Current issues with the game

[Miz]

These are just my personal thoughts so far and this will be divided into a few categories.

-Controls-
Why are F1 - F3 use for speed control instead of 1-3, as the default? There doesn't seem to be anything, by default, assigned to 1-3, and it'd be much more intuitive with other 'city builder' games to have speed controls be 1-3.

Marking to gather resources should have hot keys, and an option for 'gather all' as well.

Marking to cancel builds needs hotkey options.

'Building' buildings needs hotkey options.

I'm finding when trying to clear buildings, that there is a 'delay' time between entering a building and engaging the infected and the squad being able to accept a command to leave the building, is this intentional or not as it makes building clear when you gent absurdly huge for early day hordes frustrating (seriously, day 3 and max size infected squad with infected set to the lowest setting)

-Buildings-
Buildings only let squads inside them shoot around the 'door' and you can't have more than one 'door' to a building, this makes defending large buildings or HQ difficult even with 2+ squads stationed in it, and I'd think the survivors would understand the importance of 'shooting ports', not to mention the importance of having multiple exits in the case of an emergency.

Marking to 'tear down' the abandonded (and basically useless) buildings is tedious if you get unlucky and thers alot of them in a small area, give us a 'tear down mode' that lets us flag multiple buildings.

Farm Plots cannot be built on pavement despite all the plants growing through it, give an option for this even if it requires either longer to build the field, or, the first 'harvest' is massively nerfed to represent planting mostly 'cover' plants to till into the soil (kind of like leaving a field fallow to regenerate some)

Metal Towers don't count for the 'build a watch tower' quest, so, if you have more metal than wood, you still gotta waste the wood.

Guns should be able to be kept in towers even if we change what weapons they are using to conserve ammo.

Large buildings at start, if used as the HQ, seem to not be able to be fully utilized, or bug out the 'make shelters' quest if you increase the amount of utilization.

-Misc Issues-
In the first week, with law spawn rates on both people and infected, I've seen no people, but no less than a dozen different infected squads, one of which was max people, and even attacked by a 'horde' of 4 different squads varying in amount from 1/3 to 2/3 strength. If not for car smooshing them, due to the 'only shoot from door' issue mentioned above, I'd have been taken out by them. There needs to be a 'cap' on infected squad size based on the armaments and squad count the player has access too.

Infected human squads should carry some types of supplies on them, not a huge amount, just a few items at most to show 'hey, this one had a backpack' or the like, otherwise, they're just naked people who are sick.

Civilians should be capable of defending buildings they are in since they are capable of manning towers. If getting big buildings set up is gonna cost an arm and a leg, let us make them into fortresses.

Option to zoom out more or search for city names when starting to generate a map.

Remove county lines, only keep state/country lines when selecting start locations.

Ability to plant trees, or, let hardware store locations carry resources like wood and metal otherwise those are irreplaceable materiel leaving to a hard lockout cap in various situations, honestly same could be said for brick.

Non maned building should be ignored unless there is no other way to get to survivors that have been detected by the infected.

Option to assign a squad to use a given vehicle always, mostly this is an issue after dropping off alot of things at HQ if it's a 'multiple trips, situation.

UI should show us currently available pop/total pop some where so that it's easy to see if there's enough people to start, or reinforce, a squad.

On return to HQ, squads should have a setting to heal or use x% of a medkit if they've been damaged that much instead of causing a manual need to apply healing if folks don't want to wait 10 years


-Thats it for now, I'll post more thoughts as they come up

[Rider]

Number keys can be assigned to squads, by pressing ctrl + number when a squad is chosen.
Delay on squads losing HP in buildings with the infected is intended, so the player has time to react, they can be really deadly. As for the other suggestions, thanks a lot! We'll discuss them with the team.

[Miz]

Originally posted by Rider:

Number keys can be assigned to squads, by pressing ctrl + number when a squad is chosen.
Delay on squads losing HP in buildings with the infected is intended, so the player has time to react, they can be really deadly. As for the other suggestions, thanks a lot! We'll discuss them with the team.

It's not a delay on taking damage that I've experienced but a kind of cooldown delay between them entering and being able to exit the building.

Squads with hot keys is a nifty thing to know but this doesn't feel like it's meant to be super heavy on coordinating assaults or the like so I'm not sure at the moment if thats going to be useful

[Vash the Stampede]

Saw a recent review of the zombies phasing through the walls, I've also had this issue where they will randomly just poof inside. It only happened I believe twice so far to myself in the amount of hours I've played. Otherwise I've been enjoying learning the game and figuring out the systems in place. Good game. especially with the response's and feedback to the community.

refreshing to see. Thank you for your for your time.

