Reclaiming lands

Unturned II U4 Discussion
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Reclaiming the lands in Unturned II should be a goal in the minds of Single and Coop players. Being able to fortify map positions will be valuable considering the fact that zombies will now wander.

Now that Zombies wander, and hordes can appear at your front doorstep, it is important to carefully consider what place would be perfect for surviving the apocalypse.

Cabins in the middle of the woods attract very little attention, and can be built and expanded upon, but halt movement for most wheeled vehicles (in dense forests), among other things.

Prisons, surprisingly, provide some of the best protection I have been able to find. Most prisons (before 1965), have 10 foot high concrete walls surrounding the perimeter, and cell blocks provide formidable reinforcement against the Turned. They are as good as keeping the living in, as they are the dead out.

Anyways, I bring this up as I believe reclaiming lands should be a bit more intuitive than in 3.x.

Currently, we have Safezone Radiators, which have lots of issues on their own, such as

  • Zombies aren’t hard to kill

  • Zombies don’t spawn everywhere

  • Sentries exist

  • Safezone radiators disable loot spawns

  • It needs to be powered constantly

  • It has limited range, so at most locations you’ll need several to actually stop spawns in the entire navmesh

  • Zombie spawns not disabled can just chase you into your safezoned area

(Molton provided all of the issues above, you’re the best Molton!)

So since all of these issues exist, I think scrapping the Safezone Radiator for 4.x would be the best plan, and then replacing it with a sort of Horde Beacon.

Now before you get your pitchforks out for me wanting Horde Beacons back into the game, It will work differently than it does now.

Placing down one of these Horde Beacons in a location will call upon a horde of zombies upon your location, and the amount and strength of the zombies will depend on how many players are present and where the beacon is placed. (Fewer and weaker zombies at a town; more and stronger zombies in a military base).

However, finishing the Horde Beacon, does not grant the player any items, but instead disables zombie spawns and also disables item spawns at that location. This is why this should be restricted to Single and Coop players as online players could easily abuse this feature.

But it makes sense for Single and Coop play, as if you decide to do a beacon at a military base, sure, you won’t be able to grab any loot there, but a military base is one of the best places to defend. Most military bases have secondary, or even tertiary defenses, and towers provide excellent sniping positions and can also provide early warnings upon an approaching horde. Whereas doing a beacon at a town will grant you a place that is more difficult to defend, but you do not lose out on lots of important loot.

Now this solution solves lots of the problems that the Safezone Radiator had, but it absolutely CANNOT be used in Multiplayer without massive tweaking.

Thoughts?

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maybe after you clear out those places, you could build bases of sorts, and you could decide if randomized npcs would move in? or maybe take a similar approach to state of decay 2, where you can build a base, then you go save survivors and they come live with you. I dunno

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I think that would be rather cool, but the programming of that would be rather intense. Plus, the NPCs would have to do something to even make it worthwhile to actually make houses for them (Scavenging maybe?).

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yeah maybe. It might take some work but you could have them farm supplies for the colony/settlement, or go out and scavenge, or even sell stuff to you. yada yada yada. pluss maybe you would get some rewards for doing it, like they will help defend the base against zombies hordes. I dunno. ima go make a post about hordes, brb.

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Again, quite intensive on programming but would be rather interesting to see.

Another settlement needs our help, I’ll mark it on your map.

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well if you do it right, it might not be. we are already gonna have global navmeshes for zombies, cant the npcs use the same one?

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Not quite, there are so many factors that go into making NPCs do such feats, making NPCs have that global navmesh would inevitably break something, and interfere with gameplay as you would not have to loot the military base, but you could get NPCs to do it for you. (Balance is needed)

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well if nelson has set paths they follow from place to place, it might work. like maybe they follow only certain routes?

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Once again, so many more factors go in play. What if you block off the paths? What if you already looted the location the NPC was going to loot?

I request someone, someone with much more integrity about NPCs.

@Whistleblower pls

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Going back to topic, I still think that one of the biggest unknown factors is how will turneds interact with players bases. Will they attack to destroy? If yes we still got the usuall issue where naked Joe could just bring a horde to someones base and let the turned do the raiding job…
If turneds won’t be able to attack bases, then what could happend? Infinite huge Trump towers? Also will the bases still use the current sandbox mechanic where u can build skybases, or structures will need to have a “realistic” look like basment etc?

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I believe the Turned will destroy a person’s base if it impedes their progress of reaching the player. So a player would have to get into a person’s base for the horde to start attacking that base (Preventing what you said from happening). There will be no Skybases in Unturned 4.x, but the system behind preventing it is still in the works.

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I really hope that naked Joe won’t just have to jump on top of the base to trigger the turneds

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Hopefully not, but there are many other factors that need tweaking for Global Navmesh zombies to be balanced.

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14

Also for military bases, they should have .50 cal heavy machineguns that you could reload.

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15

like my Mounted weapons post?

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16

I wonder how much of this post was inspired by The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead

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ITS A GOOD BOOK OKAY?

Quite a bit, After reading through the “Home Defense” I decided that an actual system for reclaiming lands should exist. That’s where the Prison part came from too.

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18

I agree about the claiming land stuff and the problems that safezone radiators have, but I don’t agree with the method being suggested for claiming certains areas in the map.

The use of a horde beacon to be able to claim a place isn’t just unrealistic, but also this:

It has been discussed before that there should exist noise-making devices for luring turned instead of horde beacons.

Also about this…

Just no guys, mainly because of this:

On an ideal perspective, NPC’s should have their own territories and bases like in 3.x, and maybe some of these could have patrols in their surroundings. Also there could be a few wandering ones, such as bandits or lone trader caravans maybe.

How it should work IMO

Claiming areas should only work via base building, whether in already existing structures or from bare zero on the wild. To claim and area and avoid zombie spawning, players would just settle their utility and barricade buildables depending on the structure size and needs. E.g. to claim a house in a town, player(s) would need enough barricades for all doors and windows, and some utility storages/buildables, since they’d need a generator to power lights and existing utilities in the house (fridges, stoves, beds, sinks, etc., are already existant in most houses, meaning that structures that doesn’t have any of these would need at least 1 of those to be claimed).

Like this, any single structure could be a potential base. However, to avoid players of having +3 bases in any place they want, turned hordes should periodically attack bases and settlements according on it’s size or activity level; the bigger the base, the more activity it has (players living there, active utilities), and as a result, there’s more possibilites to be attacked by a horde.

Activity level is meant to prevent turned from offline raiding (abandoned bases might rather be reclaimed by someone else), and also it would be pretty hard or impossible to a single player to claim a big building, besides horde size should depend on turned population of the nearest towns/cities, so there’s pretty good balance.

All this said, there could be an advantage on taking a building as a base, but at the expense of having to protect it more often from the turned than if you built your own structure in the woods.

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Good ideas all around, your plan even works in multiplayer, but what about item spawns? Will they not spawn in a claimed area?

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I don’t see why those should keep spawning.

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