davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)

So last night I settled down to play the first tier five Point of Interest (POI) I've run up against in zombie game Seven Days to Die. Bear in mind my character is now pretty much maxed out on skills, completely maxed out on hit points, with mostly max level weapons and armour.

The POI  was a large factory site which I had to enter, kill all the zombies, and retrieve a hidden courier satchel. I went in with 4 weapons (drum-fed auto shotgun, pistol, assault rifle and silenced sniper rifle) and 750 rounds of ammunition*. Most zombie encounters up to now have been running 1-4 zombies, with maybe 6 to 8 for the boss fight before getting to the main loot. I realized previous rules might not apply when my first encounter threw 8 zombies at me. And they kept on coming.

I'd figured it might take a couple of hours (two in-game days), four hours later I threw myself despairingly off a rooftop, because after what I thought was the boss fight I was swarmed again, trapped in a corner by multiple high-level zombies, and that was the only option that had any chance of not leaving me dead in seconds. It was pure chance there was a lower level roof for me to land on and leg it back to my jeep on 53 hit points out of 200.

By my reckoning I fired about 550 of 300 rounds of pistol ammo (that's not a typo, I managed to find extra just as I was about to run out), 130 rounds from the shotgun, the same from the sniper rifle and about 100 from the assault rifle (I'd held it back for the boss fight). I may well have killed over 200 zombies, it was certainly well past 100. And the factory still beat me.

I can't help feeling that possibly the balance may need tweaking.

* You could totally call this armed for bear as there was a zombie bear in the car park outside.

davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)

I'm headed up to see my folks at the end of the month (Easter trip postponed to Whit given a poorly timed bout of Covid on my brother-in-law's part), so went onto LNER's website to book the ticket on Monday night, at which point I was slightly disconcerted to be see:

1) in the left-hand column a confirmation that I'm a wheelchair-using passenger intending to stay in their chair throughout the journey,

and

2) in the right-hand column, almost exactly opposite, a warning that I may have to 'stand' on the connecting services*.

Slight lack of joined-up thinking in the website design there, I feel! **

* The connecting services don't do reservations, and one is a London commuter line, so the warnings aren't unreasonable for actual ambulant passengers, but we wheelchair-users have spaces all of our own.

** It's not the only issue, the time it allows to walk between stations if your journey needs that (St Pancras to Kings Cross in my case) doesn't allow for the extra 5-10 minutes needed to get off the incoming train if you need the ramp and the 20 minutes you're supposed to allow for passenger assistance at your outgoing station. But the standing thing is new.

Recent Reading

What Abigail Did That Summer, Ben Aaronovitch

This is a Rivers of London novella*, but from the point of view of Peter Grant's 13yo cousin Abigail, who makes up the youth wing of the Folly (aka Falcon, aka the Met Police's tame wizards - though Abigail has to pass her Latin GCSE before she gets to learn any spells). It's the summer holidays, and Peter's out of town helping on a missing persons case (and having encounters with homicidal unicorns - see Foxglove Summer), while Abigail's mother has a full-time job looking after her disabled brother, so Abigail is pretty much being left to her own devices. Until, that is, the espionage-obsessed talking foxes seek her out to tell her that something's amiss on Hampstead Heath (a large London park)**. And Abigail quickly figures out that whatever it is has already tried to suck her in, and, separately, her new friend Simon. So it's up to Abigail, Simon, and Indigo the fox to figure out what's going on.

Abigail's a pretty compelling, and convincingly written, character (there are footnotes to explain the slang, framed as for the Folly's tame FBI agent). It's very easy to accept that a streetwise, very intelligent, 13yo, mixed-race Londoner is going to give most police a very wide berth, or the minimum of (false) information necessary to get away, which makes Abigail taking on the problem herself convincing enough. There's only a brief appearance by Nightingale and not a lot of the Rivers here, bar a short audience with Fleet, but the covert female strand of wizardry does show up. Overall it's a strong addition to the series, though I foresee future issues between Nightingale and Simon's mum.

* At 175 pages short novel may be a better description.

