Crackdown Mod: Plan Z Update!

[Finale]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2206322009
Hello heisters! It’s been awhile since an update, hasn’t it? All of us have been caught up in the world events of 2020. It’s been long.

Too long.

It’s time to pull out all the stops with an update that hits everything and everywhere at once. The plan for when all other plans fail. Plan Z.

With the long wait comes a truly massive series of improvements, fixes, and expansions for Crackdown, including many frequently-requested changes.

Some highlights:

• A massive range of improvements to the visual assets of almost every enemy in the game
• Full compatibility with the new Holdout system
• Top-to-bottom enemy and bot AI improvements
• Crackdown Medics now display their AoE heal effect
• The first beta of the player-side rebalance, Total Crackdown. Access it from the mod options menu! Only a handful of mods and skills are changed so far.

We on the Crackdown team thank you all for sticking with us through these dark days. We’ve recruited new team members and are committed to a much more frequent, productive update schedule for the time to come.

NOTE: Crackdown has become too big for the autoupdate system, and must now be manually downloaded from the Crackdown github. It is available at

https://github.com/Crackdown-PD2/deathvox/releases.

Launch site: http://www.crackdownmod.com.
Download the mod at https://github.com/Crackdown-PD2/deathvox/releases.


We're going to continue to expand and adapt the mod based on your opinions- including an optional comprehensive player-side rebalance mod, and other modding functions down the line. While we can't promise to please everyone, we're aiming to give Payday 2 a broad, stable modding base as it begins to near the end of support. Please post here with your questions, or your feedback- we'd love to hear what works and what doesn't.

Major features in the Plan Z Update:

(details in subsequent post)

• Complete reworking of all enemy tactics and AI
  
• New/improved enemy assets on all difficulties
  
• Partial implementation of the Total Crackdown player side rebalance (optional)
  
• Working Zeal Medic AoE healing
  
• System-wide improvements to bot AI
  
• Custom surprise behaviors for all unique boss enemies

Links

Come see what changes were made and read up on Deep Lore at our launch site, http://www.crackdownmod.com.

Tell us about issues and find other players on our Discord:https://discord.gg/dak2zQ2.

Download the mod at https://github.com/Crackdown-PD2/deathvox/releases.

[Finale]

FAQs

What is Crackdown?
Crackdown is a massive, comprehensive rebalance mod for the Death Sentence difficulty. This mod changes enemy assets, AI, stats, spawngroups, and much more, all with gameplay and fun in mind. Many individual changes have been made to make the Crackdown zeal force fight smarter, rather than attacking in an endless wave of damage. For example, Crackdown snipers use tracers instead of lasers, Bulldozers have explosive resistance, and cloakers travel in packs.

The mod also includes heist variants specifically for DS (similar to the old Death Wish heist changes), and a custom heist track, Dead End, by Neppu Tennouboshi.

How hard is Crackdown?
Compared with Death Sentence, individual enemies on Crackdown do less damage over distance and (mostly) have less health- but they come with AI, behavior and distribution changes that make fighting them every bit as hard, with many more "viable" build options available, and with a greater emphasis on co-op play. Most of our test groups find the average Crackdown heist is as hard as, or harder than, Death Sentence, but the difficulty is much less "spammy".

How do I install Crackdown?
You can download the mod from https://github.com/Crackdown-PD2/deathvox/releases. Installation instructions are available on that site. Don’t worry, it’s easy!

Other questions?

A more comprehensive FAQ is on the launch site, www.crackdownmod.com.

We're going to continue to expand and adapt the mod based on your opinions- including rolling out further rebalances for all lower difficulties, an optional comprehensive player-side rebalance mod, and user-friendly modding information down the line. While we can't promise to please everyone, we're hoping to provide Payday 2 with a broad, stable modding base as it begins to near the end of support. Please post here with your questions, or your feedback- we'd love to hear what works and what doesn't.

[Ashley]

I'm happy to pin this due to the huge amount of work and time you guys have put into this! <3 Wonderful and really makes me happy to see people make such impressive things in the community! I'll move it to modding after a short while.

Edit: Just to clarify this isn't Overkill approval or anything official! Just thought this was super cool and people would want to see it!

[Finale]

Thanks Ashley!

[Teacyn]

Congrats on getting this all out! It's been a long road, but it's all coming together.

[76561198255260574]

I wish this mode is not be more zerg police Assault mode infinite assault.
I feel fear for a new A.I., but hope for this mod. to be a test for fix that.

