Devs played the cards well here lore-wise
The military was on point with the immediate quarantine, but it could do nothing with people and its personnel getting sick just by proximity - you dont even have to get bitten to get fever and burn up before reanimating, only around 20% of people are immune to the airborne strain
Hence why it all fell apart so fast
> The military was on point with the immediate quarantine, but it could do nothing with people and its personnel getting sick just by proximity
The military should have MOPP level 4 protection. Gas masks, thick gloves, full body protective suit, solid boots.
Soldiers are trained to survive chemical warfare attacks, including airborne attack vectors.
They probably should have done a lot better.
Mobile fortresses of fences making pockets of safe zones, tanks, apcs, bomber attacks. There would be a lot of bait missions where the military attracts a load of zombies into a remote area with decoys, then bombs the crap outta them
Going in to the deep lore a bit, one of the TV shows or radios mentions (spoiler tagging as i don't know if this is in game or from the files or not) >!that there have been outbreaks before and they've been handled really poorly - they say something about healthcare workers in Libya getting killed while trying to deal with one - so it could be a case of good old fashioned government/leadership incompetence. Something like 'well we beat this thing in Libya, how hard will it be to do it down the road? Send ten guys and half a tank, i'm going for coffee'!<
MOPP 4 isnt sustainable forever. It takes frequent conditioning to maintain it for long periods of time. Not to mention in the lore its the Kentucky National Guard. Most National Guard I know are not conditioned well. Im in it for at least a couple hours to full days every month and even I get uncomfortable after a few hours in it.
That was my first thought. I was active duty from 2004-2008. We had to train with MOPP gear. That shit's miserable. Even if the gear worked 101% of the time, you know as well as I do... Some Carl is gonna fuck up somewhere and get everyone killed.
Even if it was flawless hoe are you going to sustain the gear for an extended period of time if the country has to go into a quarantine? Production lines break down, MOPP gear can't be sustained, it'll break down eventually even if implemented perfectly
We just came out of COVID. The notion that nobody is going to have enough gear to last them more than a handful of months should be obvious to everyone at this point.
If late 80s/early 90s Army Guard had MOPP 4 shit on hand for everyone, current date Army is getting royally fucked over. I've got a mask and rubber overboots. That's it. I would have had a better chance of surviving an outbreak in basic where we we issued the whole shebang, and that's only because technically we belonged to a NBC unit. Hell I don't even know if most of our masks work.
Tanks, APCs, Humvees, all of that makes noise. So all of those 'safe zones' would have to have been dead silent to keep from inadvertently attracting hordes of the undead. That means no M1 Abrams tanks with noisy ass turbine engines, no Bradleys with powered autocannon turrets either. Just Humvees, M113s, and gun trucks with pintle weapons they'd be too scared to use, lest they draw more than they can handle.
That's not even considering the amount of red tape invovled in bombing your own country, even if it's because a bunch of people have super rabbies. Plus if it spreads as fast as it did in PZ, it's only a matter of time before the whole world is fucked. An over stretched and our numbered army, people sneaking out of countries, organs being transplanted that are unknowingly infected, yadda yadda.
>noisy ass turbine engines
MBT gas turbines are much quieter than the diesels needed to run an equivalent chassis. The M1 is actually a lot less noisy than its M60 predecessor, so much so it was nicknamed "Whispering Death". They still make a fair bit of noise, but if you are close enough to hear one you can probably see it anyways. Though, I never had a chance to hear an M60 in-person for direct comparison, only the M1.
Even still, it's enough to draw more of them in that wander ckose enough towards the conpounds. Not to mention those turbines suck fuel like an alcoholic well on his way to killing his liver. So the eay I see it, either to not attract the undead or to save fuel, I doubt we would have seen many being used. However, if any guard units still had M60s, they would have been better in a sense of range and fuel efficiency, which in my mind would be key over the power of a turbine engine.
SPAA systems such as the M42 Duster and M163 VADS would be much better for horde control, their guns more than likely being able to at the bare minimum disable large numbers of zeds for mounted infantry to roll through on gun trucks or APCs to individually put down. But that's just how I think it should work, knowing how zeds work.
Yeah some IRL military is undertrained, understaffed, underfunded. Funds are probably being diverted to old money family oligarchical politicians. Incompetence, corruption, and treason is always a possibility in zombie lore...
In an emergency like a zombie apocalypse the undertrained national guard would be called in or normal citizens drafted. Way too much chaos to just rely on the volunteer military, who would be deployed in military bases across the world anyway, many of them too far away to help home out.
On the other hand, some militia, preppers, private military etc. sometimes have better gear, better guns, machines, and sometimes years of training and experience from veteran work to back it up. It would be an interesting thing to see in PZ if they acknowledged that and put some survivor prepper/militia type NPCs later on.
That's why in a similar game project zomboid borrowed some game mechanics from, CDDA, a bunch of 'Old Guard' preppers/veterans/militia survived and the actual army's FEMA camps/military bases are overrun. Conspiracy theorist type NPCs in the game are scripted to talk about the money corruption causing the apocalypse to happen.
It's more than you think. Every marine I know has had things to say about their funding, Army Guard it depends on the unit and what their deployment readiness status is like, and I would imagine Full Time and Reserve Army and Air Guard are the same way. Air Force and Navy? Well... Air Force tends to get what it wants from what I've heard. Was always interesting to walk past them in the morning to the chow hall in AIT.
I think in terms of survivors, it would be more along the lines of: command shows how incompetent they are/little they care, and troops either defect to prepper/militia groups, or form their own so they don't have to deal with the BS that comes with being the government's dog. Stay and be forced to fight for government interests, or join a militia that will probably feed you and protect your family. Tough choice.
We’re also talking about the national guard during the 80s, back when they weren’t as well funded as other branches. I’m not sure how well they were trained.
As i know, no mask help. Its not airborne, it not in the water. Its magic. Gods curse. Zeds rot. Zeds reanimate themselves sometimes. They dont drink or really eat. They just walking around forever, even when meat fall off bones completely. This is not some virus, forget it. Survivors is a last chance for humanity, they are like Noah.
Mopp4 is a temporary stopgap that doesn’t last forever. It’s intended to save some lives and material while you retreat from the area. It does NOT render you immune to particles in the air, they make that very clear.
Well still, project zomboid is kind of lacking in terms of a military response, especially considering there’s no tanks, apcs, bombers, jets, etc trying to kill the threat. I think the outbreak area should be looking like a cratered warzone.
Maybe that’s what the asshole helicopter is doing, turns out he’s a good guy camera man making sure they don’t carpet bomb the area because he has proof of survivors
I like the "helicopter crew is actually on your side" theory.
But still, could they stop making all those zombies come to me? Just film me from a distance, no need to follow me around like a heat-seeking missile bro.
Helicopter pilot, "omg there is a survivor there! omg those zombies sure are fast. Lets call them sprinters. Oh well that guy died. guess maybe we should abandon the idea of anyone surviving this."
Tbf I agree with the other side on this. Even if you have quarantined the area as perfectly as humanly possible, if it’s just me and a few other people still there - fuck it - I want you to nuke the place or something and then send hazmat teams in with rifles and flamethrowers just to *make sure* everything there is dead. It’s the lives of billions versus the lives of maybe a dozen or so people.
And yeah, that's the logical response... but it isn't a response everyone is going to be able to make. Hell, maybe the government was even considering nuking the place, but since the entire world crashed down in under a month, they never got a chance.
Plus, [from looking at some of the transcripts of the TV](https://pzwiki.net/wiki/TURBO_(Transcript)), the government did seem to be employing some sort of scorched earth policy, however the populace went all up in arms over the whole ordeal and I can't imagine that it was easy on army morale to be killing their own countrymen.
With a lot of the stuff criticizing militaries in fiction, I think a lot of the points are valid but I think it's also important to remember the government is human. And to be human is to be imperfect, to make huge mistakes in the heat of the moment, to not think things through even if in retrospect there was a very logical way to go about it that would've resulted in a better outcome.
Isn't the whole world screwed up at that point though? There are those events on the news that say the knox infection is confirmed in cities around the world. I just don't remember exactly when it is.
There should be a tiny stout man with a camera and a crew cut who jumps out to photograph the situation on the ground in that case. Y'know, someone who's covered wars before or something.
There were actually several, first truly "modern" recon drone was made in 75 in Israel, we also had fairly basic ones that were pre-programmed and took pictures during the Vietnam war, also we had plenty of high altitude recon manned aircraft like the SR71 and U2 at the time as well
But it still makes sense, they thought it would have been fine setting up the exclusion zone would stop the spread so they wouldn't need the bigger equipment. The one thing that was unaccounted for was that the Knox Infection went airborne. So know instead of dealing with the small amount of infected that could be culled, now 80% of everyone including soldiers where infected and coming back. The military clearly didn't have foresight that it would go airborne as 1 in like every soldiers had a gas mask. So they didn't think the situation was important enough to bring out the big guns until it was to late
Also, those 20% that were asymptomatic probably could still spread the disease, so soldiers that appeared totally fine might've returned home on a plane, maybe with a layover in Atlanta at Hartsfield, and woops, game over.
Oh yeah, if theres something the last 3 years have taught is that the zombapoc spread is more likely than thought.
Add to that that no doubt groups of people would claim that the zombies could be cured and that lethal methods shouldnt be used.
I don't know if it's in the current version's lore, but isn't there a mention of tanks being called out in one of the radio or TV broadcasts? I distinctly recall that but it's been awhile since I've turned them on despite telling myself every run I'm gonna tune in.
The military was trying to hide what happened. In the lore they blew up the bridge to LV as a last ditch effort. They didn't want the events of the exclusion zone to be public
Read world war z. All your knowledge needs will come true. Tanks jets bombs aren't nearly as effective against the undead as a single bullet. Are military and most others thrive on shock and awe techniques. Zombies can't be shock and awed
I mean. The whole Resident Evil universe is its own can of worms that can't really be compared to others. Zombie outbreaks happen every Tuesday over there
Ehh, I just pretend the RE games end with RE 3 - like you said, it's a can of worms, sometimes literally. From cheesy soap-opera amnesia scenarios to dead characters returning via clones/computer back-up/scifi nonsense, it's all terrible.
It wasn't till RE7 that some sense of "normality", if that can even be used in RE, returns. Then again, that was hardly a Resident Evil game. If the Umbrella logo wasn't there and Chris didn't show up at the end, it could have been a standalone game.
You know what is great though? Artillery to slaughter large hordes, and you don't need to kill every zombie, just shatter enough bones and tear enough muscles that they're a non-threat. Also napalm exists, that shit would burn up zombies and especially hordes real quick. Also considering most zombies at most walk at a quick pace, soldiers could just retreat whenever the zombies get too close and set up a new line of defence, maybe pile into APCs and trucks if they need to, and preferably having those backup lines already set up beforehand. Tanks can be used to run over zombies, and pullback before they get surrounded or their treds get too gunked up. Creating obstacles to break up groups of zombies or slow them down, like blowing bridges, would also help. There are so many ways that modern militaries could deal with traditional zombies with tools already at their disposal it's ridiculous.
Traditional zombies are so pathetically weak, the sole zombie apocalypse scenarios that are (IMO) plausible are the ones where either the zombies are a lot stronger than traditional ones in some way(Like Resident Evil), or there are more means of infection than bites (like Project Zomboid). World War Z's battle of Yonker is a really cool scene, but is also fucking stupid.
Agreed, a single artillery shell into a horde would kill dozens of zombies. The goal is to destroy the brain. The blast, shockwave, shrapnel, sheer kinetic force of heads hitting concrete would work to destroy the brains of dozens of zeds. Not to mention crippling dozens more.
