Post by Tony Blair on May 16, 2009 17:20:14 GMT -5
Well like I have said previously I have no fancy tricks or ninja magic tricks that will turn our despair into victory just the good old fashioned hammer and nails approach. Anyway with out trying to write too lengthy of a post here are some basic steps I would take to try and make lemon out lemon aid. Of course this is not the only way this is only my way and my way isn't always right.
Malls / Forts: In an act of shocking blasphemy I say F**K malls and as for forts I think we can work with them but not right now because we need more man power. The problem with malls is they have too many damn doors. There are now many large hordes who can easily breech one section of the mall, stack up 20+ zombies in that said section they block our ability to barricade, allow dozens more zombies to poor into the compromised mall, and make the whole mall useless. Pole Mall might be a bit of an exception because with only 2 squares we don't have to spread our defenders out so much, but the same is also true with the zombies. Once the zombies crack Pole they can easily stack up 50+ in both squares and make it damn near imposable for us to get back in again.
Other Buildings: In my opinion this is where the game is at and not always with just hospitals, PDs, and NTs either. It's like a game of Risk. While there is always a temptation to stack up the majority of your forces at the choke points of you continents (or in our case a mall or fort gatehouse) to maintain the power that owning a continent gives you there is also a risk involved with doing this. For if your enemies amass a force large enough to punch through your heavily defended choke points then once they are on the other side it is likely that your rear lines are wide open and easily crushed.
However, if you spread you numbers out stacking a few troops in every country then when your opponents try to make drive on your lands they find that their massive army starts to descentagrate (sp) with every country they take. No it's not the fact they have fight servile smaller battles instead of one huge battle, that essentially makes no difference. It's the fact the fact that with each new country they take they are required to leave behind soldiers to protect it, and this weakens them beyond the loses they are taking in battle. That means that with each new country they take they will have fewer and fewer troops to take the next one with.
It's the same with zombies and buildings. It's a fact that zombies can pretty much dominate any building they choose, they may even be able to control a small cluster of buildings at once, but sooner or latter if you spread them out far enough they will start to lose critical mass. The zombies need to cluster about 20+ rotters inside of any given building to reach critical mass (the point at which a building becomes all but imposable to take back with anything less than a real time coordinated raid and some serious fire power). This means that horde of a 100 zombies can only control about 4 or maybe 5 buildings. On the other hand we don't have to make more than a token effort to defend any building, because if one building falls we just have to move to the next one. All we have to do is survive and we're showing the zeds deviance. Now of course, the zeds can move around better than Risk soldiers can, but they still can't be everywhere at once.
Weapons: Now this is where life might become hard to accept for those use to siege warfare. The pistol (AKA old stand by) is no longer such a great weapon to have anymore. Granted I still recommend carrying about 2 or 3 of them with a few extra clips (note that clips cost less encumbrance and therefore allow you to carry more ammo this way), but pistols are no longer able to allow you to win sieges like they have in previous battles. The only thing that they will be good for now is buying your allies more time to escape before they get munched. You can gun down a few zombies, and try to board the place back up, but that's about it and your new barricades too long either. The biggest problem with pistols is that by giving up our malls we are also giving up our best ammo caches. You can dump the extra shooters and carry clips which will help but before too long you will shoot through that extra ammo as well. Still these days pistols only prolong the inevitable and it's best to give up the gun than give up the war.
Shotguns have never been considered to be all that great before but these days they are surprising useful when it comes to building clearing. One trooper armed with 8-10 fully loaded shotguns can pretty easily take out three zombies in one playing session and that's assuming that every zed has body building, a flak jacket, is at full health, and that the trooper rolls slightly worse than average attack rolls. Using this fact along with a real time coordinated raid allows you to fully clear out, repair, and barricade some pretty heavily infested building it just doesn't allow you to keep them. This can be useful but it can't be our end game. Also like the pistol we still won't have enough ammo with our shotguns to hold the zeds off for any length of time, and we just can't find new shotgun ammo fast enough to replace the shells we'd be shooting, and that would be true even if we had a fully equipped mall.
