Tywin Lannister's Camp ISOTed to Walking Dead Verse

[Vendetta]

I think the point people are trying to make is that the outbreak simply won't get big enough for the military to run out of ammo, it will be put down too fast and too effectively.

All the "zombies overwhelming, military runs out of supply" scenarios basically put in their premise that the zombies already won and then ask whether they would win.

[Solauren]

Maybe for Walking Dead, the virus was already fairly wide spread and dormant, before it activated?

Then again, that screams planned bioweapon.

[Honorius]

I think the point people are trying to make is that the outbreak simply won't get big enough for the military to run out of ammo, it will be put down too fast and too effectively.

All the "zombies overwhelming, military runs out of supply" scenarios basically put in their premise that the zombies already won and then ask whether they would win.

And the point I'm making is the virus causing the outbreak was already in people, weakening their immune systems, and all who died, regardless of reason, came back. On top of that, society broke down in mass panic, riots, and revolts, which caused the military to thin out, dispersing their firepower and mass, causing them to be overran.

When the series starts, the outbreak has already been going on for a few months with the larger public unaware. Rick was unaware. When it became global, it was rapid with the military collapsing within a few weeks due to utter chaos caused by the outbreak hitting multiple cities and rural areas rapidly.

The first few weeks of the Global Outbreak saw millions die and reanimate. The panic caused the economic system to break down and thee military had far too many crisises hit far too fast to contain the outbreaks.

Tywin has the advantage of having men who are trained melee fighters and have shields and armor to win shoving matches in the narrow streets of cities or in the open field, and are bite proof due to armor covering the extremities likely to be bit, and they have stronger immune systems having already been hit with the worse shit young and living to suffer even worse shit and still live.

It also helps Tywin, the worse is over, the US Military destroyed the largest herds before collapsing and most of the warlords who rose up in the chaos and most of the survivors are scattered and disorganized with the major villains yet to really get started or just starting out. He can likely sweep up large numbers of small groups with minimal fuss and might even find willing adherents to his banner due to all trained troops he has which can provide protection.

[Jub]

A disease which already spreads and infects well enough to reach the levels of infection you're talking about would have no need to turn people into zombies, those traits would never be selected for naturally. Then you have to have the 'turn people to zombies' bit never have manifested, even partially prior to this. One top of that, it needs to have lain dormant in many copies of this disease, or all copies of this disease must have selected for this over a very short period of time and then expressed this selection over an equally short period of time. Frankly any zombie plague would either have to be magic or some form of very specific bio-weapon, neither of which I'm buying.

Even if you do get zombies, many of them will wind up trapped in buildings, in graves, or in morgues reducing the threat to the world at large. If you move you need energy and a means to distribute it so you can't avoid the fact that zombies need their nerves, muscles, blood, stomachs, and other major organs; without any of which they cease to be able to live. This means injuries that an unthinking unfeeling zombies sustains will add up and kill the walker very quickly. Things like center mass bullet wounds can and will kill or incapacitate them. When this isn't the case you have to do some serious explaining as to why they don't need things that every other living moving creature needs.

Hence you basically need magic to make zombies work. They just don't work any other way.

[Sea Skimmer]

You don't even need injury for rapid attrition, dehydration should start to incapacitate large portions of them within three days. It'd also be pretty likely in areas with major waterways, even creeks, vast numbers would simply drown given how hard it is for a human to swim with clothes and shoes on. And swimming at all would already would require some fairly complex thought patterns not normally shown as present in 'zombies'.

Invader Zim got this right.

[Guardsman Bass]

The main problem I have with the "everybody comes back who dies" aspect is that it should have made the whole zombie problem much more noticeable early on. If it's just biters, then that could be dismissed as weird shit for a while, and then as some disease later on - it would take them a while just to figure out that the zombies are actually revenants and not just "sick people", which would further tie up resources when they try and contain the "sick people" in hopes of treating them. But if everyone who dies is coming back, then you should have some pretty intense initial outbreaks happening in hospitals among clearly identified dead patients, alerting the government and others early on that this is something strange and new that's bringing back dead people.

