Higher Difficulties

[velrac]

Has anyone else felt that on the higher difficulties from Survival and up that it's actually a detriment to have more players in the group?
The increase in health from the extra players really causes the traps to start to become much less effective. Also with extra players the 2 Heavy Bosses at every POI really slows things down. We spend many game hours just clearing a area just to loot, that we are falling behind in hours to actually loot. This in turns causes us to build much slower because we run out of time to scavenge.

[SleepyEyez]

Adopt trap combat with dedicated roles.

Trap Combat
A simple mobile kill zone is comprised of cutters surrounding a bait trap on a very low foundation for forcing crawlers onto a higher ground to get hit by cutters. Build cutters before building the foundation because this game's building priority is such that if built last, foundations can overlap cutters. A staircase with a bridge may be needed for repairing the bait from above.

Some materials such as ropes, large meat cuts, and intestines will be lost when a mobile kill zone is moved, so in a different perspective, those materials are ammo for trap combat.

Dedicated Roles
The one with Demolitionist perks sets up, babysits, and rebuilds the mobile kill zone,

The one with Porter + Scavenger perks pulls zombies to the mobile kill zone and then loots.

The puller, when finishes pulling inside a building, communicates with the re-builder so he/she knows when the last batch of zombies is coming so as to move the kill zone to the next area while the puller loots.

An experienced re-builder is one who knows the map well so as to set up the bait that can pull as many zombies as possible, or just enough so that the bait won't lose hp too quickly in order to save small meat cuts.

Ammo
Large meat cuts, intestines, and small meat cuts are easily farm-able by using the trick to reset an Animal Spawner as long as there're no other players near that spawner.

To min-max animal traps for meat production, force parallel spawning instead of sequential.

Small animal traps have a suppression radius of around 30 units, which stops other small traps in range from parallel production, and causes them to spawn animals sequentially one by one. Leave a space of 30 units between one another.

For medium animal traps, the suppression radius is 50 units.

Small animal traps don't suppress medium traps and vice versa, so these 2 types of traps can be placed next to each other.

Since the difficulty is Survival, a Veteran Demolitionist can spend leaves to rebuild animal traps instead of reloading them with seeds and small meat cuts.

As for ropes, lumbers, planks, and rebars, they can be obtained on site from loot boxes, wooden boxes, and fridges. Or build workbenches to make them on site instead of going back to the base and then demolish them when done.

[velrac]

SleepyEyez thank you for replying.
We used the trap pulling method when clearing the research center. Once we had that book then we switched to clearing with the flame thrower. Found that is much faster and don't lose materials from having to break down the traps. I used shredders instead of cutters. Cutters don't seem very good unless upgraded and hook to electricity.
The issue is the huge 40% increase to the health of the heavy zombies. You really see the difference going from Hard to Survival difficulty. Each heavy zombie takes a average of 70-80 crossbow bolts(retrieved from the corpse, not fired) along with setting them on fire. I don't think your ment to have to set up several traps at every intersection just to be able to clear the area and then break down and move 200' down the road to set up another kill zone. That I feel is going to take longer then just setting them on fire and gunning them down. Perhaps it would be a good feature that the zombies health starts off at a lower amount and increases as each day goes by until say day 10 they reach their current health level.

For the say first 10 days while trying to funnel all research notes into 1 player to get up to the research needed for the plasma shocker,and heavy range weapons like mortar, MRL, and the rail gun. This doesn't leave much research to go around let alone getting veteran demo as a high priority especially when at least I feel you save more resources going for master builder than veteran demo. That is until you have your base set up of course.

We never have a issue with getting meat, have 10 small animal traps and 5 medium traps set up and every time we return to base almost every one has a animal. Sure stags are a rarity for us, but we don't have the time to run back and forth over a map area just in the hopes of spawning a single stag.Sure once the base is set up we would have more time to actively hunt stags and bears when needed.

[SleepyEyez]

Nice to know that you're rushing for plasma shockers and MRL.

