Barricade Strafing
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Barricade Strafing
The practice of Barricade Strafing is the barricading of buildings by survivors that they have no intention of using as shelter for themselves.
It is a misuse of the term strafing, or to lay down covering fire from a moving platform. In Urban Dead terminology, it means to lay down cover (barricades themselves) while moving through an area.
It is considered to be griefing by some Zombie players, especially when deployed in the Zombie homeland.
The Objective
Barricade Strafing has both altruistic and selfish motivations behind it.
On one hand, the creation of large areas of barricaded, but sparsely populated, buildings creates a haven for characters. Strafing an area can be done purely to help fellow survivors... well... survive.
On the other hand, strafing also provides abundant cover for a group's own operations, ensuring that the zombie hordes can't pinpoint the position of an occupied safe house amongst all the other barricaded buildings in an area.
Some people suggest the goal of strafing is to demoralise zombies by having them break into building after building and finding no one to eat, causing zombies to become disillusioned and move on to other areas.
Additionally, strafing buildings can be used in an attempt to draw zombies away from ruined buildings allowing survivors to repair them as the zombies focus on tearing down the barricades on empty buildings.
In Practice
In practice, altruistic barricade strafing is seldom done in an organised manner; usually it's an individual decision to use any spare AP "for the greater good", while the strategic, tactical application of higher than necessary barricades is often carried out to a set plan.
Problems
With the introduction of Ruin to the game, the practice of barricade strafing now has a counter tactic. Zombie players can now Parachute into empty strafed buildings and convert them into Pinatas. For the same reason, it is now imperative that a strafed building be cleared of all zombies before being barricaded beyond VS+2, as the zombies will ruin the building, then wander off to deal more damage, secure in the knowledge that the humans will not be able to repair the building until they can reduce the barricade levels.
Controversy
Some Zombie groups don't like the practice because it means knocking on empty doors... but then, that is the whole idea. It's a legitimate, effective, if boring tactic when done right. It can however become a rift between survivor groups if a barricade plan is not agreed to beforehand, meaning that entry points are over-barricaded.
In places where the zombies hold sway and don't want to leave, most notably Ridleybank, many zombie players consider the use of barricade strafing to be a tactic that is pure griefing, purely intended to abuse the massive AP imbalance inherent to barricades to waste zombies' time and demoralise them, especially since no survivors have any intention of dwelling within these buildings.
Bigger Fool Theory
Barricade strafing of of non-useful buildings is arguably an example of the Bigger fool theory. Survivors spend AP on barricading a building of little value on the assumption that a zombie will pay even more AP to destroy those barricades. Zombies spend AP on destroying barricades and sleeping in said buildings, on the assumption that a survivor will pay even more AP to kick out the zombies and re-barricade. Thus both sides spend disproportionately large amounts of AP on a (useless) building on the assumption that the opposing side will then spend even more AP on it and so make the investment worthwhile.
For this reason, many barricade strafers bypass or ignore buildings with zombies inside of them; the ones truly dedicated to this strategy don't bother with weapons at all.
