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.