Is concrete worth it?

[BanDHMO]

Seems like concrete takes a lot of work and though it's stronger than cobblestone, it's not impenetrable. I was looting an apartment the other day, and a small horde showed up. I ran down to fight them as soon as I heard moaning, and by the time I found them, they already chewed through a few concrete blocks.

So, personally, I'm always operating on the assumption that any unattended block can be broken, and so a good base is one with a lot of redundancy as opposed to one made from strong materials. e.g. if I take a prefab and build a lip around it to stop spiders, then the horde can break into the first floor, but it's unlikely to break down so much of the first floor walls as to make the whole building collapse. This is true whether the first floor is made of concrete, brick, or cobblestone. So there's not really any reason to learn concrete and spend all the extra resources it takes.

Anyone else feel the same or can explain why concrete is worth it? I see many people using it, but I'm not sure it really is the best material. Maybe people just go for it because it's the top of the building tech tree.

[Ogre420]

Structural integrity, Check the stats of the blocks, they show how much a block weights and how much it can support.

Concrete walls or pillars can support more then most other blocks.

Use strong heavy blocks to support wood/lighter floors.

[BanDHMO]

Originally posted by Ogre420:

Structural integrity, Check the stats of the blocks, they show how much a block weights and how much it can support.

Concrete walls or pillars can support more then most other blocks.

Use strong heavy blocks to support wood/lighter floors.

I don't follow; according to the wiki the SI of cobblestone is 6, and reinforced concrete is 7. Does it really make that much of a difference? And if it does matter, then why not simply support your structure with metal trussing, which has SI of 16?

[Marstil]

Here is a simple test for you, place a cobblestone block, a concrete block and a reinforced concrete block. Get out your pick and destroy each. You should have a good idea which one you want between yourself and a horde of zombies by the end of the last block.

[BanDHMO]

Originally posted by Marstil:

Here is a simple test for you, place a cobblestone block, a concrete block and a reinforced concrete block. Get out your pick and destroy each. You should have a good idea which one you want between yourself and a horde of zombies by the end of the last block.

Well, see, the philosophy here is that there should be no such thing as the "last block" between you and the horde. If there is, you are dead, regardless of what material it's made of. The horde is not smart enough to purposefully undermine your base and figure out which supporting walls to destroy to bring the whole thing down. It just attacks in blind rage and crushes whatever gets in its way, and neglects to crush whatever doesn't.

It's not very good at figuring out what to destroy, but it IS very good at actually destroying stuff.

So the idea is that instead of building with stronger blocks, you build with more blocks. Stronger blocks just mean the horde takes longer to dig through them, but more blocks means more chances that the horde will neglect to attack a block completely.

Concrete is great, but it costs so much that for each reinforced concrete block you can have 4 cobblestone blocks. So imagine a base supported by 1 concrete column and a base supported by 4 cobblestone ones. Wouldn't you rather be in the cobblestone one?

The other way to look at it is why you are building a wall in the first place. A wall will delay, but not stop the horde, so you also need some way to cause them damage. If you are shooting them yourself, fine, but if you are relying on log spikes, then a wall that holds out longer than the spikes in front of it is a waste. Often, the spikes in a trench in front of my walls fail before the cobblestone does and then the horde just safely demolishes the wall. I'm not sure it'd make a huge difference if the wall was stronger.

I'm not saying cobblestone is definitely better. The above is just kind of thinking aloud. But I do think that many of us use concrete just because it is strongest and therefore best without putting much thought into it.

Also, concrete requires special machinery and a lot of time to cure, which means you can't repair destroyed walls quickly and you have to spend points on unlocking it and building the mixer.

[Marstil]

It appears that I misunderstood your original post, I thought you were asking which is better overall. I'm now thinking you were asking which material is better in week 1 or 2 when the hordes are weaker and you don't have a mixer.

In my opinion concrete is better.

I am not just saying the concrete is better out of habit, I'm saying it out of over 2000 hours of gameplay that includes not only cobblestone and all forms of concrete & steel, but also multiple layers and even ablative coatings of basic wood.

Reinforced concrete (with rebar frames) is hands down the most cost effective wall material. Made with concrete blocks, it is less cost effective, but concrete blocks can be dropped for an instant 3k (nice to keep some on hand for emergencies). If you are going to go for 4 layers thick, use 4 layers of reinforced concrete for 24 thousand hit points instead of 4 layers of cobblestone for 6 thousand.

[BanDHMO]

No, you're right, I'm thinking overall. I'm actually considering not spending points on concrete skills at all, and rather using the motors I find for other tools first.

Now, of course, a 1-layer concrete wall is better than a 4-layer cobblestone. If nothing else, a 4-layer wall takes more than 4 times as many blocks, because of corners. But also, because as soon as the first wall is breached, the Zs are no longer standing on spikes. I think we can safely elimitate that from consideration. I'm suggesting something else: 4 single-wall cobblestone forts instead of 1. As one fails, you move next door via a catwalk. That one has fresh walls, fresh spikes, and the Zs have to spend some time going around to reach your new wall. If you are lucky, maybe they even have to take the long way around the outside of your old fort's wall and walk on top of the spike layer all the way around it.

