Guides:The Zombie Vulture

This is a guide for a new style of zombie play that is suitable for loners and ferals who have minimal time to play the game and little or no time to spend meta gaming.

Background

The ideas in the article came to me largely as a result of playing a zombie as a member of Zombies Unlimited. Those zombies were intended to be "non-aggressive" zombies who never got revived. However, they needed SOME experience to be worth playing, and even before Yahoomas I found I could earn XP's fairly steadily and even quickly with a minimum of work. This guide hopefully explains how and why.

Path of the Vulture

A vulture is not a weak creature. They are in fact larger and stronger than most birds of prey (raptors) - they just follow a different lifestyle, one that emphasizes opportunism over hunting. Similarly, the Zombie Vulture can be a very strong character, but they follow a path of opportunity rather than hunting.

Rules

The basic rules of the vulture are as follows:

1. Never attack a barricade
2. Never pass up a free meal
3. Never leave your suburb
4. Never breathe

Reasons

1. Attacking barricades is very AP intensive. Without a strike team backing you, it is ALWAYS better to save those AP and wait for food to drop in your lap, or to spend them scouting for food that is already outside. A possible exception is if you find loose or light barricades, have a decent amount of AP, and suspect there is food inside. It's too much work, so don't do it.
2. This should really be "do everything you can to find a free meal". Log in often; somebody could be passing by. If you are a corpse, DO stand up and attack them, even if you won't have much AP. Its easy, so do it!
3. By staying in one zone, you learn the local terrain, and can figure out where people tend to go (or even better, get stuck) outside. Don't sleep there; sleep a few blocks away to people won't see you and move away from there. When you log in, move over to your kill zone, and see if any food is waiting. If not, just move around a bit, then head back "home". At worst you will have wasted 10 AP- much less than most zombies spend on barricades in a day.
4. Living is for chumps. You can make XPs while alive, but it takes real work. Stay lazy, stay dead.

How To's

1. Well, obviously, not attacking barricades doesn't require any advice. But then, how do you make XP's? One easy way is using bite attacks (only) on zombies. With the "Neck Lurch" skill, this is actually a decent way to gain 20-40 XP a day. The trick is, you want to move around a bit; if you bite a zombie who has 30+ HP left, move on to another location. Eventually you will either find a survivor (BRA!NZ!!!) or a zombie who is weak enough that your bites will kill them (which nets the full 10 xps for a kill).
2. As above. Zombies are free food; don't be picky about attacking the live vs the dead, but be smart about getting the most XPs from your actions.
3. I generally advocate scouting a suburb in a diagonal pattern that follows a closed path. This maximizes blocks seen (so you can spot survivors stuck outdoors) but also lets you see the same areas frequently, so you get to know the habits of the locals.
4. Put "do not revive" in your profile. Avoid sleeping near revive points or NT buildings. If you do get revived, consider tagging an empty block as a "Headshot Zone" or with your name and "Do Not Revive NAMEHERE / ID# = PKer & GKer. You might actually want to do some PKs and GKs to get on the lists people use with UDtool to know who is dangerous to revive, but that is a bit much work (it requires finding weapons and buying survivor skills) until you reach high levels.

Build Order

1. Start as a corpse with Vigour Mortis
2. Munch Zombies and free BRA!NZ!!! until you can buy Neck Lurch
3. Repeat above until you get Lurching Gait
4. Repeat above until you get Ankle Grab
5. Breathe a sigh of relief, because life is easy now.
6. Generally I'd pick up the claw skills at this point, so I can earn more XP when I find a survivor in the streets.
7. I'd probably get Infection, just to be mean. A lot of the survivors you see stuck outside are newbies who don't know how to (or at least are not equipped to) cure an infection. I had a blast with this during Yahoomas.
8. I'd also consider a scent skill or two, so I can tell which survivors are easy to kill, and earn even more XPs. Scent Trail might be tempting, but always leads to a barricade, so why bother?
9. I might FINALLY consider Memories of Life, because you do come across buildings that are secured or loosely barricaded, and do have the claw skills needed to open buildings when called for.
10. I'd also consider Brain Rot or Free Running along the way somewhere. Which you choose depends on character concept; Brainrot if you are a pure zombie, free running if you are dual natured or want to play occasional pranks / use propaganda/ whatever.
    Brainrot keeps you dead, while Free Running is needed to quickly get inside buildings where you can find fun toys like spray paint and fire axes, and also gives you an easy way to die. Without free-running, you can spend a LOT of AP looking for a building to search in or jump from that are under VSB.

And that really about it. Body building isn't needed, as you take fewer headshots than a zombie who goes inside and then gets killed and dumped. In fact, being easy to kill can encourage people to hang around your home base killing you, and when they get low on AP ans can't QUITE make it back inside...
Zombie communication skills are not needed, but obviously can be fun.

Comments / Critiques

This is a work in progress, so feel free to contribute directly, within the theme of the article.