Cheese Bases only in alpha 18?

[posey70]

So my friends and i have recently got back into 7 days, due to the new update of alpha 18. We have built a base as we always did and well we got our asses kicked. We have always liked to take an active role in fighting the hordes and hated cheese bases such as drop and box style bases. The hordes from nights 14 and 21, felt like hordes from day 140 and 210. As far as i know, we are playing on default settings all around. So is alpha 18 only favoring mega cheese bases that exploit the AI to killing themselves?

[Olaf_Sand™]

Nah, i got a "normal" base... 4 walls surrounded by spikes..and some turrets..not having any problems.

[posey70]

Hm interesting. Cause we end up fighting until 6 am against irradiateds. We have got iron spikes
and spinning blade traps and they plow through them like nothing.

[Shurenai]

Nothing but irradiateds on day 14 and 21? Do you have your exp gain set really high to like 300+%? Day length longer than the default 60 minutes? (EG: 2 hours?) Do you have player block damage set really high like 300%, and did a lot of mining?

Any of these things can dramatically skew the gamestage you end up at on any given horde night. For example, if you have 300% exp gain, then on the day 7 horde you're doing the equivalent of a 21 day horde. If you also had double length days, you're instead fighting the equivalent of a 42 day horde on your first horde night...If you ALSO had block damage set high and did a lot of mining, you could be talking an equivelent of somewhere between a 50 and 90 day horde on day 7...And thats not accounting for how player experience gain accelerates as you gain skills and do more damage, so day 14 for you could very literally be something equivalent to a day 140 horde on fully normal/default settings.

Also, Up till 6 am? Did you change the daylight length? Horde ends at 4:30 by default (18hrs of day, 6hr night by default) and it shouldnt take much more than 30 ingame mins to finish clearing off stragglers, in theory..

Not to mention, if you also had a high difficulty set, that gives you a much higher limit to game stage (EG: Lowest difficulty caps it, say, 100. but the highest caps at, say 2000. Not sure of the exact numbers) -- And I believe you get a difficulty multiplier on gamestage calculations, AND also a multiplier for having two or more people within a small area on horde night.

There's a lot of stuff that goes into determining how/why what happens happens. :)

For me personally, up to day 35~ and still doing horde nights without AI abuse or exploits, no falling traps and whatnot.

[JimmyIowa]

I use an open base design that doesn't wall them out completely but slows them down and funnels them single file to where I choose the fight to happen. People seem to consider many different things "cheese", but other than an electric fence, my horde base (I just call it a "combat station" since it is small and can be built on the fly anywhere) doesn't use turrets, traps, falling traps, trenches, inclines, killboxes, columns, impossible jumps, or infinite loops of any sort.

I fight using the sledgehammer, and generally get 400+ kills in early game horde nights, and maybe 180 kills in late game horde nights (when rads make the killing much slower). The only time I use ranged attacks is for vultures and as as finisher for knocked down radcops. Other than that it's pure melee. This handles nomad difficulty, 100% block damage, nightmare run speed horde night just fine.

[JimmyIowa]

Just a P.S. for clarification - I have nothing against using clever traps, pitfalls, killboxes, infinite loops, jump puzzles, cleverly placed hatches and bars, ranged, or whatever. If you have outsmarted the enemy then you have outsmarted the enemy. A gram of creativity is worth a ton of brute force. And it wasn't my intent to imply there's anything wrong with any of that.

[Kattla]

posey70님이 먼저 게시:

So my friends and i have recently got back into 7 days, due to the new update of alpha 18. We have built a base as we always did and well we got our asses kicked. We have always liked to take an active role in fighting the hordes and hated cheese bases such as drop and box style bases. The hordes from nights 14 and 21, felt like hordes from day 140 and 210. As far as i know, we are playing on default settings all around. So is alpha 18 only favoring mega cheese bases that exploit the AI to killing themselves?

Spikes both metal and wood loosing some of their value once the radiated shows up. Blade traps are good if you can repair them during the horde night. But using dart traps to either kill or weaken the zombies can be very helpful, and some way to funnel the zombies, unless you want a billion dart traps around.