[Teacyn]

Originally posted by darwinmpn:

I wish this mode is not be more zerg police Assault mode infinite assault.
I feel fear for a new A.I., but hope for this mod. to be a test for fix that.

We've done our best to resolve the common issues people have with the seemingly infinite assaults without compromising difficulty. It's a very fine balance line!

[Finale]

Crackdown has a spawncap of 50 compared with the death sentence cap of 108, if that helps put things in perspective.

[Reno]

What the deathvox! this is clearly the biggest cheat since buccaneers bounty!!!

[G4T0]

AWESOME WORK

[Red]

We just had a guy designated as the flashbang thrower throw one while he was being taken as a hostage (Not desync related I assume since the host himself saw that happen).

Also the cloaker can kick the last man standing, that was ehhhh... Unexpected... And kinda meh for a mod that's supposed to rebalance things up to be more fair.

EDIT: The grenadier is a big F U to dodge players, making an already niche build even less useful. Also bots die REALLY quick, especially if the grenadier is anywhere close.

[Finale]

Red, regarding your issues:

1. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "being taken as a hostage". Coule you rephrase this a bit?

2. Cloakers able to kick last man standing is intentional. They also spawn in groups! Bear in mind the mod in its current form is intended to replace Death Sentence.

3. The Grenadier hasn't been an issue for dodge players in most of our testing- so long as the dodge player doesn't sit in the gascloud. The unit is specifically intended to discourage camping, especially with more mobile builds.

4. We're currently looking into the causes of increased bot squishiness, and will release a hotfix (via the automatic update system, how convenient!) as soon as we determine the cause. Right now it appears the bot invulnerability period between hits isn't triggering.

[Red]

Originally posted by Finale:

1. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "being taken as a hostage". Coule you rephrase this a bit?

We surrounded an enemy unit and while he was handcuffed (You know, in that state where you can then convert him if you have the skill) he suddenly threw a flashbang, as if he was ignoring his current state.

Originally posted by Finale:

2. Cloakers able to kick last man standing is intentional. They also spawn in groups! Bear in mind the mod in its current form is intended to replace Death Sentence.

I like them being far more present and them spawning in groups of 3 but them being unable to kick the last man standing is one of the few things I've always liked about OVK's original design. It's not a big deal but it feels like a regression here.

Originally posted by Finale:

3. The Grenadier hasn't been an issue for dodge players in most of our testing- so long as the dodge player doesn't sit in the gascloud. The unit is specifically intended to discourage camping, especially with more mobile builds.

There are particular builds, especially the more risky ones, where a surprise gas grenade out of nowhere is just going to end you no matter what, pretty similar to the "Out of your control" loses you mention that happen in DS and that no one likes. I would've liked it more if the damage exponentially increased the more you were inside of the gas' range so certain builds don't immediately lose their armor on the first hit but I don't know how plausible that is via mods.

They're also a very cool mechanic to prevent camping... But I've seen one too many times where they're just randomly thrown with no regard of how it might affect the heist, even if you're not actually camping to begin with. In fact, most of the times my friend and I decided to camp we barely seen a gas grenade happening.

Eh, not a big deal I guess, beats the cops not having falloff damage in the original thing

Originally posted by Finale:

4. We're currently looking into the causes of increased bot squishiness, and will release a hotfix (via the automatic update system, how convenient!) as soon as we determine the cause. Right now it appears the bot invulnerability period between hits isn't triggering.

Well, we're still winning the heists but it's good to know that it's not an intended thing. Hoxton Breakout day 1 in particular is as nightmarish as ever!

BTW is it intended that we wake up with around half of our HP after being revived? Actually it would be cool if the official site listed all the actual changes (Except the crackdown map ones to keep them a surprise), even if it breaks the site "lore-wise". Are they listed anywhere? (Haven't checked the mod folder yet to see if there's a txt or something).

[Finale]

It's a difficult balancing act, when it comes to providing change detail. For example, we've set about 15 new values for every crackdown unit, all the spawn groups are completely new, most of the overarching enemy tweakdata structure is reworked, and there is a long list of miscellaneous changes (like health on respawn) that are hard to keep track of.

I'll try to get a more comprehensive changelog together for everything.

I should mention that each heist actually has its own comprehensive changelog, in the heist folder.

[LesserSphinx]

Does this need Super BLT or sumtin?

[Senidia]

ohh