Fire Axes: For better or worse this is the new/old old stand by. Axes still allow us to clear out lightly infested buildings, as well as repel small break ins. As you know they don't have great killing potential but when ammo is hard to come by they may be your only real choice.
Tactics: It's the simple hit and run tactics of the old days. We work together take a few buildings barricade some to heavy plus, others to very strongly. We position no more than 4 fighters per building, and when 1 building is compromised we fall back to another one rather than defending the compromised building.
Advanced Tactics
Super barricades: This is a tactic that might not be so useful but I'm putting it out there as something we could try. Super barricades are barricades that built above EHB. According to some joint CDF and CC experiments we ran last year the highest we can go EHB+4. That's great but the downside is talking hundreds of AP just to get that high and making matters even more complicated is the fact is that there is no way of knowing if you are at EHB+0, EHB+4, or anywhere in between. You don't even know if you're actually making the barricades tougher, or just fixing damage that trenchies/zombies have caused.
- Edit
It's worth noting that this plan worked for us for the reasons listed above, but it's something that we could always try again with more people.
Darkened Buildings: This one is slightly more helpful I think. Basically you find a dark building like a movie theater, pop in a genny to help barricade it up, and then when you finish building the barricades, you smash the genny. This gives you a double protection because if the zeds get through the barricades they have lower attack rates from the darkness. Of course our attack rates would be lower too, but with these tactics we wouldn't really care too much about that because we wouldn't be trying to hold the buildings forever anyways. The downside of this is that is a question of if this tactic is even worth the genny in the first place.
Strategy: We could put this plan into effect anywhere really, but it's best to try and find somewhere meaningful to do it. A prime location to use such a tactic might be the “Stange Bank” because from this location would have a PD, a hospital, an NT, an autoshop (I think these have gas), and a school (for spray paint) all with in one block away from this location. In that same area we also and all very close to the bank we two other NT (for a total of 3) and another close by PD located in Havorcroft.
Having a great free running 'shopping center' isn't the end all and be all of this plan either though. The zeds still need enough of reason to want to fight us in the first place otherwise the whole idea is moot.
As for leaving an unfuled genny behind it would only be a matter of at most hours before that unfuled genny somehow becomes a fueled genny. Paint all the warnings you want but people will still fuel it.
Malls / Forts: In an act of shocking blasphemy I say F**K malls and as for forts I think we can work with them but not right now because we need more man power. The problem with malls is they have too many damn doors. There are now many large hordes who can easily breech one section of the mall, stack up 20+ zombies in that said section they block our ability to barricade, allow dozens more zombies to poor into the compromised mall, and make the whole mall useless. Pole Mall might be a bit of an exception because with only 2 squares we don't have to spread our defenders out so much, but the same is also true with the zombies. Once the zombies crack Pole they can easily stack up 50+ in both squares and make it damn near imposable for us to get back in again.
Other Buildings: In my opinion this is where the game is at and not always with just hospitals, PDs, and NTs either. It's like a game of Risk. While there is always a temptation to stack up the majority of your forces at the choke points of you continents (or in our case a mall or fort gatehouse) to maintain the power that owning a continent gives you there is also a risk involved with doing this. For if your enemies amass a force large enough to punch through your heavily defended choke points then once they are on the other side it is likely that your rear lines are wide open and easily crushed.
However, if you spread you numbers out stacking a few troops in every country then when your opponents try to make drive on your lands they find that their massive army starts to descentagrate (sp) with every country they take. No it's not the fact they have fight servile smaller battles instead of one huge battle, that essentially makes no difference. It's the fact the fact that with each new country they take they are required to leave behind soldiers to protect it, and this weakens them beyond the loses they are taking in battle. That means that with each new country they take they will have fewer and fewer troops to take the next one with.
It's the same with zombies and buildings. It's a fact that zombies can pretty much dominate any building they choose, they may even be able to control a small cluster of buildings at once, but sooner or latter if you spread them out far enough they will start to lose critical mass. The zombies need to cluster about 20+ rotters inside of any given building to reach critical mass (the point at which a building becomes all but imposable to take back with anything less than a real time coordinated raid and some serious fire power). This means that horde of a 100 zombies can only control about 4 or maybe 5 buildings. On the other hand we don't have to make more than a token effort to defend any building, because if one building falls we just have to move to the next one. All we have to do is survive and we're showing the zeds deviance. Now of course, the zeds can move around better than Risk soldiers can, but they still can't be everywhere at once.