[Miz]

So, after playing a bit more, some more feedback!

Defensive structures, in general, are a bit prohibitively priced early on if you didn't spawn with alot of trees in the map.

Bricks, I see why every one complains about them now. Instead of the current walls and towers system, I'd recommend changing to a 'tiers of material x' so, start with 'shoddy' wooden/metal/brick defensive structure options, then research to be able to upgrade those into better constructed versions, and, instead of needing wood for all of them, allow the choice of wood, or metal for 'structural support' thus giving metropolitan area players better metal utilization.

Workers walk extremely slowly when 'empty handed', making travel times too/from work problematic, and causing issues since you can't tell people which shelter building to use, perhaps increase the movement speed of workers.

Scavengers (for tear down of wood/metal/bricks/buildings/etc) should use the squad mechanic as well so we can put them in vehicles, and be able to tell them what resources we want them gathering right now more directly

Raider 'capture the squad' event feels pretty bad right now, there's no indication, or way to know, and, your guys can't fight back at all, so it's basically just 'hope you have a spare squad or mess up your labor force to get them back'. This even happened with a building that was in 'visual range' of my hq but that I hadn't searched right away as the 'school' was way far away.

Raider spawns, much like infected spawns, are too high. I'm on minimum population setting and within 2 weeks I've killed more infected than the population I started with, and half as many raiders.

Police stations should also have shotguns and scoped rifles as police do use both of those as well.

Sporting Goods stores should be added, which would carry just, a grab bag of most supplies outside farming/construction materials.

Cook House should have the option to use fuel for cooking or if not, then add in 'cooking fuel' specifically (could be propane tanks even)

Temperature doesn't make sense to season. Even if I set my start point in Anchorage AK, it shouldn't be below freezing in June.

Buildings should take into account number of stories for 'available space' otherwise why even render multistory structures?

Soil fertility for a region should be taken into account. Places like the 'Black Hills' in the Dakotas are renowned for the fertility of their soil. I grew one pumpkin plant there and by harvest time, that one plant had taken over my entire back yard, Rhubarb can grow over 7ft tall there too!

Fishing should be a food production option as well.

Shotguns tooltip says they are slow to load/shoot and close range, real life shotguns aren't that slow to load, and, have a lethal range of 100yards (football field) reliably while using 00 buck (which is what 99.99% of games have them loaded with) The major factor is the size or the rounds, or in some cases, magazines compared to rifle and pistol cartridges, and while yes, magazine fed weapons are faster to reload than a shotgun tube, when you are out of loaded magazines you can't really use the weapon effectively where as shotguns mitigate this issue.

Fresh food should have a positive effect on mood.

Canned foods should be able to be 'cooked' and mixed with fresh ingredients in a pinch to help preserve canned food stocks.

Should be able to tell people not to eat canned food if fresh is available.

Cook Houses should produce significantly more food at once. This isn't gormet catered meals, it's soup/porridge/grilled meat, really basic stuff. Heck, even making a fancy cream soup from scratch from 8+ different ingredients, I can, on my own in a small kitchen, make 8 servings in 2 hours, and that's with prep time and taking into account the vegies are roasted prior to soupening and then being creamed in a blender.

Why are gas stations apartment buildings?

Usable vehicles feel quite rare for how necessary they are, perhaps have players spawn with a 'dinky' vehicle, where it has only half, or even just 1/3rd the capacity of a sedan.

Tech tree should allow for researching better equipment, such as the ability to make armors, cold/hot weather gear, backpacks, wheelbarrows, etc to let squads/workers/various professions haul/carry/do more.

Squads should accumulate exp for various tasks, like searching, killing infected, or killing raiders (heck, or hunting animals if that ever becomes an option) which makes them better at that task after they accumulate enough. This could mean faster, more accurate, or longer range shooting, faster search times or finding more loot, etc to encourage people to keep squads alive and utilized as much as possible.

After a set period of time inside the HQ squad members should automatically use medical supplies if they have more than 20% of their health missing.

I wish farms weren't a 'paint and place' tile, but a 'designate a zone stretch box, like you do for harvesting wood/metal/bricks.

Barn shows chickens, with this being the case, let us convert the tiny, otherwise unusable 1 wood, 1 metal, 1 brick structures that dot some maps as chicken coops to produce eggs/meat.

Crop grown seems to only be wheat, we should get the option to choose or set a rotation to maximize yields and ensure we don't deplete the soil.

Sewer main lines would really be the only areas infested could travel through the sewer system, the pipes from/too buildings are only a few inches in diameter so some events don't make sense (like the child infected escaping from searched home directly into the sewers, it'd need to run to the roadway first, and even then that's only for larger population centers)

end of additional feedback