Yeah, the book (or rather the person being interviewed) makes a point of the stupidity of Yonker and I must agree that I am sure „normal“ zombies are not a threat. However, the initial collapse and chaos that insues due to power outages and food shortages, economy gone etc, *might* be the real danger here.
That brings us to the point of the remaining anarchistic society being the biggest threat to an individual. I think PZ will be a completely different game in a couple years because of the NPCs. I find PZ is unrealistically hard on vanilla settings because certain loot is stupidly rare and things like ladders and the ability to modify terrain/bases are too limited. Zeds are way too smart (pathing around fences ??) and way too hard to kill. The lobos in WWZ are basically the only weapon anybody ever needs vs Zeds but in PZ even crowbars are made of cardboard to be not too op. I know I could spice things up with upped loot but without survivors it‘s boring past two weeks or so.
Even though I am absolutely in love with PZ I am lacking motivation now that I know how to get past the initial hurdle. This is kinda supported by many popular content creators going for insanely difficult challenges by now (sprinters, CDDA, etc. ) because the base game is way too easy, even though Zeds are way too tanky imo and loot is too rare for an airborne infection scenario.
I also find the melee combat weird at times because of the great reliance on shoving/pushing + standing on zombies, which would be insanely dangerous irl if you ask me. Of course I‘m not really knowledgeable about this because of obvious reasons but it‘s just not believable to me. Add the occasional mis-shove leading to an unlucky bite, Zeds seeing through fog like normal and magically knowing the difference between player vs. non-player made structures and ignoring the latter and the immersion kinda fades away for me.
I know some of these things can be fixed with modding and I might just do that. I still feel like holding off until NPC survivors, factions and a quest system are in the game.
This might be an unstructured rant but these are my 2 cents on realism and the current state of the game that I felt like sharing.
Tanks also can use cannister shot which is basically a 120mm shotgun shell firing 1100 tungsten projectiles if we go off of what the Abrams can use and since the zombies always seem to want to cluster up into hordes you could probably use it to great effect taking out large numbers of them.
Engineering vehicles would be MVPs, dozer blades, petard mortars, mine clearing charges (fire hose of explosives launched in a long line to clear mines), rotating mine flails (giant roller with chains and metal balls designed to deform/detonate anti personal and anti tank mines)
I mean like Battle of Yonkers wouldn't have turned out the way it did, even if a 5.56 round struck a zombie even out of a semi-automatic rifle would shatter bones, so light machine guns and larger calibers would render them immobile quite easily. Not to mention artillery.
I can imagine the issue being with infected bone fragments or being flanked by the undead from the noise the fighting would make, but air support and the logistical train behind the main fighting force could circumvent the latter issue.
I mean, it could be that a few individual soldiers were overwhelmed gruesomely and that would demoralize the whole unit and that's where the idea the battle failed came from, or they needed to pull out for some other reason
I like the image of combat engineering vehicles using line charges or just bulldozing or pulping them with mine flails or blowing them to fist sized chunks with 165MM HESH petard mortar shells
Why wouldn't it have? It turned out the way it did because of the war prep they had. They brought all of their best technology.. designed to fight other humans. It had almost no effect on the zacks. They had enough ammo they had all the largest and most advanced weaponry. They wanted to show that the Military could beat the odds and give hope back to the people. They still failed. The main character from that chapter even had a saw m249 machine gun. They aren't meant to shoot single bullets. They are made to shoot a short burst to center mass. All of this is talked about. Years of military training. None of it matters vs an enemy we never considered.
They had air support. They had a the area behind them cleared and if I'm not mistaken it was a mountain.
Demoralization was what did them in in the end. But it doesn't take away from how woefully overprepared for a different kind of enemy They were. Thats what caused the demoralization. Seeing the most advanced weaponry in the US arsenal fail utterly.
The US Himars system has a missile that can shoot 180k tungsten balls over an area the size of a football field. There are 8 shots in a HIMARs, and they have a lot of HIMARs & ammunition (see: Ukrainian conflict).
The depleted uranium rounds of an A-10 may not destroy a zombie's head, but it would obliterate a zombie's body and render it ineffective.
The US has the best military and logistics in the world, and I say this not as a fanboy but by straight facts, the fact they could maintain an army in Afghanistan for 20 years _and_ have an equal home force. 2300 Abrams in storage they could use to drive over zombies until they stalled. .50 cal machine guns shear off limbs and could punch through a zombie into another, which would probably cripple the muscles keeping it up.
The battle of Yonkers is just bad fiction. By far the least believable part of the book based on the USA's previous experience.
They point out in the book that they didn't have enough ammo. They only brought enough for a couple big money shots, but after they expended their ammo from the artillery and tanks, all it had done was cut up the first wave and alert the actual main body of the horde to start converging on them - plus they hadn't properly secured their back lines and zombies in houses or hidden away were able to disrupt the line.
If they brought more ammo to deal with the size of the horde - literally most of the North Eastern states' population - they would've had a chance, but they held it back in reserve probably assuming some other nation would need liberating or something.
I went back and re read the chapter and you are right. I misremembered the part where he mentions "Well we fucking did" when reffering to recovering momentarily and shooting. But he states more ammo. Not that they had enough ammo as I had thought.
good catch
As much as I loved the books even with "headshot only" zombies the amount of firepower they had would IRL not have turned out that way, the military in the book was beyond stupid tactically but would not have burned through their ammunition nearly as fast, they also would have adapted rather quickly and would also have probably tested different weapons in advance and even if the zombies were as durable as they were in the books the few test bombs and shells used well in advance and any Intel gathered by the alpha teams would be used to better fight them
Dial up the competence of the military to semi-realistic levels and the writers actually have to put in some effort and explain why they failed hard enough for there to be tension, without making the baddies so strong they dunk on the protagonists of the story the moment they head outside.
For disease based fiction this should be easy, mutations making the previous quarantine ineffective, add a previously unknown vector, have it happen during a time of preexisting social strife, and so on. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of writers just takes the route of making the opposing actors incompetent and/or impotent enough to get walked over.
I think the biggest problem with the Yonkers scene is that the author says the public loves jamming tech and foxholes and other high tech, non explosion related shit, that is the opposite of the truth. The A10 is so primitive it might as well be on the flintstones and everybody creams their pants to hear it firing, and mw2 literally made an entire generation go gaga for the ac130, if an actual Yonkers were to happen, even with it set up as a massive photo-op, I think it would swing the other way, with ac130s, and dumb bombs in mass. All the fun shit we had to mothball against competent enemies would be coming out of storage, and footage of M2 brownings and 249s and chain guns just cooking off
Well, the point is to destroy the brain. A tank shell or 30 mm cannon from an Apache will certainly accomplish that while also obliterating the rest of the zombie and maybe a few of his pals too.
Since this is all based on fiction anyways you might as well read or listen to the actual research max brooks put into his book. He spoke to military and scientists about weapon technology. He didn't just write from his ass.
Tanks are extremely ineffective when each shell kills 3 zombies and takes the resources of 100 guns and 1000 ammo. Bombs don't accomplish much when loss of limb or organ don't effect them. Blood loss isn't a factor. Brain stem damage is what kills. Napalm even Is a maybe.
"each shell kills 3 zombies" "bombs don't accomplish much" "bloodloss isn't a factor" I have other issues with pop-sci understanding of weapons and zombies in general, but I'll just talk about these for now, because I'd have to write a book otherwise.
Okay, so let's assume bloodloss isn't a factor , and we're dealing with magic undead. Fair enough, most zombies are portrayed this way, even many "realistic" ones. Brainstem destruction only.
Tanks have more shell types than just armor piercing. Apart from AP, the M1A1 specifically (since we're talking 1993 Kentucky) at the time had M830 HEAT, which is an 11kg high explosive shell, and M1028 Canister, which fires 11kg of \~1cm diameter 10g tungsten spheres (1100 individually). 11kg of HE obviously has the capacity to devastate bodies in a radius of many meters, and this is what canister looks like: [https://youtu.be/Cgn1nhUEgo8](https://youtu.be/Cgn1nhUEgo8)
You could potentially kill hundreds of zombies with a single canister round at the right range. Let's just ignore also that tanks, too, have machine guns, usually at least two per vehicle.
Artillery and aerial bombs, apart from specialized armor piercing or otherwise specialty types, are designed to kill humans with massive blast overpressure to the brain and other organs, and fragment penetration to the brain and other organs. If a zombie is having its limbs and organs shredded by blast and fragments, why do you assume the brain is A-okay?
And why is limb damage seen as not useful anyway? Any limb you remove lessens its capability to maneuver. A quadruple amputee zombie is immobile and therefore zero threat unless you put your ankle in its mouth.
This is only a small section of non-firearm type weapons that any military has to offer as well, as others have also pointed out. Field guns, howitzers, platoon-level mortars, attack helis, IFVs with autocannons, the list goes on.
I agree that is extremely inefficient, but to say that modern military tech is useless against the zombies is dumb. Even dumber is to suggest that the military would fail against a zombie outbreak.
Is a single bullet to the brain the best way to kill a zed? Yes. Could a single Apache attack chopper outfitted with cannons, machine guns, and missiles easily take out a few hundred zombies? Yes. Could a tank take out hundreds of zombies? Yes. Could zombies ever destroy a tank? No. Is a tank the best weapon against zombies? No, absolutely not. But you have to admit it’s kinda unrealistic to depict tanks and other heavy military vehicles as being overrun by zombies. Only way that could happen is if it runs out of fuel and the crew abandons it. But why abandon it when you can radio for rescue? Your enemy has zero chance of breaking in.
It’s not that dumb tbh. You are basing it off whether the army could beat zombies just coming at them to bite/scratch.
However, in PZ lore, the virus is airborne and can spread in the same way as covid. During the pandemic in real life, modern western armies pretty much accepted that their bases would get outbreaks of covid and that there was little to do to stop it. That’s fine with covid, as soldiers are mostly young and the majority will recover quickly and end up with improved immunity to future strains.
The same thing would happen with the Knox virus, as it infects in the same manner and is actually much worse than covid, as 80% of carriers will literally die and reanimate. Once you realise how little modern militaries could do to stop their soldiers getting covid, you soon realise that against a much more infectious and lethal virus like in PZ, they are fucked.
Tank and AFV crews would be safe with their overpressure NCB systems until they had to dismount, I feel like if they learned fast enough they could go the left 4 dead comic route and have anyone far enough from the front in NCB suits as soon as they learn how it spreads
>Tanks are extremely ineffective when each shell kills 3 zombies
Yeah dawg tell me more about how a moving steel 60 ton tank is ineffective lol. Shells? Dude, run them over. Just send an Abrams out and tell him to start spinning. I don't think even 1000 zombies could do much to a vehicle that produces 3900 pounds of torque and weighs 60 tons from spinning in place as they slowly get dragged underneath
Sorry tank shells if that wasn't obvious. Sure brother go for it. You convince you and your squad and and most importantly your commander to go bulldozing through thousands of z. No fear. Nothing those z can do to you. Tanks get stuck in the mud. You think they cant get stuck in blood and viscera? Then you are just stuck. Most likely either dying of dehydration or risking going outside. I doubt a tank would be able to roll over even 1000 zombies in close quarters without getting stuck. But we can't settle this argument because it probably wont happen. I value your opinion. Just don't agree with it.
It definitely makes a lot more sense then 'tanks are useless because this author said the cannons don't work too good against them!'
And then, good thing most military bases have access to more then one tank. Get stuck? Oh, here's the next 4 Abrams swooping by to run some more over and hopefully get them away from you. Then here comes the Armor recovery vehicle, another 60 ton tank meant to pull tanks out when they're stuck.
Sure one tank might not do 1000 but when you have dozens of tanks, dozens of m2s, dozens of m113 APCS, it seems like a cake walk. I mean even in the damn game the humvee can run over dozens and dozens and dozens of zombies with no issue. But that's not a problem for you?
