I’d be shocked if there aren’t a whole lot of butthurt nerds being real butthurt about their butts being hurt by a game with non-trivial difficulty.
I seem to miss something, but how do you stop the wave? The Rangers can’t do it … the walls break down. I cannot prevent them getting to the HQ. I will try if I can win on the easiest difficulty.
What wave? If you mean the Campaign, Rangers can if you build enough. It takes lots sure (my problem was I didn;t see the other wave and so while I was stopping one way off in the NW corner the other was rampaging through my base. And yes I had idle archers).
Wall structure is key. For diagonals, go 3 deep. For Straights, go 2deep. But you should have additional layers of walling beyond those. It will help give the archers time to kill.
e.g.
xx yy
xx yy
xx yy
1 or 2 spaces between the rows of walls. And you can do another layer (it will mean few archers can get hits in initially but every bit can help.
yes, the campaign… I cannot shield off my HQ with walls because of the train track.
You want to wall off the NW choke point. I’ll try to grab a screen shot in a second. The game is not letting me screen shot.
You can defend at the tiny choke point just NW o f the RR tracks elbow bend. Or you can push out and do it at the land bridge. Note that it did get easier this morning so start a new campaign - only one wave, and fewer zombies (and 300 pop needed instead of 400).
For rangers you want a lot. And you can stash some as a forward guard between wall sections. Aim for 50+ rangers.
uff, I had 20+ and thought that’s a lot
You are correct in that they are absolute garbage for defending. So you want more, and you want extra defenses since they are going to take awhile to kill everything. A fallback setup doesn’t hurt either. But try to keep them out of the base proper or they’ll make more zombies. You could also create kill squares outin the open area between the land bridge and the small choke point. If placed right they could divide up the zombies and you can put a decent amount of archers in each. Again, double-walls everywhere minimum.
Another issue with the map is you don’t get a lot of opportunity to score ranger veterancy (which makes them much better). You might send a ranging band across the rail bridge to try and farm xp before day 24 30 (on 100%).
Edit to add: so a force does come across the train bridge. You can set up a series of 3 double wooden gates (that’s the only thing you can build across tracks) with some wooden walls on the side (helps distract undead!). I had a force of 18 rangers, with 2 vets, who were able to hold them off (the first two sets of wooden gates were destroyed. You want to push forward to fight behind the first set and fall back as needed).
My main force of 33 was holding offr a the land bridge. Two sets of double walls did fine. My kill box forces never even got involved.
I thought I read something about being able to undo choices on the tech tree? Because I probably already ruined my campaign if not lol.
I think you can only undo a tech choice if you haven’t exited the tech screen yet.
If they’d released the game in early access for a while to let players try the game and offer feedback, they probably could have done a better job getting the difficulty right.
-Tom
I think you’re right. Well I will get farms before the Meadows map, at least.
Also, I don’t think taking the lady hero is a good idea. I watched someone stream with her (on Nightmare), and she seemed to take forever to kill and require a ton of kiting. The dude, however, is a wrecking crew.
The campaign was not released to the public, ever. Just survival mode and custom maps.
I think that was exactly his point. They didn’t have any EA period with the campaign, so it’s no wonder the difficulty was off.
I did manage to pass mission 1, after this morning’s patch, but I can’t get past any of the next ones. There’s 3 options for mission 2 and they’re all pretty tough.
He said “game”, so I didn’t read it like that.
there’s no question the campaign is not polished. The horde maps on nightmare are exercises in extreme micromanagement and thenjust sitting there for like 5-10 minutes while the rest of the horde (14k zombies) plow into your largely veteran forces in the center (early in the campaign anyway, this guy only has soldiers). It might be longer than 10 minutes TBH.
I took soliders with my first tech upgrade, hit up the first “exploration” mission, and then did the "eliminate doom villages ". I think you can safely do one 100 point upgrade next to soldiers and then do another exploration for mission 3 and have enough to get to farms for the Fields map (thinking the “bonus hunter cottage food” tech would be MASSIVELY helpful). I will not swear to that.
Anyway doom villages isn’t too bad with soldiers, at 100% anyway. But I did find that soft hordes would spawn along the east and south east portion of the map and cause trouble so I kept most of my rangers (and a few soldiers) on guard in those areas while a group of 20 soldiers just wrecked all the doom villages. You have to spam the shit out of hunters cottages to get to 400 but there’s enough room and then some. It’s mildly tedious though.
Like I said, hmm, it’s a shame they didn’t take advantage of the benefit of a long early access period. For guys like me who have been eager to play this game as soon as it’s released, a slap-dash half-assed campaign that needs balancing as it goes isn’t really in anyone’s best interest.
And, yes, I was riffing on the fact that this has been in early access forever. You would think they might have, you know, taken advantage of that. But really, I don’t care that much about the campaign, so I’m just grousing for grousing’s sake.
-Tom
Tom send them a strongly worded email! Use that influencer power. ;)
I accidentally had my difficulty set to tiny baby mode, and wow was the first mission shall we say not challenging to someone with some beta experience, heh.
Moved it up to normal moving forward, we’ll see how that goes.
What’s the deal with the train? Is there any gameplay effect other than occasionally gibbing zeds?
It delivers colonists. You only get them when it shows up, up to available empty housing (AFAIK).
There are upgrades on the tech tree - well at least one - that have it deliver other stuff.
As someone who payed in EA, skip the campaign for now. Just start an easy survival game. The game is pretty simple to grasp so you can figure it out at a nice slow pace.
Are colonists anything other than cosmetic and occasionally zombie food though? Pretty sure I’m getting my money and my workers as soon as my tents complete.
Not in the campaign, not at 100%. Tents stay dark until the train brings people. So there’s a delay before you get your benefits from building housing.