[kkitts]

I found out via playing that the old hotel with the roof over the driveway at the entrance, the pool out back and the fountain in the center of the building is an excellent horde night POI, because of the new pathfinding algorithm. In A17, the zombies would run in circles by the fountain, unable to find their way up to me. In A18, they will take whatever clear path they need to get to me. In this case, they made a hole in the outer wall at floor level, climbed up 3 staircases on one side, came to the washer/dryer hallway closest to where I was, and punched a hole in the wall.

What I didn't realize until the end of horde night, was that they made a functional killbox for me, all on their own. Because the zombies always made that turn and came up the hallway, I had at least 6 meters before they could come out of the hole and start tearing up the building trying to get to me (dogs and cop zombies are special cases because they tend to destroy faster for some reason - spiders don't jump if there's other zombies in front of them). Between groups, I dug out the sections below the hole, so zombies would drop to the ground (then they proceeded to climb back up the stairs again).

Note: the killbox method only works when there is a clear path to get to the player, and the player has to be near the exit point of that path, or the zombies will break through closer walls to get to you. Still, that motel POI was near perfect, with me standing about 3 - 4 meters from the hole on the 3rd floor. Usually, I'd put up a ladder on the entrance roof, and another to get to the roof of the building (as there's no inside roof access), but when they broke through the outer wall on the 3rd floor, it was shooting fish in a barrel, you couldn't really miss. The dogs and cop zombies were the only concern.

TL;DR: make your killbox multi-level, and put a drop near where you are at the top, so if the zombie wanders towards you, they have to start at the bottom and come back up (wash, rinse, repeat). It might take some work to perfect it, but that's the cheese concept for A18 as of now.

[posey70]

I will ask the host to check his settings and see of he has tweaked with them in some way. We were playing on default days and horde size as far as he knows.So must be the other factors that are bumping up the horde difficulty so soon.

[Jenkins]

JimmyIowa님이 먼저 게시:

I use an open base design that doesn't wall them out completely but slows them down and funnels them single file to where I choose the fight to happen. People seem to consider many different things "cheese", but other than an electric fence, my horde base (I just call it a "combat station" since it is small and can be built on the fly anywhere) doesn't use turrets, traps, falling traps, trenches, inclines, killboxes, columns, impossible jumps, or infinite loops of any sort.

You like sledges; I like machine guns. I might argue your walls and funnel are sort of trench/killbox -ish. You might argue me running around without them is sort of infinite loop -ish. I like the simplicity and engagement of both our horde approaches so this is just cheesy salt for ya, Iowa.

I'm leaning towards mixing up some of yours with all my running around so I can take a breather on horde night. Call it the hall of rest. Run down hall, trip fence, repair and reload, go back out.

OP - if you can find a "volunteer," having a bait man running around with the horde, along with slowing devices/obstructions in the field will take a lot of pressure off the walls and especially nice with a sniper/grenade tosser in a turret nearby to take out jumpers. As a runner, I like leaving the cops and demos until they blow up the others for me, but I focus the spiders and wildlife because they do the most damage to me when running on horde night.

I'd think the ideal 3 man would have a sniper/bomber in a perch protected by a sledge-man at the end of a small funnel hall with a runner outside taking the heat and lining/blobbing the horde for the sniper. This could be setup quickly from any POI or a quick hall/perch build, even with flagstone. Add various obstruction blocks, flat wire, and electric fence to the "field" for ezpz.

This is active combat for up to 3 with varied roles. Sniping perch optional if you have a sniper or bomber type. I used to run rifles for single shot stops when backpedal was still in because the blob would line up. In A18, machine guns are working better for me for the spread and because slow when facing. I haven't gotten sledge to work in open field well yet. You could also just all stay out with them for chaotic fun.


tl;dr If you don't want much of a victory by design (some call cheese) and prefer active fighting, imo A18 offers lots of opportunity if you're willing to mix roles &/or get out in the fray.
The perks and stamina work well with this in A18. Obstructions and live bait can keep zombies away from your "home".