About the research data predicament, there're a few loot boxes that can be grabbed through windows from outside without engaging in combat, but those require memorization.

There is a speedrun technique - robbing, which requires practices and also memorization. Robbing is a hit-n-run method for loot boxes by pressing F, T, ESC with CloseUIWhenAttacked disabled in the UI settings, and then run away.

With Marathoner perk and some maneuverability practices, on Survival, one can get away with speedrun-robbing these places in the city (from north to south):
- oil company (4 boxes)
- pharmacy (1 box)
- super market (4 boxes)
- the shop south of the super market (1 box)
- 2 adjacent shops north of the church (1 box each)
- liquor store (1 box)
- 2 warehouses on the west edge of the city (one with 3 boxes, the other with 1)
- white house for sale south of the church (1 at garage; 1 behind a tree on 2nd floor)
- ReadHead Rooster (1 box)
- optics shop at the south exit of subway (1 box)
- subway (15 boxes and headset, the quest item)
- reception desk on the 4th floor of the hospital (2 boxes)
- reception desk on the 3rd floor of the hospital (1 box and book)
- black building with floor windows, west of hospital, south of police station (1 box)

Outside of the city:
- south gas company where exploders are (3 boxes)
- the blue shack east of that gas company (1 box)
- the house east of that shack (1 box grabbed through window from outside)
- all open shacks in green (1 green box each)
- all greenhouses in white (1 green box each)
There're a lot more places for robbing but it's hard to describe them all so I will just end here.

The school (7 boxes), Knucks convenient store (2 boxes), south gas station (2 boxes), and the southwest factory (26 boxes and morse code machine) can also be robbed on Survival but a lot more practices are needed to get out of there alive.

The higher the difficulty, the more efficient time management needs to be. In another word, the game becomes a speedrun, which involves glitches and exploits. Discussing them is against forum rules and also offends PvPers. What I can say about how powerful glitches and exploits are is that it's totally feasible to get at least 1k research data and also set up a working defense before the 1st wave starts in a solo 1300% game.

Understandably, the game's higher difficulty practically turning into a speedrun may displease some people. If the game parameters are unreasonable for you, I'd recommend leaving a post on the Game Suggestions forum, since that's where devs visit.

[velrac]

Wow that is a lot of great detailed info!
We have been trying the smash n grab method. Did the sneak in through the back door of the school to run in and grab the book and also just run up the stairs to the reception desk in the hospital. It really does feel like we are going to have to adapt our play style more towards a speed run mentality instead of needing to eliminate all the zombies in the area before looting.
Hate to hear that the even higher difficulties require exploits and glitches to even succeed. Hopefully the devs will smooth out the game play as early access continues. You shouldn't have to use cheats to do a play through no matter the difficulty setting.

[SleepyEyez]

The devs have been tweaking speedrun in such a way that it could be incorporated as a legit strat in PvE. It used to be mostly employed by speedrunners and competitive players (PvP and public PvE).

For example, Marathoner perk used to be the only speed booster and cost a lot like 250 iirc, and then it got split into 3 perks and now costs 175 in total, albeit the combined perks don't substantially render more speed increase than the old Marathoner. Moreover, almost all world zombies used to be able to catch Marathoners on Survival difficulty and above, and robbing was only viable on Hard and below. The recent world zombie speed reduction gives Marathoners a chance to escape, making robbing more viable across all difficulties.

However, day 0 main quest speedrun has been nerfed. The materials needed for basic workbenches has been increased. Day 0 is shortened by 5 hours. Craftable quest items are locked behind books and multiple perks, which require more research data and more times of re-speccing.

As for speedrun glitches, some got fixed, some survived since the very first day of game release, and some new ones came with new patches. The devs have to either cater to the PvP community or the speedrun community. Now that someone has showcased one of the 1300% speedrun exploits for skipping a major part of the game on YouTube, let's see what devs will do about this one. I'm leaning towards the same fate as subway mining.