Z-3 Debrief - Ideas for Improvement

[Tweedy]

Ah yes, the Zombies....we could have had a disaster were it not for the thin green line of the 1st and 2nd battalions of the Knotted Handkerchiefs Brigade! Heroes they were. After the great Battle of Snotty-Nose Wipe, the Zombies realized they had met their match and retreated in disarray. The Zombie commander, shocked by their defeat, stated "We may be icky and horrible, but at least we don't sneeze straight into people's faces".   

[Darkesia]

Last time we (TWP) placed 7th in the list of survivors. In order to pull that off, I had to channel my inner hard ass General. But in the end, it was the people in the region who made it fun and kept it organized. I was a very proud Delegate.

[Elegarth]

We should consider starting sending TGs about it as of later this week, with instructions and what not.

[punkdaddy]

Indeed. 

 

Research the cure. 

 

 

Mr. Mayor do you want to create some cool Zombie Apocalypse flags of some kind. If we research the cure early and get large nations to do so, we could be in awesome position by the end of the apocalypse.

[Mediobogdum]

I have already spoken to Autonomica who did  much work on Z-3 last year and this was his response to me yesterday:

 

'Hey Medio,

Yes! I have been meaning to get in touch with you and the other active players for the last few weeks. I've also been pretty swamped and had less time that I would like to plan for Z-4. But, yes I am definitely in to put on an even better showing this year.

My scripts should still work without major changes, I will still throw up the webpage and host the target list. It's probably still going to be the same crappy HTML-only interface but it's better than nothing. I have to pull a recent roster to see what kind of numbers we're talking about this time around and figure out how long the full refresh cycle will take. I know that NS has been more aggressive at removing inactive regions, this will probably be a good thing for us.

Now that we've seen the mechanics twice around I believe in order to get the absolute best returns this go round we need *every* nation in our region to only research a cure. No one can be researching TZES and we should *never* send out the kill squads.

Here is my rationale, at the top of every hour during the Z-Day a triggered event seems to occur and passively affect your Survivors/Zombies/Dead based on what you are researching. 
If we have people researching TZES, some of their zombie population will be turned into dead at the top of the hour. We can't afford this so we need everyone to set Cure as soon as they can so we don't accidentally lose any possible survivors to these passive triggers.

Though the highest zombie population = most bang for our buck on cure missiles, I believe it's the *ratio* of zombies:survivors that will actually affect how well we'll perform in the long run. I ran a quick calculation for this last year that was kind of out of whack so I will try to fix that. If the zombie ratio is too high I think people start dying. So some of the tiny regions may need more support up front so we don't lose them all as dead.

At the same time the only tactic we should be using against the Zombie Empires is also Cure-only. If we kill them we lose the survivors. Again, at the top of the hour these guys will get more zombies, but at least we can turn them into survivors again and neutralize the threat for another hour. If we are aware and have enough cooperation we can take these guys out pretty quickly and every time they get whacked with a Super Weapon they get hit with the freeze, so they won't be able to send out hordes.

We can continue to deal with unauthorized TZES(which is *any* TZES at this point, much easier to track on the regional happenings) and Zombie Empires as we have before, by booting those regions. 
Additionally I will go through the data and try to pick out the Nations that were building zombie empires last year so we can pre-seed the ban list with them if they made their way back the TWP.

I think in addition to making clear this course of action by sending out a mass message and updating the RMB header page- we should try to get volunteers from every, or at least as many overlapping time zones as we can to coordinate efforts on the RMB, point people at the targeting webpage and report any Zombie Empires or TZES activity for anyone who has missed the mass telegram and notice on the RMB header. 
A full list of active users and their timezones would be helpful too, I will try to throw a webpage together that people can register against. I am in the US East Daylight Savings timezone(GMT -4) myself.

Ideally we would also have someone that is capable of banning nations available for the full 36 hours but, that may not be feasible. As long as we have enough active friendlies in each overlapping timezone we should be able to minimize our losses.

So the executive summary is:
Everyone researches Cure, NO TZES this time
Cure the most overrun regions first
Cure the most populous regions next
Ban all un-corrected TZES activity(we cannot fix the dead)
Ban all Zombie Empires (not *required* per se since we can fix zombies, but helpful to get our cure % higher and cut down on wasted effort)

Try to get a straw poll of all participants and their timezones / Designate volunteers for every time zone to keep focused and direct newcomers to the targeting page
Try to have a delegate or other guardian available for the duration who can ban the non-compliant nations.

I'll see what I can do about getting a registration page up, I think NS provides an authentication API, so we can have people verified by NS account but, I haven't used it yet so we'll see. I'll also start up a dry run of the targeting page.

Autonomica"

 

Have not had time to absorb much of this but maybe we can draw out some details for a first mass tg to the region about our plans for Z-4?

[punkdaddy]

The TLDR versions is as i said, research the cure.

 

We can definitely do this. Should be a really good time!

[Tweedy]

Indeed. 

 

Research the cure. 

 

 

Mr. Mayor do you want to create some cool Zombie Apocalypse flags of some kind. If we research the cure early and get large nations to do so, we could be in awesome position by the end of the apocalypse.

 

 

...with compliments.

[punkdaddy]

Nice work!!

[Elegarth]

...with compliments.

You're awesome

[Bhang Bhang Duc]

Wow, wonderful flags Mr Mayor.