Few ideas to make the late game more challenging

[Mr.White]

I will get straight to the point. For me, the biggest problem with the dificulty right now is the fact, that the game rarely tries to actively hurt you. You get some quite dangerous events at the begining of the game, like the helicopter. However, there are no such events in the late game. True, you get the ocasional dog barking or someone screaming / shooting, but nothing as dangerous as the helicopter.  And even if you set the helicopter event to hapen more than once, it still won't attract any zombies if you are at the "wrong" place.

 

Another problem. Living in the wildernes is really boring and pretty easy. Food is easy to farm, building resourcess are everywhere and most importantly, zombies never come after you. In my latest game, I went to the top of the map (small settlement with two houses, gunshop and gas station) and I spent like a ingame month there. No zombies. Not even when I arived (this is most likely a bug). The game becomes very easy if you know what you are doing and there are no suprises. These ideas could fix that. Atleast a bit.

 

1.) Spawning zombies towards player location

Simple. If player spends like five days without leaving his home location, spawn small number of zombies heading to this location. They will not know the player is there, but they will most likely start bumping into obstacles causing damage. This will not only force players to never let their guard down, but will also make forest forts usefull since now zombies will actualy attack you on their own. The number of attacking zombies should increase with time.

 

Moving around the map should reset this timer since moving around is usualy dangerous in it self.

Could be implemented into the base game or as a sandbox option.

 

2.) Zombies getting stronger with time

This could make for a perfect sandbox option.

Right now, you can set zombies to get weaker as the time goes on. But I think making them stronger and faster would make more sence from the gameplay perspective.

At the beginning of the game, zombies will shamble as die easily. As the time passes, they will become faster and stronger. At first, you will see one or two zombies shambling faster / taking more hits. Weeks later, you might come across a two to five sprinting zombies. Months later, 50% of all zombies will sprint and take a more damage to kill.

 

With the option n1, this could make long term survival much harder and engaging since now you will have to do more than just eat, water crops, refil generator, build something and sleep.

 

I don't think these are imposibly hard or time consuming features to implement. What do you guys think?

[junglistjim]

i like your first option - but not too keen personally for the second.

i dont like the way that z's dont seem to come into your area after a while - its like they are just waiting at the edges - but i suspect thats due to how many cells are actually active.

 

i think there should be a later game event - maybe after a month - of a horde

there may even be that in MP i only play SP - but it would be cool if a massive herd of z's appeared in each major town and just cut through it in one direction.

for horde i mean like 1,000 z's all going in the same direction.

 

its early and im not sure i am spelling horde right - it doesnt look right - meh need a cup o tea

Edited June 6, 2018 by junglistjim
changed herd to horde - still looks funny

[Kurogo]

Some more metaevents would be neat, but this sounds more like you could use a peek at sandbox settings. Zombie spawning, migration, density....these are all things you can already adjust in sandbox.

 

I'm not too keen on them getting stronger over time though. Logically, they'd be getting weaker as they continued to decay and be subjected to the elements.

Edited June 10, 2018 by Kurogo

[Ayrton Orio]

On 06/06/2018 at 8:54 AM, junglistjim said:

i think there should be a later game event - maybe after a month - of a horde

 

For me that's the only real option, because even if you had stronger zombies, around the mid to end game, you are supposed to have a confortable stock of weapons and ammos, so it would not be too hard to kill them anyway (unless you make them reallllly resistant, in which case it would be silly imo)

The horde would be a good justification for stockpiling ammos, and gathering npcs, and it would possibly destroy your base. Or at the very least turn it to shit for a while. 

I don't know if the new animation update will enable fill screening hordes though.

[Ayrton Orio]

Actually now I think about it, you could simply simulate zombies starving, and as a result boosting their detection senses over time (like radius of detection getting larger, or chances of aggro increased), which, I guess, would organically form hords. I would actually decrease their resistance over time in addition to that (as the general lore says)

 

[Gennadios]

In terms of few zombies in the wilderness, I had an idea on the topic for a while but never brought it up 'cause I'm not usually active on the boards, but;

 

I *severely* dislike the way the game hamstrings itself in the long term with initial infection/first week/six months later scenario selection. I always thought the game should organically progress, with the game starting out with high densities of zomboids in the populated areas, and then have the density map equalize over time to model zombies migrating in all directions.

 

Basically, over time zombie density in populated areas should a  go down a bit as they lose whatever memory/instinctive connection they had to populated areas, while at the same time increasing zombie density in previously unpopulated area to simulate them randomly wandering in all directions for however many months.