New game I found : Urban dead

[Huang Di]

Yeah I found this neat game called Urban dead. Its an action point based game where you play a survivor or a zombie in a quarantined city. I like it, but it has drawbacks.

Things you need to know before you start playing:

1. ALL characters are players, ALL OF THEM.
2. Your allies? Yeah, they are stupid, regardless of what team you pick.
3. Your enemies? They never are.
4. The game plays SLOWLY.
5. Zombies are currently unbalanced. Survivors can still hold their own, but when zombies team up, just run.
6. The game has a wiki, use it or die. It has a full map of the city, as well as guides like "First day in Malton"
7. If you run out of AP in the street as a survivor, you're dead.

www.Urbandead.com

[blackknight]

Sounds cool. I'll check it out.

[Drago Goldenwing]

Oh-ho-ho, I played the Hell out of Urban Dead. I had a level 11 Survivor (Scientist, so I could get all the Necrotech skills,) and a level 12 zombie.

The game is currently in a state of total havoc because the developer Kevan game Zombies an ability to completely ransack a building.

See, humans in UD have previously relied on a system called 'Free Running', by which they buy the Free Running skill which allows them to move from one building to another without having to go outside and face the undead horde. To keep safe, almost every building in human occupied areas would be extremely heavily barricaded, making it hard for all but a group of four to five zombies working in concert to break into the building, which was usually totally empty. This gave humans some measure of freedom, and essentially the game was being played on two different levels: Humans had Inside, the zombies had Outside, and never the twain shall meet.

The problem came when the developer gave the zombies a new skill called 'Ransack'.

Previously, when a zombie broke into a building, they had the option to wreck the inside of the building. This didn't really affect anything though, and it was considered a waste of Action Points. Ransack made ruining a building do something: When a zombie Ransacks a building, it becomes useless. And the really game-breaking part, it prevents human survivors from using the Free Running skill to move directly from one building to another; In essence, it gave zombies the ability to control survivor traffic in an area. Now the zombies control which buildings it is easy for humans to reach, and which ones the zombies want to make it impossible to reach.
There are several building types which attract lots of survivors because they're useful resource points: Hospitals provide healing, Necrotech Labs provide scientists with the tools necessary to track and revive zombies into humans, police stations and fire houses provide the humans with weapons.
The zombies, being more intelligent and better organized than the humans, used their Ransack skill to break into nearly every Necrotech lab in the game and ransack it, meaning scientists could no longer provide the necessary number of Necrotech Syringes to revive human players who don't want to be zombies. At this point a number of zombies would stay behind in the Necrotech Lab, to prevent any humans from fixing the building, and the rest of the group would begin systematically ransacking all the buildings around the lab, so that it would be very hard for a group of survivors to get into the lab and begin to make it useable again.

This had two effects: The first was that the zombies immediately took complete control of many areas of the game. By Ransacking all the buildings, the zombies made all survivors have to move outside the buildings to get to other areas. Because the zombies are much better at combat than survivors, any experienced survivor will tell you that going outside is a death warrant. The zombies formed a 'line' around human-occupied areas that prevents any groups of survivors large enough to retake ransacked areas from getting to those areas. This has caused a stalemate between the zombies and the humans: Because there are now so many humans hiding in the human occupied area, their sheer numbers prevents the zombies from taking any new areas. But at the same time the humans can't leave the human areas to retake any areas destroyed by the zombies.
The second effect is perhaps the most insidious: When the zombies destroyed and captured the Necrotech Labs, they cut off the single most important resource the humans had. The labs are the only place where the medicine to turn zombies back into humans can be made. This is causing an Armageddon in the game, because as human players die, there's a very low chance they'll manage to be revived again. So the humans fall and rise as zombies, and have to stay that way where once before they could just go to a graveyard and find another character willing to revive them.
This is causing a very large number of human players to get ticked off, because it makes the game severely imbalanced and some feel it's unplayable as a human character now.

[Huang Di]

What drago says is all true.

I'm not going to restate that rather long winded explanation but simply say that you know your game dosn't make sense when the zombies are smarter and more organised than the communication-centered humans.

It also dosn't help the situation that in urban dead, every significant zombie flaw can be removed by taking a certain skill. Zombies can't talk? Take death rattle. Zombies are too slow? Take lurching gait. Zombie keep getting revived in combat? Take brain rot.

IT. GETS. OLD.

Then theirs their OTHER gamebreaker skill. Ankle grab. The friggen thing let's zombies stand up for ONE action point after you kill them. IT TAKES YOU LIKE THIRtY TO KILL THEM!

Then theres the PKers. In a game where the zombie are knocking at your door, most people belive that it is better to kill zombies right? Wrong. PKer show up in every major grouping of humans there is. I hear they've even got a suburb under their control along the northern border.

I currently run 2 low level firemen, one of whom is dead and looking for a revive, and two zombies.

By the way drago, stupid question, but you know what the second big bash is, right?

EDIT: Sorry just needed to apologize for my spelling and grammar. I can't type when I'm annoyed.

[Drago Goldenwing]

Haven't a clue, unless you mean one of the Mall Tours.

[Huang Di]

Not so much a mall tour as a zombie crusade meandering about the city with no particullar goal in mind. Here have a look at this:http://wiki.urbandead.com/index.php/Big_bash_2

[Drago Goldenwing]

I've stopped playing. I don't really want to play a zombie, and with both my active humans trapped dead behind the Zombie Line, I don't have a very good chance at getting them revivified.

The sad thing is that, as you pointed out, neither of them fell to zombies. It was human PKers who killed both of them while they were chain-using FAKs on injured people.

Why is it that I've never met a level 41 player in UD who wasn't a PKing bastard?

[Huang Di]

Because they've all clued in that humans are a lost cause. By the way, why don't you just take your, well, they're zombies now, and run them to somewhere still in the green. You won't ever get revived where you are, but it's not all that hard to get to somewhere where you might.

Just found this amusing: My friend was talking about how any suburb in the game can be retaken with enough support. Just to shoot him down I reference Candyland (also known as Ridleybank) and bring up the amount of time it has been zombie controled.

He was quiet for the next ten minutes.

[Drago Goldenwing]

Ridleybank is really a singularity though. The RRF holds it because they concentrate all their resources to holding it, and are both large and very well organized.

If an equally large and equally well-organized group of humans got together they could take back the Candy, but everyone's too scared of the RRF.