World of the Living Dead

A lot of changes have filtered in over the last couple of weeks along with fixes, so I’ll address the meatier parts of the update, which took longer than we expected, due to real-life infection in your devs.

Speaking of infection, your survivors can now be bitten by zeds…

Infection

The circumstances leading to a bite during PvZ combat are complicated, but z-density certainly plays a role. Future items, infocards and skills will help to improve bite resistance, but for now your characters have to rely on their general fitness and skill.

Being bitten does not always immediately lead to infection, although some characters may have lower natural infection resistance than others. Again, this will be something that can be improved over time, and some items may even allow you to stave off infection for a long period. For now, your characters will become infected within a matter of hours or days, depending on their natural resistance.

Note that NECRA regulations prohibit the use of bitten or infected characters in defensive positions.

Bitten characters will display a gray square next to their normal health indicators. A report will be shown in gray when a character is bitten.

An infected character can continue as normal for a varying amount of time, depending on their virus resistance. Again, this attribute will be something that can be improved using items, infocards or skills in future, but it’s just their natural resilience that you can depend on for now.

Infected characters display a sickly greenish-yellow square next to their normal health indicators. A report will be shown in the same colour when a character becomes infected.

When a character becomes infected, there is a risk involved in keeping them active and around other characters. They may be able to keep moving, but they can turn in hours or days. Although you may notice patterns over time, the unpredictability of this can be dangerous. A character who turns while in the midst (in a squad or a safehouse) of other survivors - even survivors under the control of another NECRA operative - may be able to get in a few bites before they are subdued. Characters left alone when about to turn will tend to wander off, delirious and in search of company, before they fully join the ranks of the living dead, so you won’t find compromised safehouses. This also means that safehouses cannot be intentionally rendered unusable by leaving an infected character there.

A NECRA operative can choose to terminate the survivor status of any character who has been bitten or infected. This effectively means that their fellow survivors will be told to “remove” the survivor by whatever means they deem necessary, or, if the survivor is alone, communications will be terminated and they will no longer be tracked by SCUGS. This action can only be taken from the NECRA ID page of the affected survivor.

Your tools to fight infection will grow over time, so do not be unduly disturbed by feelings of powerlessness when a survivor is bitten. This reaction is normal but your operative training should allow you to make tough decisions when they are required, and evaluate the risk of keeping a bitten or infected survivor in the field.

SCUGS streamlined

The second major change today is that the the map page no longer causes a page refresh when moving your squads. This was a massive overhaul which has meant several other changes in the way that the map works.

Loading the map page no longer results in a scan for z-density and locations for every active squad. This alone should really speed up load times for players with multiple squads. Instead, when you select a squad, SCUGS will scan the vicinity around the squad. This is only done once for each squad, after a page reload, so it shouldn’t be too intrusive. Doing it this way means that the map page should be a lot snappier to load, letting you get straight into planning a route for your chosen squad and not being held back while resting squads take a leisurely look around.

For normal movement, your squads will progress after a slight delay as SCUGS tracks their new position, but the page itself no longer needs to be reloaded.

As part of this change, we have removed the broadcast counter at the top of the page. This has been the cause of a lot of delays in page loading times, and we haven’t found it to be exceptionally useful in our own testing. Instead, this has now been replaced with a private mission counter. The “Battles” counter has been renamed to “Attacked!”, a minor change to highlight the danger when a report comes in. The PvP system will be streamlined over time. We’re well aware of the problems with the way it currently works.

Part of the update which may be unwelcome for those of you on smaller screens is that the current reports have now been merged with the survival reports under the map. This is a temporary solution so we hope you can work around it.

We hope that you will enjoy these improvements to the SCUGS interface. Thanks to Jungly for putting in some crazy hours to get them working so well!

Missions interface

Missions have been slowly increasing in complexity as we piece together the engine we’re working towards. The “deliver” missions which were introduced a little abruptly recently have been difficult for most of you to attempt, and in some cases have been confused with “collection” missions. Bear in mind that missions are being tested and so we know that the current approach is not ideal, but we’d like to see how innovative solutions to completing the delivery missions can get. You can use trade or combat to obtain special items, so remember that, even when you don’t have a particular strain or vaccine, someone else might.

In order to make the mission types clearer, we’ve added coloured flags on the missions page, showing the following types: collect, deliver, survivor, cache, family. We hope these will assist you in deciding which missions to attempt, and we’ll be getting back to improving missions very soon.

Thanks for your patience over the last two weeks. We really hope the update today makes playing WotLD more fun and we’re looking forward to your feedback and bug reports as you really get your teeth into the new features!