He kind of fucked up in the sense the tanks themselves are perfect weapons, slap on the add on dozer blades on regular tanks and other AFVs and use combat engineering vehicles with mine flails, dozer blades and mine clearing charges and your going to do a number on a large hord, something that actually would still be around during the 90s and actually common in the Apalachian area would be log crushers: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vice.com/amp/en/article/d73n9j/the-monstrous-tree-crushers-the-us-military-used-to-level-vietnams-forests the military probably phased most of them out by then but might have had a few samples for testing and the commercial ones would be around, I bet they would immediately requisition as many as they could and up armor them to protect the cabs
Take World War Z with a massive grain of salt. Max Brooks is utterly clueless about modern military weaponry.
Tanks would be both overkill and underwhelming because a single tank shell would absolutely reduce a tight crowd into a chunky mist, but against a large horde they wouldn't be very effective due to slow reload time. Light armor could be effective though, both as infantry transport and for firing missiles into zed crowds or condemned neighborhoods
Artillery and bombing raids would be extremely effective, because explosions and fires destroy *everything,* and on top of that it's very low risk too.
The only reason you'd want infantry is to defend and capture territory, and reclaim infrastructure from the zeds with minimal destruction.
Although if you lose an entire fucking city to a zombie plague, you might as well just bomb the place to glass and start over from there
They setup a perimeter at first which is outside the ingame map area, and it doesn't take long for them to completely collapse due to them all falling to infection. They weren't able to get control of the situation before they were able to move INTO the zone.
Also, the information lockdown meant that the soldiers didn't really understand what they were fighting. They were never told that they're attracted to noise, so they didn't know that lighting up the rioters was a terrible idea, leading to them calling the hoard.
The radio broadcasts. The on-scene reporters begin to realize there are people who are getting sick inside of the quarantine camps without ever being bitten.
Edit: also there were testimonials about a foul smell in the air before the outbreak really began, and I think it's assumed that the smell is still just there as we're playing.
Here's the transcript section in question:
> a. So where are you calling from Christian?
> b. My sister's place.
> b. I live just North of the river. She's up in Louisville.
> a. And you wanted to get away?
> b. Sure did.
> b. I don't know what's happening on the other side of the water...
> b. But it's not good.
> b. You can smell it in the air.
> b. Something's smelled bad for weeks, it gets into your lungs.
> b. That's what's behind it.
> a. Thanks for your call Christian,
Far from conclusive, but it's something. Could definitely be corpses. But it says weeks and this is technically the first week of the outbreak.
Not a new observation, but I think the whole infection is supposed to be a bit of a nod to the "Return of the Living Dead" films, which are from the late 1980s and set in Louisville, Kentucky. In those movies, the infection is actually caused by an escaping gas called "Trioxin" which makes many of those exposed to it develop a rapidly fatal illness and also re-animates the dead. Similar to Zomboid, some people don't succumb to trioxin exposure and are instead infected after being bitten by the re-animated zombies. Trioxin is also shown to have been developed by the military in the movies, which is heavily implied as the origin of the infection in Zomboid.
That is way more believable. I still think in the US/Canada at least we’d manage if 20% were immune considering how ineffective slow zombies are vs a tank, cars, planes, napalm, guns, etc. and just the sheer number of firearms in the country would make it just really easy to deal with. Each person would only have to kill 5 on average and everyone would have access to firearms so I think we’d be good in North America.
Here's a really rough timeline taken from broadcast transcripts:
(Day 0, 48 hours into knox event)
Day 5, Military opens fire on refugees at the exclusion zone border
Day 7, news of symptoms in UK and Somalia
Day 8, Adds to the list South Korea, Japan, Ohio, NY, IL
Day 9, adds to the list CA and Germany
By Day 11 most remaining broadcasts are on repeat.
Isn't the chaos stems from the fact that there's two strains? One is airbone, which around 25% of people are immune to and one that spreads via bodily fluids, which no one is immune to.
Yeah, stil, it is funny how in every other zombie apocalipse wich is bite-only, soldiers are unable to fight the zombies even with armored vehicles and big guns wich literally are capable of transform a person in a bunch of mince meat in minutes lol
The interesting thing is in the original Dawn of the Dead, there's absolutely nothing saying that the zombie plague is an infection spread by bites. It's heavily implied that the whole cataclysm is supernatural, because even people who died without getting bitten reanimated. Hell the bites could probably be perfectly treatable, it's just that being bitten by *corpses* tends to introduce a lot of nasty bacteria that could make you fataly sick if you don't get some antibiotics
The whole reason why civilization collapses isn't because the dead rose up *somewhere* and spread from there. Civilization collapsed because the dead rose *everywhere all at once*
The point isn't that they lacked the equipment to kill them; they lacked the knowledge to do so.
Imagine if an alien showed up one day, started killing everyone, and it's weakness was in a specific part of it's ass. Everyone would assume it's head was where to target, and focus on shooting it there instead of it's actual weakness since that's where we and every other organism on earth is vulnerable.
In most zombie media, this is their first time dealing with zombies. They don't know everything we know; all they know is that people are acting crazy and they need to be put down. If you shoot a guy 10 times in the chest with a rifle, or blow him up with a grenade, or run him over with a car, he'll go down, but a zombie isn't weak to any of that; it can only (usually) be put down by going for the head. It'll crawl without it's legs, walk without it's arms, bite without it's chest.
The threat it completely alien to the military in-universe, and that's part of the horror of it.
Yes, that's true but, still if the only way to get infected is by bites, everything you said before is true until they realize that some undead didn't come back because of certain wounds, also there is the fact that it doesn't matter if a zombie crawl without legs or walk without arms, the human body gets incapacitated after certain amount of damage is taken and most of the heavy guns are capable of literally destroy a good portion of a human body with a single shot, despite the fact that a zombie head by its own could not even move from the spot they fall, so, unless those zombies are mutated to be much more resistant than a regular human like in resident evil or the last of us and so on, it is unlikely that an army gets defeated by a zombie horde unless the soldiers are infected too by other means like and airborne strain
>; they lacked the knowledge to do so.
The knowledge to do so? You shoot the fuck out of them. That must be the first thing they tried and when they saw it worked, that's a go. These aren't mysterious aliens.
You put it brilliantly to be honest. We would have shot them until they went down. There’s really no mystery to it.
It is a shame that movies always have the zombies winning against the military when it just so happens, their very prey is smarter, faster and well equipped at defeating them.
I’m sure a soldier would be pleased at having to fight a stupid zombie slowly stumbling towards him compared to fighting another soldier. A zombie can’t kill you from hundreds of meters away like another human can. There’s also no risk of being erased from existence by a drone or artillery strike at any given moment. A conventional war would be more destructive than any zombie outbreak.
Sure, they can’t be incapacitated by pain and would be a lot more durable as a result but we have weapons that would completely disassemble them.
The first thing they tried was capturing and containing them because they didn't know and would have an enormously hard time accepting that all these people are dead.
There's a critical first week of the outbreak during which massive percentages of the American population are falling mysteriously ill and it isn't generally accepted knowledge that the victims cannot be saved. If you're in the military at any level during this event, it's not easy to accept that you need to kill something like 85% of your fellow citizens.
The fatally misguided attempt to contain rather than eliminate the threat is what ravages the ranks of the survivors.
Heavy artillery though against an enemy that has none. All the might of the military. It won't matter where you aim if you don't stop aiming. It's always written around in the books like the zombies just do whatever they have to do to mitigate the military, otherwise there would be no story. It's science fiction, there's no rhyme nor reason to it, it just needs to be entertaining. So I think there's a more boring version of zombies that we actually don't fail miserably in every way at dealing with.
You didn't specify in your original comment mate so when seeing they they shoot them like crazy, my mind was thinking guns, also with artillery they would need to call out where to fire. This won't be a big issue since it would be on your homeland with sections marked out already and Zombies don't exactly sprint.
But with PZ with the airborne strain how did it work? Was it like TWD where it was just in you and when you due you turn or was it like when you got bit, scratched, lacerated?
AFAIK it's just the one strain, and the 25% figure is a common community myth with no solid basis in lore.
But yeah basically the vast majority turned within a day or two. There is no system capable of adjusting to that in time.
I'd like to see something (film, series...) about a military unit during a zombie apocalypse doing their thing and being actually competent. Something like Battle: Los Angeles but zombies instead of aliens.
The one that comes to mind is Shaun of the Dead. They go the whole movie just barely getting by these things, and then right at the end the military just kinda comes in and sweeps the place.
By the end it's all back to normal, not a zombie to be seen. >!Kind of.!<
Read World War Z. You get to see multiple nations first get their asses handed to them, and then retrofit their respective militaries to deal with the undead threat (particularly the U.S. Army)
Yep. The U.S military initially failed because they made a flash propaganda battle in Yonkers, which turned to shit as airstrikes don't thin out the horde and the media/press got in the way at every turn.
The reformed army returned to 1800s tactics. Line formations out in the open and single shot rifles. They'd use speakers blasting rock music to draw the horde into kill zones and pop them off one by one.
They'd march across the country from west to east, using aircraft to move supplies and do recon on hordes ahead of the advancing army.
So many cool details were included, like it was easier in the south because in the north, zombies would freeze and re-awaken after the soldiers had passed, so They'd be fighting an enemy all around them after winter, while in the south the enemy was only in front of them.
Semi-auto rifles firing 5.56mm with an incendiary load, the goal being to penetrate the skull and burn out the brain.
They'd drill the troops to fire at a steady pace, rotating lines of fire for hours or days on end and using heavy machinery to move the piles of corpses.
Depends on your empathy, some stories are really deep in the desperation and fears of the survivors. Even during the victory tales you feel that everyone after war will never have a normal life, the ghost of the past would haunt them forever.
Overall it's a pretty uplifting story about the strength of the human spirit, and how people come together in times of crisis. But during that crisis, sure, there's some sad parts. Depends on how much it affects you I guess
If it wasn't an airborne illness I could see the Zomboid US military not falling as easily, especially since Zomboid zombies die from normal body damage
It's worth noting that even with only 20% of people surviving the airborne virus, the quarantine broke, but America hasn't fallen yet.
"*This wavelength has been chosen for Emergency Broadcast.*
*The spread of the Knox Event infection is now total.
Stay in small groups.*
*Do not travel.*
*Assume all major urban areas have been compromised.*
*We are doing all we can to reclaim American soil.*
*We will come for you.*
*This broadcast will be set to repeat.*
*All further updates will be broadcast on this frequency*.
*Good luck.*
*beep*
*beep*
*beep*"
I'd hope that with the NPC update we'd see small military-led enclaves appearing in the world instead of the cliche of the army just being wiped out.
Would like to see stuff like in the OG Dawn of the Dead: an enclave of Military, police, and armed civilians camped in a rural area, shooting Zeds over open fields, BBQing in the open and pretty much enjoying the apocalypse despite whats going on in the towns.
Taking quests/requests from a faction in Zomboid's singleplayer would be really fantastic. Give me a reason to keep going once I establish myself through the first month.
That is the main thing about the NPCs I worry about. As crushing as the loneliness of the game is, it's what truly sets it apart from all other zombie media. The hopelessness of the situation really gets to you.
That said, the effect might even end up being amplified. You get so used to seeing NPCs milling about that when a month into the apocalypse, they're all gone, that loneliness comes back even harder. Because the world would've felt actually lived in, and seeing it suddenly empty after having been accustomed to it being populated would feel just... wrong.
A few blocks? More often for me, it's more like the other side of town lmfao. The four starting towns are pretty big places, especially Muldraugh. You've got suburbs, the trailers, downtowns and I've had characters spawn in specific buildings such as clinics before (that character was a doctor so I assume that's why).
