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[Frumple]

Ehehe, even I've noticed that. There's like a pause button when you click on the resource gathering whatever it is. Think in the bottom right corner of the command bank? No clue if you have to enable it in the options or somethin'.

Maybe custom maps added more, I really wasn't into that stuff

They totes did, from time to time. More SC2 than WC3, on that front (far as I've been able to parse, it's both easier and less clumsy with SC2), but even some of the more involved WC3 ones cracked open the base game's resource type limits. The leader board whatever it was functionality got abused to hell and back after a while

[Tiruin]

Spoiler: digression (click to show/hide)

I assume the engine has a lot of other under the hood optimizations, for example you can see that if you build something new in your units path they'll bump into it a bit before repathing.  They must not call the pathfinding script very often.  The target priority script also seems like its not called very often, since units won't retarget until their target dies even if better target opens up. [...]

In my layered wall of text, I would note that the sniper is perhaps the only unit (where it may obviously be seen) that goes against this :3 in that the targeting happens to anything in range by the time of firing, but the preparation time is pretty much only 'time before attacking'. If nothing is in range, they perform the lower-the-rifle animation...although I have encountered instances where they quick-fire while still doing that lower-down, if an enemy rushes into range?
Although now that I think about it, I think this applies to all units--for the Ranger, the problem is you can see the projectile, which may be a big part of creating that notion because of her being the early game unit. I've noticed Marines also having this sniper-esque target shifting (both the marine and sniper have 'exact' projectiles, they never miss and when they shoot, it already arrives at target), only that their preparation time and firing time are a lot quicker than the sniper.

I still hate how the Lucifer BURNS EVERYONE AND ALL YOUR UNITS though! :I

I do like this knowledge however GIVE MORE PLEASE!

...we can toggle off production?  I thought I had to nuke the building.

Did you miss the pause icon whenever you clicked the sawmill? Because it has always been there since the start, and I'm unsure where any of that is in the options but it's not there. I found it very nice--it relinquishes all resources, that even if infected, it doesn't spent your stuff (if those buildings get infected, you can STILL pause it and it'll free up those resources Until that point, it will keep using those resources. This also includes the workers, although if it's infected that doesn't mean it'll spawn more...infected.)
Although it wasn't ever known directly too, that the Ballista can be upgraded to the Executor...

[EnigmaticHat]

I tried out your 20 sniper squad.  What the fuck.  Its day 55 and the map is completely clear of zombies.  I have two squads of snipers roaming the map, occassionally returning home to swap out their veterans for new snipers.  Something like 40 veteran snipers are back at the base, along with 7 lucifers and 8 thanatos. 

After additional testing, I'd say Thanatos are great, but only suited to defense against giant hordes.  Titans seem not worth the cost; they seem best for patrolling outside the walls, but with snipers being what they are there's no need.  Lucifers are... still pretty questionable.  That being said I have found a niche for them.

XXXT   TX
XXXGGGX
       LLXX
       LLXX
          XX
          XX
          XX

Where X is a wall, G is a gate, T is a tower, and L is 6+ Lucifers.  The enemies are coming from the lower left.  You want snipers and/or shock towers at the tips of the walls.  The gates are optional; it will make that point into a vulnerability, but it will let the lucifers back off if things get dicey.  Set the Lucifers to hold position.

Lucifers are immune to each other's flames.  So what happens is, they turn that entire inner area into a firey hell pit.  The walls function to prevent them from being surrounded.  If you want to make it extra spicey you can set up stake traps outside the Lucifers' range, but if they're too close the Lucifers will burn them.

Another thing you can use lucifers for is to get a small number and hold them in reserve.  If you set them up in between the wall and your houses they can form a decent second line.  Alternately, they have 3 armor and 400 health, so you can use them to plug a gap in your walls.  One weird advantage lucifers have is ridiculously fast out of combat regen; 30 per second.  I have yet to figure out any amazing application for that tho.  Overall I'd say Lucifers are viable but not worth bothering with as long as snipers remain as good as they are, and the engineering bay remains as difficult to obtain as it is.  I think they would be better if stone structures and wire traps were immune to fire.

