State Of Decay 2 - May 22nd Release

Vorph said:

Trumbull Valley was just added as a map for the main game last month

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with the OP amusement park base and everything? hmmm

*edit*

nm looked it up on YT, you don't get the jurassic junction megabase. sad.

Vorph said:

Trumbull Valley was just added as a map for the main game last month

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Could have used a bit more polish, but it's not bad. I like that they added a way to sample the OP Red Talon stuff by repairing the Red Talon FOB so you don't have to play Daybreak. The FOB even lets you summon a cleo weapon drop for influence instead of prestige, albeit at twice the cost (and at 1k influence it really isnt worth it). Not sure how I feel about the haven device, the siege was incredibly intense (and this was on standard, i cant imagine how much of a ballbuster that siege would have been on lethal) but once I move from the military base to the farm compound I'll see if you can combine the haven device with a cleo relay for drops without sieges. Although I'm not sure I want drops without sieges considering the big chunk of influence you get from completion.

Builder legacy may be OP, but warlord leader is definitely where it's at imo. The ability to craft exactly the ammo you want with the armory is such an improvement over getting random ammo from ammo bags, even if the other warlord buildings are pretty meh.

Trumbull Valley map lags and stutters for me on series x to the point I quit playing one settlement and took a map-exit on another that was more developed.

For ammo, Warlord Armory became obsolete once I'd collected ammo making building mods for each category and load them to a surviver I want to take to a new community. Tedious, but so is a lot of things in this game.

In general, game is buggy as hell. Followers go retarded too often, stuck in doors or invisible guns that don't shoot or just generally incompetent.

Had one map the same character was always unavailable, so had to reload if I wanted to switch. Another time one character would make the game very laggy, but was fine on a new map. Weird shit happens every few hours of play. Every dead character Dread and below was because followers or game mechanics spazzed out.

It's cool they do content updates so often, but so many weird quality of life or tedium things not addressed. Like, just let me access and check out full traits and stats of survivors from the selection menu, which either can't do or never figured out or made clear how to. Hard to build synergies when I can't see all their traits.

Tedium: I spend far too much time hunting for new additions to my community that aren't fugly, and I'm impressed how ahem diverse these mostly rural communities are.

Overall game is fun, despite tedium and annoying bugs and at time inexplicable bad performance at times. If polished, would be 9/10, but as is feels like playing some 15 year old unfinished game in compatibility mode.

I don't think I've ever built an armory unless the game forces you to as part of the ending quests. Only ammo I ever need to craft is either 9mm or .357 so I leave the pistol ammo press installed 95% of the time and swap in the magnum press when I get low on heart killing ammo for my MPX. I generally start with a Sheriff leader to get Lounge 3 going (for training videos) then demote and get a Trader in charge for the rest of the days.

Haven siege was super easy at the farm on lethal. IIRC there were only 2 Blood Juggs and a few ferals, barely worse than a major siege really. I got up in the barn and sniped all the incoming bloaters and screamers to make sure things didn't really get out of hand, and the AI handled everything else with the big guns. I do have some Daybreak stuff though.

Pre-haven the layout was Lounge 3, Staging Area, Auto Shop (mandatory on lethal because cars are made of tissue paper), and Trade Depot in the larges, RT Watchtower, RT Workshop, Officer's Quarters, and storage upgraded to Firesafe 3 in the smalls. Once the quest lines finally worked all the way, I dumped the Watchtower for hydroponics (meds) and the Trade Depot got sacrificed to make room for Haven. Hardest part of Lethal difficulty is keeping morale up and it's never been so easy as it was in the farm base.

As for the FOB base I really like the concept and the ability to get a 'free' C4 crafter out of it. The problem is that it's in the ass end of the map and a complete fucking nightmare to move up there on lethal. There's usually at least 5 hearts overlapped on it which not only is risky at the beginning, but also killing that many hearts ramps up the difficulty curve due to gaining too much standing too early. Compare that with the farm has literally nothing near it which virtually guarantees that you need to clear no more than 2 hearts to claim it, and it's so easy that it actually takes longer to get the 5 survivors than it does to clear out the plague. IMO the only way to really make use of it is by doing the 'start a game on green then switch to lethal after a couple days' trick once you have the Demolitions guy.

Vorph said:

Only ammo I ever need to craft is either 9mm or .357

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Maybe I just rely on guns too much rather than melee. I'm at the Marshall base, which is ok but mainly just a staging ground to search Marshall until I make the move to the farm base. Although really the game is so goddamn easy on standard that it doesn't matter much. I just don't feel like doing a higher difficulty without my legacy boons, so I'll probably uninstall again after I finish everything in Trumbull.

Think I've said this before but the game really feels more like SoD 1.5 than SoD 2. I hope 3 is a bit more ambitious (and polished).

Dread is fun and I suspect a sweet spot. Have to pay attention, but not as severely punished when a follower goes retarded or the game mechanics spazz out.

I almost quit after standard but glad I kept going for dread achievements. Hard enough it forced me to try different play styles and got fun again. I feel any harder and I'd just be motivated to cheese more.

Might go for the 100 day achievement as the game is decent to play while listening to podcasts and I mostly enjoy the Sims aspect of house building and collecting survivors (wish there was some penalty or danger for exiling them).

Regarding ammo. I craft a lot of the 40mm to blow shit up once I got grenade launcher that holds 12. Boom, headshot. 6 shots in a few seconds and plague hearts die (in dread, do the hearts get harder higher levels?).

Craft a lot of 7.62 and shotgun since they shred through hordes with sharpshooter. Neither necessary, but fun carnage.

