matbrojoe

I was sure I'd seen the 99% figure quoted elsewhere, perhaps it is just speculation, i'd say it was pretty near the mark given how few people Rick's group meet though. Yeah, there is that, i think we could agree that staying as far away from Rick as possible would be the best survival tactic in the long run. . Yes they do seem to be unlucky on that score, but TBF The Walking Dead isn't a documentary, it's a drama, the writers are throwing these difficulties at them because it makes the series more interesting. they had a good functioning community at the prison which should have worked, it only fails (as does Woodbury), because the Governor is stark raving bonkers, there's no real explanation for his behaviour beyond him being nuts, and i tend to think that's a flaw in the writing. It's true that in such a violent and nasty world, violent and nasty people would be likely to be over represented amongst the survivors. but i think you'd be unlucky to find someone quite so hell bent on suicidal self destruction as the governor. but how does keeping a low profile work in the long term? I suppose it depends on whether you're looking at personal survival or you're looking to future 'nation building'. If it's the latter, surely at some point you'd have to get together with a larger group and look towards setting up some sort of self sufficient enclosed community. (what does CDB stand for BTW?) I think in the initial stages of the emergency that you'd be quite right here, getting away from centres of population would be a good idea. the current storyline is what? 2 years down the line at least ? There appears to be no more people, or walkers in the centre of Atlanta than in rural Georgia. If you'd survived that long, you'd surely be thinking about how you might continue to survive in the long term rather than just day to day. to my mind community has to be the key to long term survival in such a scenario. You'd have to have some sort of safe haven where you could at least move towards being self sufficient in food production which in turn allows specialisation from individuals, so you could have rudimentary medical care, people who make and repair infrastructure etc. You can't live from foraging tinned food forever, do you disagree?

Hang on, I thought we we specifically talking about the Walking Dead scenario here, where, as i understand it, over 99% of the population have died? only that brings us down to 175,000 people, (probably much less given the high attrition rate on the series' cast) A scenario where most of the people have died but the majority of the infrastructure of society is still in place is very different from one where society breaks down and all the people are competing for limited resources.

I think that would depend on the scenario, but as you (and indeed I) pointed out, we're talking specifically about the somewhat unlikely scenario presented in TWD. In TWD one of the key issues beyond the obvious one of there being loads of zombies is that most of the population has died early on, so, you've got all the residual resources left by civilization, but very few people to compete over them. In such a scenario people become one of your more valuable assets. The more people in your group the stronger it is, the more opportunity for specialisation you have and the more likely it is that your group will prevail. Again it depends on what your intentions are, if you're sitting on a cache of supplies and are intending to ride out whatever difficulties you're facing in the hope that someone will eventually come to your rescue, then yes, you're not going to welcome interlopers, but if you're accepted that there is no rescue coming, and that it's up to you to rebuild society, then it's a case of the more people you get with you the better chance you have of doing so. All of these objections are true for whatever kind of secure settlement you create. what are the alternatives? cabin in the woods or some sort of fortified building or compound? cabin in the woods kind of restricts you to personal survival only, you're not going to be nation building because by its very nature you're hiding from the people you could be building your new nation with. fortified compound, no matter how well fortified or defended, could always be overcome with a big enough force. There are pros and cons to either scenario, but i disagree that an island would be objectively worse, you live on a n island you'd have boats, i can't see that it's particularly worse trying to escape in a boat than trying to leg it from the zombie hordes that have overrun you fortified compound, at least once you're at sea you've got away from the zombies for the tie bing, assuming you haven't got them on the boat with you. That's true if you have a base on the mainland as well though. In TWD Rick initially refuses to let Tyrese's group join them in the prison, but later, they take in the refugees from woodbury, and other survivors they find in order to make their group bigger and hence stronger. This approach appears to be working and only fails because the governor attacks them. Again rick offers to take in the governor's group, which is the correct and logical course of action, it only fails because the governor is stark raving bonkers and he initiates a fight in which both sides inevitably lose. If you set up some sort of functioning society, it is possible that others will attack you and try to take what you have, but the bigger you are the bigger your enemy will need to be in order to succeed, and the more likely it will be that it will make more sense for others to try and join you rather than attack you.

