Thank you for your work

Sorry to dissappoint everyone, but I pretty much left the Civilization franchise and I honestly don't expect to be back. If serious bugs are found in my mods I will probably make time to fix them out of respect for the community, but otherwise no new features or anything like that.

@nerevatar One fix I recommend: prevent barb zombies from killing levied/owned zombies. (I mean do zombies kill other zombies - no!)

i have tested a standard game and it seems that the zombies do not scale with the gamespeed but the productioncost do. So you have the same amount of zombies in epic and standard, whoch causes massive difficulties. On standard all is ok. I think i will look at your mod and balance it for myself if this is ok for you.

I would suggest the following changes:
1. Zombies can not reduce the city pops and raise another zombie unit if the city has an intact wall. Zombies can not infect pops, if they are guarded by a intact and defended wall.
2. meeleunits can burn dead zombies or other units if a unit dies in the own empire. Or workers can remove spawnareas in the own empire. Spawnrate outside is increased.
3. Maybe a later Building called: The great Wall, which denied zombies the access to the cities tiles/border, because humans build a wall to hold them off there lands. maybe zombies can cross the wall, of they have enough numbers. For example if there are 3-5+ units at the border, they can cross.
4. Zombies which are moving to an improved tile, gets damage to simulate that the civilians are fighting back. But Zombies have a chance to raise a new unit through improvements.
5. If a city is destroyed the zombies will spawn as many units the city had as pops.

I just played a game and it was horrible. I played on SG8, so the AI gets massive Boni. 2 AIs collapsed completly in the first 60 rounds. My neighboor had 3 citys and he lost 2 of them and a 4th fresh one. His capital is nearly permanent without defence (HP and WallHP). Currently at round 120 on epic gamespeed i have problems too, because the zombies raise their combatpower faster than i can. My archers can make 20 damage (as army), the Walls 14 and my meeles 28. But they recieve 50+ damage if attacked. A army which has contact to 2 zombies is dead, even if there is a mountain and/or river.

Agree with @FishRaposo. Or at least reduce the chance if possible.

One thing that would be REALLY helpful is making it so zombies don't spawn off other zombies. It doesn't make much sense AND makes them spiral out of control pretty fast. This change alone would make the zombie mode much more enjoyable (and also make barricades actually useful against them)

@Geronimo: Nope, sorry. That would require some changes from Firaxis.

@ghostreporting911: Thank you, and happy you could tweak it to better suit your specific mod setup. I try to make my mods easily tweakable by adding explanations of what each thing does.

Great mod, I tweaked a few things here and there and added a few arguments to make this compatible with mods like historic speed and more barbarians (not that there is a compatibility issue, but because there is a massive balance issue where historic speed makes zombies scale way faster than you could ever hope to compete with and more barbarians exacerbates the issue further).

Would be possible to add cap to mutation bonus

The other option would definitely be doable, where zombies spawn faster and with more mutations, but zombies killing zombies wont spawn anything. It would be a pretty different experience however and would only "fix" a problem where the player is actively using zombies to fight zombies, which I don't think is the norm and definitely not something the AI does. And I am generally against making the game easier for the human but harder for the AI at the same time.

I would much rather tinker with a late-game zombie apocalypse, combining this mod with my late-start zombies mod. In my opinion that would be much more interesting and spice up a part of the game that is fairly lacking compared to the early and mid game.

All interesting plans for the future. Right now I just maintain my mods for new patches until the mood strikes me, and I start spending all my gaming time doing mods again.

I'm 99% sure the "zombie tiles" is not visible to LUA. It is made by attaching a Modifer to a unit death, and as a rule of thumb, Modifers are not accessible by LUA. If something has to be done, it would be by manipulating the Modifer with some Requirement. The Modifier itself only refers to the unit and it's owner(Player), so only those two entities would be possible to work with in the Requirement, other the global stuff (like game era). So purifying would have to be a "switch" for an entire civ and not a single tile or city, which would be kinda boring.

Sorry to be the bringer of bad news.

An interesting alternative would be a milder version of the zombies mode, where they do not respawn endlessly. They would act as a "war punishers": war means possible destruction by zombies in the future. For balance, you'd need to drastically reduce respawn time and/or increase mutation strength more quickly (+3 or +4 instead of +1 per zombie death).

-> It would be awesome if both options were available in a single mod, with a single toggable option in the setup screen (check Configure Diplomatic Victory Points for an example). What do you think?

@Nerevatar
I think it is on purpose as it makes the zombie apocalypse inevitable. The problem is that the execution is meh as the zombies respawn in-place. It would be much more better if you could purify the place with a city project or if the zombies respawned outside the territory as hordes - which would make zombie defenses actually useful btw.

The first option seems doable - you'd need a lua script that combs over the city tiles and the database corresponding to the zombies XML (I doubt you could do it using pure XML) and allow the project only if there is at least one zombie "waiting to revive in the city territory". The tricky part is to make the AI actually use the project. I suppose you could add very high yields to the project (like 10000 gold) to trick the AI, which you'd remove right after the project finishes.

As Adriaman says it was already observed a few comments down, and yes it would be possible to fix, but I think it is an oversight from Firaxis so maybe they will fix it in the April patch which is due in 1.5 weeks. If they don't fix it themselves I can implement it myself. Lets wait and see.

@Adriaman Oh yeah. I only just realised what you meant.

@blkbutterfly74 That was my comment below...

@Nerevatar I think I've found the problem re: Zombie infinite spawn: when your ZOMBIES KILL ZOMBIES.

I haven't had a deep look at the XML but is is possible to change this? If this one feature were to be removed I think the Zombie infinite spawn could be stopped.

You know it makes the game easier? I tested it on Snowflake map and the Zombies snowball much faster -> https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2451950879

O/w I'm enjoying it. TBH I want a "Zombie Apocalypse" mod

That would be possible, yes. However from reading on different forums it seems like the impact of the zombie modes varies widely from game to game. With such a variance, it will probably be hard to tweak it to something that is always "perfect".

I have been thinking about this mode and this mod, and I think both should only be used with my Late Era Zombies mod: https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2436725069 , so that zombies become mostly a late-game "crisis". This will also make it easier to tweak everything to give a good gameplay experience. This however will require a fair bit of playtesting which I don't have time for at the moment. But it is something on my radar once I got more spare time.

Is there a way to prevent zombies deaths from causing other zombies to spawn? This makes the game always end in zombie apocalypse with OP, unkillable zombies. And it makes the micromanagement very annoying.

Ideally, this would be a toggable option in the setup (check Configure Diplomatic Victory Points for an example).

A quick look at the XML (Portugal_GameEffects_MODE.xml) shows keys like VICTIM_IS_ZOMBIE that seem to be related to that.

cheers, now i'll just have my fingers crossed for the devs fixing that barb core bug

Got it done now. You can download it here: https://psteamcommunity.yuanyoumao.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2436512618

I think that fits better with another mod to be honest. I'll make it when I got some time, if no one beats me to it :-)

In regards to barbarian clans mode, that is a bug within game core and is not fixable by a mod. Please report it to Firaxis, since the only way to get it fixed is if enough report it so that they notice.

Could you make something small to have the barricades be available without needing to activate the zombie mode? I like the idea of more defensive fortifications but not the fiction element of zombies. Also a separate "fix", if you will, to the barbarian clans mode since after a certain point camps just don't spawn at all anymore, leaving you with zero barbs left in the midgame.