Hey Liam,

Thanks for the thoughtful analysis. Here’s a little bit of my thought process, keeping in mind that the bottom line here is that your guess is as good as mine.

Quote Originally Posted by LiamKerrington View Post
As for the people hiding in boarded up and fortified buildings: I am not so sure about that; the one guy who denied Hope and Datu access was hidden; and yet at least one Inkling made its way into his building; also Datu and Hope were attacked within a (less properly) fortified building. Therefore at least parts of the civilians are anything else but safe, because the boardings and fortifications might be to weak and only a proper match against Regulars, but not special ones.
There’s a certain cold-blooded logic to the concept of having the civilians shelter in place, and it isn’t necessarily to keep them safe.

First, it gets the civilians off the streets, where they’re easy targets for the zombies to turn and recruit. During the initial outbreak there were large, panicked crowds on the streets that provided rapid, massive reinforcement for the zombies and allowed them to spread rapidly in overwhelming numbers.

Second, it forces the zombies to spend extra time breaking into individual houses to find humans to turn. This means they’re “recruiting” in ones or twos, and they’re taking losses doing it. The zombies lose momentum, their progress slows and the troops won’t have to face as many.

Third, it makes it easier and safer for the troops who respond. The greatest advantage the human troops have is their ability to kill zombies at a distance, before the zombies can get close enough to kill or turn them. With the civilians indoors the troops are free to shoot anything they encounter, shooting first and asking questions later.

About the sweat bombs: I think these things won't work on "Little Ones". Reason: Sweat attract Regulars, because they have a highly developed scent, but a very poor sight; also Regulars act very dumb and need to be controlled from the outside...Little Ones act quite autonomously ever since; also they don't engage in combat 'blindly' and without hesitation like Regulars do, but they seem to observe and to understand the situation before they attack according to the situation...Maybe they would smell the sweat bombs and notice them; but then they would observe the place and realize: there is nothing to literally chew on.
We know the Little Ones/Inklings/Soldier Zombies are faster, stronger, tougher and craftier than the standard biters, and we suspect that they may retain some knowledge from their past life. But what we’ve seen so far of their actions in Boulder don’t strike me as being dramatically different from what we saw from normal biters during the initial outbreak. How much of their attack is thought out on the spot, and how much follows a pre-programmed script? My thought is that they’re doing the same thing biters would have, just faster and more efficiently.

We don’t know that they’d have the same response to the sweat bottles that the normal biters do, but there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t. It’s worth a try, and if the sweat doesn’t do the trick there are other ways to lure a mass of Inklings into kill-zones. Of course, with the Inklings there’s a good chance that tricks won’t work more than once, so the Army is going to have to make it count.