Negan is a character from the comics who hasn't turned up in the TV series yet, apparently he makes the governor look like a sunday school teacher. We're talking about a fictional scenario here, it seems highly unlikely that any of us will have to face hordes of the undead. even if civilisation as we know it does break down, so all this is really just hypothetical but, you know, if we *were* in the same situation as TWD characters then i think initially i'd be looking for some large secure building to hole up in for starters. The thing about a scenario like TWD is that there are very few people left, so resources shouldn't really be that scarce, in fact it's people, particularly people with valuable skills, that are possibly your most valuable asset. (which is the reason the Terminus "I know, let's eat them" model makes so little sense, well, one of the reasons anyway). Making somewhere secure from walkers would be relatively simple, you just need some sort of physical barrier to stop them, a wall, a ditch, a fence, whatever, the question is what else do you need to protect yourself from? One of the key themes of TWD is that the people are more dangerous than the walkers, i'm not convinced that if such a thing came to pass that, as bleak as human nature is, things would end up quite as awful as Kirkman portrays them, surely there would be some people left who were actually pleased to see some fellow human beings? If society really did break down, i'd imagine the biggest fight would be over resources, in which case being somewhere remote, where there would be fewer people to fight you for what bit you do have, would probably be the best bet. I live in the UK. which is fairly densely populated, i have a farm and have the means and the knowledge to feed myself but i'm less than an hour's drive from manchester, a city with over 2.5 million people. If i have food and they don't, it won't matter how big a wall i have round my house or how many guns i have, when they turn up at my gate they're going to take what i have from me. OTOH, if all those people are zombies, maybe a big enough wall would keep them out after all? In day of the Triffids they eventually set up camp on the Isle of Wight, a fairly large island off the south coast of the UK, 380 km2 in size with a population of 145,000, so possibly that would be a tad ambitious for even Rick's group to take on the job of zombie clearing. but the bigger the group you have, the bigger the place you look for. There are remote islands in the outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland which support small communities now, something like that would be better perhaps. If i were parachuted in to join Rick's group and i didn't know much about American Geography, i'd be looking for a library to find an atlas and see if there was anywhere that fitted the bill within striking distance, i'd be emptying the shelves of some self help DIY type books as well whilst i was at it as well. I don't think having to go back to the mainland would be such a problem, if you're in a fortified compound you'd have to go out and forage just the same. having to make the boat trip is to my mind a decent trade off for having an immediate wider environment that isn't infested with zombies. Ultimately a lot depends on what you want to do, do you just want to survive yourself and have you and your immediate family / friends live out the rest of your lives as best you can in the circumstances? or do you want to try and rebuild some sort of ongoing society / civilisation?

I've just read through the thread and I'm going to disagree with the thread consensus that an island is a bad idea, it worked in Day of the Triffids, which after all is the blueprint for many modern zombie shows and films, and i think the objections raised would be largely true for any fortified compound you might set up as well. If you want to remove a pervasive existential threat from your environment, one way to make that a whole lot easier is to make your environment smaller. there's no way Rick's group can kill all the zombies in North America, but they could remove them all from somewhere smaller. they can clear the prison, but the walkers are still outside trying to get in, along with assorted nut jobs like The Governor. On an island you have an extended space to rear livestock and grow crops without the immediate threat of a walkerumping out from behind a bush and nibbling you. It's true you have coastline to defend, but if you're really paranoid there's nothing to stop you having a fortified compound as well, just to be on the safe side, it's true that within the context of TWD someone could die accidently and turn into a walker, but that could happen with any safe haven. Also, in order to attack you, any passing Negans would have to actually know you were there in the first place, and if you were far enough off shore for them not to see the lights from your settlement, who would know you were there anyway? If they did know you were there, it's still much more trouble to get a boat, learn to sail it, get all the stuff you need on board and *then* launch an invasion than it is to just rock up at someone's boundary fence and lay siege to them.