head or one arm. Or having them pile over your concrete wall because you didn't clear them away from it while your defenses held. Materials don't have to be invincible to keep zombies out, they just have to be stronger than the zombies. Different zombies could vary their attacks (acid spitter, strong arm, spider), so walls would not be completely invincible against all zombies. And even with normal zombies, they would still receive damage, though it would be minimal. It would simply make defenses have a different role. Our bases would not be invincible, they would just reward careful planning and defense. We will also have bandits that add another element to defending the "castle", so not all of our current tactics would keep zombies out. We will never be completely safe, but we can be safer than when we started out.
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I'm not sure you fully understand the concept of TLDR :D That aside I like the idea of limb damage we can break our legs they should be able to break theirs. While it makes sense that beating on a concrete wall would cause damage it seems like excessive realism. I don't want to tear muscles or blow out tendons from swinging tools or weapons. Also the more information the game has to track for each entity might cause issues with game slowing down (I don't know this for sure but it seems logical.)
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I think the two problems are: 1. zombies will try to destroy anything for no reason. They need to change it so zombies will just casually move around while you are "undetected", or search the general area (by moving around not smashing through walls) while "sensed", and only destroying blocks while you are "hunted" and until you lose detection by the zombie altogether. 2. The block damage is highly unrealistic, zombies wouldn't be able to break down a solid metal door, or any solid metal block for that matter, and concrete blocks would take alot more damage than they do. They need to add more special zombies to make it more difficult in a way that makes sense e.g. The police zombie's acid spit could corrode metal and eat away at concrete therefore doing much more damage than a generic zombie hitting it. They could make a tankier zombie that has grown an exoskeleton that would be more capable of breaking larger blocks. There's nothing wrong with making blocks stronger and more realistic, the problem is that this is an area that needs to be dealt with differently rather than just changing block strength.
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[QUOTE=Wyrmholez;131433]I'm not sure you fully understand the concept of TLDR :D[/QUOTE] You are most likely right, I can be a bit clueless about how this shorthand is used. Though I had figured the top part summed up my thoughts fairly quickly. I agree with to much realism being bad, but this seems reasonable at least for zombies. Unalike a living human being, they would use their bodies with no limiters that would prevent damage to themselves. This comes with the advantage of strength, but also damage to bodily tissues. Apparently there will be limb damage in the future, so I assumed one of two possible causes. One with HP (resource intensive), and the other being a random chance (maybe less?). The latter would assume that there was previous, unhealed damage. It would also add an element of randomness and hopefully reduce resource use. I figure a dice roll within a certain percentage is simply another calculation, akin to them choosing to go left or right. [QUOTE=pharen;131472]I think the two problems are[/QUOTE] 1. I agree completely, they should not single out player placed blocks, simply try to get to a sensed player. AI needs, and will most likely will have an overhaul. 2. I also agree that the current state of blocks. We should have to keep an eye out for rare, special zombies that can be detrimental to our base. There should also be counters to those zombies, like coating our base in baking soda (disables acid). Counters should be time and resource consuming, and/or be rare.
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TL;DR = Too Long; Didn't Read. So as the OP...heh it is kind of funny. I do agree that for most blocks a zombie would take significant damage from just trying to tear down a wood wall. Flesh and Bone are not all that useful. Zombies could of course evolve claws or exoskeletons on their finger tips...like what the spider looks to have. But harder materials would need more dangerous zombies. I do agree that basic shamblers should be no threat to most buildings. But after some time bigger threats should come out of the woodwork.
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[QUOTE=SyberSmoke;131527]TL;DR = Too Long; Didn't Read. So as the OP...heh it is kind of funny.[/QUOTE] Never hurts to make people laugh, even if not intended. :) Evolving/rare zombies would be interesting. It is actually an idea I had for a video game, but that is beside the point. I think the bigger threat will come with bandits, since they should be more intelligent than zombies. They should also be much more heavily armed and armored. So, while zombies should be an early game threat, bandits will be a late game threat. Well, unless they add a military cleansing team to the mix, then our goose would be well an truly cooked. For now at least, MM has confirmed the presence of bandits some time later.
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