Really like some of the game concepts (and can't beat available through Game Pass), so hope SOD 3 gets more polish and more intricate.

popsicledeath said:

(in dread, do the hearts get harder higher levels?)

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Nightmare has only slightly more hp than Dread, but Lethal has twice as much hp as Nightmare. That's not the worst of it though. The real ballbuster is that you don't get to magically kill all the zombies in the area by finishing off the heart (aside from the one feral that always seems to show up late to the party). Not only are they all still alive, but there's a shitload more of them still incoming. And every special zombie on lethal is the plague variant too.

ScentBlock still trivializes it though. I run in, drop a C4 next to the heart, burn one mag from a MPX, detonate C4 and reload, then half of the second mag and it's dead. Quickly loot the plague samples if possible, otherwise GTFO and come back later if I really need anything from hearts still. I can usually get back to my car without being attacked and depending on how close other hearts are you can sometimes get 3 or even 4 of them down before the ScentBlock wears off.

Cutlery said:

I'm still trying to figure out which survivors (or perhaps more accurately...skills) I need to bring when I start.

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Assuming you don't have Red Talon dudes, I'd go with Lichenology, Pathology, and Pharmacology (used to do Munitions first, but that skill is moot now that there's a free Demolitions guy)

It all depends on how many people, which skills, and what kind of base you intend to have in the long run though. Like the farm setup I listed above, that's with a crew of Hacking, Pathology, Lichenology, Plumbing, Pharmacology, Demolitions, Automechanics, and a couple others that are just kind of dead weight. One doesn't even have a 5th skill iirc, since I never had a skill book trader show up on this map. I used to always use an Agriculture guy, but now I get all my food production from outposts and only need the Lichenology guy to counter the Infirmary upkeep and provide Gardening/Herbalism when I decide to use Hydroponics.

Guess I can see how one or two presses would be enough, especially if you primarily rely on melee. Cars may not technically be a necessity but good lord I would not want to haul rucks without them.

It's a fun enough game but I'm probably done with it after this Trumbull run. They've done a lot of good work improving the game from the mediocre state it was in at release which gives me hope for SoD3, but the core gameplay loop is still pretty shallow.

Cutlery said:

Not exactly what I was hoping for having content locked away behind bullshit like that.

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I still have like 45k daybreak prestige. You never hear of the community editor? I assume it's still being updated.

Cutlery said:

No, set the game aside a year or so ago when I started prepping for the zombie apocalypse IRL, picked it back up last week when I saw the thread get bumped. Makes sense there would be something like that available. Fuck daybreak, forced multiplayer bullshit. Nothing I hate more than that crap hamfisted into my single player campaigns. If you wanna hand out MP rewards, that's fucking great, but let me unlock them in single player thru some other method so I'm not subject to the whims of retards and can do shit on my schedule.

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The mode kinda sucks and was pretty hard to boot. Supposedly it just got a lot easier with the change to ammo stacks because now you get double ammo but it didn't take more than a couple rounds of Daybreak to make me go looking for a prestige cheat.

Gavinmad said:

I still have like 45k daybreak prestige. You never hear of the community editor? I assume it's still being updated.

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It still gets updated, but since Update 27 just dropped it's broken again. Usually takes a week or two to get an update out, plus it's a good idea to let some guinea pigs try it first. People who used the version he put out when Trumbull Valley first released found that using the editor had side effects ranging from deleting all your shit to breaking quest progression until you moved to a new map.

I can't imagine playing the game without such a tool, there's no other way to change all the they/them pronoun people back to he or she. Literally unplayable!

Vorph said:

I can't imagine playing the game without such a tool, there's no other way to change all the they/them pronoun people back to he or she. Literally unplayable!

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Yeah I rolled my eyes pretty hard when Izzbee explained that Cleo was a they.

In a different age I wouldn't have found anything exceptionable about not wanting to gender an AI. In 2021? Fuck off and die.

If I'm doing a single map then the trader 4k boon and a computer expert carrying a mod for extra bases is quite powerful.

A few of my strongest characters have been medicine or agriculture and they seemed good as start skills.

I recruit and exile to sociopathic levels so never too hard filling in the ranks as needed, but computers, medicine and agriculture has worked for a solid starting trio.

Have gotten to 50 survivors having to axe 4 or 5 and never seen or figured out lichenology.

Was avoiding close combat, but finally got some Asian chick that fought in pits called Grinder I couldn't resist keeping around, and close combat can be fun.

I really enjoy the random character builds and forming up a team the most it seems. Like Sims with zombies.

Gavinmad said:

Yeah I rolled my eyes pretty hard when Izzbee explained that Cleo was a they.

In a different age I wouldn't have found anything exceptionable about not wanting to gender an AI. In 2021? Fuck off and die.

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Build Them's fighting gym. Shit had me confused. Thought I had some Asian character named Them or some shit.

I like being a Nazi so will exile ugly characters or idiotic nonbinary pansexuals. Will only use asian doctors, and thankfully found an Indian computer guy named Sandeep.

Not total racist though. Right now I have a black dude doing construction.

popsicledeath said:

Have gotten to 50 survivors having to axe 4 or 5 and never seen or figured out lichenology.

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It's ungodly rare to just find it in the wild, I've seen it a grand total of once ever on a recruitable NPC. You either have to roll for it when creating a new survivor, or recruit someone with an empty 5th slot and have him read a book (from skill book vendor or a very rare mission reward).

The skill itself is simple. It provides all the benefits of Gardening and Herbalism except you get 2 meds a day instead of just 1, and don't need to bother with the whole leveling process.