Zombie Mode

[blackbutterfly]

What's the bug?

[NFP] - [1.0.11.16] [Zombie Defense] Infinite Zombie Spawn | CivFanatics Forums

I've been playing another game as The Maya on Snowflake with Zombie Defense post the Apr 21 patch, which updates The Maya and the whole game.
Zombies haven't quite swarmed the world yet. IDK if this is because I'm playing differently to before, now that I'm aware of how Infinite Zombie Spawn works.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

So just finished my first Zombie Mode game (apart from a quick test shot with China), I played as Tamar which helped a bit with the walls. Early on was intense but once I got my walls up and a garrison in each city it was manageable for a while. The AIs didn't fair so well, this was on King so meshes with what others are saying. Spain had Barcelona razed early on but coped OK with that but Brazil, Egypt and Macedon spent most of the game with their capitals under siege and as their only city. There was a bit of a tipping point at one stage when the Zombie mutations reached 71(!) and I didn't have anything strong enough to counter until Machine Guns came along. I had planned a religious victory but the Zombies do target religious units! I settled for a Diplo Victory in the end so the lat 60 turns were a bit of a grind!

This is bad design, and we are seeing the consequences. It would be perfectly sensible to declare a domination victory when controlling all the existing original capitals. Then there's no problem.

The existing design isn't perfect but your idea would be much, much worse - at the moment to win a Domination victory you need to be strong enough to hold onto all the Capitals at once, with your design change you could simply raze the AI Capitals as you go making Domination much simpler.

 

[Abaxial]

you could simply raze the AI Capitals as you go making Domination much simpler.

You would have to capture them before you could raze them, so it wouldn't be much different. Holding all the capitals at once isn't the main difficulty; I've yet to see a capital I captured recaptured by someone else.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Loyalty is the issue you wouldn't have to deal with if you could just raze them, I stick by my point - the suggested change would make the game much easier IMO.

 

[blackbutterfly]

Update: post Apr 2021 patch re: multiplayer (MP).

I played 2 Zombie mode MP games recently.

In the first (on Fractal map) the Zombies didn't snowball and it was pretty cool. (I refrained from expanding thinking they would snowball and got left behind).
In the second (on Shuffle map) Zombies snowballed. All the guys who expanded dropped one by one. I had the lowest score but was the last remaining player

What is troubling though is that in Zombies MP, for some players Zombies are not an issue (so you can expand) but the game is pretty boring as turn times are long cos of those battling Zombies. So I think a couple of players quit cos of the long turn times. Another quit cos of the endless Zombie spawn.

It's not fun (in MP).

EDIT: I just played a 3rd MP game:
Fractal map is ok maybe? Zombies didn't swarm again and there could be civ-civ warfare not just entirely attack Zombies.