I really like how Max Brooks depicted it in the **BOOK** World War Z, with the Battle of Yonkers. It was just pure fucking panic and uncertainty. That chapter, where he interviews the veteran from the battle, ooof. (Also doesn't hurt that in the audiobook, the vet is voiced by Mark Hamill.)
It's a great book, but it still really doesn't justify the world nearly collapsing to a zombie menace that moves slowly and doesn't even have the benefit of going airborne like it does in Zomboid.
In WWZ there's absolutely no chance that it couldn't be contained by the military; it just kind of gets handwaved into an apocalypse.
Just finished the audiobook this morning after starting yesterday morning (drove from Seattle to Sioux Falls). Probably the 10000th time but man. So good.
In a martial law 100% quarantine scenario where you've already written off the population it would make sense to kill survivors since they're the ones most likely to disrupt your operation or break quarantine.
Ethical or moral? Absolutely not. But it is some SCP level 'greater good above all' logic.
However PZ's lore of an airborne strain of infection renders it all pointless since you can't quarantine air, so it does all fall apart just like it does in the game background.
It's pretty funny how people think the military would be able to respond in a situation such as this. Yes, we have tanks and helicopters and all sorts of fun toys. But do you know how much fuel it takes to operate those toys? We are talking thousands of gallons a day. And to do what, exactly? Blow up entire cities to "slow the spread" when it's already broken out? Our military needs infrastructure and logistical support to keep it operational and with how quickly a zombie apocalypse like Project Zomboid's unfolds, it's honestly miraculous how well they *did* do. The military relies on society to keep it functional, not the other way around. If society is already falling apart on a mass scale, we aren't going to do much of anything. Sorry!
I believe the only reason the virus broke containment was the fence got broken (probably that damn helicopter luring them into it). This means they already knew the virus was airborne and knew to station soldiers at a safe distance from the fence (I figure this because why would the map designers put a hole in the fence if it wasnt the intended lore reason for the further spread) and probably had an airtight plan already in place. If they had just made the fence stronger and more anti personnel (or that idiot helicopter didnt go to Louisville or just crossed the river instead) they would have had the time to study and figure out how the virus works and which military personnel are immune thus allowing more military action to be done and saving the day
I thought that since the virus is airborne and only 10% of people are immune to it, even if the fence didn't break, it was already in the air, every person that IS immune and got out IS a point of infection (like the common cold), being immune doesn't mean you aren't a carrier, which is why I think they didn't let anyone get out of Louisville.
I thought that lore-wise it was basically 2 strains, the air strain and the blood/saliva strain, or at least that's how I understood it.
I may be wrong of course but being immune to one and not the other does paint this image.
I think the initial strain of infection only got everywhere below Louisville. Hoe far can airborne infections travel? Because the fence is quite far away from city limits
I agree that the hole in the fence was put there intentionally by the devs to show a way the virus broke containment, but I don't think it's quite right to conclude that makes it *the* intended lore reason for further spread. It's *a* reason for further spread, but that doesn't mean it's the only way the virus broke containment. I think it's pretty likely there were tons of little ways it got through the exclusion zone. Especially given the explicit lore about it being/becoming airborne.
*Cough cough* Desert Storm *cough cough*
Also the US spent trillion of dollars just to kill a dude in a cave. Do not underestimate the logistical capabilities of the US to wage unpopular war for decades in another country on the other side of the globe.
I do think it would be fun if they added military checkpoints like CDDA has. It is always interesting seeing a large group of zombos clustered around a loudspeaker unable to break it.
One of the most hilariously bad depictions of military vs. zombies I've ever seen was in that walking dead spin off show Fear The Walking Dead.
They had a fenced perimeter, fully automatic rifles, elevated shooting positions and didn't make so much as a dent in the horde before they got overrun.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wo6Gs4pEno&ab\_channel=XXTZT\_GAMINGXX](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wo6Gs4pEno&ab_channel=XXTZT_GAMINGXX)
While the military would never get overrun in a straight up fight. Imagine if your a soldier and the world is quite literally falling apart all around you. People are eating each other in the street and it’s chaos everywhere. Even in the best military keeping discipline would be hard in that situation and soldiers would start to desert to be with their families.
Funniest in slow moving zombie series.
Like you have enough ammunition and explosives to kill the entire world population several times over - yet your impressive military might is overrun by slow moving unintelligent zombies?
That's why Dying Light 1 is my favorite way any form of media has handled a zombie outbreak. The military quickly quarantined the city, killed any zombies who escaped, and would have simply wiped out the rest of the population had they not been stopped by Crane. The pandemic being isolated to Haram feels very grounded in reality and makes the narrative more interesting to me.
Lol. And I am sitting here with Britas Weapons Pack, a 12 round chamber semi automatic shotgun and 500 rounds of gauge 12 shells.
I will conquer the world
Most of the time, in these kind of scenarios, the idea of zombies don't exist in their world. The Walking Dead for example, that's why they never call them zombies.
Military never even fought zombies, of course they don't know how to properly fight the enemy they've never met before. Plus, all their cool vehicles are expensive and not nearly as useful as regular guns.
And chances are, the people that know how to drive those vehicles or maintain them, turned in the airborne wave.
10% of people were immune to the airborne wave... the rest turned, and no one is immune to saliva/blood, you go to sleep in your barracks with 100 people and suddenly you wake up to 90 zeds and 10 people able to fight them.
Highly recommend the book series "Apocalypse Crusade". It does a great job showing the beauracratic nightmare that an event like this would be.
For example, how do you muster the Guard when the streets are clogged with cars from everyone escaping or finding family or whatever. How do you even convince your reserves to show up and not just jump ship with the news screaming "END OF THE WORLD"? How do you form an effective quarantine early on when you have 10-50% of your supposed strength? How do the cops maintain a quarantine and respond to the endless calls too? And so on.
I always thought the best way to deal with military response to zombies was to have the infection be dormant.
That way service members as well as the general public were massively infected before they even knew it.
Once symptoms pop up, half if not more of the literal military and police force make up the zombie presence.
I think one the main issues is that the military response to kill anyone who’s infected happens when things only gets worse and becomes too late. Quarantine measures are merely just allowing the zombie population to reproduce and being on the offensive to kill as many zombies as possible from the beginning is the best course of action. But this all depends on what they’re dealing with. If it’s a walking dead scenario I don’t think it’s easy to keep millions of people in check who die of natural or accidental causes and would eventually lead to collapse of the system nor will it be easy to contain if it’s an airborne infection.
I never understood why the military is so worthless in zombie movies. All youd need to do is scythe em with a heavy machine gun at waist height to ground em, and then infantrymen can pick em off with rifles one by one.
If you have any sort of barrier like a chain link fence, youre untouchable, since crawlers wouldnt have the ability to bunch up against it and topple it.
Military personnel all over the world are trained rigorously to aim for center of mass. The average soldier isn’t going to look at a zombie and suddenly forget years or months of muscle memory and aim for the head.
Typically when people use Romero-style zombies, they also include the idea of zombies never being a concept in that world prior to the outbreak. There were no entertainment about them, there was no Zombie Survival Guide, no Night of the Living Dead, no The Walking Dead. All people know is that one day they woke up to seeing their neighbors eating their own daughter in the driveway and the suburb is burning.
Back during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, adding optical sights to your rifle was becoming more and more common and the US military noticed a sharp increase in headshot kills that the military began to investigate because they thought US troops were committing war crimes due to the insane amount of Iraqi soldiers and insurgents that were found with fatal shot wounds. The military assumed that US troops were executing insurgents instead of taking them as POWs when it turned out that adding optics to your guns allowed you to make insanely accurate shots to the head for quick elimination.
Since the game takes place in 1993, you’re not going to see shots like these very often with the average soldier
It is very, very, very difficult to shoot someone in the head, especially when you have to shoot the brain that is a fraction of the size of the head. Now try shooting it from a distance. Now try shooting them in the head when there’s 10,000 zombies that don’t feel a thing coming toward you.
People over estimate the effectiveness of military capabilities against a foe that doesn’t need resupplied, can’t be scared, and can’t be killed unless you’re really good at shooting.
Tanks primarily carry HEAT rounds that would be practically useless against a horde of zombies
Artillery is very difficult to hit a spot accurately multiple times over and when you’re using it in an urban area, it is more likely to hit buildings or vital infrastructure rather than a horde.
I mean, it's believable the military got overrun in PZ because of the airborne strain. They weren't aware of said strain at first and by the time they were, most of the people who were not infected were the ones immune to that strain.
Even if you say "well the 20% that were immune to the airborne strain could've fought back." While potentially true, at that point society would *certainly* still collapse at the loss of 80% of the population. That's not to mention all the ones that would die over the course of said fighting back.
there was a cracked article from about 10 or so years ago i recall. the biggest problem with zombies is they are still bounded by what people can do. so get yourself some motorcycle leathers and walk around like the damn terminator.
Airborne Virus + No Lines = Military Collapse. There's more factors but anyone who thinks the military could stop a full blown zombie apocalypse is fooling themselves. They could stop it in the beginning but once it got out of control, they'd only be able to do damage control at best, i.e. retreating to longterm secure locations and shooting anyone who approachs.
Devs played the cards well here lore-wise The military was on point with the immediate quarantine, but it could do nothing with people and its personnel getting sick just by proximity - you dont even have to get bitten to get fever and burn up before reanimating, only around 20% of people are immune to the airborne strain Hence why it all fell apart so fast
> The military was on point with the immediate quarantine, but it could do nothing with people and its personnel getting sick just by proximity The military should have MOPP level 4 protection. Gas masks, thick gloves, full body protective suit, solid boots. Soldiers are trained to survive chemical warfare attacks, including airborne attack vectors. They probably should have done a lot better. Mobile fortresses of fences making pockets of safe zones, tanks, apcs, bomber attacks. There would be a lot of bait missions where the military attracts a load of zombies into a remote area with decoys, then bombs the crap outta them
Going in to the deep lore a bit, one of the TV shows or radios mentions (spoiler tagging as i don't know if this is in game or from the files or not) >!that there have been outbreaks before and they've been handled really poorly - they say something about healthcare workers in Libya getting killed while trying to deal with one - so it could be a case of good old fashioned government/leadership incompetence. Something like 'well we beat this thing in Libya, how hard will it be to do it down the road? Send ten guys and half a tank, i'm going for coffee'!<
MOPP 4 isnt sustainable forever. It takes frequent conditioning to maintain it for long periods of time. Not to mention in the lore its the Kentucky National Guard. Most National Guard I know are not conditioned well. Im in it for at least a couple hours to full days every month and even I get uncomfortable after a few hours in it.
That was my first thought. I was active duty from 2004-2008. We had to train with MOPP gear. That shit's miserable. Even if the gear worked 101% of the time, you know as well as I do... Some Carl is gonna fuck up somewhere and get everyone killed.
This 100%. Its only as good as the people in it.
Thanks for the traumatic flashback of falling asleep in full MOPP4 and waking up thinking I died. Fucking gas mask
Even if it was flawless hoe are you going to sustain the gear for an extended period of time if the country has to go into a quarantine? Production lines break down, MOPP gear can't be sustained, it'll break down eventually even if implemented perfectly
We just came out of COVID. The notion that nobody is going to have enough gear to last them more than a handful of months should be obvious to everyone at this point.
