Here are some great things I found in my Playthrough of Days Gone Survival II without buying any extra stuff or mods!
Here are some great things I found in my Playthrough of Days Gone Survival II without buying any extra stuff or mods!
I used 1 upgrade early in the game, the silencers, but those are all captured well after that and never upgraded again. I started by clearing NERO checkpoints without using any NERO Syringe perks, just injecting Focus syringes to make them work. Not buying the Focus skill means they can't be used like this. Looking back, I could have saved most of the checkpoint clearing for World's End story missions instead. That would also let me get nearby ammo restocking lockers for some tough Hordes. But I'd still had 2 World's End missions left to finish because there are 11 World's End checkpoint missions plus one start-of-game mission where you need sterile bandages for Boozer, and there are only 10 Focus syringes. This game is unpredictable about whether the kill percentage resets to zero once you move far enough to resupply ammo and grenades. So I finished just 3 hordes from the campaign and a few others, focusing on capturing them. One big challenge of killing hordes without upgrades is Deacon cannot reload while sprinting. I did finish some challenges, but since they take time to get gold in each one inside each challenge, and are arcadey and easy to cheat with junk food, I didn't capture any of them. This was the knife boss fight against the Ripper faction leader. It showed how to beat him quickly without taking damage just by making sure you hit 5 knife slashes on every attack, draining his stamina and leaving him open for more attacks. That's where I first thought no upgrades were possible at all, but I succeeded by placing a couple of remote bombs, hitting him hard with my bike so he ran into the railing, then firing one shot to explode his bike. Without upgrades, it's pretty impossible just by chasing him down though. This is the first Horde you must destroy in the campaign. I could go a little longer using stealth than usual, but I always break stealth when there are no more nearby propane tanks to lure them closer, because it can be hard to lure lots of horde members to farther ones without getting spotted. I used my bike to get to a spot where I could run through buildings to slow them down, then zig-zagged through the fenced area using explosive barrels. This bike chase mission was harder than the last one because placing and timing remote bomb explosions is very hard. You usually get dropped to a Target Escaping warning right at the start, but you can make up ground just enough by taking a more direct route. This was the second campaign Horde mission where you had to collect fertilizer for the truck bomb. It went way faster than I thought it would. I used my bike after the first attack to let the horde cool down and refuel. I didn't even use all the tanker trucks I could have gotten. Now I find this is the easiest of the 3 hordes needed to finish the campaign. This was the 3rd Horde mission the campaign requires you to complete, and at 500 Freaks it's also the biggest one. It went faster than I thought because I used a lot of throwable weapons from a hidden spot. But I struggled as usual trying to kill as many Freaks as I wanted with that extra-large propane tank; only about a half dozen got in there. A Reacher nearly caught and killed me at the 7:09 mark. This fight almost always has a Breaker, Screamer, or Reacher lurking nearby at the start (at least on Survival II anyway), but when they appear midway while you're being chased, it's extra scary.
Good job! Thanks for the ideas; I'll watch the videos after I come home. Also, I have to reinstall the game and play from the beginning. By the way, there are 500 enemies—that's crazy! But no worries, it's going to be a big boss fight. I guess this level is on Old Sawmill, near Lost Lake.
500 zombies is normal if you use even the lowest level of the Massive Hordes mod, which is how I played Survival II before adding upgrades. But with higher versions of that mod, the zombie groups get much bigger than 500. The way this mod works for hordes is they spawn in batches of about 250 at a time. That's the only way they can fit into lots of small hibernation spots like camp huts. And yes, the 500-horde mission is just one of the missions that has to be done during the main campaign, which takes place at The Old Sawmill. I've learned though when doing a Survival II run without any upgrades that it's not really about how big the horde is, but where you fight them and whether they reset to zero if you leave them to restock ammo, grenades, or gather supplies for new weapons. None of the three hordes in the campaign actually reset to zero; you can easily clear them in big chunks. I was mostly doing other hordes just to get enough trust points to level up all camps to a 3-star rating. The only ones I really need to do those are Copelands camp and Diamond Lake camp, because one zombie ear gives you three trust points, so it adds up nicely. If you clear other hordes as missions though, you have to take them more seriously, especially the ones that reset into a hard state without an ammo saddlebag upgrade on your bike. A lot of these hordes actually become pretty tough when they reset after you leave to resupply, and many have very little items nearby to kill them quickly, like tanker trucks or explosive barrels.