Suggestion talk:20071203 Falling Into Disrepair

Discussion from Talk:Suggestions

Falling into disrepair

Timestamp:	Pardus 09:37, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
Type:	Tactical Addition
Scope:	Ruined Buildings
Description:	Issue: At the moment ruined buildings can be repair for 1AP with a 100% chance of success, this appears to some as unbalanced, but previous suggestion have had rather unlikable side effects. Idea: I suggest that for every day a building is ruined the chance to repair it decreases by 15% to a minimum of 10%. Therefore if ruined for; >1 Day 85% chance to repair >2 Days 70% chance to repair >3 Days 55% chance to repair >4 Days 40% chance to repair >5 Days 25% chance to repair >6 Days 10% chance to repair Results: If survivors do not pay attention to a building for a long time they will have a difficult time retaking it and zombies may be able to claim territory. This will give survivors more interesting things to do than "Lets retake blackmore!!!" for the Nth thousand time.

Discussion (Falling into disrepair)

Me like, unless I am missing some obvious flaw.. - Whitehouse 14:32, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Ruin is already effective. If you don't like the way it works, suggest some balanced change. That is, if you want to reduce the odds of a repair being successful, do something like lower the encumbrance of the toolbox. And 10% chance to repair is a bit extreme. --Pdeq 17:42, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Ruin is not already effective. And although I speak for the OP, this is clearly intended to be a change which helps ruin to be balanced. Your assertion that every suggestion should be perfectly balanced assumes that the game is already perfectly balanced. That is a mistaken assumption. I'd vote keep, btw. - Grant 17:47, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Ruin is only effective for helping survivors.--Karek^maps?! 17:52, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

It'd help survivors if they where smart enougth to take proper adavntage of it. --Seventythree^Talk 17:53, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

That doesn't change that it is essentially useless to zombies.--Karek^maps?! 18:15, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

This would help re-dress the AP imbalance and hence make ruin more useful. If zombies hold a building as ruined for 5+ days, it would (on average) cost more AP for the survivors to repair it than it did for the zombies to ruin it. I think that is a very good mechanic, as the main thin working against zombies is AP imbalance.  Swiers 20:09, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Ruin is NOT effective for zombies. All said and done, ruin helps survivors more than it helps zombies. And toolboxes most certainly do NOT need to be reduced. Well, anyway... 10% might be a tad extreme, 20% as the worst penalty might be better. But, in general I like this idea... How is this for an alternative... zombies spend 5 AP to ruin a building... Why not have a scale just like barricading... fixing a ransack is automatic. But as you scale up the AP used on ruins, it gets progressively harder to fix. That would add a tactical element to ruining buildings... like, how much AP do I want to spend to slow the harmanz down??? Whaddaya think? --WanYao 18:22, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

10% is not at all extreme. It takes zombies 6 AP to ruin a building, and that assumes they are already inside and there are no survivors in there. It takes survivors 1 AP to fix it, and its easier for them to get in and it takes fewer APs for a survivor to kill a zombie than the other way. So yes, if it potentially (in rare cases of long held buildings) takes 10 AP to fix a ruin, that is in fact NOT to much.  Swiers 20:09, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Here you go... this is done with "balanced" percentages... frankly, i think this still goes a too little easy on survivors. but it is a step in the right direction, anyway.

• Ransack only - automatic repair for 1 AP
• 1 point Ruin - 83.3% chance of fixing for 1 AP
• 2 point Ruin - 66.7% chance
• 3 point Ruin - 50% chance
• 4 point Ruin - 33.3% chance
• 5 point Ruin - 16.7% chance

--WanYao 19:26, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

I likey. However, this is to easy on survivors. There should be a "destroy" option where you change the building into a "rubble" square that can be repaired for ?(a lot, like 20) AP, ? % chance. Sound fun? BoboTalkClown 21:30, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

percentages can be different, that was simply an evenly distributed scale... --WanYao 22:04, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Ok here is my new % table:

• 1 pt = 75% chance of completely a ruin
• 2 pt = 60%
• 3 pt = 45%
• 4 pt = 30%
• 5 pt = 15%

