[2020] Is Insane balanced?

Balanced against what, exactly? Balance implies a comparison between two or more things. Balanced against your personal skill level? I couldn't say. Balanced to fit on a smooth difficulty curve with the other difficulty levels? ...Well I'm not sure on that one either, since I don't change the difficulty setting much.

It's more than changing the damage numbers, though. I know that on harder difficulties, zombies do their quick lunge after getting hit more often. Perhaps more importantly, higher difficulty means racking up a higher gamestage, and that means your hordes will consist of tougher zombies. You'll get a higher proportion of spiders that jump, ferals that run, soldiers with armor, cops that spit, radiateds that heal damage, etc.

There are quite a few ways that zombies get harder besides their damage numbers. It's just not as obvious that you're getting a cop instead of a skateboarder in part because you're playing on insane.

Sorry, I could have been clearer. I was pointing out I don’t know the OP’s skill level, as a player, not their character’s skills. So I can’t say whether Insane is balanced for them.

The setting they call “difficulty” isn’t the whole picture, though. You can make zombies move faster in more situations, you can increase the number of simultaneous Blood Moon zombies, and you can have Blood Moons more often; not to mention ways to make survival harder beyond zombies.

The developers have expressed disdain for games where each enemy ‘levels up’ in lock step with the player’s level, saying it ruins the sense of progression. That’s probably partly to blame for an individual contest between you and a given zombie type going from harder to easier.

It makes sense to me to have different kinds of problems to worry about in the late game than in the early game. But if some want that fear factor at all times, I respect your opinion.

Originally posted by amyasleigh: It is basically the worst way to have an increased "difficulty". Tried it, its easy to survive but it just adds tedium. dance back and forth back and forth hitting them forever and be forced to run away from any even slightly disadvantageous encounter unless you want to die.
Default setting with increased spawns is basically the ideal. Hopefully one day we can get a proper difficulty selection that makes zombies more numerous and spawns harder types earlier rather than what we have currently. Nothing feels worse in a vidya than blasting something in the head with a shotgun 20 times only for you to have done less than half its hp in damage.

It does spawn harder types earlier at higher difficulty. Zombie types are determined by gamestage, which rises faster at harder difficulty levels.

Originally posted by 'gamestages.xml': gameStage = ( playerLevel + daysSurvived ) * difficultyBonus

On quantity, the devs have opted to work within the technical limits of how many enemies they can put on screen at once. It's trivial to crank up the numbers in a mod, but not without increasing system requirements.

Originally posted by Uscari: The real bottleneck for difficulty is the AI. Insane difficulty would be hell if the AI pathing was stronger, and zombies didn't have such predictable movement. It's far too easy to funnel them into a choke point and eviscerate them.

I don't see how the pathing can get "stronger." They already take the path of least resistance. In other words, any deviation from what they do now would be sub-optimal. One can lament that they're boring structural engineers now, but it means they're already doing the strongest thing they can.