User talk:Grim s/Rants/Revival Imbalance

Commentary

While its a good article, I think you present a skewed case. At the vey least, you MUST add the cost of building a cade to EHB+2 to the survivor side of the equation, since you assume zombies destroyed such a cade. I think that comes to about 40 AP? Without any cade re-builds, the whole city would soon be de-caded, massively reducing the cost on the zombie side...

Other factors that realistically increase the cost of the typical revive are:

• It's very, very hard to manage 4 revives per trips; it assumes that you have 50 AP to spend on nothing but moving and reviving, which is rare for most survivor players. 3 revives is good for a well played reviver using the tactics your model presumes, and 2 is nearly as common.
• Its not all that uncommon to find that you can only scan a rotter at the RP because all the rest are scanned. The typical solution is to move around some more and scan at a new location. This is one reason for the above quoted figures.
• It often takes more than 3 AP to get to a revive point, especially if you want to find one that isn't over-crowded or being hunted by trenchie skullfucks. I'd say its more like 8 AP.
• Entry points are often NOT within 1 AP, are over-barricaded, or are on the other side of the RP from where the NT building is, further increasing travel costs.
• Search AP is arguably to low, because it ignores the fact you need to spend AP staying alive (cading, moving, getting revived) to be able to search on a sustained basis. On the other hand, I also think the find rates are closer to 20% in a powered building, so a figure near 9 AP isn't unfair to either side.

Obviously many of those are due to flaws in survivor tactics / inability to co-operate, but they are still real factors in the cost. Several of them are heavily dependent on the environment; in a burb that is under heavy attack and / or has really crappy revive point setups, many of those costs go up, often dramtically.

I'd say your zombie figures are right on the money though. I could quibble over a few points, but its safe to say a 10 member strike team kills 10-12 survivors on an average night when in a "target rich environment". They often do worse, so any arguments they could do better balance out.

The balance is not that much better for dirtnap, btw. In fact, the math probably looks even worse for the survivors if you go by the assumptions of dirtnap. The difference is that dirtnap doesn't require any barricaded buildings to retreat to (allowing you to easily target RPs in red zones) and maximizes the survivors use of "stored AP" in the form of syringes in inventory, which also removes the need for an intact NT building. Its got a slightly hgher cost, but the cost is unaffected by adverse conditions.

However, I don't think this indicates unfairness / unfun play for zombies. If the rate WERE equal, survivors by definition would have to spend as much AP reviving as zombies do attacking. Since zombies essentially do nothing but attack, if ever zombie and survivor numbers were equal, survivors would by defintion have to do essentially nothing but revive, or else rapidly go extinct. And I think that in itself proves the numeric imbalance without any need for math; survivors plainly do spend far fewer AP on revives than zombies do on attacks, and yet the balance tips towards survivors. Whether thats a bad thing or not is up to interpretation; for me, it seems required to have a playable game where survivors do more than just push needles as fast as they can. Doing so is fun, but on a sustained basis its much more boring than even the most limited kind of zombie play.

 Swiers 00:48, 22 June 2008 (BST)

ill do what i can to minimise the stuff you said here, but i have to say right now that i said that the game was unbalanced, in addition to being unfun. I didnt say this made it unfun. Ill have more when i get back from the shops. --The Grimch ^{U! E! WAT!} 07:18, 22 June 2008 (BST)

Midianian had some good points to. I forgot entirely about the healing, and you should assume the zombies are alive at the start of the day. Killing a zombie is a HUGE waste of survivor AP- the only reason they even CAN do it is because of the revive imbalance. In a pure "zombies kill vs survivors revive" contest (the type I advocated for The Big Prick), you don't kill any zombies, because all your AP need to go towards revives, to (locally) maximize that imbalance in favor of the survivors.  Swiers 18:17, 22 June 2008 (BST)

Actually, you are assuming that the only reason they can kill is because of the revive imbalance, and while i agree that the revive imbalance is partly responsible for that (Not by muc), the main reason is because humans have a vast pool of waste AP floating around, which i use to fuel things like healing and killing zombies, which are outside the system im examining. My example here is an extreme composed of zombies who have earned awards for outstanding achienvement in the field of murder, and to be perfectly honest, with only about one and a half thousand flagged zombies, (I gave an exact figure on kevans talk page) and only a couple of hundred of them operating at this level of efficiency. The scale of the revive imbalance at this level of the examination has a huge knock on effect with those vastly less efficient zombie clases, especially the feral zombies who make up the overwhelming majority of the zombie population. My argument is that its not so much the fact that theres an imbalance there thats the problem, but that the scale of the imbalance is a problem. Also, by playing smart, spreading out, and maximising their advantages in stealth, barricading, and movement, humans would reduce the impact of zombies significantly, decreasing their efficiency and enabling more to survive, meaning that even if there was a perfect revive balance, humans would still have the upper hand, contrary to your assertions otherwise.

