Talk:Evolution of Zombie Tactics

Geographic Vs Temporal clustering; the basis of X:00 tactics

Zombie and survivor actions in the past have both tended to focus around geographic locations. That is, they both say "go to this place, then figure out what to do."

I think that for zombies, that is not the best alternative. Unlike survivors, zombies are only really effective when a group of them acts all more or less at the same TIME. Obviously, the zombies need to be in the same place, but given that it is easier to change you character's location than the time (in global, GMT terms) at which you prefer to log in, it seems to make sense to use TIME as the basis for zombie actions, and treat the location as a secondary factor.

This is already happening. Within large zombie groups, it seems that the strike team tends to be the basic unit of action. These strike groups generally consist of people who can commit to logging on at a certain time. It is usually AFTER the selection of the strike time that a target to strike is designated. Things may not start out that way, but once a strike group takes out its geographically selected target they will tend to want to pick another, and with good reason.

X:00 was founded to capitalize entirely on this concept; X:00 isn't intended to focus zombie efforts on any specific location, but instead to focus them on specific TIMES, allowing them to be more effective in whatever location they find themselves in.

Normal strike teams need to conceal their attack times, because they generally boradcast thier attack location. What if you publicize your attack time, but conceal (or simply never select) the location? Well, if you had a lot of zombies doing the same thing, it could be pretty effective, if they had some way to gather into groups. And X:00 tactics provide that gathering method. --Swiers ^X:00 20:11, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Thats a very good idea. However couldn't this work against the Zombies as well? Survivors who find many Zombies clustering up outside their building could DNA scan then and then find out at what time they are going to attack at, thus making their efforts at barricading much more effective by barricading at the right times. Assuming that a zombie knocks off a peice of barricades once every 4 hits, for each survivor actively barricading you would need 4 zombies just to break even. However I do concede that the chances of enough survivors being active at the time of the attack to drive off even 10 zombies attacking at once is slim to nill. That IMO is probably what would make X:00 work, or at least to a point. - Jedaz^{ΣT MC ΞD GIS S!} 04:20, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, that pretty much sums up my thinking; there is a risk of the information being used by defenders to prepare, but the improvement in zombie co-ordination would likely more than offset that. In cases (like mall sieges) where the defenders have a lot of communication and check outside the walls often, its probably not a great idea. But the idea is to promote lots of smaller safehouse raids carried out by semi-feral zombies, and in those cases many of the safehouses would not have the organization or luck to figure out when to defend themselves.

Besides, the zombies don;t have to attack the same building they sleep / organize in front of. If they sleep one place, but then shift to the building next door to attack (organized by a zombie gesturing at threat building) then the local defenders are pretty still pretty much in the dark as to WHERE they will strike. --Swiers ^X:00 22:47, 4 February 2007 (UTC)