Some Feedback on Base Design (quite long)

[Mezameru]

My primary complaint of A17 is base building. This stems from a few points. First I'd like to establish what I want my base to accomplish in 7d2d. It should allow me to: store my loot, process my goodies in forges, chemlabs, and other crafting tables, assist me in defending from hordes, fend off smaller attacks without my concern or presence, eventually store my vehicles, and be relatively convenient to enter/exit. It should require some degree of maintenance, but that maintenance should be reasonable and not require me to devote 100% of my time to upkeep.

 

A16 accomplished this, but nonetheless was almost too easy. A pitfall with spikes and it was over. I found myself living a box that was flush with the surface in the bottom of an area until I could build 'pretty much' the same base defense as before and then the game was over. A few metal nodes per 7 days was really all it took to maintain it. Log spikes were fairly durable, but still broke during hordes, defenses often required other measures like adding in shotgun traps activated by a switch. The game grew stale, but at least the system worked and was reasonable. Enter Alpha 17.

 

A17 did a number of things but almost all my complaints stem from one major change: Zombie AI. As someone else put it, zombies now all appear to hold M.S. in Structural Engineering. I believe someone explained their AI as the weakest link goes first, and my experiences thus far have concurred with that. Therefore in any base the entrance I use will always be the weak link. We used to circumvent this to some extent by using some creative methods to enter our walls, e.g. long tunnels going way out of zombies range with a hatch, or a stairs-like system that aided us in jumping over our defenses in and out of our base. These are no longer viable, zombies now have wings and if there is a tunnel leading straight to you they will tear into it. Unless I am overlooking a possibility I see two methods to deal with this in A17.

 

1) I acknowledge my base will have a weakness except on horde nights, which I build up just before horde night and tear down just after. In other words, I seal up my entrance like the rest of my defenses just before horde night. This leaves my base exposed when I am not around, and it also leave the possibility of zombies entering my base while I am crafting etc...not acceptable IMO and fails a number of my criteria for a base.

 

2) I use defenses which will activate for zombies, but not for players. Not much to say here, good luck keeping enough ammo in those turrets. This also fails one of my requirements, I do not want to have to farm coal and nitrate 24/7 effectively bringing my game to a stop.

 

A great professor of mine once told me not to bring a complaint without a solution, otherwise it's just ♥♥♥♥♥ing. Therefore, here is one possibility for each of the above.

 

1) Implement some kind of mechanisms that will affect zeds and not players that do not require 5000 9mm bullets/horde night. Some examples are the primitive traps in The Forest. Not saying those are great, but it's a concept, you go from there.

 

2) Implement some kind of door/drawbridge that is invincible, or otherwise zombie 'immune' limited to one per claim block/player to avoid exploitation. I believe land claim blocks are already limited to one per base/player anyway. There must be a way to accomplish this. This would force zombies to ignore that as a point of entry focusing them on the rest of the defenses which would ideally be 'roughly balanced'.

 

Some quick other things I've noticed...metal spikes don't replace log spikes, we have no low-tech semi-renewable reliable method of killing zeds and the early weapons don't kill them fast enough to keep up with even the smallest horde count (4). Based on the different forums and reddits posts most players are losing all the early hordes. In fact I don't think I've seen a single success story. My 'success' story involved building bridges between buildings and running like a madman til daytime.

 

The removal of item growth between ranks sans durability has made gathering laboriously slow. Even with maxed perks and 6-rank (lul) steel tools, farming is slow. We need to gather a LOT more than before to accomplish the same, so why do we gather at less than half the rate, even when maxed.

 

Forge level 20, beating a dead horse.

 

The solutions to these problems are pretty straightforward. Give us back these features/items or give us a viable alternative.

 

I am ignoring glitches, e.g. melee swinging twice. These will be fixed given time, the rest is simply my feedback on design choices.

 

I realize it's experimental, and features are broken/need improvement, why else would I write all this? ;P

 

<3 7D2D