[2021] Suggestion: climbing zombies

I don’t like it when a base design fails to protect against any type of zombie, nor when it foils every type of zombie. The more different types of zombie there are, with different behaviors and abilities, the more interesting base design becomes.

For instance, for week 1 maybe you have enough time to set up an effective defense against basic zombies, but not enough time to put a roof on everything to protect you from vultures. That’s the kind of scenario I like in this game, where your base can be improved week after week to protect against different threats, until you have a robust, multilayered base design. I’d like to see more situations like that.

So rather than all zombies climbing, I would prefer to see a ‘special infected’ that climbs. If they all climb, then you either sink or swim with your first week’s design, and if your design is effective, then you’re set forever after. I know it doesn’t take much to put a lip around your base so climbers can’t do their thing, but it’s more about the principle of having a progression curve. I don’t want to have to build the perfect base the first time around. And adding lips, roofs, etc. makes building more interesting than a static design where you just upgrade the blocks to take more damage.

It’s the same with digging. They made all zombies able to dig down, but I would’ve preferred if dogs or some particular type of zombie was the designated digger zombie. Then digging could be introduced as one of several attacks you need a defense against at some point. You could have situations where your underground base worked great this week, because the horde was mostly Infected Police Officers that can spit but not dig, but then next week you get slammed because it happens to be mostly diggers. You’d have interesting decisions to make about what to prioritize in base design, and then during horde night you can play to your weaknesses. I.e. you didn’t put a proper lip around everything, so you’re always shooting the climbing zombies while your base defenses work more indiscriminately on the rest.

So that’s my long winded way of saying, I like the idea but I see the most advantage in divvying up special abilities like climbing among different types of zombies.

Originally posted by vgifford: Spider zombies used to climb, but humorously they would climb trees, light posts, etc...

Indeed. And the biggest problem in my view wasn’t that they were climbing the wrong things, but that they looked really bad doing it. They had no climb animation, so they ‘walked’ up on all fours, as in their heads touched the block and the rest of their bodies stuck out behind them.

It’s probably easy to make a climb animation from flat ground up onto a flat wall, but difficult to make it look right in different situations given the many, many block shapes, and that it’s a sandbox so they could encounter anything. And of course, if the devs tried to make it look good by making climbers only climb a few block shapes that look good, then players would exploit that by using weirder shapes so that climbing is nullified.

So it makes sense that they changed spiders into jumpers instead of climbers. One can hope that climbing could still be implemented in a way that looks decent, since it’s a distinctly different behavior from flying, jumping, swimming, or anything else.