Hold The Piñata

Trans-Mortal Tactics

The information on this page or section discusses tactics that can be applied if you find yourself on the wrong side after getting killed or being revivified.

Hold the piñata is a tactic for maintaining a piñata from the inside against attempts to break down its barricades from without.

Motivation

Piñatas are an incredibly effective construction, integral to cade and ruin and islanding. However, an empty piñata will inevitably be broken open by zombie or survivor action, allowing reentry to the building. It would be better if piñatas could be actively maintained at a greater than Very Strongly barricaded level.

Prerequisites

While a player acting alone can create a piñata, two or more cooperating players are required to hold a piñata from within and rebuild its barricades whenever they are under siege.

For a single-block piñata all players must have the Construction and Lab Experience skills and a supply of Revivification Syringes.

Process

The objective is to have two or more players inside a piñata, all infected and at least one always human or reviving. As the simplest example we will consider the two-survivor situation from hereon. By alternating turns, each player can revive their zombified partner, repair the piñata, strengthen the building's barricades, die from infection and then ransack and ruin the building back to a piñata state.

Creating the Piñata

Both players should be present in an Extremely Heavily barricaded building, one player already zombified and the other an infected survivor. The infected survivor revives their zombie partner, dies from their infection and then ransacks and ruins the building, creating a piñata which contains both themselves and the reviving body of their partner. If their now revived partner is not yet infected, they will have to bite and infect them on standing up.

Maintaining the Piñata

The two players alternate their turns, acting each time they are revived and following these instructions:

• Stand up
• Revive your standing zombie partner
• Repair the building
• Strengthen the barricades
• (Optional) search for syringes
• Die from infection
• Stand back up as a zombie
• Ransack and ruin the building

They then wait for their partner to do the same, repeating the cycle of revives.

Large Buildings

Large Buildings are much easier to maintain as piñatas as the players inside can coordinate their interior movements to avoid blocking each other's repair and ruin. Revives are therefore unnecessary providing at least one survivor and one zombie remain inside the structure. Better real-time coordination is required to ensure each repaired and barricaded section is then immediately re-ruined, to prevent access by free running.

NecroTech Buildings

Necrotech buildings are advantageous as the only single-block building that can be maintained as a piñata indefinitely, as the players inside can search for syringes to replace those that they use. Optimally, the players should concentrate on stocking up on syringes until the piñata comes under siege, at which point they should concentrate on maintaining its barricade levels above Very Strongly barricaded.

Body Building

The Body building skill affects the HP of a revived player, reviving at 30HP instead of 25HP. This in turn affects the number of actions the player needs to take before dying from infection - it may actually be beneficial for players defending a piñata to not have the body building skill.

Repelling Breaches

If a survivor (or zombie) manages to tear down the barricades enough to enter, they will have to be killed and their body dumped back outside. Both survivors and zombies will block piñata maintenance - zombies in blocking repair, and survivors in blocking ruin.

Counter Tactics

Zombies are more effective at tearing down barricades than survivors, but survivors need only tear the barricades down to Very Strongly barricaded in order to gain entry. Zombies are survivors working together are therefore most effective at sieging a piñata. Healing the piñata defenders once inside is also disruptive, as they will then need to coordinate reinfecting each other, which requires more real time cooperation, before they can return to active piñata maintenance.

Alternatively, the brief window of time during the defender's turn in which they repair the piñata (in order to strengthen its barricades) gives a real time window to free run into the building.