I have absolutely no idea to what extent this is even possible in the engine, but I imagined an actual hierarchy of hordes and basic movement rules so interesting shit can actually happen compared to Zombie Apocalypse as Particle Physics.
Zombies clump in hordes, like they do right now. But instead of clumping in the same size hordes, these hordes can increase ranks. At the moment I picture it as doubling in size per rank, so the lowest level is like 4-8, then 8-16, 16-32, etc. eventually ending around something like 600-1200 I think it was.
When a horde encounters a horde of sufficiently lower rank, it subsumes it. When a horde encounters say 1-2 other hordes of higher rank, one of them promotes.
The way hordes move about is that they basically experience little migration events, and importantly, this happens on the overall world map regardless of where you're at (this is hte part that may not work with it at all); if a cell isn't loaded, the game assumes that any zombies inside of a structure (at least a structure that's closed up) stay inside of it, it freezes them in time like it currently works, but the big hordes, those are actual objects the game tracks around the map. So they're getting these random orders where they choose to just up and book it for somewhere else. Meanwhile, it follows a logic. Hordes in the orbit of a larger horde will try to loosely escort it, sort of randomly deviating from its path but generally trying to stay space out around it, and this can go on down in size. Small hordes migrate short distances and lazily. More medium sized ones do so at a brisker pace but with lots of pacing, and don't go that far. The big ass hordes set off long distances (like the idea of a city-to-city mass migration), move slowly but also deliberately like a slow flood. This gives you the effect that:
- Within an area, the little hordes don't just constantly fuck things up by moving incessantly
- The big hordes, if not aggroed, actually do come constantly but not too fast.
And the bigger the horde, the more it prefers sticking to roads.
Overall, this turns zombies into a sort of weather system where you actually can climb your roof, peer out and see 2000 zombies fanning out as far as the eye can see descending on your farmhouse for absolutely no reason. Not hunting YOU, just that you happened to be in the way. You can anticicpate, you can watch out. The problem gets worse the longer the game goes on as the hordes have more time to agglomerate and compact, but if they do that, then the flip side of this is that there's less random zombies everywhere.
The zimbobs only need to be simmed when their horde-object enters a loaded cell. And the hordes could maybe even remember the specific zombies that join them (though that doesn't work super well when it comes to how hordes grow in size when moving around off map). I don't see why it couldn't have just a list of specific zombies to spawn the same way cells remember which zombies were where.
Another random "fuck you" mechanic would be the NEST. Not real common, but some hordes decide to just go into a building that has an exposed doorway and they hang out there. Then you pass by a window and turn your back and wonder why 30 zombies just poured out of a two story house.
You could actually get something vaguely silence siege like with this when you fuck up realize 1,000 zombies are VERY slowly creeping like geriatrics through your yard and you just need to wait until they're past you.
Just a mechanical revision of the idea.
