Imperium vs Zombies

No, I am not talking about the animated corpse of N3.

Yes, whatever is left of the great N3 invasion of Fountain is still sort of spluttering along.  It is the first of May and the former owners of Delve hold only two of the 85 systems they once owned in the region.  Wait, no, the last two TCUs went down even as I wrote that.  So we’ll call that done.  Key systems in Querious and even Period Basis have been falling as well.  The invaders have now scattered, though null remains active in its own way.

Between now and the next expansion on June 9th, which will introduce changes to sovereignty warfare, The Imperium’s main plan is to pull back into its homeland in the north and prepare for the coming brave new world.

During this quiet time, the loyal troops of The Imperium have been given a new task, a new war to fight, a new territory to invade.  We will be headed into the dystopian age of H1Z1.

Operation Announced

Like a million other suckers before us, we are going to put down $20 for Daybreak’s launched yet still not finished zombie not-an-MMO thing.

Part of this is finding something else to do as a group, while another part is the fact that The Imperium leadership is tight with Smed, who was a member of the CFC himself at one time.  He even sent The Mittani a “welcome to the neighborhood” message that was shared with us.

Please let your goonswarm know that my fellow H1Z1 team members and I have decided to make tmw afternoon all about hunting newbie goons for sport. Please apologize to your friends for their impending deaths and make sure they know of our warning.

We’ve prepared a video of what it’s going to look like. We do apologize ahead of time, but we wanted to welcome you to H1Z1 in a special way!

The video was of Smed’s dog humping a cushion.  He likes us, he really likes us.  So we have that going for us.  We’ll see if the servers are up to the challenge.  Right now it seems more like Smed’s team will be fixing login/disconnect problems.

And this was also a moment of opportunity.  A big patch dropped for H1Z1, the details of which can be found on Daybreak’s new official forums, the key item of which is a complete player wipe.  Welcome to launched but not released.

But trashing all those carefully built up bases means that The Imperium comes in on an equal footing.  Well, equal in that everything is up for grabs and we can find a decent place to call our own.  Perhaps not so equal in that the plan is pretty much the same as the 2006 Goonswarm plan, though replace noobs in badly fit frigates swarming the enemy with noobs wielding primitive weapons swarming the enemy.

We were actually promised machetes.  We’ll see how that turns out.

As a warm up some of us got on last night, and I have to admit that there may be something to the game.  I am pretty sure I would quickly tire of it as a solo effort, but being in a group on voice coms trying to find each other and figure out what was going on was pretty fun.

Likewise, PvE seems like it would be pretty tame.  Zombies are not much of a threat and are easily avoided.  My main environmental concern, besides food and water, seemed to be wolves.  I died to wolves more than anything else, though I punched a few to death in return.  But aside from wolves, and an unfortunate incident with a bear, other people are the main thrill of the game.

Oddly, the first thing I learned to do on coms was take off my clothes and shred them in order to make a bag to hold things.  So there was some running about in my underwear for a while.

The hunter and his prey

There is a starting stretch where you are gathering stuff and trying to find your mates while wandering around the land trying to match up landmarks to the rough in-game map, something made even more difficult when darkness falls. Fortunately clothes and other items are not too scarce and I was able to get myself together and find the rest of the team after about an hour.

I found a hat, and a machete

There was some chasing around as random people wandered into the area.  That, as I said, is the interesting bit.  You don’t see names until you are very close and when you are running after somebody all they have to do is break line of sight around an obstacle and suddenly reacquiring them can be a chore if there is any cover at all.

My third leading cause of death, after wolves and suicide respawns was gunshot wounds.  Stranger danger is a thing in H1Z1.  At one point as I was trying to find our group, I ran across a couple of guys who played friendly at first.  Then one shot me in the back of the head.  Later on, when I was with the group, I got up to the top of a rise and was gunned down again by an unseen assailant.  A lesson in that I am sure.

Anyway, it seems like it might make for an interesting diversion during the month of May.  We’ll see how it goes.