You did bring up an interesting point about rebar frame-based concrete blocks. I'm honestly not sure what it does to the cost, since we are now comparing iron vs stone, but definitely something to think about. Maybe you can't get 4 cobblestone instead of 1 concrete after all.

Basically, this line of thinking is coming from seeing just how good the hordes are at destroying anything. It feels that stronger and more expensive blocks are not the way to go, and instead we should try to maximize the time that the horde is shuffling to another location all confused and not hitting anything at all.

Let's say, take an apartment building, build a spider-proof lip around it, fill the outside and the parking garage with spikes, and fill any openings with cobblestone or adobe. Then take a building next door, do the same to it, connect the two, then another building, do the same again. So, quantity over quality. Make it so that the hordes are either traveling between buildings, trying to figure out what to hit next, or hitting one of the prefab blocks most of the time, and only rarely hitting one of your blocks. Seems like it'd be better to have many fallback positions than to have a stronger single position, no matter how big the horde is.

The caveat here is: cost of connectors and cost of spikes for each of the multiple locations.

[Marstil]

I can see that you are thinking outside the box right now, so here is some food for thought:

Eventually, a surface structure will be breached. I like to make mine so that if they get inside, it is only to a killbox. I am actually on a grid above them 100% safe and can choose to engage from above, flee, or just wait until morning. The main reason I put spikes outside is to kill zombies and make more spawn; thus, lots of corpses to loot in the morning.

Remember, the horde will follow you, turn that to your advantage.

[simon]

Originally posted by Marstil:

Eventually, a surface structure will be breached.

Why?

The zombies never get to brake any of my walls because they die before they have time to. If they are actually breaking your walls down you don't have enough spikes. You should have enough spikes so you are only picking of the top tier zombies that have lots of health or cops that can damage your walls from afar. 4 or five rows of log spikes (up-graded to iron) and 2 – 4 layers of pointy sticks with barbed wire on top should kill nearly everything that tries to get to your walls.

[BanDHMO]

Originally posted by Marstil:

I can see that you are thinking outside the box right now, so here is some food for thought:

Eventually, a surface structure will be breached. I like to make mine so that if they get inside, it is only to a killbox. I am actually on a grid above them 100% safe and can choose to engage from above, flee, or just wait until morning.

Remember, the horde will follow you, turn that to your advantage.

Right, that's exactly what I'm thinking. Why build something they can't penetrate - that's a fool's errand. Instead, let's build something that slows them down enough to let the log spikes do their job, then let them move on to another wall and spikes. No single wall needs to be super strong - cobblestone or even adobe should do. But there needs to be enough of them to keep the horde occupied and writhing in pain from the spikes all night instead of hitting stuff.

[Not A Beach]

Originally posted by Marstil:

If you are going to go for 4 layers thick, use 4 layers of reinforced concrete for 24 thousand hit points instead of 4 layers of cobblestone for 6 thousand.

Reinforced concrete has 6k, then turns into a regular concrete block with 3k for a total of 9k durability. So it's actually 36k durability with 4 layers.

And just to throw in my 2 cents, I surround my walls with a spiked trench and have iron bars in my wall so I can still shoot zombies. most of the work is done by spikes, but i can still shoot the strong ones.

[BloodyRain2k]

Originally posted by Tritix:

Reinforced concrete has 6k, then turns into a regular concrete block with 3k for a total of 9k durability. So it's actually 36k durability with 4 layers.

Something must be seriously wrong with my game then because when I upgrade a cobblestone block it turns into a concrete block (10 concrete mix used), and if I upgrade that one again (another 10 concrete mix) it turns into something that has 1.5k HP, makes wood sounds when bashed and does NOT downgrade to the ones it was before, it's just gone after these lousy 1.5k HP.

[Not A Beach]

Originally posted by BloodyRain2k:

Originally posted by Tritix:

Reinforced concrete has 6k, then turns into a regular concrete block with 3k for a total of 9k durability. So it's actually 36k durability with 4 layers.

Something must be seriously wrong with my game then because when I upgrade a cobblestone block it turns into a concrete block (10 concrete mix used), and if I upgrade that one again (another 10 concrete mix) it turns into something that has 1.5k HP, makes wood sounds when bashed and does NOT downgrade to the ones it was before, it's just gone after these lousy 1.5k HP.

Yea, thats reinforced concrete. You have to let it dry.

[BloodyRain2k]

Originally posted by Tritix:

Yea, thats reinforced concrete. You have to let it dry.

That seems rather backwards to NOT have it dry the first time (cobble to concrete) but on the 2nd time it suddenly needs to dry ._.

How long does that take and how do I know it's done? (without smacking it every few minutes...)

[Alt]

You doing it wrong, make a rebar frame then upgrade it straight to reinforced concrete, you need only 20 wood and 10 concrete mix for that. Let it dry. Then you will have a 6k hp block of reinforced concrete that turns into regular concrete with 3k hp, when got penetrated. Do not upgrade cobblestone frame, it will take 20 concrete mix, insteade of 10.

[iaregamertom]

Do the block hit points "stack"?
In other words does upgrading a wood frame through all stages to concrete give you more HP than just making a concrete block and skipping the earlier materials?