Possible victory condition / difficulties system. Thread - Total Decay

Note: I am not trying to subvert the designers intended format of the game. Its just, like Kirk, I don't believe in a no win scenario.

On on hand I like the "There is no win, just how long it takes you to lose' idea for its originality and in how that sort of reminds me of Dwarf Fortress, on the other, I also always find that to be rather annoying. Perhaps there could be some sort of system where in the localized area there is a number of zombies, and the number is reasonably massive, so it is pretty unlikely that you will survive. However, if you last long enough, and enough zombies have died due to various reasons, then perhaps you could declare that your area is largely pacified.

This could even be an easy way to modify the difficulties system.

For example, lets say you chose to play in an area that is declared to be in/near Chicago.
Due to being in a major city, loads of zombies initially, but high amounts of salvage. But winter conditions will drastically increase the natural attrition of zombie deaths. So in a way it is easier, because if you can hold out for enough winters, the zombies will be drastically reduced.

Another example,
You are near Houston Texas, loads of zombies due to major city, high amounts of salvage, but there is no winter, so the natural attrition of zombie deaths will be lower, you will have to take a more pro-active stance when it comes to killing them if you want to survive.

Leading into that, as it seems like the intention of the game is a base construction/defense game, then the way you'd go on the offense would be to bring the zombies to you. The best offense in this instance would be a good defense. Taking a page out of World War Z, you could install noisemakers which you could activate to draw zombie hoards near your base. Now of course this can go VERY poorly, but that is the risk. More zombies showing up means greater zombie deaths, but also siege conditions and personnel attrition over time.

As a further thought, that value of how many zombies are in the surrounding (say 100 mile) area could be kept track of by the game, but as far as the player is concerned they only have an estimate. Random events can cause this to fluctuate (bad weather drops it, a different survivors city falls increases it, etc). And the player has the option to declare at any time to basically state that the people believe they are safe and try to rebuild without an eye towards zombie defense. If the actual value of zombies is low enough, then they successfully rebuild. If the value is too high, then the settlement falls and death occurs because the meager defenses were overwhelmed by the hoard of zombies that still existed.

Thoughts?

Edited by: Mazon_Del

Truly sorry for the late reply, but in honesty I completely forgot I created the forums!

And honestly, this is going to be like a modified roguelike. On the hardest difficulty, there won't be any reloads or save games, only a Save on Exit. A victory condition is kind of the opposite direction I'm trying to take, installing the feeling of a hopeless post-zombie apocalypse world with no hope of endless survival.

I do appreciate your input, though, and I encourage you to continue contributing to the ideas and thoughts of the game! We try to listen to our (granted, small) community as much as possible

-Schalk