cephalo

Thanks! Did not know that. One thing I want to add is that loot is so important that it makes the 'lucky' skill almost obligatory. Without it, I would be coming up with almost nothing house after house except for maybe enough food to get to the next house. With it, the game was much easier.

At a certain point, the number of zombies doesn't matter anymore. You can learn to maneuver the hordes and burn them or whatever. It takes a bit of practice, but once you lose your fear of the zombies, you can toy with even large hordes.

Well... why can't I drag logs around with sheets?

I'm sure you want player mistakes to be related to the zombie apocalypse, and not to the games interface. This is an interface issue. You have to capture the users intent. A survivor might make too much noise and die from it, but he's not going to absent mindedly make things out of materials he needs for other things.

Let me clarify what I mean. Log walls require logs and either of ripped sheets, twine, or rope. Ripped sheets are practically free. You never want to build a log wall with anything else. Ropes are rare. You never want to build a log wall with ropes. Twine is an acceptable alternative to ripped sheets because they aren't required to be in your inventory when working with logs. Rope however, is necessary to haul logs efficiently, so they are always in your inventory when making a log wall, putting them at great risk of being consumed. The issue is that the user interface is tricking the player into making a potentially catastrophic decision. Going back into town for more ropes is life threatening, but the alternative is to haul logs one by one, which is four times the amount of the players real life time. It presents a 'quality of life' problem for the user. Here's how it went down: I chopped my trees, made log bundles to move the logs to the construction area, dropped the logs where the walls will be placed. Selected the 'build' context menu to build a log wall. Since my materials are all accessible, I can build 3 wall sections from the same standing location. When finished building 3 walls. Ropes are gone! I could swear I had plenty of ripped sheets in my inventory but they might have been in my backpack. I'm not sure exactly why the ropes were consumed but they were. My suggestion is to remove 'ropes' specifically from the options to make a log wall. Ripped sheets and twine should stay in the recipe. An alternative would be to allow ripped sheets to make log bundles, but that suggestion makes ropes useless.

Rope is hard to come by, and is crucial for carrying logs. When you are building log walls, it is too easy to accidently consume them if your ripped sheets get low or are in the wrong container. I've done this twice already and it's extremely aggravating to suddenly quadruple the amount of hauling that needs to be done because you lost your ropes. Can I get them back if I destroy the wall? When you build log walls you need lots of logs, that means ropes. It's a dangerous combination.

I had never heard of this game until I read an article on 'behavior trees' (great article btw). It's a great game and needs more press. However, there's nothing like 'other people' to ruin a fine game. MP in most games too often devolves into players having fun by trying to ruin the fun.