Hi everyone! I have something hopefully exciting for you this week!
I've added a new state for the civilians to be in called Alerted:
Being Alerted is a lesser state of panic than being Alarmed where civilians are complying with orders from the police, but they do not know the real nature of the threat yet. I'll try to break this down more by using examples.
- Unaware is when civilians don't know they are in a zombie apocalypse. They go to work, go home, all normal civilian duties.
- Alerted is when civilians know something is wrong, for example the police are evacuating them from a building or they have found a dead body, or they have encountered panicking crowds of people. They will want to contact the authorities and report the incident. They don't realise how bad things will become.
- Alarmed is when civilians know they are in a zombie apocalypse. People are dying everywhere, the cops are overrun, panicking and looting are taking place. This is when a civilian becomes a survivor. They will try to take shelter and do the things survivors do in zombie apocalypses.
Having a state between Unaware and Alarmed is how I'm going to be taking the sim moving forward so that I can have the Alarmed citizens do more dramatic things as part of surviving an apocalypse while still leaving room for people to do reasonable things when the magnitude of the threat hasn't yet been discovered. It also means that people don't instantly start barricading and such if a single zombie appears and the city is still relatively safe.
Here for example is a region where cops have evacuated the citizens out of the building. They are waiting outside to see what happens next. At the moment there are a lot of things I need to add such as giving the all clear if there is very little threat and the alarmed survivor features, but this is a start.
Thanks as always for playing and please let me know if you have questions about this new phase or suggestions!