New Mall Defense Strategy
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New Mall Defense Strategy
Most recent revision: May 16, 2011
This article subject to revisions by the author as new data becomes available. If you do not have the patience to read this entire article, then scroll down to "The Problem" and begin reading there. It is strongly recommended, however, that you read the entire article as it offers explanation for the NMDS system.
NMDS (or New Mall Defense Strategy) is a plan originally pioneered by Ackland Mall Security's Tarumigan Gistarai. It is a plan designed for Mall defense, but can be adapted to fit the defense of any survivor-critical area in Malton.
NMDS was conceived in response to increasingly unsuccessful and indeed catastrophic battles fought over Malton's malls. Proponents of the NMDS system contend that a series of game-mechanics changes implemented by Urban Dead's creator (Kevan) fundamentally altered the dynamics of siege warfare in favor of zombies, particularly large and organized groups of zombies such as the RRF, the Dead, and perhaps most famously LUE. The major changes were:
- Large Building Rule- On December 30th, 2005, the game changed so that it was now possible to walk around inside large buildings such as malls (which contain multiple rooms). Prior to this time each room inside a mall was barricaded separately, which led to malls that were highly compartmentalized. The removal of these divisions allowed survivors to walk around from room to room, but perhaps more importantly it also allowed zombies to move freely from room to room.
- Ransack and Ruin- The Ransack (and Ruin) ability is pivotal for zombies. If zombies can break into a room and kill all survivors occupying the room, they can ransack the room. A ransacked room cannot be barricaded until it has been repaired, and it cannot be repaired so long as zombies are alive in the room.
There are, of course, other abilities that benefit the zombies in this regard. The ankle-grab skill is a godsend, since it essentially eliminates the action point penalty that a zombie normally incurs when he or she dies. In addition, live zombies inside a building often block survivor efforts to rebuild barricades thanks to the January 23 2008 update, which allows them to passively interfere with survivor efforts to re-cade simply by being alive and standing inside a building.
The game mechanics conspire with the strategies employed by both survivors and zombies during Mall sieges to produce deadly consequences. Most malls in Malton contain four rooms, and the survivor populations within them invariably spread out (at least somewhat) amongst each of those rooms in an attempt to defend them. While survivors spread out, zombies are busy concentrating their strength. A siege usually involves the vast majority of zombies all directing their attacks towards just one corner of a mall, usually the weakest corner (the corner with the fewest people defending it). Since survivors are forced to defend four rooms while the zombies are attacking just one, it's relatively easy for the zombies to achieve superiority, bring down the barricades, and storm the building.
Suppose for a moment that you are defending Caiger Mall from zombies. Each of your four rooms in Caiger has 25 survivors defending it. Outside the southwest room is a horde of 40 zombies attacking the barricades. In total numbers, the survivors have the edge over the zombies (100 to 40 or 5 survivors for every 2 zombies). Yet in actuality the zombies have a distinct advantage. They are, as the illustrious Ron Burgundy once coined it, only fighting the 25 survivors defending the southwest room. Depending on their skill and organization, the zombies may either chip away at the southwestern defenders by repeated break-ins, or they may pull off a simultaneous attack with all 40 of their fellows and sweep the room in one bloody battle. One way or another, they kill each and every one of the 25 survivors protecting the southwestern room and ransack it.
It may not appear so immediately, but Caiger Mall is doomed at this point, even though there's still 75 survivors alive in the building to fight the 40 zombies. Why? Because once the zombies achieve a ransack in the southwest room, the barricades there cannot be rebuilt until the room is repaired, and it cannot be repaired so long as there are live zombies in the room. Killing zombies is not enough to save the Mall at this point, because it takes far more action points for a survivor to kill a zombie and throw the corpse out a window than it takes for a zombie (especially one who has the ankle-grab skill) to stand up outside and simply stroll back inside. With no barricades to stop him, a zombie can get killed many, many times and simply stand back up and walk back into the ransacked Mall room. It costs the zombie only a few action points to do so, but it costs survivors many more action points to kill them and drive them out. For this reason, it's easier for zombies to maintain a ransack once it has been achieved than it is for survivors to kick the zombies out of the room and rebuild/rebarricade it.