One reason i am resistant to adding healing (Despite the fact it would only add another 96ap or so onto the total) is because healing is an action that occurs outside the closed hit system i am examining here. When a strike team hits an area in this scenario they are hitting one building. There are another 60 buildings full of people who have nothing better to do. I am treating this as background ap thats floating around. Id be more than willing to add it in if we were going to be doing a full mathematical modelling of the game, but unfortunately we lack the data for such (I am after it though, hence my posts on yours and Midianians talk pages).

Also, unfortunately, zombies not starting off dead is unrealistic. I could write up an alternative section if you want to deal with it, but that will have to wait until my next day off work. In any event, it wont result in any more than one more death, which is easily absorbed by the existing human totals (Since the tally stands at 11, and a 50ap reviver can nail four per trip) the end result would be a decrease in the zombie AP count from 483 to 479 (I just did the maths, a grand total of four less AP there) for a bonus one one extra kill which increases the human count at only a handful of points, (25 to be exact) to a total of 312. Thats for removing the assumption that zombies start dead. Tossing on, given my assumption of 66% bodybuilding would give us a simple increase in costs of 32 ap to heal them all with another 64 to find the FAKs in a mall, for another grand increase of 96. However i am fueling such actions from the vast unused floating AP pool. --The Grimch ^{U! E! WAT!} 18:53, 22 June 2008 (BST)

My point is, its bad to assume that survivors have a pool of excess AP, when one of the main functional reasons they have a pool of excess AP is that they don't have to spend a lot of AP constantly reviving to keep up with the zombie kill rate. Its circular logic to do so, and only gives a valid assertion in the circumstances you assume- all building repaired, zombies killed, and survivors healed for free by "spare" survivors. What happens when (such as a few months ago) there are very few "spare survivors" to do those things, and survivors start spending more and more AP only on revives? Then those healings, cadings, and killings don't happen, right? But if those don't happen, survivors don;t really recover.
Put another way, saying "vast unused AP pool" is pretty much like saying "magic pixies do it". You could claim that any survivor reduced to 12 HP is killed for 2 AP (feeding drag plus re-entry) because of the "vast unused AP pool" of all those feral zombies waiting for street meat- but you don't, you do the math all the way down to 0 HP. Same needs to go for both sides.
Even more briefly: "No Free Lunch."  Swiers 21:42, 22 June 2008 (BST)

A Response...

...there is. --Midianian^{|T|T:S|C:RCS|} 02:08, 22 June 2008 (BST)

A few points

Just some points on the figures that I've noticed reading through...

Recently collected data suggests that find rates for syringes in a powered NT are more like ~17.5% at the moment, so you may want to revise the search costs.

As for the construction rates, the table seems to have been misread somewhat... it's only possible to make one successful construction at "loose" before barricades become "light", and it only takes 2 additional constructions at "extremely heavily" to reach EH+2. ᚱᛁᚹᛖᚾᚨᚾᛏ 12:43, 22 June 2008 (BST)

Like Grim says, those were my calculations. I was thinking of Grim's 1+3+3+3+3+3+3 needed to de-barricade, but of course it doesn't work the same way for construction. They are now fixed in my response. And Grim, you forgot to reduce one level from building EHB, which drops the AP cost considerably more. --Midianian^{|T|T:S|C:RCS|} 13:05, 22 June 2008 (BST)

Revenant is right, and a note, it hasn't been at the rate you give for about 1.5-2 years('06-early '07).--Karek^maps?! 15:00, 22 June 2008 (BST)

Missings some points : You just demonstrate that Zeds are better

• Zeds begin with an handicap. They are all neutralized and are outnumbered.
• No building maintaining cost. To have NT building working efficiently, you have to spend time to recad, repair generator, find generator and have factory/warehouse with generator and fueled too.
• Some assertion are abusive (No brain rot, AP cost to find a syringue).
• Revived humans have to find First Aid Pack or they will die from infection.
• The end of demonstration did not match the begin.
  • Cade aren't rebuild.
  • Zeds are still living.

Other point : at the begin of your demonstration you have 10 corpses, 21 survivors. At the end you have 0 corpse, 21 survivors, 10 zombies. Who spend usefully their AP ? Zeds.

Let's say, humans spend their 178 PA left to kills Zeds. They've all skills. Axe has the best ratio. 43 PA/Kill. They do 4 kills. So end of turn : Zed spends 483 PA. humans 500 PA. There is 4 corpses, 6 zeds and 21 survivors. Still Zeds have been more efficient event they were outnumbered. Next turn zeds will spend less AP to stand up, no AP to find source of food. They will have more AP to kill people. Some survivor will be injured and infected and some have to spent AP to find FAK and heal others - less AP to revive or kill Zeds.

Final notes : It costs less AP to a pro-zed to suicide, than a pro-life to come back to life.

• Bug MacLock 23:47, 22 July 2008 (BST)