Weapons: Now this is where life might become hard to accept for those use to siege warfare. The pistol (AKA old stand by) is no longer such a great weapon to have anymore. Granted I still recommend carrying about 2 or 3 of them with a few extra clips (note that clips cost less encumbrance and therefore allow you to carry more ammo this way), but pistols are no longer able to allow you to win sieges like they have in previous battles. The only thing that they will be good for now is buying your allies more time to escape before they get munched. You can gun down a few zombies, and try to board the place back up, but that's about it and your new barricades too long either. The biggest problem with pistols is that by giving up our malls we are also giving up our best ammo caches. You can dump the extra shooters and carry clips which will help but before too long you will shoot through that extra ammo as well. Still these days pistols only prolong the inevitable and it's best to give up the gun than give up the war.
Shotguns have never been considered to be all that great before but these days they are surprising useful when it comes to building clearing. One trooper armed with 8-10 fully loaded shotguns can pretty easily take out three zombies in one playing session and that's assuming that every zed has body building, a flak jacket, is at full health, and that the trooper rolls slightly worse than average attack rolls. Using this fact along with a real time coordinated raid allows you to fully clear out, repair, and barricade some pretty heavily infested building it just doesn't allow you to keep them. This can be useful but it can't be our end game. Also like the pistol we still won't have enough ammo with our shotguns to hold the zeds off for any length of time, and we just can't find new shotgun ammo fast enough to replace the shells we'd be shooting, and that would be true even if we had a fully equipped mall.
Fire Axes: For better or worse this is the new/old old stand by. Axes still allow us to clear out lightly infested buildings, as well as repel small break ins. As you know they don't have great killing potential but when ammo is hard to come by they may be your only real choice.
Tactics: It's the simple hit and run tactics of the old days. We work together take a few buildings barricade some to heavy plus, others to very strongly. We position no more than 4 fighters per building, and when 1 building is compromised we fall back to another one rather than defending the compromised building.
Advanced Tactics
Super barricades: This is a tactic that might not be so useful but I'm putting it out there as something we could try. Super barricades are barricades that built above EHB. According to some joint CDF and CC experiments we ran last year the highest we can go EHB+4. That's great but the downside is talking hundreds of AP just to get that high and making matters even more complicated is the fact is that there is no way of knowing if you are at EHB+0, EHB+4, or anywhere in between. You don't even know if you're actually making the barricades tougher, or just fixing damage that trenchies/zombies have caused.
- Edit
It's worth noting that this plan worked for us for the reasons listed above, but it's something that we could always try again with more people.
Darkened Buildings: This one is slightly more helpful I think. Basically you find a dark building like a movie theater, pop in a genny to help barricade it up, and then when you finish building the barricades, you smash the genny. This gives you a double protection because if the zeds get through the barricades they have lower attack rates from the darkness. Of course our attack rates would be lower too, but with these tactics we wouldn't really care too much about that because we wouldn't be trying to hold the buildings forever anyways. The downside of this is that is a question of if this tactic is even worth the genny in the first place.
Strategy: We could put this plan into effect anywhere really, but it's best to try and find somewhere meaningful to do it. A prime location to use such a tactic might be the “Stange Bank” because from this location would have a PD, a hospital, an NT, an autoshop (I think these have gas), and a school (for spray paint) all with in one block away from this location. In that same area we also and all very close to the bank we two other NT (for a total of 3) and another close by PD located in Havorcroft.
Having a great free running 'shopping center' isn't the end all and be all of this plan either though. The zeds still need enough of reason to want to fight us in the first place otherwise the whole idea is moot.
As for leaving an unfuled genny behind it would only be a matter of at most hours before that unfuled genny somehow becomes a fueled genny. Paint all the warnings you want but people will still fuel it.