[Sirus]

You can toggle off some buildings. Not all of them, and in fact it seems almost arbitrary which ones can be paused and which ones can't.

This may not be a popular opinion, but I'd love to see some overhaul on the workshop buildings. They're huge, they take a ton of workers and resources, and once you've researched everything they can't be demolished or toggled, and just sit around looking pretty and being useless. You almost want the undead to infest them, just to free up some workers and energy.

If they provided some sort of passive bonuses to the overall colony, then it might be different. As it is, I hate how the nature of the game forces you to waste so much on buildings that remain useful for all of about ten-twenty minutes and become nothing but resource drains afterwards.

[EnigmaticHat]

I also wish you could research units in the same buildings that build the units.  One thing that's very frustrating to me is that you need to research oil refining to make use of most things in the foundry, but you need to research the engineering bay AND build one before you can research elite units.  So I end up either putting off the economy upgrades for a long time or putting off engineering bay units for a long time.

It would be nice if the stone workshop gave us another military production building.  That way the engineering bay could be made cheaper to research, and then more quickly and cheaply upgrade out of an existing building.  That would also solve the problem that there's no mid tech offensive options; even the shock tower feels more like a late tier building and you don't need it until the lategame waves.  As is we're stuck with first tier units and wooden stakes for most of the game.

Another thing that would help is if you could produce units you don't have the oil income for.  With some kind of consequence should you run out (I guess the units dying at random until you're income neutral again).  I doubt anyone would buy oil up in the longer term, but in the short term it would let you get a couple elite units or advanced buildings up without needing to research oil refining.  You could also go up to 200 oil and then overproduce units, to slowly work through your reserve (since as-is, oil is the only resource I never feel like I want a bank of).

[Tiruin]

I tried out your 20 sniper squad.  What the fuck.  Its day 55 and the map is completely clear of zombies.  I have two squads of snipers roaming the map, occassionally returning home to swap out their veterans for new snipers.  Something like 40 veteran snipers are back at the base, along with 7 lucifers and 8 thanatos. 

After additional testing, I'd say Thanatos are great, but only suited to defense against giant hordes.  Titans seem not worth the cost; they seem best for patrolling outside the walls, but with snipers being what they are there's no need.  Lucifers are... still pretty questionable.  That being said I have found a niche for them.

Muhwahwahwah :3 Someone else feels the fun.
Also I updated my wall of text (page 2, default forum viewing of 15 posts per page) with pics so people can see what I mean a bit better!

You can toggle off some buildings. Not all of them, and in fact it seems almost arbitrary which ones can be paused and which ones can't.

This may not be a popular opinion, but I'd love to see some overhaul on the workshop buildings. They're huge, they take a ton of workers and resources, and once you've researched everything they can't be demolished or toggled, and just sit around looking pretty and being useless. You almost want the undead to infest them, just to free up some workers and energy.

If they provided some sort of passive bonuses to the overall colony, then it might be different. As it is, I hate how the nature of the game forces you to waste so much on buildings that remain useful for all of about ten-twenty minutes and become nothing but resource drains afterwards.

Fully agree with that the research buildings/workshop buildings CANNOT BE DEMOLISHED, so they take up a fashionable 4x4 space
It may not be a bother for some people, because of how much space you can plan for building things, but it is for me, because of all the buildings you cannot evacuate? It be those ones.

And you do NOT get 'freed up' resources if the building gets infested, by the way Easily tested by any of those outlying quarries or such, wherein you want to just plop them for the resources (especially gold mining), but can't expand enough to defend just one building. When it gets infested, you'll notice a lack of...freed resources, until you pause it anyway.

Another thing that would help is if you could produce units you don't have the oil income for.  With some kind of consequence should you run out (I guess the units dying at random until you're income neutral again).  I doubt anyone would buy oil up in the longer term, but in the short term it would let you get a couple elite units or advanced buildings up without needing to research oil refining.  You could also go up to 200 oil and then overproduce units, to slowly work through your reserve (since as-is, oil is the only resource I never feel like I want a bank of).