Now we have something MEANGINGFUL. If I spend 2 or 3 AP total, the survivor will stil have a pretty good chance of fixing it in one go -- in 2 goes it will probably be done. But if I chose to spend 1 Ap ransacking and another 3 AP ruining, now it is getting harder... And if I spend 5-6 AP in total, then there is a REAL effect for that investment. This, my friends, this would make Ruin a real action and not a zombie AP seive... --WanYao 22:18, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't feel that ruin is broken. Aside from the fact that toolboxes are dammed heavy, ruins are an AP drain on survivors - only 6 people have to lose their footing and the AP spent by the zeds is equaled. Not everyone carries a toolbox - I'm sure that, in heavily ruined areas, people are falling into the street all the time. Sanpedro 02:27, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

i dunno, every survivor in the groups i am in and/or whom i talk to carries a toolbox... and the weight of the toolbox and the equipment it means a survivor can'nt carry is the ONLY thing imo that makes ruining buildings worthwhile.... and i did think about your point with 6 survivors dropping to the street making up for it... but, i do not think that is as big as you think. first of all, you can avoid dropping to the street -- because you can see the ruins! one usually only goes outside when one needs to, like to clear out a building... usually survivors stay inside or go straight into the street... and, if a building is empty of zombies, it always gets fixed very quickly, minimising the ap drain... so, really, i am not convinced that it is balanced in the big picture. i don't think ruin is broken per se, but i do think it is a big waste of zombie ap for very little effect... and considering how hard everything is for zombies to acheive, every ap is sacred ;) ... i have actually STOPPED ruining buildings because it is so expensive. --WanYao 05:26, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

I think this depends on the area you are in. I find I lose a lot of ap just checking to see if I even can repair a ruined building, and if there's zeds inside, I've just wasted 2 ap getting in there to do nothing. The way ruin was first designed was that zombies could spend extra ap to ruin, and survivors could tolerate carrying a heavy toolbox. In resource poor areas, not being able to carry those extra 8 faks on a mall run or some extra ammo eventually results in more ap spent on having to get resources more often, although this isn't an issue for well maintained areas. If people don't like this dynamic (as many people think the toolbox is not much of a disadvantage), simply make it a straight ap for ap thing (or average ap spent for average ap sent thing). Do away with the heavy encumbrance of the toolbox and make it so it takes a survivor an average of 5 ap to repair (although perhaps accomplish this with percentages). Problem solved: ap spent by both sides averages out to equal so no issue about imbalance, and no more debate about the toolbox. (And by the way, I know several survivors without toolboxes, as their focus is on other tasks.) --Pdeq 09:00, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Ok, lets seriously look at what it takes to bring it to 10% chance. 6AP for the ruin and a minimum of 6 days staying within an area to maintain the repair block, which any organized survivor group could remove with minimal effort. Now if it takes almost a week for the survivors to clear a building, the zombies are really pulling the hard yards for that building to be held or the survivors are extremely sloppy looking after their suburbs. I believe Wan Yao's variation tips it even further into the zombie favour by allowing them to move on after ruining which would really hurt the survivors and the idea is frankly fairly vanilla, which is the same thing I can say about Pdeq's variation, as they both just make it a mirror image of play styles. Wan Yao's is ruin strafing, Pbeq is negaruin and the idea that the longer a building is in disrepair the more it falls apart is based fairly solidly in reality. - Pardus 14:46, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

i don't understand your comments about my idea being "vanilla" .... or mirroring playing styles... huh??? i do agree that my idea tips things even further pro-zombie, that was my point. anyway, all your points are valid and i am not in disagreement with anything you said, nor am i opposed to your suggestion as it stands -- in fact i think it is cool. but, i tend not to like ideas that have time-delayed effects, and prefer keeping things as is -- where an immediate use of ap gets an immediate effect that is permenant until another use of ap changes the state. perhaps THAT is a very vanilla way of gaming, but it is the way UD works and i try to stay within that framework... and this is a development and brainstorming page, and that is what people do here -- they brainstorm ideas and revisions and tweaks, etc. etc. sometimes those ideas take a suggestion in a somewhat different direction from the original proposal, and often those are actually some the greatest suggestions! that is all we were doing here, brainstorming your idea with you.. --WanYao 16:32, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Don't take it too harshly about the vanilla thing. The beauty of this game in my opinion is that both sides have very different styles of play, there is almost no similarity between the two. And when i said about mirroring playing styles, it's the same as barricade strafing, do the damage and move on. Not criticizing you or anything, I just believe the feel of this game is better kept my asymmetrical but balanced ideas. - Pardus 17:00, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

I like this suggestion very much, it also means a EHB building that serves no purpose will degrade over time until someone take an interest and uses it as a hideout. good for Pkers and zombies. stats would have to be tweaked by the moderators if it gets put in effect. Michael ruppe 07:21, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

---