Suggestion:20070517 Hordes 2.0

	Closed
	This suggestion has finished voting and has been moved to Undecided Suggestions.

20070517 Hordes 2.0

ShadowScope 19:48, 17 May 2007 (BST)

Suggestion type
Brand New Non-Metagaming Skill!

Suggestion scope
Zombies

Suggestion description
Zombies are starting to organize together into hideous evil-looking Hordes. This is because they remember their past of when they were once humans and organized together into militas and Groups. They are doing the same as well...altough in a perverted form.

Under Memories of Life is a skill known as "Horde". A zombie who has this skill (and where there are no Hordes currently) can press a button: "Start Horde" (5 AP). This zombie starts up a Horde and joins in. All players will see:

There are X zombies in a horde. (Join Horde? 1 AP)

Only Zombies with the "Horde" skill can join Hordes (sorry Trenchies). There can only be 1 Horde per Block. A Horde disappers only when all of its members leave that Horde. The 5 AP start-up for creating the Horde is just there as a cost, and there is no benieft for the person who starts up the Horde. The Horde is only as powerful as how many people join in.

Once you join the Horde, the screen changes to:

You are in a horde with X zombies. (Leave Horde? 0 AP)

You also automatically leave the Horde when you leave to another block...or if you get killed or revived. If you enter into the block's building, you do not leave the Horde, but the Horde has no effect, except outside.

Hordes can only be formed / have an effect outside.

If there is a Horde, there are now two different targets on the drop-menu used for targeting people: A Feral Zombie stack...and a Horde Zombie stack. The feral zombie stack works as before, with a person targeting the first member of the stack, destroying it and then moving onto the second person of the stack. All people in the Horde Zombie stack are not in the Feral Zombie stack.

When attacking "a Horde Zombie", a random member of the horde would be targeted. The target would be newly selected for each seprate attack, because the zombies in the horde are tightly packed and always pressing forwards, replacing any member who gets impeded by the brief shock of an attack.

This gives zombies some very good protection against headshots when standing around in a group / outside a building they want to attack, but then, attacking zombies who are standing outside is pretty pointless from a strategic viewpoint. It doesn't stop folks from earning XPs by attacking zombies outside, but it does stop them from actually killing the zombies. And as a side benefit, you'd have more wounded zombies looking to use "digestion" when they finally got into a building they had horded outside, thereby giving zombies an encourgment to bite.

When inside the building, the Horde effect does not apply, and all zombies get targeted normally as "A zombie", altough they still manitan a membership in the Horde.

Scanning a "Horde Zombie" is like attacking, you scan one zombie randomly and then you can scan another one randomly.

Overall, this is a small boost for zombies by providing them an interesting mechanics. Plus, it reinforces the belief that going outside is dangerous.

Voting Section

Voting Rules

Votes must be numbered, signed, and timestamped. # justification ~~~~ Votes that do not conform to the above may be struck by any user.

The only valid voting sections are Keep, Kill, Spam and Dupe. If you wish to abstain from voting, do not vote.

Keep Votes

1. Keep - Hard for me to vote against. To Da Axe Man- what do you mean by "easy for humans to get picked off"? Think about what happens in a Mall Seige; zombies collect (in a horde) outside, where nobody should be killing them. A few break in (where the horde effect no longer works) and kill people then get killed and dumped themselves. Eventually the zombies win the siege (they almost always do) and have to disband (ending the horde effect completely).
   Also, this would help dead survivors at revive points, not just zombies in sieges; join the horde at the revive point and you are potentially easier to scan (rotters can't block random scans) and harder to kill. --Seb_Wiers VeM 02:34, 18 May 2007 (BST)
2. Keep - You implemented my changes and added a deal of "ZOMG ZOMBAH ANONIMITY IS BACKZ". This would add A LOT of flavor to the game, discourage trenchies that still think shooting zeds at the doors is of any help, and as a survivor player I don't care about the possible difficulties it can bring. Cool suggestion man! Just one thing tough: when people gets inside the building, it's almost the same if they leave the horde automatically as zombies aren't likely to step outside again unless as corpses or stepping on another block, so don't put much care about inside/outside thing: it would be easier to code if they just leave the horde when stepping inside. --Matthew Fahrenheit ^YRC☺T☺+1 04:00, 18 May 2007 (BST)

   Yeah you're right. I'll put it as a note though.--ShadowScope 04:02, 18 May 2007 (BST)