I'd just love if there was a better autosell. I love the one already implemented! But the 'forced mayor' option, and the lack of autosell to those kinds of reserves...makes me wish there was more in that context.
Also female units because I'd play and buy any game with more because the Ranger is just a loveable sarcastic person. But in all seriousness, the sniper works perfectly as current, that if anything, he could be branched off into another unit while having his capabilities a bit tweaked (steampunk rifle infantry are pretty cool though). Maybe a new female infantry advanced unit perhaps?

[EnigmaticHat]

Welp.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Contrary to what the first picture might imply I actually would have won even if the game continued past that point.  My military was vastly overprepared for the zombies, but I forgot one thing: a reserve.  Oddly enough it was the main gate which fell.  It had a lot of troops but was just a long double wall and a single shock tower.  I had been going around to my many gates fixing up the ones that weren't to snuff, I guess it was inevitable that I would miss an important one.  A good 8 thanatos and 50 snipers were defending entrances that were never attacked.  Next game I'm definitely going distribute my forces throughout the town for the final defense, and then send them to the walls only after I know where the zombies are going.

Unfortunately for New London, the front gate was also coincidentally the furthest from any other garrisons AND the closest to the main town.  I desperately threw all my resources into a last wall between the zombies and the command center.  That held off the zombies, but there was no one defending the wall.  Most of the other defenses had held or were holding, so I desperately pulled ever increasing numbers of soldiers back into the defense.  They approached the horde from all sides, but unfortunately due to that specific breach point the zombies held the densely populated oldest districts and we were the ones attacking into them.  The zombies pushed so far in that it was just a single wall between us and defeat; the only thing that saved the command center was an 8 man thanatos team that managed to get behind it and fire mortar shells over it.  The explosions physically pushed back the horde long enough that the rest of the military could arrive to clean up.  All of the old town was demolished or destroyed.  Not a single house was left intact.  The town was designed so that the military and work areas served as a buffer between the main town the outside, except for that one gate.  Man am I kicking myself.

In addition to the main town, there were two "satellite" towns loosely connected to the main one.  The tent shanty town to the northwest was overwhelmed when one of the largest hordes noticed it on the way to the main town; its southern gate was smashed although its defenders killed many zombies.  The northern gate held off the zombies from the outside and then scant hours later were forced to turn their guns on the shantytown's infected residents, they lost their shock tower and two of their sniper towers but four snipers won the battle with their tower intact, being the only survivors from the shantytown.

The other satellite town, a sort of cottage suburb to the north, was left mostly unscathed.  Some zombies were bashing their way through a few cottages on the edge when the game ended, but snipers were hot on their trail.  I wanted to see how that ended but considering I got the victory screen I'll just assume we took care of it.  Pretty sure we would have.

The only other areas that survived were a small cluster of cottages shielded behind the southern gate (which itself almost fell), the military employees in most of our barracks and shock towers, and the workers in the heavy industrial district to the north of town.  That's... the extent of who survived in New London.  Out of the prior population of 2000, I'd estimate 500 survivors.  The military fared much better; out of ~250 soldiers, I'd estimate "only" 75 were killed.

So, yeah.  Had my first town survive!  For some definitions of "survive", at least.

[Criptfeind]

Nice! With 7,000,000,000 billion zombies in the world, and 4612 humans, humans merely need a 1.5 million to one kill to death ratio. 18 to 1 is pretty good! 

More seriously, nice! My first surviving city was much the same, vast swaths of area infected, the remaining military barely holding off the edge of disaster. The game really does a good job of making things tense at the end. Good luck with the other areas in the game!