** We're actually dropped into the story in media res, but loop back to the start almost immediately.

Werehunter, Mercedes Lackey

I actually pulled this off the shelf while I was winnowing a few books to go to the charity shop, but ended up reading it instead. It's a collection of short stories and I wasn't really taken by the title story, which may be why I didn't remember it favourably. There are a handful of other stories I was a bit meh! about, but another nine I did like, which is a reasonable ratio. Four of those revolve around S'Kitty, a telepathic ship's cat, and her handler as they deal with a bunch of aliens who have a vermin problem. They're not going to win any prizes, but they are enjoyable. The one Valdemar story deals with how Alberich, the Herald's Karsite weaponsmaster, was Chosen. There are two Diana Tregarde stories, one fairly slight encounter that's really, really not kind to the (thinly disguised) Romance Writers of America. I suspect revenge fiction. The other is reasonable, and went on to be the basis for her novel Children of the Night, but some of the language has not aged well. And the last two are a sort of junior Victorian paranormal investigator series with two girls (one an ex-streetkid) and a parrot at a school for the children of those working in the colonies, whose principal is an acknowledged Diana Tregarde expy. Again there are some language aging poorly issues, but they're otherwise sound enough. Their main issue is an egregious outbreak of Dick Van Dyke Cockney.

Hells Bell, Keri Arthur

Book 2 of the Lizzy Grace series and runaway-witch Lizzy and werewolf cop Aiden are fairly desperate to have sex, but ghostly bells summoning Lizzy to find a dead body with its soul ripped from it throw a major spanner in their plans. So Lizzy and her partner/familiar Belle have to step in again given the werewolf reservation's lack of a resident witch to protect its magical wellspring. It possibly plays the "Oh, bugger, we can't have sex, they just found another body" gambit once too often, but otherwise it's an enjoyable outing and the addition of grump witch troubleshooter Ashworth to the cast is a positive step.

Hunter Hunted, Keri Arthur

Book 3, and Lizzy stumbles onto someone conducting blood magic of the worst kind, the kind that leaves a body behind. The witch hierarchy that practically runs Australia call blood-magic using witches heretics, and has an agency to hunt them down, which is just as well as the wellspring decides Lizzie is just the person to turn to when someone starts hunting and skinning werewolves. On the positive side there's just time between the two crimes for Aiden to finally get her into bed. But when the heretic starts hunting the hunters, it turns out Lizzie really isn't going to get away with concentrating on the less dangerous threat.

Another competent episode, and after the previous book's addition of grumpy Ashworth I really liked the addition of his (non-grumpy) husband Eli.

Recent Gaming

I've been playing a fairly ridiculous amount of 7 Days to Die and my adventures in zombie AI wrangling continue. Over the past three horde nights:

Day 77: This week's preparatory changes were stringing a couple of rows of barbed wire down the sides of my base, and fortifying the stairwell up to the ground floor proper/mezzanine should they manage to beat their way into the cellar. Rather than attack me at the (almost) open front door all the zombies still charged up to the sides of my base, into the barbed wire and set about trying to beat their way through the fencing at the side (5000 damage points per block) that keeps them out from under the balcony. I had great fun when I discovered that they would come to stand below wherever I was standing on the balcony, wading through the barbed wide to get there, so I spent horde night running from front to back and vice versa, and taking potshots at the zombies as they tried to keep up with me and the barbed wire slowly whittled them down from below.

Day 84: I doubled up the side fencing to two layers. And this time I got the zombies to the front of the house, where they promptly tried to beat their way through the fencing under the balcony, which was still single layer there. *Headdesk* 

On top of that the World War Z style zombie pile-on at that corner was reaching the point that it was threatening to overtop the fence on top of the balcony, even though that's the in-game equivalent of four metres off the ground. So I rushed out to the projecting bastion and started shooting out the bottom of the pile, which was the moment I glitched through the balcony, down onto ground level with the zombies.

I'd hosed off three full magazines from my AK-47 in a panic before I realised they couldn't get to me, that I was still safely inside the double layered fencing under the bastion and they couldn't reach through to me. Which let me finish horde-night in a much more leisurely fashion. On the gripping hand it took me 5 minutes to beat my way out with an axe in the morning.

Day 91: This time I upgraded the fencing to two layers all around the base, and three in places (and put escape hatches in the floor/roof of all of the bastions in case of another glitch). I think that makes a minimum of 15,000 points of damage to beat their way into the base at ground level (and zombies mostly do 10-20 points per hit). And it worked, they finally came for me at the front door.

Gulp.

