Overview[]
Villages of Doom are large "nests" of infected which are placed on the map during generation and can range in size from only a couple of buildings to almost city-like proportions especially if several spawn adjacent to one another.
Although they may seem initially innocuous, when roused by sound or damage these structures begin to spawn large numbers of infected units according to the values below, these units can easily overwhelm unprepared players if not tackled with appropriate units and caution.
When destroyed the buildings will drop several caches of randomly chosen resources making them a useful if dangerous way to accelerate the early game if you can clear them fast enough.
Spawning Statistics[]
Each building has a maximum number of units produced between resets, affected by the "Infection Factor" of the map theme.
- Medium: Size Factor 2; Max Generation 150; Infected Fresh, Infected Colonist
- Large: Size Factor 5, Max Generation 500; Infected Fresh (39%), Colonist (39%), Executive (19%), Chubby (3%)
Infection Factors: 0.38, 0.4, 0.41, 0.42
The number of units produced: Ceiling(Random(0.5, 1.5) * Size Factor * Infection Factor * Disturbance Level)
Disturbance Level: 3 when attacked. 0.8 during final wave. 1 during every 5th day after Last Day when > 20 days. 1 during every 12th hour after Last Hour. 0.5 every 120 frames.
Villages of Doom will send waves of zombies after 20 days it sends them every 5th day.
The Villages will spawn new zombies every 12 hours if there is not enough zombies around the area (it stops doing that if the village is dried up from zombies.)
Buildings[]
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| Name | HP | Watch range | Resource stashes | Resource types | Max infected |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dwelling of Doom | 400 | 6 | 2 | Wood, Stone | 40 |
| Tavern of Doom | 1500 | 7 | 4 | Wood, Stone, Gold, Iron, Batteries, Food | 150 |
| City Hall of Doom | 4000 | 9 | 6 | Gold, Iron, Oil, Food, Batteries | 500 |
Survival Map Villages[]
On Survival maps, Doom Village sizes scale with the "Infected Population" difficulty setting.
| Survival Map | Number of Villages | Doom Village Size | Infected per Village Factor |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Deep Forest | 1 | 3 to 4 buildings | 0.5 |
| The Dark Moorland | 1 | 5 to 7 buildings | 0.8 |
| The Peaceful Lowlands | 4 | 7 to 10 buildings | 1 |
| The Frozen Highlands | 2 | 7 to 10 buildings | 1 |
| The Desolated Wasteland | 3 | 8 to 10 buildings | 1 |
| Caustic Lands | 1 | 22 buildings | 1.5 |
Dealing with Villages early[]
Avoid noise when close to or even in the vague direction of the village.
If you need to clear and make noise, make the noise away from your village and buildings, in a way that you can kite any spawns, also be ready to sacrifice at least one unit to draw aggro and save the other units and your village.
Anything more than 1 ranger in close proximity will generate too much noise over time, even a veteran ranger can generate too much noise. Avoid attacking with soldiers at all, as the short range and high noise of their weapons will lead to an uncontrollable cascade.
The more noise, the farther from the village you have to keep the unit when you need to attack.
Change positions after some time to avoid noise stacking up.
If you need to defend your settlement in the direction of a village of doom, build 2-3 ballistas, as they are the most silent solution, and can deal with many things without creating an endless cycle.
Early, before you unlock ballistas, put your units directly behind your buildings, this will prevent
your units from taking damage, which in an emergency they won't have time to regenerate.
This also prevents your units from clearing areas without the need to, which will generate noise. Even 2 tiles difference in noise generation can make the difference between no reaction/a small managable reaction or an endless noise loop of death.
Having your units 12-14 tiles away at every point is a good rule of thumb. But even then only one unit shooting at a time.
If you really need to put multiple units to defend one building, then 12-14 tiles will not be enough, or won't hold forever.
Remember that you can normally destroy/pause buildings to regain some resources.
Use that to get a workshop and a soldier center.
Destroying and rebuilding a few, especially cheap buildings and having only the very least number of buildings necessary is better than dying, because you were too greedy.
Especially gold income shouldn't be any of your concerns before you get ballistas, workers/food and energy are the bottlenecks you should focus on. For workers you need food and energy, for food you need energy.
Expanding too far or building too much without really needing the resources right now, before having balistas is an easy way to lose.
In fact you can build a wood workshop without having to build a single mill, or more than one energy pole if you're lucky (just make sure you have enough workers and space to build a mill etc. afterwards).
Strategy and Tips[]
It is notable that while they do spawn Chubbies these villages will never spawn Harpy or Venom units making area of effect damage very effective at clearing the hoards of weak infected that pour forth. This makes village clearing one of the relatively few practical applications of the Lucifer. If the village is sufficiently far from the map edge, it can even be successfully cleared - albeit slowly - by moderate sized groups of rangers, provided they are carefully controlled to not spawn too many adds at a time and they have a safe position to fall back to.
Villages of Doom frequently are placed quite near your Command Center. This is a common situation on map 4 and the normal situation on map 2. While the presence of such a village is a cause for concern, it should not cause undue alarm provided you understand the mechanics involved. If you have a village spawn very close to your Command Center at the start it is best to initially not build anything between it and your settlement. This is because anything you build decreases the space between you and newly spawned infected and the edges of your settlement, which will then increase the number of infected that are drawn to the settlement because there are structures in their view range. Indeed, if you find you have built something near a village of doom, it is often a good idea to delete that building as soon as practical.
Although it is common advice, it is a bad idea in particular to build a wall between your settlement and the village of doom. This is because the attack of an infected on a structure such as a wall generates noise which will in turn provoke additional adds to be spawned by the village of doom buildings. These adds will also attack the wall and generate more noise. Even the act of trying to kill these attackers will produce yet more noise. This very quickly will lead to a situation where noise increases exponentially until wave appears which is far too large for a new settlement to deal with.
Instead, place rangers on patrol between the village of doom and your settlement, far enough back that they are outside of the view range of village buildings and new infected spawns. As infected stray into range, kite them back as far as possible to avoid creating undo noise and attracting further attention. If at all possible, try to make your initial expansion out in a different direction away from the Village of Doom. If that is not possible, because the Village of Doom is quite close (less than 20 tiles for example) or otherwise is making expansion very difficult because of limited building space or a shortage of options for obtaining critical resources, you may need to alter your strategy to remove the obstacle early. The most important thing you can do in this case is obtain Great Ballistas as soon as possible to defend yourself. This is because ballista have an excellent noise to damage ratio, and can thus destroy large numbers of infected without attracting excessive attention. Once you have Great Ballistas, you can build ballista as close as you dare to the Village of Doom, protected by a wooden wall that you then build at that time. This is likely to attract a lot of attention from the Village of Doom, but two such ballista with overlapping fields of fire can handle most passive spawns from a Village of Doom with relatively little player input and help drain buildings of infected. Effective utilization of defensive structures can allow villages to be cleared for their valuable resource drops much earlier than would otherwise be possible.
Villages of Doom can be safely and efficiently cleared by sufficiently large numbers of late game units, such as 30 or more Snipers or 10 or more Titans, although do keep in mind that such activity will certainly attract attention from any nearby specials.