Balanced system to control spawning

[Brian9824]

I've seen a lot of suggestions with crazy stuff like gutting the entire land claim block system in order to allow people to secure huge areas of land and I figuired i'd post a much more balanced, reasonable option, thats expandable and doesn't allow people to claim huge chunks of land with no upkeep or maintenance.

 

Allow the crafting of an item that when fueled with gas emits a ultra sonic frequency that stops enemies from respawning in X radius. It uses a large amount of gas and needs to constantly run in order to be effective. Multiples of these items can be scattered around the area you wish to protect allowing you to scale it as much as you want with the trade off being that you have to maintain a sufficient supply of gas. It can even take durability damage over time and require more components to repair. Perhaps the radius shrinks as it gets damaged?

 

This has several benefits.

 

1. It's scalable. A single person can run 1-2 to protect their base, and an entire group could run 10-20 to protect an entire city if they wanted to devote the time in making enough gas and keeping it running.

2. It can be expanded when NPC's and Bandits are out. Imagine having these in their settlements protecting them.

3. It can tie into quests. Bandits could give you a quest to go to a settlement and destroy their emitters protecting the colony, or you could sneak into a bandit base and destroy theirs opening their base to zombie attacks. Over time zombies might fully over run their base and kill them all.

4. It's balanced. The reward is great, but its not free and takes work to maintain. The bedroll still provides your small area of protection, but to truly be secure these would need to be crafted.

5. For pvp these could even be important targets as once they are destroyed someones base is vulnerable to zombie attacks.

[Jost Amman]

Honestly it sounds too "techy" for my taste, I'd rather have some chemical repellent that you need to spray on the ground to mark your perimeter... but the basic idea of a way to expand the no-spawn area could be worked on and could be useful.

 

One of the faults in your implementation would be that if you build a base (e.g.) in the desert, where oil shale is abundant, or near a city with many cars to loot, you won't ever have to worry about fueling your protection field again... any idea how to solve this?

 

Otherwise a chemical repellent could be more balanced IMO. :-]

[Brian9824]

Honestly it sounds too "techy" for my taste, I'd rather have some chemical repellent that you need to spray on the ground to mark your perimeter... but the basic idea of a way to expand the no-spawn area could be worked on and could be useful.

 

One of the faults in your implementation would be that if you build a base (e.g.) in the desert, where oil shale is abundant, or near a city with many cars to loot, you won't ever have to worry about fueling your protection field again... any idea how to solve this?

 

Otherwise a chemical repellent could be more balanced IMO. :-]

 

I think we all know that gas usage is not balanced at all. I'm not to worried about that as it needs to be balanced for all gas usage items during the beta.

 

Although you could just as easily replace gas usage with a craftable chemical repellent that's loaded into the device and used as "fuel" and accomplish the same thing. Since zombies can smell meat they do have a sense of smell so that makes sense too. Then you remove its reliance on gas, but can still have hefty requirements to craft the repellent and require semi rare loot so it would be hard to keep a lot of them fueled at once.

[Brian9824]

Honestly it sounds too "techy" for my taste, I'd rather have some chemical repellent that you need to spray on the ground to mark your perimeter... but the basic idea of a way to expand the no-spawn area could be worked on and could be useful.

 

One of the faults in your implementation would be that if you build a base (e.g.) in the desert, where oil shale is abundant, or near a city with many cars to loot, you won't ever have to worry about fueling your protection field again... any idea how to solve this?

 

Otherwise a chemical repellent could be more balanced IMO. :-]

 

The more I think about the chemical idea the more I like it. It could even be expanded with a personal reloadable repeller using same chemicals that reduces detectability by zombies so it has multiple uses. Repellant could involve rotten flesh, antibiotics, and other items.

 

It would make antibiotics valuable again. I'm not sure if I'm only one but by mid to end game I'm swimming in way more then I could ever use. Don't think I've ever had to craft one before.

[Jost Amman]

The repellent idea is not even new "per se", I was thinking about something opposite to the "smell lure" used in Left 4 Dead (the one from Valve) where you throw some spray can and all zeds attack the marked infected for some time. :-]

 

Your general idea is actually good for anyone who wants to create an (almost) safe area for the normal week days, so that on-line players could build up small communities in the world with a semblance of how the life was "before"...

 

That could also be applied and introduced in the new NPC communities where you could go to live once you complete some quest.

They could be protected by the same game mechanics, that would be cool. Maybe after you earn their trust they could teach you the secret formula to craft the concoction by yourself with an alchemy lab, I don't know. :-]

[Roland]

Brian and Garit please put each other on ignore. Thank you.