It is best to think of survivors and zombies as separate machines. Zombies are MUCH more AP-efficient machines than survivors. Survivors can do tremendous burst damage and healing, but they need supplies (bullets, medical kits) to keep things going. Zombies are not bound by such logistical constraints. The barricade is the equalizer for survivors. Without the barricade, survivors are forced into a direct confrontation with zombies...and it's a confrontation that the survivors WILL lose, either immediately or over time, because of how efficient zombies are.
The Problem
The conclusion, then, is that the current mode of Mall defense is a fundamentally flawed one. The strategy places large numbers of survivors inside a multi-room building and tethers them to the defense of that building regardless of the fact that defending a multi-room building is an extremely disadvantageous proposition. In other words, sleeping inside of a mall is likely to get you killed if a zombie horde attacks the Mall. The game plays in such a way as to MAKE you vulnerable inside of a Mall, and there is no way to change that.
What You Should Be Doing About It
NMDS draws on common-sense tactical thought: If your current location cannot easily be defended, then you should move to a location that IS easily defended. Specifically, you shouldn't try to defend yourself from inside a mall any more. The way that the game is set up makes malls difficult to defend; if you choose a mall as your defensive position of choice, you are handing zombies (particularly large and organized zombie groups) a tremendous advantage. This does not mean the malls should be abandoned! They are valuable tactical resource points and should be protected. If finding a building where you can defend against zombie attack is the goal, however, then malls should be down on the bottom of the list.
Don't sleep in a mall! Sleeping in a mall leaves you open to attack. You may feel safe sleeping with fifty other people in one corner of the Mall, but it is a false sense of security. Once the zombies break into a weak corner and ransack it, you might as well be sleeping outside on the street because the zombies can freely enter the mall at that point and devour you. You are that vulnerable inside of a mall. Once the zombies break the weak corner and ransack it (even if it's not the corner you are sleeping in), then the lives of every survivor inside are forfeit unless they are lucky enough to log on before the zombies finish sweeping the Mall. Although survival is never certain in Malton, it is stupid to leave more things to luck than you absolutely have to.
Instead, you should sleep in a building directly adjacent to or very close to the Mall...and it shouldn't be only you. The bulk of the Mall's population should be sleeping in the same building along WITH you. If your Mall has a security group (like Ackland Mall Security) that is responsible for organizing the defense of the mall, then they should take the initiative and select a place. If your Mall does not have such a force, you need to organize yourselves. Every single Mall should have a broadly-recognized Regional Defense Authority (RDA)...in other words, a group that claims to administer the Mall. When the situation becomes desperate, you will NEED some type of centralized, survivor command structure that can make the decisions needed to defend the populace of the mall (Do we stay, do we evacuate, etc). In Ackland Mall, it was traditionally assumed that during emergency situations that Ackland Mall Security would take the lead role in organizing the defense of Havercroft and the Mall. Having an acknowledged RDA doesn't mean you'll be able to compel everybody to follow the RDA's instructions...we are, after all, individuals playing a game. But there needs to be a group everybody can look to for direction. One of the advantages that zombie hordes possess is that they are typically organized groups with a clear command structure, and they are working towards a single goal together (destroy your Mall). On the other side, you have a mall with a hundred survivors in it, and you have one-hundred different priorities, defense strategies, etc. Someone has to take the lead and set an example that other survivors might support. Most especially, there has to be a generally-acknowledged shelter in which Mall patrons rest while they're not actively using the mall. Select a shelter, scout it out as your safehouse, and then pack as many people into it as you possibly can.