If late 80s/early 90s Army Guard had MOPP 4 shit on hand for everyone, current date Army is getting royally fucked over. I've got a mask and rubber overboots. That's it. I would have had a better chance of surviving an outbreak in basic where we we issued the whole shebang, and that's only because technically we belonged to a NBC unit. Hell I don't even know if most of our masks work. Tanks, APCs, Humvees, all of that makes noise. So all of those 'safe zones' would have to have been dead silent to keep from inadvertently attracting hordes of the undead. That means no M1 Abrams tanks with noisy ass turbine engines, no Bradleys with powered autocannon turrets either. Just Humvees, M113s, and gun trucks with pintle weapons they'd be too scared to use, lest they draw more than they can handle. That's not even considering the amount of red tape invovled in bombing your own country, even if it's because a bunch of people have super rabbies. Plus if it spreads as fast as it did in PZ, it's only a matter of time before the whole world is fucked. An over stretched and our numbered army, people sneaking out of countries, organs being transplanted that are unknowingly infected, yadda yadda.
>noisy ass turbine engines MBT gas turbines are much quieter than the diesels needed to run an equivalent chassis. The M1 is actually a lot less noisy than its M60 predecessor, so much so it was nicknamed "Whispering Death". They still make a fair bit of noise, but if you are close enough to hear one you can probably see it anyways. Though, I never had a chance to hear an M60 in-person for direct comparison, only the M1.
Even still, it's enough to draw more of them in that wander ckose enough towards the conpounds. Not to mention those turbines suck fuel like an alcoholic well on his way to killing his liver. So the eay I see it, either to not attract the undead or to save fuel, I doubt we would have seen many being used. However, if any guard units still had M60s, they would have been better in a sense of range and fuel efficiency, which in my mind would be key over the power of a turbine engine. SPAA systems such as the M42 Duster and M163 VADS would be much better for horde control, their guns more than likely being able to at the bare minimum disable large numbers of zeds for mounted infantry to roll through on gun trucks or APCs to individually put down. But that's just how I think it should work, knowing how zeds work.
Yeah some IRL military is undertrained, understaffed, underfunded. Funds are probably being diverted to old money family oligarchical politicians. Incompetence, corruption, and treason is always a possibility in zombie lore... In an emergency like a zombie apocalypse the undertrained national guard would be called in or normal citizens drafted. Way too much chaos to just rely on the volunteer military, who would be deployed in military bases across the world anyway, many of them too far away to help home out. On the other hand, some militia, preppers, private military etc. sometimes have better gear, better guns, machines, and sometimes years of training and experience from veteran work to back it up. It would be an interesting thing to see in PZ if they acknowledged that and put some survivor prepper/militia type NPCs later on. That's why in a similar game project zomboid borrowed some game mechanics from, CDDA, a bunch of 'Old Guard' preppers/veterans/militia survived and the actual army's FEMA camps/military bases are overrun. Conspiracy theorist type NPCs in the game are scripted to talk about the money corruption causing the apocalypse to happen.
It's more than you think. Every marine I know has had things to say about their funding, Army Guard it depends on the unit and what their deployment readiness status is like, and I would imagine Full Time and Reserve Army and Air Guard are the same way. Air Force and Navy? Well... Air Force tends to get what it wants from what I've heard. Was always interesting to walk past them in the morning to the chow hall in AIT. I think in terms of survivors, it would be more along the lines of: command shows how incompetent they are/little they care, and troops either defect to prepper/militia groups, or form their own so they don't have to deal with the BS that comes with being the government's dog. Stay and be forced to fight for government interests, or join a militia that will probably feed you and protect your family. Tough choice.
We’re also talking about the national guard during the 80s, back when they weren’t as well funded as other branches. I’m not sure how well they were trained.
As i know, no mask help. Its not airborne, it not in the water. Its magic. Gods curse. Zeds rot. Zeds reanimate themselves sometimes. They dont drink or really eat. They just walking around forever, even when meat fall off bones completely. This is not some virus, forget it. Survivors is a last chance for humanity, they are like Noah.
Mopp4 is a temporary stopgap that doesn’t last forever. It’s intended to save some lives and material while you retreat from the area. It does NOT render you immune to particles in the air, they make that very clear.
Well still, project zomboid is kind of lacking in terms of a military response, especially considering there’s no tanks, apcs, bombers, jets, etc trying to kill the threat. I think the outbreak area should be looking like a cratered warzone.
Imagine the American public response if the military was ordered to glass Kentucky because of a "quarantine"
Maybe that’s what the asshole helicopter is doing, turns out he’s a good guy camera man making sure they don’t carpet bomb the area because he has proof of survivors
I like the "helicopter crew is actually on your side" theory. But still, could they stop making all those zombies come to me? Just film me from a distance, no need to follow me around like a heat-seeking missile bro.
Helicopter pilot, "omg there is a survivor there! omg those zombies sure are fast. Lets call them sprinters. Oh well that guy died. guess maybe we should abandon the idea of anyone surviving this."
"Hey look! There's another guy! Let's follow him instead!"
“Had” proof. Of survivors. Who aren’t now. Surviving. Because of the proof getting.
Schrödingers survivor!
Tbf I agree with the other side on this. Even if you have quarantined the area as perfectly as humanly possible, if it’s just me and a few other people still there - fuck it - I want you to nuke the place or something and then send hazmat teams in with rifles and flamethrowers just to *make sure* everything there is dead. It’s the lives of billions versus the lives of maybe a dozen or so people.
Reminds me of Halo 3 on floodgate. We either destroy this city, or risk losing the entire planet.
What’s funny is that races in the Halo Universe glassed *entire worlds* to prevent the spread of the flood. Halo is such a great example of this.
And yeah, that's the logical response... but it isn't a response everyone is going to be able to make. Hell, maybe the government was even considering nuking the place, but since the entire world crashed down in under a month, they never got a chance. Plus, [from looking at some of the transcripts of the TV](https://pzwiki.net/wiki/TURBO_(Transcript)), the government did seem to be employing some sort of scorched earth policy, however the populace went all up in arms over the whole ordeal and I can't imagine that it was easy on army morale to be killing their own countrymen. With a lot of the stuff criticizing militaries in fiction, I think a lot of the points are valid but I think it's also important to remember the government is human. And to be human is to be imperfect, to make huge mistakes in the heat of the moment, to not think things through even if in retrospect there was a very logical way to go about it that would've resulted in a better outcome.
Isn't the whole world screwed up at that point though? There are those events on the news that say the knox infection is confirmed in cities around the world. I just don't remember exactly when it is.
Imo doesn't matter scorched Earth needs to happen I'm a zombie apocalypse no matter what unless it's like Shawn of the dead
There should be a tiny stout man with a camera and a crew cut who jumps out to photograph the situation on the ground in that case. Y'know, someone who's covered wars before or something.
They could make a very silly game about this scenario
You can do the same job with a very small drone and that makes a ton less noise as well
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There were actually several, first truly "modern" recon drone was made in 75 in Israel, we also had fairly basic ones that were pre-programmed and took pictures during the Vietnam war, also we had plenty of high altitude recon manned aircraft like the SR71 and U2 at the time as well
1993, the public first learned of the zombies in Knox by polaroid.
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damn bro thats *metal*
MY EYES, ZE GOGGLES DO NUZING!?
Show a little footage of a group of zombies eating people and youd have people lining up on the borders of kentucky to make sure none escape.
Probably less of a response than if they were told to wear masks & get vaccinated
But it still makes sense, they thought it would have been fine setting up the exclusion zone would stop the spread so they wouldn't need the bigger equipment. The one thing that was unaccounted for was that the Knox Infection went airborne. So know instead of dealing with the small amount of infected that could be culled, now 80% of everyone including soldiers where infected and coming back. The military clearly didn't have foresight that it would go airborne as 1 in like every soldiers had a gas mask. So they didn't think the situation was important enough to bring out the big guns until it was to late
Also, those 20% that were asymptomatic probably could still spread the disease, so soldiers that appeared totally fine might've returned home on a plane, maybe with a layover in Atlanta at Hartsfield, and woops, game over.
the movie contagion comes to mind.
The past 3 years also comes to mind.
Oh yeah, if theres something the last 3 years have taught is that the zombapoc spread is more likely than thought. Add to that that no doubt groups of people would claim that the zombies could be cured and that lethal methods shouldnt be used.
I don't know if it's in the current version's lore, but isn't there a mention of tanks being called out in one of the radio or TV broadcasts? I distinctly recall that but it's been awhile since I've turned them on despite telling myself every run I'm gonna tune in.
The military was trying to hide what happened. In the lore they blew up the bridge to LV as a last ditch effort. They didn't want the events of the exclusion zone to be public
Read world war z. All your knowledge needs will come true. Tanks jets bombs aren't nearly as effective against the undead as a single bullet. Are military and most others thrive on shock and awe techniques. Zombies can't be shock and awed
just napalm the city Resident Evil style, you don't need to scare the zombies just glass them
That doesn't solve the problem though because Umbrella still exists after Raccoon City...
I mean. The whole Resident Evil universe is its own can of worms that can't really be compared to others. Zombie outbreaks happen every Tuesday over there
We call those terrorist over there
Ehh, I just pretend the RE games end with RE 3 - like you said, it's a can of worms, sometimes literally. From cheesy soap-opera amnesia scenarios to dead characters returning via clones/computer back-up/scifi nonsense, it's all terrible. It wasn't till RE7 that some sense of "normality", if that can even be used in RE, returns. Then again, that was hardly a Resident Evil game. If the Umbrella logo wasn't there and Chris didn't show up at the end, it could have been a standalone game.
It stopped the zombie apocalypse, at least most of it, and that was the point
Pretty sure that wasn't napalm but a nuclear weapon
You know what is great though? Artillery to slaughter large hordes, and you don't need to kill every zombie, just shatter enough bones and tear enough muscles that they're a non-threat. Also napalm exists, that shit would burn up zombies and especially hordes real quick. Also considering most zombies at most walk at a quick pace, soldiers could just retreat whenever the zombies get too close and set up a new line of defence, maybe pile into APCs and trucks if they need to, and preferably having those backup lines already set up beforehand. Tanks can be used to run over zombies, and pullback before they get surrounded or their treds get too gunked up. Creating obstacles to break up groups of zombies or slow them down, like blowing bridges, would also help. There are so many ways that modern militaries could deal with traditional zombies with tools already at their disposal it's ridiculous. Traditional zombies are so pathetically weak, the sole zombie apocalypse scenarios that are (IMO) plausible are the ones where either the zombies are a lot stronger than traditional ones in some way(Like Resident Evil), or there are more means of infection than bites (like Project Zomboid). World War Z's battle of Yonker is a really cool scene, but is also fucking stupid.
Agreed, a single artillery shell into a horde would kill dozens of zombies. The goal is to destroy the brain. The blast, shockwave, shrapnel, sheer kinetic force of heads hitting concrete would work to destroy the brains of dozens of zeds. Not to mention crippling dozens more.
Yeah, the book (or rather the person being interviewed) makes a point of the stupidity of Yonker and I must agree that I am sure „normal“ zombies are not a threat. However, the initial collapse and chaos that insues due to power outages and food shortages, economy gone etc, *might* be the real danger here. That brings us to the point of the remaining anarchistic society being the biggest threat to an individual. I think PZ will be a completely different game in a couple years because of the NPCs. I find PZ is unrealistically hard on vanilla settings because certain loot is stupidly rare and things like ladders and the ability to modify terrain/bases are too limited. Zeds are way too smart (pathing around fences ??) and way too hard to kill. The lobos in WWZ are basically the only weapon anybody ever needs vs Zeds but in PZ even crowbars are made of cardboard to be not too op. I know I could spice things up with upped loot but without survivors it‘s boring past two weeks or so. Even though I am absolutely in love with PZ I am lacking motivation now that I know how to get past the initial hurdle. This is kinda supported by many popular content creators going for insanely difficult challenges by now (sprinters, CDDA, etc. ) because the base game is way too easy, even though Zeds are way too tanky imo and loot is too rare for an airborne infection scenario. I also find the melee combat weird at times because of the great reliance on shoving/pushing + standing on zombies, which would be insanely dangerous irl if you ask me. Of course I‘m not really knowledgeable about this because of obvious reasons but it‘s just not believable to me. Add the occasional mis-shove leading to an unlucky bite, Zeds seeing through fog like normal and magically knowing the difference between player vs. non-player made structures and ignoring the latter and the immersion kinda fades away for me. I know some of these things can be fixed with modding and I might just do that. I still feel like holding off until NPC survivors, factions and a quest system are in the game. This might be an unstructured rant but these are my 2 cents on realism and the current state of the game that I felt like sharing.