3. Keep - This sounds really cool. Balanced and well thought out. --Sonofagun18 06:26, 18 May 2007 (BST)
4. Keep - I feel pretty sad to those newbie zombies I killed so I do want this mechanic to be added. --JudeMaverick ^W!TJ! 09:28, 18 May 2007 (BST)
5. Keep - i'm quite surprised that i like it. --Duke Garland_T^{LCD SSZ} 11:23, 18 May 2007 (BST)
6. Keep - Sure, why not? --Hhal 21:13, 18 May 2007 (BST)
7. Keep - Very interesting and creative suggestion, I would really like this to be implemented into the game, if Kevan reads this.--SCfan7 22:51, 18 May 2007 (BST)
8. Keep - This and the Lair skill sound the best that I've read. I hope they're used. --Ylomaus 12:47, 19 May 2007 (BST)
9. Keep FTW! --People's Commissar Hagnat ^{[cloned] [mod]} 02:20, 22 May 2007 (BST)
10. Keep -- Sometimes "harder" == "better." This is one of those times. --Firemanrik 01:28, 24 May 2007 (BST)
11. keep - this would make the game alot more fun. --'BP^Tmz 08:53, 26 May 2007 (BST)
12. Keep Toss on a bonus vs barricades and it's perfect. Just make it more accuracy against hitting barricades, not knocking them down. Like a +1% chance to hit for each 10 zombies maxing out at 10%. "It creaks" and "It collapses" both seem to count as hit. I don't really know how the game calculates the barricades being collapsed or creaking, so it would leave those mechanic alone and only increase accuracy. I like the idea of the "HP Pool" and how the effect is negated in a building. Negation in a building makes it actually fair. I wouldn't paying AP for that HP Pool. --Secruss 16:40, 26 May 2007 (BST)
13. KEEP- Could it be? The end to constant head-shot-ification? :) I like it.--Jebus14 15:43, 30 May 2007 (BST)

Kill Votes

1. Kill - In a huge horde, it would be stupidly easy for humans to get picked off. Eventually, almost every major square in malton (e.g. outside malls) would contain a horde and zombies just wouldn't get killed, so no. --Da Axe Man 23:22, 17 May 2007 (BST)
2. Kill Well, you said it yourself: This will make it to difficult to kill zombies in a horde. It just so happens that some people actually like trenchcoating, why take that away from them?. - BzAli 10:07, 18 May 2007 (BST)
3. Above. --•▬ ▬••▬ • •••• •▬ ▬•▬• ▬•▬ ^{#nerftemplatedsigs} 13:11, 18 May 2007 (BST)
4. Kill -Actually this is a pro-survivor skill. This would actually hurt zombies in sieges. Now the top zombie soaks all damage leaving all other zombies at full health. In a strike the fallen zombies simply stands up and enters the building making all zombies inside at full health. Now if they started hording as described in this skill, all damage would be spread equally amongst the zombies. In a siege strike all zombies inside would be damaged and thus far more easily to get rid off.

   This skill would make trenchcoating have a strategic value and a legitimate style of play. Perhaps good for the game overall as trenchcoating is a wildly popular style of play in a certain sub-group. As death means nothing for a zombie I fail to see why they would use a mechanic voluntarily that will only help survivors. If it is changed to an involuntary mechanic, it should be implemented with massive boosts to zombies to offset a gigantic nerf. I'm afraid the effects on balance are to difficult to plan for for me to vote keep on.--Vista ⁺¹ 17:29, 18 May 2007 (BST)

   While I understand this, you must also realize that by redistrubting the damage done from a mass of trenchcoaters over to a Horde, you will only receive a couple of HP loss, instead of having to suffer from a headshot. This saves you 5 AP right there (1 AP is already spent joining the Horde in the first place). And if the Horde is big enough, it may be that you will not be able to actually get any damage to start off with, or the damage, distrubted over to a large Horde, will only be 4 HP each. The cost of being partially wounded after the next day though can be offsetted by the increasing use of Digestion to recover HP. Overall, there are reasons why one may not want to Horde, but for other people, Hording may be pretty useful as a way to save AP, since the AP lost headshotting could be used to bring down one level of barricades.--ShadowScope 21:57, 18 May 2007 (BST)

5. kill It seems that large zombie hoards are allready sucessful, and don't need more power. StarDolphin 23:21, 18 May 2007 (BST)
6. Change The random hitting thing for members of a horde is way to powerful, what happens when a few zombies break into a building, like 5, and they horde. Yeah it takes more AP, but that ap makes it so that it takes far longer to kill them, especially if they are active. Change the random thing and my vote become keep.--karek 13:10, 23 May 2007 (BST)
7. Change I like the idea, man, but... you seriously need to think. Multiply it by a billion. No zombies would ever die, say, if you attacked a horde of 100. Random? No. Rethink that part and we have a good suggestion. Nalikill 20:31, 1 June 2007 (BST)

Spam/Dupe Votes