The type of place you select can come from a list of several possibilities:
- NECROTECH BUILDING: The most obvious solution is a Necrotech building, like Caiger Mall's Latrobe Building, which sits immediately east of the Mall. If your mall is lucky enough to have an adjacent or nearby NT, it would make an excellent shelter for reasons that should be immediately obvious. Using a Necrotech building as your shelter essentially means your syringe supply cannot be interrupted. A steady flow of revives makes it more likely that the defenders can resist a siege indefinitely. There is historical precedent in the game for this strategy: the battle for the Blackmore Building in Ridleybank proved that concentrated survivor populations defending a single-room building can resist siege from even very large zombie groups.
- BANK, CINEMA, OR CLUB: Alternatively, you could select any building that is subject to the Darkness rule (banks, cinemas, and clubs). WHY select such a building? Simple. If there is no generator running in a cinema, bank, or club then the building is affected by the darkness rule, which means that all attacks (zombie AND survivor) suffer 50% penalties to hit. That means that if zombies do manage to break into the shelter, the damage they can cause will be mitigated by the fact that they will have difficulty hitting targets. Zombies, however, cannot install or refuel generators. Survivors CAN....which means that if a break-in occurs, anyone with a fuel can and a generator can turn on the lights, allowing uninhibited targeting of any zombies left in the building. Once the zombies have been purged, the lights can be turned off again by simply breaking the generator. Of course, this strategy is not perfect...death cultists can install their own generators and fuel to light up the building and reveal the defending survivors. Nevertheless, such activity forces death cultists to hunt around for generators and fuel, and a quick-reacting survivor might destroy the generator before too much damage is done.
Regardless of which location you select, the critically-important part is to convince the mall-shoppers that their lives are in less danger when they hide inside a designated bunker all together as opposed to spreading out over four rooms of a mall. THE STRATEGY WILL ONLY HAVE A CHANCE TO WORK IF LARGE NUMBERS OF SURVIVORS EXECUTE IT. Instead of having ten pairs of eyes watching four different barricades, you can have forty pairs of eyes watching one barricade. This will make it more difficult for zombies to break in at all (since it's more difficult to catch forty people napping at the same time than ten)...and if they do break in, they cannot ransack a one-room building so long as there are survivors left alive inside. At once, this strategy deprives zombies of one of their critical weapons (ransack) and concentrates survivors forces in such a way as to match the concentration of zombies. In addition, this strategy also assures you of an uninterrupted supply of syringes or allows you the opportunity to use the lights as a weapon against the zombies, both advantages which are lacking inside of a mall.
It is entirely possible that zombies will take the opportunity to attack the lightly-populated mall building itself and not the shelter...but so what? Survivor casualties in such a situation will likely be minimal (limited only to those foolish enough to sleep alone in an empty mall). If a mall goes down but the survivor population is safely hidden away inside the shelter, then they can easily come out and repair the mall once the zombie threat has abated. Repeated sacks of Ackland Mall by the powerful LUE zombie horde failed to leave a long term impression on Havercroft as many survivors managed to escape with their lives, proving that the survival of key personnel is more important than the defense of a particular mall building. Every time Ackland Mall's defenses collapsed, many Ackland Security officers managed to escape with their lives. Indeed, in several sieges we, the AMS commanders, determined that our defeat was inevitable and we deliberately sent key personnel out of the Mall BEFORE the collapse just so that we'd have resources to fall back on. Those same personnel were later instrumental in rebuilding the suburb, since they escaped with revive syringes, toolboxes, medical kits, weapons, etc. The Mall is not as important as the people who use it. If the Mall falls, but a majority of the population survives, that's a victory for humanity. Guns can also be found in police stations, medkits inside hospitals...but the explosive depopulation that usually follows the defeat of a mall (as the zombies kill many of the residents) is difficult and slow to recover from. Damage to buildings is transitory, to be undone as soon as the zombie grip on the suburb loosens. A suburb can be brought back online in as little as 48 hours, provided that you've got enough living survivors at hand to retake it. Survivor strategy should prioritize the survival of the survivors. That means the careful selection of when and where to fight in order to maximize survivor advantages and to minimize zombie advantages. To do anything else is to essentially invite the zombies over for a four-course meal with YOU as the main dish.
