Talk:Guides:Military

• • • For Medics: Considering the low-level medic's biggest problem - namely that he doesn't know who needs a heal - what do you all think of the idea of hitting up revive points/cemetaries and healing the zombies there? They're almost all injured and/or infected, and will be your survivor friends as soon as they can get a needle stick. Of course, if this became a very common practice, we might end up with lots of rotters hanging around revive points hoping for a free heal.

Tiamare

-- I disagree most good military have free running. This allows you to have a strong hold with a high barricade and a building to enter and exit your stronghold. This allows you to attack and then hide in a fortress.

I concur. Is there anybody who can give a compelling reason why military types don't absolutely need free running?

Fixed the free running information. JRH

JRH moved all of these comments here until they can be integrated.

EDIT: I believe a more prudent strategy as a starting Private would be to save the initial 18 pistol rounds and focus primarily on finding a Very Strongly barricaded safehouse, as there is no absolute guarantee that you will be able to find a nondescript hiding place in the 5-10 turns that most players allocate to themselves at the end of the day. (Also, a streak of bad luck may find you trapped outside of a string of overbarricaded buildings.) After that, the most efficient route is to try and loot a nearby Police Department over the course of the next couple playing sessions until you have amassed 36 or 42 total pistol rounds, so that you can take out a single zombie at full health in your next sortie. 18 rounds will likely only leave your first target partially wounded, and can be a liability if they happen to possess Scent Trail. Also, making sure that you obtain the 10 XP bonus from the finishing blow to a zombie during each sortie can serve to improves your ammo/XP ratio, something you're very likely to miss out on if you spend the initial 18 rounds on the first target you see.

-- Mercurial Lily 06:55, 15 Jan 2006 (GMT)

EDIT: In my personal opinion, Scouts are far better Medics than Medics are. Much like Doctors, Medics actually have a handicap in initial XP gain as healers; they must find twice as many injured survivors to heal due to the fact that they only gain 5 XP per use of First Aid Kit, despite healing twice as much HP. This is exceptionally inconvenient at lower levels, when the lack of Diagnosis skill means that many of a player's turns will be wasted attempting to heal fully healed survivors. This is compounded further by the fact that Diagnose, as a Scientist skill, costs a relatively hefty 150 XP. Furthermore, a Scout starts off with Free Running, the best defensive skill in the game (in my opinion) as it allows a brand new character to hide inside Extremely Heavily Barricaded buildings from her first day. The first few levels tend to be the most deadly for players, since most players do not start with Free Running and typically choose to obtain a different complementary skill to their primary means of XP during their first or second level-up.

-- Mercurial Lily 06:55, 15 Jan 2006 (GMT)

I disagree with buying Tagging early. The low chance to find and the low experience given from tagging make it a poor way to level up.

EDIT: I agree, a Private (or for that matter, a Cop) should take Pistol Training before Shotgun. You will find roughly the same amount of Pistol Clips to Shotgun Shells, and as Pistol Clips come with 6 shots (each doing half the damage of a single Shotgun Shell), you will quickly find that your ammo supplies have triple the overall damage (and XP) potential from Pistol Clips as from Shotgun Shells. Furthermore, you do not begin play with a Shotgun and while it's quite likely you'll find one in your first few days, a streak of bad luck could prolong your path to Shotgun. My strong recommendation is to avoid using ANY shotgun shells at all whatsoever and instead focus on the Pistol skills. By the time you've gotten enough XP for both (or at the very least, the first) Shotgun skills, you should have just enough Shotgun Shells stockpiled to make a single sortie killing run with Shotgun Shells alone. As Shotgun Shells are hard to amass quickly, you will definitely at least want Basic Shotgun Training, as it nearly doubles (30% to 55%) your efficiency with Shotgun Shells and hugely cuts down on the number of wasted shells. Some might argue that this is a strong reason why Shotgun Basic Training should be obtained BEFORE Pistol Training. However since you will be harvesting TRIPLE the overall damage/XP potential in Pistol Clips as opposed to Shells during your looting, you will be wasting a severe ratio of potential damage (almost half, or more than half if you factor in Advanced Pistol Training).

-- Mercurial Lily 06:55, 15 Jan 2006 (GMT)

EDIT: Free Running takes an absolute priority over Construction. At this point in the game there are many buildings with Heavily (or more) levels of Barricade around, and reinforcing a building yourself beyond Very Strongly Barricaded tends to eat through a lot of your turns, and there's no way to return if you step out of the building. It's also quite likely (not to mention safer) that with Free Running, you'd spend less AP searching for a new building with Very Strongly or greater barricading, rather than shoring up the barricades in your safehouse should it be assaulted. I also agree that Tagging should be one of your last priorities; almost every other skill you can possibly obtain has greater utility, whether in keeping yourself or others alive, or in improving the efficiency of your XP gain.

-- Mercurial Lily 06:55, 15 Jan 2006 (GMT)

edit: you can take one shotgun and load it with more than one shell, although i dont know how far this goes upto as i only had two shells at the time.

edit: Two shells is the maximum. If you try to reload again, it will say that you have no shotguns in need of reloading, and you'll lose the AP.

EDIT: The headshotters alone now outnumber the zombies, so the above point is not quite as valid as when written.

About tough leveling up

It was said that leveling up for the first time is very tough and takes several weeks, but I disagree with this point of view. I've made a new character less than a week ago, he's a private and he has already 69 XP points, so it will take him just a little more to level-up. Maybe I'm extremely lucky, but I didn't see anything too difficult to gain XP points, just don't forget to search for the clips and that's it. --Malcolm 6 March 2007 (UTC)

I created 2 scouts about 2 weeks ago and they are both level 3 its not hard