They still didn't come quite the way I'd expected. They came up a couple of side staircases that need an awkward jump, rather than up the nice simple ramp they were supposed to use (and I'd forgotten to pull up the temporary planking over the pit of barbed wire that was supposed to force them onto awkward balance poles that they will fall off half the time). And for the fifteen minutes of horde night I was firing pretty much continuously trying to keep them back. Of five layers of barricade they'd beaten their way through two and were regularly hurdling the third, simply because I couldn't fire fast enough to kill them to give me time to repair the barricades. At one point they actually got all the way in and almost killed me before I managed to hose them down with the AK-47. I ended the night with 6 rounds of rifle ammunition left out of just shy of 200, and had also used about a hundred each of pistol and shotgun ammunition. Eeep!

First thing I did the next morning was beat down those side staircases, then rejig the front of the base with a completely enclosed corridor with five layers of main barricades and two fall-back ones, all completely enclosed so there'll be much less of this hurdling barricades next time. But I really need better weapons!
davidgillon: Text: You can take a heroic last stand against the forces of darkness. Or you can not die. It's entirely up to you" (Heroic Last Stand)

I bought myself 7 Days to Die when it was on sale on Steam a few weeks ago (for £5.60 vs a normal £20-odd). It's your typical looter-shooter survival game, but with zombies. I was surprised by just how gorgeous it looks, and that my laptop will actually run it (it takes forever to start and does keep stalling for unknown reasons, but I'm impressed it runs at all). Scattered over the map (either pre-gen or randomly generated) are Points of Interest, POIs :-  homes, shops, factories, utilities, which you need to loot your way through in pursuit of the supplies you need to survive. (And the several hundred different POIs in the game are all built using the in-game building system which has something like 1000 different building blocks - impressive). So obviously you want to find yourself a nice safe base to settle down in, and for me that was a nice semi A-frame cabin by a lake that happened to be the second POI I cleared, and is right next door to one of the traders (who buy and sell loot, and give you missions). Lakeside view, wrap-around veranda, access up a flight of stairs*, the ideal place to live, if it wasn't for the shambling neighbours.

The '7 Days to Die' element is the game's tower-attack gimmick.  Every seven days, the Blood Moon rises and hordes of zombies attack your base throughout the night (standard settings are one hour per day, and the night runs 22:00 to 04:00  - so a quarter of an hour of mayhem. As the zombies can both beat their way through walls and will do World War Z style pile-ons if they stack up in one place, you need a carefully designed 'horde base' to get through the night. Especially as each week's horde is worse than the last. Looking on youtube the standard base design, with lots of individual variations, is basically to create a path up to what's effectively an armoured serving counter for you to deal out mayhem with rifles, pistols and nail-studded baseball bats.

So I'm now seven weeks into my initial game and should, in theory, have a good horde base by now. Emphasis on the 'in theory':

Week 1:  The week 1 Blood Moon I spent huddled atop a lift car in a mine-shaft after running out of time in the POI I was clearing. Every so often a zombie would appear, try to jump to get to me and plummet down the mine-shaft. Rince and repeat until morning.

Week 2: This time I completely lost track of what day it was, never mind what time. When the first clap of thunder marked the imminent arrival of the horde I had just enough time to sprint home, ditch everything I was carrying, and on the clap of 22:00 come out of my front door like an Olympic sprinter, hurdle the horde and throw myself into the lake. This tactic would have worked perfectly if I hadn't gotten myself stuck under a dock and drowned. When I respawned, essentially naked, I went and hid on top of one of those little box-girder bridges you get in the States and never saw a zombie all night.

Week 3: I accidentally built a horde base while trying to harden my base against random wandering hordes rushing in during the night. When the actual Blood Moon rolled around I had four customers all night.

Week 4: I stumbled back to my base just ahead of the Blood Moon after an encounter gone wrong with about half hit points, a broken leg and a concussion. So it was just as well I only had four customers all night. Again.

Week 5: I completed my next step in the horde base, boxing in under the veranda. Two customers all night, but I could hear far more. When I went out in the morning it turned out the horde had beaten its way under the veranda, then gotten stuck there.

Week 6: Ditto

Week 7: I expanded the veranda with a projecting bastion on the front right corner. This let me go and have a look at what the zombies were actually doing. All through the night each new wave would come running up to the framing under the veranda and try to beat its way inside. If they succeeded, they then tried to beat their way back out again.

Reader, I broke the zombies.

Plans for next week: bastions on all four corners, then string barbed wire between them to see it that helps.

* Stairs aren't ideal for real-world wheelie me, but are good for slowing down zombies.

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davidgillon: A pair of crutches, hanging from coat hooks, reflected in a mirror (Default)
David Gillon

March 2025

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