Trapped Tactic

Survivor Tactics

The information on this page or section discusses a survivor strategy.

The Trapped Tactic is an upgrade from the Distributed Defence tactic. It was originally used for Los Chelisticos Guerreros de Malton and is based on the premise that reducing the effectiveness of attacks on resource buildings will frustrate attacking zombies. Based on this idea, it uses scattered defenders staging counter-strikes against an offensive force as a way of making it potentially more beneficial for attackers to leave an area than spend the time and energy to fully secure it.

The Concept

This idea is taken from the well-known fact than zombies always prefer to attack the resource buildings. Using this to our favor, this idea takes some resource buildings (which are carefully chosen and are not all of them) and turns them into fake survivor refuges which work like a zombie decoy and attract zombies to them, who thus avoid the survivors hiding in safer buildings around the decoy building.

This can take two forms:

• an area form: all the true survivors refuges are hiding around the decoy building.

• a funnel form: where the decoy building is at the deepest of the funnel.

The form of the application doesn't matter, the important things are two:

• 1º) Avoid using buildings in one area of 3x3 around the decoy building.

• 2º) Make sure the zombies are "surrounded" by shelter buildings and they don't know about it.

The decoy building must always be with light (powered on) and must be kept Extremely Heavy Barricaded, it helps a lot if between the "Line Walls" (the area between the limits of the circle or funnel created by the true shelter buildings) there are at least 10 blocks of distance from the zombies attacking area, because this way they can't track the survivors and this way, they can't discover where the survivors are hidden.

The true resource building must be visited like in Distributed Defensive Tactic, just for restocking. Try to sleep in another building nearby, instead of the resource building.

This tactic always works until the decoy building is destroyed or the trick is revealed, anyway if some of this happened and/or a shelter is discovered, the shelter can always be changed and the decoy building can be changed by another decoy building using the River Tactic.

This not only cause the enemy a hard time (if you have enough coordinated survivors) for zombies because your guys attack them too frequently, this cause too a real bad-ass frustration when the zombies finally destroy the decoy and realize than it is just a pair (if any) of survivors inside.

The Counter-Attack

If an attack does occur, any given attacking force will nevertheless have spent the better part of their AP tearing down barricades - leaving most of the survivors alive in those buildings which were not targeted for the lack of sufficient time. It would then be very easy for these survivors to run back and re-barricade the fallen buildings, while players with the headshot ability could strike hard and fast against the enemy hordes.

The perfect goal is keep the zombies really retarded on their advance, if is possible, make them so frustrated that they'll be forced to retreat because they can't even destroy the decoy building, or in price of destroying the building, make them spend a lot of AP to just stand up and attack with no clearly successful outcome.

But a good goal isn't a decisive "victory"; rather, it is to be such a thorn in the side of the enemy that any attacking force will retreat or withdraw from the area rather than be forced to spend the energy necessary to fully-secure the area permanently, making it too hard (if not impossible) to make the suburb fall entirely.

Criticism

While this form of defense is hypothetically effective, it can be difficult to implement. Unless a more sophisticated method of communication than graffiti (probably meaning metagaming) is better if is practiced by large survivor groups or confederations, but always must have in mind if is used, it is difficult to inform unaware survivors of what "trapped tactic" is. Even such tactics as using tagging to link to explanations of the tactic can be lost on inexperienced or simply apathetic players. This defence, however, can be theoretically strong if there is a high numbers of players using it, in a coordinated way.

Maybe some graffiti inside the decoy building, warning that it is a decoy building can be a good idea, this can be checked by the guy in charge of refueling that generator, but you always must have in mind than the pk's and Zombie Spies can read this and inform of this trick to the invader zombie horde.

Other criticisms include the fact that the tactic is rendered useless in the face of an opponent using spies, which can pinpoint survivor positions and that it abandons the buildings needed to sustain resistance to the enemy almost immediately.

Counterpoint

This is not, however, as big a handicap as it would seem. Though many individuals do not know the technical name, the tactic occur to most survivors after a while without being informed - likely due to its basis in preexisting, real-world combat strategies (indirectly, because is an evolution of Distributed Defense Tactic). It is also relatively easy to explain with only a few AP of speech to crowds in active safehouses. While this is a proactive approach and thus requires diligence, it is not impossible or overwhelmingly difficult to set up a defense of this manner involving unassociated players in safehouses who do not use metagame contact.

Together with that it is well known than this tactics works even better in a crowded suburb which is using the Protection Chain-Net Tactic.