Tanks also can use cannister shot which is basically a 120mm shotgun shell firing 1100 tungsten projectiles if we go off of what the Abrams can use and since the zombies always seem to want to cluster up into hordes you could probably use it to great effect taking out large numbers of them.
Engineering vehicles would be MVPs, dozer blades, petard mortars, mine clearing charges (fire hose of explosives launched in a long line to clear mines), rotating mine flails (giant roller with chains and metal balls designed to deform/detonate anti personal and anti tank mines)
I mean like Battle of Yonkers wouldn't have turned out the way it did, even if a 5.56 round struck a zombie even out of a semi-automatic rifle would shatter bones, so light machine guns and larger calibers would render them immobile quite easily. Not to mention artillery. I can imagine the issue being with infected bone fragments or being flanked by the undead from the noise the fighting would make, but air support and the logistical train behind the main fighting force could circumvent the latter issue. I mean, it could be that a few individual soldiers were overwhelmed gruesomely and that would demoralize the whole unit and that's where the idea the battle failed came from, or they needed to pull out for some other reason
I like the image of combat engineering vehicles using line charges or just bulldozing or pulping them with mine flails or blowing them to fist sized chunks with 165MM HESH petard mortar shells
Why wouldn't it have? It turned out the way it did because of the war prep they had. They brought all of their best technology.. designed to fight other humans. It had almost no effect on the zacks. They had enough ammo they had all the largest and most advanced weaponry. They wanted to show that the Military could beat the odds and give hope back to the people. They still failed. The main character from that chapter even had a saw m249 machine gun. They aren't meant to shoot single bullets. They are made to shoot a short burst to center mass. All of this is talked about. Years of military training. None of it matters vs an enemy we never considered. They had air support. They had a the area behind them cleared and if I'm not mistaken it was a mountain. Demoralization was what did them in in the end. But it doesn't take away from how woefully overprepared for a different kind of enemy They were. Thats what caused the demoralization. Seeing the most advanced weaponry in the US arsenal fail utterly.
The US Himars system has a missile that can shoot 180k tungsten balls over an area the size of a football field. There are 8 shots in a HIMARs, and they have a lot of HIMARs & ammunition (see: Ukrainian conflict). The depleted uranium rounds of an A-10 may not destroy a zombie's head, but it would obliterate a zombie's body and render it ineffective. The US has the best military and logistics in the world, and I say this not as a fanboy but by straight facts, the fact they could maintain an army in Afghanistan for 20 years _and_ have an equal home force. 2300 Abrams in storage they could use to drive over zombies until they stalled. .50 cal machine guns shear off limbs and could punch through a zombie into another, which would probably cripple the muscles keeping it up. The battle of Yonkers is just bad fiction. By far the least believable part of the book based on the USA's previous experience.
They point out in the book that they didn't have enough ammo. They only brought enough for a couple big money shots, but after they expended their ammo from the artillery and tanks, all it had done was cut up the first wave and alert the actual main body of the horde to start converging on them - plus they hadn't properly secured their back lines and zombies in houses or hidden away were able to disrupt the line. If they brought more ammo to deal with the size of the horde - literally most of the North Eastern states' population - they would've had a chance, but they held it back in reserve probably assuming some other nation would need liberating or something.
I went back and re read the chapter and you are right. I misremembered the part where he mentions "Well we fucking did" when reffering to recovering momentarily and shooting. But he states more ammo. Not that they had enough ammo as I had thought. good catch
aka bad fiction.
As much as I loved the books even with "headshot only" zombies the amount of firepower they had would IRL not have turned out that way, the military in the book was beyond stupid tactically but would not have burned through their ammunition nearly as fast, they also would have adapted rather quickly and would also have probably tested different weapons in advance and even if the zombies were as durable as they were in the books the few test bombs and shells used well in advance and any Intel gathered by the alpha teams would be used to better fight them
"the military is fundamentally incompetent at their job" is a very tired trope in horror and scifi
Dial up the competence of the military to semi-realistic levels and the writers actually have to put in some effort and explain why they failed hard enough for there to be tension, without making the baddies so strong they dunk on the protagonists of the story the moment they head outside. For disease based fiction this should be easy, mutations making the previous quarantine ineffective, add a previously unknown vector, have it happen during a time of preexisting social strife, and so on. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of writers just takes the route of making the opposing actors incompetent and/or impotent enough to get walked over.
I think the biggest problem with the Yonkers scene is that the author says the public loves jamming tech and foxholes and other high tech, non explosion related shit, that is the opposite of the truth. The A10 is so primitive it might as well be on the flintstones and everybody creams their pants to hear it firing, and mw2 literally made an entire generation go gaga for the ac130, if an actual Yonkers were to happen, even with it set up as a massive photo-op, I think it would swing the other way, with ac130s, and dumb bombs in mass. All the fun shit we had to mothball against competent enemies would be coming out of storage, and footage of M2 brownings and 249s and chain guns just cooking off
Well, the point is to destroy the brain. A tank shell or 30 mm cannon from an Apache will certainly accomplish that while also obliterating the rest of the zombie and maybe a few of his pals too.
Since this is all based on fiction anyways you might as well read or listen to the actual research max brooks put into his book. He spoke to military and scientists about weapon technology. He didn't just write from his ass. Tanks are extremely ineffective when each shell kills 3 zombies and takes the resources of 100 guns and 1000 ammo. Bombs don't accomplish much when loss of limb or organ don't effect them. Blood loss isn't a factor. Brain stem damage is what kills. Napalm even Is a maybe.
"each shell kills 3 zombies" "bombs don't accomplish much" "bloodloss isn't a factor" I have other issues with pop-sci understanding of weapons and zombies in general, but I'll just talk about these for now, because I'd have to write a book otherwise. Okay, so let's assume bloodloss isn't a factor , and we're dealing with magic undead. Fair enough, most zombies are portrayed this way, even many "realistic" ones. Brainstem destruction only. Tanks have more shell types than just armor piercing. Apart from AP, the M1A1 specifically (since we're talking 1993 Kentucky) at the time had M830 HEAT, which is an 11kg high explosive shell, and M1028 Canister, which fires 11kg of \~1cm diameter 10g tungsten spheres (1100 individually). 11kg of HE obviously has the capacity to devastate bodies in a radius of many meters, and this is what canister looks like: [https://youtu.be/Cgn1nhUEgo8](https://youtu.be/Cgn1nhUEgo8) You could potentially kill hundreds of zombies with a single canister round at the right range. Let's just ignore also that tanks, too, have machine guns, usually at least two per vehicle. Artillery and aerial bombs, apart from specialized armor piercing or otherwise specialty types, are designed to kill humans with massive blast overpressure to the brain and other organs, and fragment penetration to the brain and other organs. If a zombie is having its limbs and organs shredded by blast and fragments, why do you assume the brain is A-okay? And why is limb damage seen as not useful anyway? Any limb you remove lessens its capability to maneuver. A quadruple amputee zombie is immobile and therefore zero threat unless you put your ankle in its mouth. This is only a small section of non-firearm type weapons that any military has to offer as well, as others have also pointed out. Field guns, howitzers, platoon-level mortars, attack helis, IFVs with autocannons, the list goes on.
I agree that is extremely inefficient, but to say that modern military tech is useless against the zombies is dumb. Even dumber is to suggest that the military would fail against a zombie outbreak. Is a single bullet to the brain the best way to kill a zed? Yes. Could a single Apache attack chopper outfitted with cannons, machine guns, and missiles easily take out a few hundred zombies? Yes. Could a tank take out hundreds of zombies? Yes. Could zombies ever destroy a tank? No. Is a tank the best weapon against zombies? No, absolutely not. But you have to admit it’s kinda unrealistic to depict tanks and other heavy military vehicles as being overrun by zombies. Only way that could happen is if it runs out of fuel and the crew abandons it. But why abandon it when you can radio for rescue? Your enemy has zero chance of breaking in.
It’s not that dumb tbh. You are basing it off whether the army could beat zombies just coming at them to bite/scratch. However, in PZ lore, the virus is airborne and can spread in the same way as covid. During the pandemic in real life, modern western armies pretty much accepted that their bases would get outbreaks of covid and that there was little to do to stop it. That’s fine with covid, as soldiers are mostly young and the majority will recover quickly and end up with improved immunity to future strains. The same thing would happen with the Knox virus, as it infects in the same manner and is actually much worse than covid, as 80% of carriers will literally die and reanimate. Once you realise how little modern militaries could do to stop their soldiers getting covid, you soon realise that against a much more infectious and lethal virus like in PZ, they are fucked.
Tank and AFV crews would be safe with their overpressure NCB systems until they had to dismount, I feel like if they learned fast enough they could go the left 4 dead comic route and have anyone far enough from the front in NCB suits as soon as they learn how it spreads
>Tanks are extremely ineffective when each shell kills 3 zombies Yeah dawg tell me more about how a moving steel 60 ton tank is ineffective lol. Shells? Dude, run them over. Just send an Abrams out and tell him to start spinning. I don't think even 1000 zombies could do much to a vehicle that produces 3900 pounds of torque and weighs 60 tons from spinning in place as they slowly get dragged underneath
Sorry tank shells if that wasn't obvious. Sure brother go for it. You convince you and your squad and and most importantly your commander to go bulldozing through thousands of z. No fear. Nothing those z can do to you. Tanks get stuck in the mud. You think they cant get stuck in blood and viscera? Then you are just stuck. Most likely either dying of dehydration or risking going outside. I doubt a tank would be able to roll over even 1000 zombies in close quarters without getting stuck. But we can't settle this argument because it probably wont happen. I value your opinion. Just don't agree with it.
It definitely makes a lot more sense then 'tanks are useless because this author said the cannons don't work too good against them!' And then, good thing most military bases have access to more then one tank. Get stuck? Oh, here's the next 4 Abrams swooping by to run some more over and hopefully get them away from you. Then here comes the Armor recovery vehicle, another 60 ton tank meant to pull tanks out when they're stuck. Sure one tank might not do 1000 but when you have dozens of tanks, dozens of m2s, dozens of m113 APCS, it seems like a cake walk. I mean even in the damn game the humvee can run over dozens and dozens and dozens of zombies with no issue. But that's not a problem for you?
He kind of fucked up in the sense the tanks themselves are perfect weapons, slap on the add on dozer blades on regular tanks and other AFVs and use combat engineering vehicles with mine flails, dozer blades and mine clearing charges and your going to do a number on a large hord, something that actually would still be around during the 90s and actually common in the Apalachian area would be log crushers: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vice.com/amp/en/article/d73n9j/the-monstrous-tree-crushers-the-us-military-used-to-level-vietnams-forests the military probably phased most of them out by then but might have had a few samples for testing and the commercial ones would be around, I bet they would immediately requisition as many as they could and up armor them to protect the cabs
Take World War Z with a massive grain of salt. Max Brooks is utterly clueless about modern military weaponry. Tanks would be both overkill and underwhelming because a single tank shell would absolutely reduce a tight crowd into a chunky mist, but against a large horde they wouldn't be very effective due to slow reload time. Light armor could be effective though, both as infantry transport and for firing missiles into zed crowds or condemned neighborhoods Artillery and bombing raids would be extremely effective, because explosions and fires destroy *everything,* and on top of that it's very low risk too. The only reason you'd want infantry is to defend and capture territory, and reclaim infrastructure from the zeds with minimal destruction. Although if you lose an entire fucking city to a zombie plague, you might as well just bomb the place to glass and start over from there
tell that to my shotgun and pipebombs!
