Reasoned Out

The attack wasn't as bad as it could have been, let me just start with that. The totals are in for our casualties. We lost twenty people in the initial attack, which was a coordinated long-range strike on the wall itself. Seems the enemy was at a distance chucking improvised explosives at us. They'd have demolished huge swaths of our wall if the buffer hadn't tangled up the explosives as they came rolling--literally rolling--in across the ground. The explosions were offset enough that the concrete and stone of our wall only had big sections ripped away from the top to about halfway down instead of thirty feet of just no wall at all.

Three of those bombs hit central New Haven all at once. Twenty guards, sentries, and support staff were killed just by the explosions. In the rush that followed, in which our reserves were called up and the enemy rushed through the night to swarm the breaches, we lost another thirty lives. They had body armor, guns, and a lot of practice using both. The casualties we suffered were old guard and new arrivals alike. Even after the attackers retreated and we took our prisoners there were problems.

The undead noticed the easy access right away. A lot of people took wounds in the frantic struggle to hold them off while we patched the holes. Working at warp speed meant injuries from accidents as much as from zombies. It has been a total mess, and in addition to losing fifty lives in less than an hour there are now another hundred with injuries ranging from negligible to life-threatening.

The theory floating around at the moment is based on a lot of assumptions. Most people think they're the ones who've been ransacking small settlements. Given how precise the attack was, I agree. We're also assuming they attacked us because they know we've been in contact with other groups and know about their activities. As a larger group that just keeps growing it's entirely possible they thought we might field some hunters to track them down and stop them.

The irony is that if they hadn't attacked us, we might have done so. Will has certainly been angry enough about their activities to consider it. But they gave away some details about themselves when they attacked, just by the very act of doing so.

We know they're careful planners and don't attack unless they have the advantage. Yet they hit us, which means they were really worried we'd become a threat to them. I can't imagine risking all of their lives to slow us down--which they managed, there's no way we can field any counterstrike at present--and to prevent us from doing anything to jeopardize their activities. We've assumed these people are one giant mobile assault group, like marauders.

No. No way. If that were the case they'd have been risking total annihilation by coming here. This reeks of a small raid, and you don't send the whole enchilada in a small raid. You send a fraction.

There must be a lot of them. I don't know what the prisoners we took have said about that, as I'm not in that loop. I wouldn't put that kind of intel out to be read at any rate. But I'm damn certain we didn't deal with all of them when they hit us. And if that was only a small percentage of their number, one other thing is obvious:

They aren't marauders in the sense that they move constantly. If there are actually hundreds of them instead of the fifty or so that hit us, then they couldn't possibly manage these attacks and move around the map constantly. The logistics just don't work. They'd have to be incredibly desperate to throw all they have against us, and nothing I've read makes me think this attack was desperate. It was calculated, well executed.

There has to be a permanent settlement they operate from. These people seem less like marauders in the traditional sense and more like, well...

Us.