[Tiruin]

One reason I loved this game was it was able to track offline achievements when steam is offline.
Now with the 0.5.0 patch, it doesn't seem to be the case? Even when I just completed a Brutal map (80 days, Desolate Wasteland) for that last difficulty achievement. >_______>
Perhaps it's because I updated during the patch, so that 0.4.9 map became 0.5.0. :v

Is this one tiny function applicable for others though? I'm betting it didn't record because of that one sentence but... ._.;
Does anyone still get their actions recorded while steam is in offline mode in the 0.5.0 patch?

At least I can track how well I did, given how HORRIBLE THE MAYORS WERE (in my big wall of text on page 2, forum default 15 pposts per page, the screenshot did track them as it was that game being screenshot'd), as none of them gave lasting bonuses, just 'bonus buildings' and a free oil platform.
By day 40, cleared and expanded. Day 60 had me walling up and ballista tower'ing all borders. End came at day 72.

 

What good came of this was knowing the map. Desolate Wasteland is...beautiful. Many tiny chokepoints, plus a LOT of gold and oil deposits (I managed to grab around 9 deposits or so, which provided my gold income because of selling the oil ), but you get attacked a lot.

[EnigmaticHat]

Peaceful lowlands is a great map, but like damn.  Its basically just getting the worst possible spawn on moorlands.

I used so many snipers in my last game I'm considering trying to play a game without snipers, but I'm not sure if that will be ruining my own fun.  Their DPS is IIRC something like 3x what a soldier does.  And the later days get sooooo brutal.

[EnigmaticHat]

One reason I loved this game was it was able to track offline achievements when steam is offline.
Now with the 0.5.0 patch, it doesn't seem to be the case? Even when I just completed a Brutal map (80 days, Desolate Wasteland) for that last difficulty achievement. >_______>
Perhaps it's because I updated during the patch, so that 0.4.9 map became 0.5.0. :v

Is this one tiny function applicable for others though? I'm betting it didn't record because of that one sentence but... ._.;
Does anyone still get their actions recorded while steam is in offline mode in the 0.5.0 patch?

At least I can track how well I did, given how HORRIBLE THE MAYORS WERE (in my big wall of text on page 2, forum default 15 pposts per page, the screenshot did track them as it was that game being screenshot'd), as none of them gave lasting bonuses, just 'bonus buildings' and a free oil platform.
By day 40, cleared and expanded. Day 60 had me walling up and ballista tower'ing all borders. End came at day 72.

 

What good came of this was knowing the map. Desolate Wasteland is...beautiful. Many tiny chokepoints, plus a LOT of gold and oil deposits (I managed to grab around 9 deposits or so, which provided my gold income because of selling the oil ), but you get attacked a lot.

I don't think the game is giving out achievements at all?  I just passed 4K population in my colony and didn't get the achievement.

[Tiruin]

I don't think the game is giving out achievements at all?  I just passed 4K population in my colony and didn't get the achievement.

It did for me, in all patches since 0.4.9. (Steam profile achievements). Strange thing is that the colony # ones stack.
And this only counts for seemingly SUCCESSFUL colonies, not failed ones. .-.

[Majestic7]

Re: lucifers, I just place them at the base of an outer gate, outside the walls. They work fine to keep zeds away from it and at most burn down some traps. Of course, in the case of a major horde, might lose one or two, but sometimes that is preferrable to having them trash something more expensive.

I still prefer towers and regular troops to all the power armor guys, though. Too bad there aren't more than three troop types to put in towers. My tower setup is usually one trooper and three snipers.

[motorbitch]

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WWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
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LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWW


just wall them lucifers in in a small gap between the main wall and the outside.
they can burn through a single wall just fine. of course the single wall will fail and the lucifers will die, but as previous post mentioned, their death is cheap.
i

[EnigmaticHat]

Having tested both units a bit: Thanatos are way better than Lucifers.  The only thing Lucifers do better is noise.  Even single Thanatos shots make a hilarious amount of noise.  That and Lucifers are the most cost effective way to bodyblock breaches so the zombies can’t get in.  In every other way Thanatos are so much better.  Seriously, try using like 8 of them on a horde.  You will not be disappointed.