Spoiler: They all died.
That's the short of it, but that's no fun. The start of the epic rescue wasn't much fun either.
When team broken leg logged back in for a status check, our legs had healed as had our health. Full regen. Not sure how the system works, but apparently if you decide to log out of the zombie apocalypse for a while you'll be just fine. Need to keep that in mind for the future.
We still got a large group together (5 or 6), but this turned out to be a huge disadvantage as our communication skills suffered with more people to look out for.
We all met up in Cherno and gathered in the church, killed a few bandits and got the place locked down. It went tits up from there though. As soon as we decided to move, we needed to hunt down general supplies. We were all tooled up but had very little food, instead of going directly to a supermarket we checked out a nearby pub which was pretty much empty. By the time we made it to the supermarket, it seems that some our baiting in the curch worked against us.
In a house directly opposite the supermarket, another player decided to take a pot shot at one of us through a window from the direction of the supermarket. This meeant we were kind of stuck not knowing exactly where this guy was, needing to heal up the people who had been hit and risking zombie attacks from any shots that we fired. Needing to get a fix on thee guy, I went outside and stuck to the walls to try to get a location on him, but this wasn't the best of plans.. as soon as I returned to the house, one of the party got twitchy and decided to unload his pistol into my chest. I got to seriously low health but didn't die, but that meant us being sitting ducks again whilst I neeeded medical attention.
By the time we were finally able to move and try to chase this guy down, he was preetty much set to get the dop on us from any location we moved to. He was literally 10 meters away from us, but had good cover behind a wall, as soon as he was spotted thoguh we tried to move in after him. Playing it smart, I moved the opposite way to another of the party and we were both in a good position to get our own shots off on him.
This was not the best time for communication to break down, but break down it did. As soon as the guy started to run more in my direction, I followed him in the hope that the party would see him move and me follow. This didn't happen. Only one person other than me (the guy behind) knew where he'd gone and knew that I had gone to follow. Nobody went around the back of him at this point which was a huge mistake. By the time I realised what had happened, there was nobody with a line of sight on him other than me, at which point I decided that running away would be the best option. This was the biggest mistake of all, as the guy who was behind him hadn't realised what was going on, had reloaded his gun just in time to see me running back around the corner and ready to shoot me in the face with panic fire.
This enemy had played it smart. He was a lone, had the situation covered from the time he had to scope out his exits and knew that without anyone else to direct, all he could do was look after himself. He didn't need to worry about communication in a larger group and he didn't need to worry about friendly fire.
So far this game has been about strength in numbers and for the most part this still rings true. But when it comes to other players and not Zeds, it's also a very dangerous thing to have a large unorganised group.
Back to the drawing board with our communication. Time to realise we need to plan every move when we're above three players.
One day we will control a town, perhaps not a city.. and when that day comes, I will be the first to vote on splitting up and covering all angles, ratehr than our own asses.