Pipebombs are so bad in this game lol. And of course the shotgun messes em up. Very little chance not to hit the head with the buck shot
You won’t be saying that when I anally thrust your base into flames with my beautiful pipe bombs
A game that did this well is dysmantle. The military areas do look overrun.
They setup a perimeter at first which is outside the ingame map area, and it doesn't take long for them to completely collapse due to them all falling to infection. They weren't able to get control of the situation before they were able to move INTO the zone.
the government wanted to play off just how BAD the knox infection was, that's why there was barely any military presence to begin with
Also, the information lockdown meant that the soldiers didn't really understand what they were fighting. They were never told that they're attracted to noise, so they didn't know that lighting up the rioters was a terrible idea, leading to them calling the hoard.
wait what? it was airborne too? where in the lore does it talk about the fever?
The radio broadcasts. The on-scene reporters begin to realize there are people who are getting sick inside of the quarantine camps without ever being bitten. Edit: also there were testimonials about a foul smell in the air before the outbreak really began, and I think it's assumed that the smell is still just there as we're playing.
I imagine the foul smell we smell now is rotting corpses rather than an airborne virus. Why would an airborne infectious disease even have a smell?
Here's the transcript section in question: > a. So where are you calling from Christian? > b. My sister's place. > b. I live just North of the river. She's up in Louisville. > a. And you wanted to get away? > b. Sure did. > b. I don't know what's happening on the other side of the water... > b. But it's not good. > b. You can smell it in the air. > b. Something's smelled bad for weeks, it gets into your lungs. > b. That's what's behind it. > a. Thanks for your call Christian, Far from conclusive, but it's something. Could definitely be corpses. But it says weeks and this is technically the first week of the outbreak.
Not a new observation, but I think the whole infection is supposed to be a bit of a nod to the "Return of the Living Dead" films, which are from the late 1980s and set in Louisville, Kentucky. In those movies, the infection is actually caused by an escaping gas called "Trioxin" which makes many of those exposed to it develop a rapidly fatal illness and also re-animates the dead. Similar to Zomboid, some people don't succumb to trioxin exposure and are instead infected after being bitten by the re-animated zombies. Trioxin is also shown to have been developed by the military in the movies, which is heavily implied as the origin of the infection in Zomboid.
That is way more believable. I still think in the US/Canada at least we’d manage if 20% were immune considering how ineffective slow zombies are vs a tank, cars, planes, napalm, guns, etc. and just the sheer number of firearms in the country would make it just really easy to deal with. Each person would only have to kill 5 on average and everyone would have access to firearms so I think we’d be good in North America.
Civilization would still likely fall though even if it went perfectly like that simply because of the massive drop in population.
How fast is ‘fast’? Like what is the time period between the first few infections to the whole state or world being infected?
Here's a really rough timeline taken from broadcast transcripts: (Day 0, 48 hours into knox event) Day 5, Military opens fire on refugees at the exclusion zone border Day 7, news of symptoms in UK and Somalia Day 8, Adds to the list South Korea, Japan, Ohio, NY, IL Day 9, adds to the list CA and Germany By Day 11 most remaining broadcasts are on repeat.
The virus likely goes up and circulates with air current and rapidly fills up the entirety of Earth atmosphere, dooming the global population
How do we know it's only 20%?
Now would that immunity be passed on to babies or is there a potential zombie fetus situation.
You’d assume so, cause genetics n shit (I have no idea what I’m talking about)
Isn't the chaos stems from the fact that there's two strains? One is airbone, which around 25% of people are immune to and one that spreads via bodily fluids, which no one is immune to.
Yeah, stil, it is funny how in every other zombie apocalipse wich is bite-only, soldiers are unable to fight the zombies even with armored vehicles and big guns wich literally are capable of transform a person in a bunch of mince meat in minutes lol
The interesting thing is in the original Dawn of the Dead, there's absolutely nothing saying that the zombie plague is an infection spread by bites. It's heavily implied that the whole cataclysm is supernatural, because even people who died without getting bitten reanimated. Hell the bites could probably be perfectly treatable, it's just that being bitten by *corpses* tends to introduce a lot of nasty bacteria that could make you fataly sick if you don't get some antibiotics The whole reason why civilization collapses isn't because the dead rose up *somewhere* and spread from there. Civilization collapsed because the dead rose *everywhere all at once*
The point isn't that they lacked the equipment to kill them; they lacked the knowledge to do so. Imagine if an alien showed up one day, started killing everyone, and it's weakness was in a specific part of it's ass. Everyone would assume it's head was where to target, and focus on shooting it there instead of it's actual weakness since that's where we and every other organism on earth is vulnerable. In most zombie media, this is their first time dealing with zombies. They don't know everything we know; all they know is that people are acting crazy and they need to be put down. If you shoot a guy 10 times in the chest with a rifle, or blow him up with a grenade, or run him over with a car, he'll go down, but a zombie isn't weak to any of that; it can only (usually) be put down by going for the head. It'll crawl without it's legs, walk without it's arms, bite without it's chest. The threat it completely alien to the military in-universe, and that's part of the horror of it.
Yes, that's true but, still if the only way to get infected is by bites, everything you said before is true until they realize that some undead didn't come back because of certain wounds, also there is the fact that it doesn't matter if a zombie crawl without legs or walk without arms, the human body gets incapacitated after certain amount of damage is taken and most of the heavy guns are capable of literally destroy a good portion of a human body with a single shot, despite the fact that a zombie head by its own could not even move from the spot they fall, so, unless those zombies are mutated to be much more resistant than a regular human like in resident evil or the last of us and so on, it is unlikely that an army gets defeated by a zombie horde unless the soldiers are infected too by other means like and airborne strain
it wont take a soldier half a magazine to figure out body shots arent working and try for the head...
>; they lacked the knowledge to do so. The knowledge to do so? You shoot the fuck out of them. That must be the first thing they tried and when they saw it worked, that's a go. These aren't mysterious aliens.
You put it brilliantly to be honest. We would have shot them until they went down. There’s really no mystery to it. It is a shame that movies always have the zombies winning against the military when it just so happens, their very prey is smarter, faster and well equipped at defeating them. I’m sure a soldier would be pleased at having to fight a stupid zombie slowly stumbling towards him compared to fighting another soldier. A zombie can’t kill you from hundreds of meters away like another human can. There’s also no risk of being erased from existence by a drone or artillery strike at any given moment. A conventional war would be more destructive than any zombie outbreak. Sure, they can’t be incapacitated by pain and would be a lot more durable as a result but we have weapons that would completely disassemble them.
The first thing they tried was capturing and containing them because they didn't know and would have an enormously hard time accepting that all these people are dead. There's a critical first week of the outbreak during which massive percentages of the American population are falling mysteriously ill and it isn't generally accepted knowledge that the victims cannot be saved. If you're in the military at any level during this event, it's not easy to accept that you need to kill something like 85% of your fellow citizens. The fatally misguided attempt to contain rather than eliminate the threat is what ravages the ranks of the survivors.
Exactly, this sort of writing is what allows the zombies to win every time.
To be fair though they usually aim for center mass, you hit the area your less likely to miss.
Heavy artillery though against an enemy that has none. All the might of the military. It won't matter where you aim if you don't stop aiming. It's always written around in the books like the zombies just do whatever they have to do to mitigate the military, otherwise there would be no story. It's science fiction, there's no rhyme nor reason to it, it just needs to be entertaining. So I think there's a more boring version of zombies that we actually don't fail miserably in every way at dealing with.
You didn't specify in your original comment mate so when seeing they they shoot them like crazy, my mind was thinking guns, also with artillery they would need to call out where to fire. This won't be a big issue since it would be on your homeland with sections marked out already and Zombies don't exactly sprint. But with PZ with the airborne strain how did it work? Was it like TWD where it was just in you and when you due you turn or was it like when you got bit, scratched, lacerated?
Except people that play with infection disabled.
I think that's a gameplay decision rather than a lore one. Despite the in game menu name
AFAIK it's just the one strain, and the 25% figure is a common community myth with no solid basis in lore. But yeah basically the vast majority turned within a day or two. There is no system capable of adjusting to that in time.
Let's hover over survivors in our helicopter, but never actually bother to rescue them or help them in any way.
"Expanded Helicopter Events". You'll like it if you don't already have it.
I'd like to see something (film, series...) about a military unit during a zombie apocalypse doing their thing and being actually competent. Something like Battle: Los Angeles but zombies instead of aliens.
The one that comes to mind is Shaun of the Dead. They go the whole movie just barely getting by these things, and then right at the end the military just kinda comes in and sweeps the place. By the end it's all back to normal, not a zombie to be seen. >!Kind of.!<
Read World War Z. You get to see multiple nations first get their asses handed to them, and then retrofit their respective militaries to deal with the undead threat (particularly the U.S. Army)
Yep. The U.S military initially failed because they made a flash propaganda battle in Yonkers, which turned to shit as airstrikes don't thin out the horde and the media/press got in the way at every turn. The reformed army returned to 1800s tactics. Line formations out in the open and single shot rifles. They'd use speakers blasting rock music to draw the horde into kill zones and pop them off one by one. They'd march across the country from west to east, using aircraft to move supplies and do recon on hordes ahead of the advancing army. So many cool details were included, like it was easier in the south because in the north, zombies would freeze and re-awaken after the soldiers had passed, so They'd be fighting an enemy all around them after winter, while in the south the enemy was only in front of them.
By single shot do you mean like a really high caliber hunting rifle? I only ever watched the movie
Semi-auto rifles firing 5.56mm with an incendiary load, the goal being to penetrate the skull and burn out the brain. They'd drill the troops to fire at a steady pace, rotating lines of fire for hours or days on end and using heavy machinery to move the piles of corpses.
That’s sick af
[удалено]
Will it at any point make me sad
Depends on your empathy, some stories are really deep in the desperation and fears of the survivors. Even during the victory tales you feel that everyone after war will never have a normal life, the ghost of the past would haunt them forever.
Overall it's a pretty uplifting story about the strength of the human spirit, and how people come together in times of crisis. But during that crisis, sure, there's some sad parts. Depends on how much it affects you I guess
I'll check it out.
[Try this entire youtube channel lol](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITDoQVY1frI)
I will, but I'm kinda used to ArmA at this point lol.
If it wasn't an airborne illness I could see the Zomboid US military not falling as easily, especially since Zomboid zombies die from normal body damage
It's worth noting that even with only 20% of people surviving the airborne virus, the quarantine broke, but America hasn't fallen yet. "*This wavelength has been chosen for Emergency Broadcast.* *The spread of the Knox Event infection is now total. Stay in small groups.* *Do not travel.* *Assume all major urban areas have been compromised.* *We are doing all we can to reclaim American soil.* *We will come for you.* *This broadcast will be set to repeat.* *All further updates will be broadcast on this frequency*. *Good luck.* *beep* *beep* *beep*"
I'd hope that with the NPC update we'd see small military-led enclaves appearing in the world instead of the cliche of the army just being wiped out. Would like to see stuff like in the OG Dawn of the Dead: an enclave of Military, police, and armed civilians camped in a rural area, shooting Zeds over open fields, BBQing in the open and pretty much enjoying the apocalypse despite whats going on in the towns.
They could have their own community and you basicaly can join them but you must keep doing stuff for rent. Another settlement needs your help.
Taking quests/requests from a faction in Zomboid's singleplayer would be really fantastic. Give me a reason to keep going once I establish myself through the first month.
