POI Threat Levels

[prkchpsyring]

Hello everyone,

 

Coming off a hiatus and am new to the threat levels on POIs. Question, is it three skulls and above that you can expect to have the orange glowing eyed/enraged zombies or do they exist in the lower threat ones too? Asking this after dying to an enraged zombie in a 3 skull POI on my Ironman SP game. 🙃

[Rotor]

I want to say I've seen them in Skulls2 PoIs as well, but since I use one of those MODs that removes the skulls, my memory is hazy.

[Vaeliorin]

It's entirely dependent on your gamestage.  If it's high enough, you can find ferals/rads in T1 POIs.  It's just that higher tier POIs increase your gamestage, so you will find tougher zombies before you'd find them wandering the wilderness or in lower tier POIs.

[Riamus]

Generally speaking, the skulls (POI tier + biome modifier) give you an idea of how many zombies you can expect to fight at any given time.  For example, a tier 1 will usually not have you fighting more than 2-3 zombies at a time unless you trigger more of them, such as by running past a bunch of zombies before killing each group.  And a tier 5 might have you fighting 8-10 or something like that in certain parts of the POI.

 

However, the tier does impact your game stage as mentioned above and game stage is what determines the type of zombies you encounter (other than in cases where a specific zombie is placed in a POI).

[zztong]

On 12/5/2023 at 8:57 AM, prkchpsyring said:

Hello everyone,

 

Coming off a hiatus and am new to the threat levels on POIs. Question, is it three skulls and above that you can expect to have the orange glowing eyed/enraged zombies or do they exist in the lower threat ones too? Asking this after dying to an enraged zombie in a 3 skull POI on my Ironman SP game. 🙃

 

The threat level is the Tier of the POI. The Tier of the POI is set manually by the POI developer. I'm sure TFP has guidance on what they expect out of each Tier. Groups like the CompoPack have guidance as well. Independent designers could fill a Tier 1 with 100 irradiated bosses if they wanted to.

 

In general, a "zombie volume" (part of a POI that has associated zombies) is set to a value that will scale with your game stage. It is possible for a POI designer to choose a value that mandates a tougher zombie, even a specific type of zombie. You're more likely to see that at Tier 5, some Tier 4, and I'd be surprised to see it at Tier 3, but that's just my opinion and it would be easy to prove me wrong.

 

If you really want to know what kind of challenge you faced you can bring up the POI in the Prefab Editor and examine the zombie volumes. Or, if you caught me on Discord at a time I wasn't busy, I'd be happy to look and tell you what I find. I'd even share my screen so you could see.

Edited December 6, 2023 by zztong (see edit history)