Adjusting Gamestage

[dcsobral]

I've worked out a spreadsheet that will help estimate gamestage given a configuration. Gamestage is used in zombie spawning, so having a good grip on it let you adjust enemies accordingly.

 

The spreadsheet is at http://bit.ly/2GeVw2A, and it's a Google Docs Spreadsheet. It's view-only, so you won't be able to enter any values in it, but you should be able to make a copy and edit that to your heart's content (if you can't, please reply saying so).

 

There are two tabs in it. The first tab is intended to be modified in specific places, and the second tab shows vanilla stats.

 

On the first tab, there are two sets of values to be modified. The first is the configuration, found in gamestages.xml. The second are three fields which help auto-compute the gamestage at various days: levels/day, Deaths/Day and difficulty. So, for example, if you set levels/day to 2 and Deaths/day to 0.1, then the data will assume you gained two levels every day, and died once every ten days, and, then, the gamestage will be shown assuming all these days were spent at the same difficult.

 

If you want to compare the results against specific data, then change day, level and days alive to correspond to actual data -- you'll need to compute days alive yourself, but subtracting daysAliveChangeWhenKilled times number of deaths from the current day, minus one.

 

For example, say I'm at level 94, day 106, three deaths, vanilla settings. Then I'd just overwrite one of the entries with day 106, level 94, and days alive 87: day 94 minus 1 (because days alive is only counted at midnight) minus 2 (vanilla settings) times 3 (number of deaths).

 

I have verified the spreadsheet using settings different than vanilla, and alternately leveling up and advancing time to before midnight to roll over a new day, and checking gamestage before and after each of these changes.

 

So what about multiplayer servers? I don't know. The gamestage *for horde purposes* is computed in a different manner, taking into account the gamestage of "nearby" players. I don't know how the group of players is computed, but there's a very clear description of how the computation goes. I don't know if it matters when multiple persons are, say, entering a building and causing it to spawn sleepers. Also, *days alive* is problematic on servers. From my single player testing, I suspect days alive will increase if you are logged in at midnight, otherwise it won't, which, if true, makes gamestage cheating possible to some extent.

 

Final note: according to the doc in gamestages.xml, the only factors to gamestage are: player level, days alive, deaths and difficulty. Number of zombies killed is not a factor. I have not experimented with zombie kills to see if it is a factor or not, though, trusting the docs to be correct. If it is a factor, then at least my spreadsheet is good for zero zombie kills.

[backdownhipi]

great info. best part, where you realize its possible all your calculations have been calculated wrong from the start. I've been there, good times...