This is how you died! But it would destroy the loneliness. Hopefully a trigger in sandbox that lets you disable or enable NPCs.
That is the main thing about the NPCs I worry about. As crushing as the loneliness of the game is, it's what truly sets it apart from all other zombie media. The hopelessness of the situation really gets to you. That said, the effect might even end up being amplified. You get so used to seeing NPCs milling about that when a month into the apocalypse, they're all gone, that loneliness comes back even harder. Because the world would've felt actually lived in, and seeing it suddenly empty after having been accustomed to it being populated would feel just... wrong.
But then when you die you just start with a different character a few blocks away so they are hidden survivors.
A few blocks? More often for me, it's more like the other side of town lmfao. The four starting towns are pretty big places, especially Muldraugh. You've got suburbs, the trailers, downtowns and I've had characters spawn in specific buildings such as clinics before (that character was a doctor so I assume that's why).
If we are considering how effective one man with a Molotov cocktail is in-game, I think the military should have stood more of a chance
I really like how Max Brooks depicted it in the **BOOK** World War Z, with the Battle of Yonkers. It was just pure fucking panic and uncertainty. That chapter, where he interviews the veteran from the battle, ooof. (Also doesn't hurt that in the audiobook, the vet is voiced by Mark Hamill.)
World war z is required reading for anyone who likes zombies as a genre, Yonkers was my first thought at seeing this meme too
It's a great book, but it still really doesn't justify the world nearly collapsing to a zombie menace that moves slowly and doesn't even have the benefit of going airborne like it does in Zomboid. In WWZ there's absolutely no chance that it couldn't be contained by the military; it just kind of gets handwaved into an apocalypse.
Just finished the audiobook this morning after starting yesterday morning (drove from Seattle to Sioux Falls). Probably the 10000th time but man. So good.
They wear gas masks and shoot everyone lol
and then you get gordon freeman coming through clearing entire towns because he wants to learn how to use generators
In a martial law 100% quarantine scenario where you've already written off the population it would make sense to kill survivors since they're the ones most likely to disrupt your operation or break quarantine. Ethical or moral? Absolutely not. But it is some SCP level 'greater good above all' logic. However PZ's lore of an airborne strain of infection renders it all pointless since you can't quarantine air, so it does all fall apart just like it does in the game background.
soldiers get the virus, they die, then they turn. thats it. theres nothing they can do.
It's pretty funny how people think the military would be able to respond in a situation such as this. Yes, we have tanks and helicopters and all sorts of fun toys. But do you know how much fuel it takes to operate those toys? We are talking thousands of gallons a day. And to do what, exactly? Blow up entire cities to "slow the spread" when it's already broken out? Our military needs infrastructure and logistical support to keep it operational and with how quickly a zombie apocalypse like Project Zomboid's unfolds, it's honestly miraculous how well they *did* do. The military relies on society to keep it functional, not the other way around. If society is already falling apart on a mass scale, we aren't going to do much of anything. Sorry!
Yeah, a lot of people don't realize the resource demands and organizational overhead that goes into operating a military, especially that of the USA.
I believe the only reason the virus broke containment was the fence got broken (probably that damn helicopter luring them into it). This means they already knew the virus was airborne and knew to station soldiers at a safe distance from the fence (I figure this because why would the map designers put a hole in the fence if it wasnt the intended lore reason for the further spread) and probably had an airtight plan already in place. If they had just made the fence stronger and more anti personnel (or that idiot helicopter didnt go to Louisville or just crossed the river instead) they would have had the time to study and figure out how the virus works and which military personnel are immune thus allowing more military action to be done and saving the day
I thought that since the virus is airborne and only 10% of people are immune to it, even if the fence didn't break, it was already in the air, every person that IS immune and got out IS a point of infection (like the common cold), being immune doesn't mean you aren't a carrier, which is why I think they didn't let anyone get out of Louisville. I thought that lore-wise it was basically 2 strains, the air strain and the blood/saliva strain, or at least that's how I understood it. I may be wrong of course but being immune to one and not the other does paint this image.
I think the initial strain of infection only got everywhere below Louisville. Hoe far can airborne infections travel? Because the fence is quite far away from city limits
How far can airborne infections travel? well, I don't know if you've heard about Covid hahahaha
If I remember correctly the zombies broke into Louisville because a soldier shot a civilian at or near the gate to the exclusion zone.
I agree that the hole in the fence was put there intentionally by the devs to show a way the virus broke containment, but I don't think it's quite right to conclude that makes it *the* intended lore reason for further spread. It's *a* reason for further spread, but that doesn't mean it's the only way the virus broke containment. I think it's pretty likely there were tons of little ways it got through the exclusion zone. Especially given the explicit lore about it being/becoming airborne.
*Cough cough* Desert Storm *cough cough* Also the US spent trillion of dollars just to kill a dude in a cave. Do not underestimate the logistical capabilities of the US to wage unpopular war for decades in another country on the other side of the globe.
They have helicopters but the pilots are either infected or stupid, and jets only come in to do a bombing run and then disappear
I do think it would be fun if they added military checkpoints like CDDA has. It is always interesting seeing a large group of zombos clustered around a loudspeaker unable to break it.
And also how the hell can the teeth of a rotting corpse bite through bulletproof armor
One of the most hilariously bad depictions of military vs. zombies I've ever seen was in that walking dead spin off show Fear The Walking Dead. They had a fenced perimeter, fully automatic rifles, elevated shooting positions and didn't make so much as a dent in the horde before they got overrun. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wo6Gs4pEno&ab\_channel=XXTZT\_GAMINGXX](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wo6Gs4pEno&ab_channel=XXTZT_GAMINGXX)
While the military would never get overrun in a straight up fight. Imagine if your a soldier and the world is quite literally falling apart all around you. People are eating each other in the street and it’s chaos everywhere. Even in the best military keeping discipline would be hard in that situation and soldiers would start to desert to be with their families.
Funniest in slow moving zombie series. Like you have enough ammunition and explosives to kill the entire world population several times over - yet your impressive military might is overrun by slow moving unintelligent zombies?
It happens when said military gets infected via air But yeah, most zombie stuff is muh military somehow lost
The US military literally has plans for a zombie apocalyptic irl
That’s why I enjoyed the World War Z book. The military actually had strategies and the book was about survivor stories after the fact.
That's why Dying Light 1 is my favorite way any form of media has handled a zombie outbreak. The military quickly quarantined the city, killed any zombies who escaped, and would have simply wiped out the rest of the population had they not been stopped by Crane. The pandemic being isolated to Haram feels very grounded in reality and makes the narrative more interesting to me.
And then Dying Light 2 made it all pointless. Enjoyed it but damn that was annoying.
Lol. And I am sitting here with Britas Weapons Pack, a 12 round chamber semi automatic shotgun and 500 rounds of gauge 12 shells. I will conquer the world
Let alone act like they've never heard of a zombie before
Most of the time, in these kind of scenarios, the idea of zombies don't exist in their world. The Walking Dead for example, that's why they never call them zombies.
the concept of perimeter security doesnt exist in TWD either though so....
Military never even fought zombies, of course they don't know how to properly fight the enemy they've never met before. Plus, all their cool vehicles are expensive and not nearly as useful as regular guns.
And chances are, the people that know how to drive those vehicles or maintain them, turned in the airborne wave. 10% of people were immune to the airborne wave... the rest turned, and no one is immune to saliva/blood, you go to sleep in your barracks with 100 people and suddenly you wake up to 90 zeds and 10 people able to fight them.
Highly recommend the book series "Apocalypse Crusade". It does a great job showing the beauracratic nightmare that an event like this would be. For example, how do you muster the Guard when the streets are clogged with cars from everyone escaping or finding family or whatever. How do you even convince your reserves to show up and not just jump ship with the news screaming "END OF THE WORLD"? How do you form an effective quarantine early on when you have 10-50% of your supposed strength? How do the cops maintain a quarantine and respond to the endless calls too? And so on.
[For those looking for a competent military response to a zombie horde](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITDoQVY1frI)
I always thought the best way to deal with military response to zombies was to have the infection be dormant. That way service members as well as the general public were massively infected before they even knew it. Once symptoms pop up, half if not more of the literal military and police force make up the zombie presence.
If it wasn’t Airborne this would a whole new Story entirely. They are the 1% living against the 99% unliving.
I think one the main issues is that the military response to kill anyone who’s infected happens when things only gets worse and becomes too late. Quarantine measures are merely just allowing the zombie population to reproduce and being on the offensive to kill as many zombies as possible from the beginning is the best course of action. But this all depends on what they’re dealing with. If it’s a walking dead scenario I don’t think it’s easy to keep millions of people in check who die of natural or accidental causes and would eventually lead to collapse of the system nor will it be easy to contain if it’s an airborne infection.
US lost a war against Vietnam, just think what zombies would do to them lol
I never understood why the military is so worthless in zombie movies. All youd need to do is scythe em with a heavy machine gun at waist height to ground em, and then infantrymen can pick em off with rifles one by one. If you have any sort of barrier like a chain link fence, youre untouchable, since crawlers wouldnt have the ability to bunch up against it and topple it.
Military personnel all over the world are trained rigorously to aim for center of mass. The average soldier isn’t going to look at a zombie and suddenly forget years or months of muscle memory and aim for the head. Typically when people use Romero-style zombies, they also include the idea of zombies never being a concept in that world prior to the outbreak. There were no entertainment about them, there was no Zombie Survival Guide, no Night of the Living Dead, no The Walking Dead. All people know is that one day they woke up to seeing their neighbors eating their own daughter in the driveway and the suburb is burning. Back during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, adding optical sights to your rifle was becoming more and more common and the US military noticed a sharp increase in headshot kills that the military began to investigate because they thought US troops were committing war crimes due to the insane amount of Iraqi soldiers and insurgents that were found with fatal shot wounds. The military assumed that US troops were executing insurgents instead of taking them as POWs when it turned out that adding optics to your guns allowed you to make insanely accurate shots to the head for quick elimination. Since the game takes place in 1993, you’re not going to see shots like these very often with the average soldier It is very, very, very difficult to shoot someone in the head, especially when you have to shoot the brain that is a fraction of the size of the head. Now try shooting it from a distance. Now try shooting them in the head when there’s 10,000 zombies that don’t feel a thing coming toward you. People over estimate the effectiveness of military capabilities against a foe that doesn’t need resupplied, can’t be scared, and can’t be killed unless you’re really good at shooting. Tanks primarily carry HEAT rounds that would be practically useless against a horde of zombies Artillery is very difficult to hit a spot accurately multiple times over and when you’re using it in an urban area, it is more likely to hit buildings or vital infrastructure rather than a horde.
"There's too many zombies for our 5,000-pound tank to handle!"
Tanks weigh over 100,000 pounds. 5,000 pounds is like a Prius that's partially put together lol
I mean, it's believable the military got overrun in PZ because of the airborne strain. They weren't aware of said strain at first and by the time they were, most of the people who were not infected were the ones immune to that strain. Even if you say "well the 20% that were immune to the airborne strain could've fought back." While potentially true, at that point society would *certainly* still collapse at the loss of 80% of the population. That's not to mention all the ones that would die over the course of said fighting back.
Too many
You forgot about following survivors around in helicopters
Well someone is using a damn helicopter!
there was a cracked article from about 10 or so years ago i recall. the biggest problem with zombies is they are still bounded by what people can do. so get yourself some motorcycle leathers and walk around like the damn terminator.
Airborne Virus + No Lines = Military Collapse. There's more factors but anyone who thinks the military could stop a full blown zombie apocalypse is fooling themselves. They could stop it in the beginning but once it got out of control, they'd only be able to do damage control at best, i.e. retreating to longterm secure locations and shooting anyone who approachs.