I didn't know about the "immune system" aspect of it, although that makes a lot of sense. The whole system might already be stressed from dealing with massively higher rates of death and incapacitation from other diseases, such that the initial zombie attacks get lost until they're numerous enough that getting the problem under control is much harder (especially amidst a great panic and major in-country migrations).

EDIT: That said, I'm glad they're showing it, although that in turn has its own limits. The problem with any on-going zombie story is that if your survivors ever get "settled" permanently, you're out of a story - they'll eventually rebuild some form of society and go from there.

[Simon_Jester]

And if the Taliban were mindless shambling corpses chanting "Braaains" in Arabic, the US military would have wiped them all out in an afternoon.

They aren't. They are human beings who have breaking point at which point the flee the storm of firepower and break contact, often after firing off all their ammo.

That's my point.

It's almost impossible to wipe out determined, intelligent guerilla fighters. It's very easy to wipe out a bunch of mindless shambling zombies. Zombies would be, at most, about as hard to kill as massive tribal armies with swords and a handful of rifles. And armies like that stopped posing a threat to people with rifles and machine guns and artillery around 1900...

So you cannot say "the army can't wipe out guerilla fighters" as justification for claiming the same army can't wipe out zombies.

This is very important to grasp- virtually all zombie fiction revolves around the idea of the zombies being stupid, and slow, to the point where even small groups of lightly armed, untrained human survivors can defend themselves against a small number of zombies.

That's the thing. Small groups with limited ammo and on the run, fighting off small numbers and other human groups, and fleeing from larger numbers of dead after everyone else was largely wiped out.

...You haven't refuted my point. I'm not sure you understood it.

What I'm getting at is that in most zombie fiction, five or six people with no military training, armed with hand-to-hand weapons, pistols, and small amounts of ammunition, can defeat five or six zombies... and have a good chance of escaping to do it all over again tomorrow.

By that standard, organized bodies of a few dozen trained soldiers with rifles and grenades should be able to stop huge numbers of zombies, over and over. And to be able to train other people into such efficient zombie-killers in a matter of weeks. While you can explain such groups of soldiers being overwhelmed a few times by bad orders and bad policy, you cannot explain this happening every single time over and over until the army is utterly annihilated.

That requires other factors in play- say, the military's chain of command breaking down because of the sheer scale of human deaths from disease, not from zombie attacks, in the opening period of the zombie outbreak.

When, and where, and how many hours did the Taliban survive that? Because I'd expect them to get creamed in a stand-up fight against the Royal Army.

Wikipedia has a summary here. But basically between December 2007 and April of 200, there was a virtual stalemate. Helmand still isn't secured and the Taliban are re-taking large amounts of ground.

I note that this is happening in large part because the Taliban scatter and hide whenever mass firepower is concentrated on them. In other words, they do exactly what a horde of zombies won't.

.It entered but did not spread.

That wasn't the point, the point was, a carrier still got in and infected others before it was stopped cold.

That is an irrelevant point and a ridiculous argument. It's like saying "the US sent twelve men to the moon, so the US has a moon base." The fact that five people catch a disease despite CDC efforts does not prove that fifty million could catch a similar disease despite CDC efforts. If anything it disproves it.

The point you tried and failed to counter is that if there was a major pandemic of a disease that rapidly kills people and turns them into zombies, then this pandemic would not be covered up to avoid mass panic. It would be countered fairly effectively and quickly. The only way to explain this not happening is if the zombie disease has already infected nearly everyone before there's time to do anything about it.

Now, what I CAN believe is that a 'zombie' disease which is largely asymptomatic might spread very quickly, and THEN people start dying (and rising from the dead) as a result of other diseases due to a weakened immune system.

The reason this is credible is that it doesn't just consist of hordes of zombies directly confronting armed soldiers. Many of the soldiers themselves would already be infected, and vulnerable to further infections. Medical staff, likewise, and so on. It's like, if everyone who caught a cold in a given winter were now a carrier for Zombie Virus, and it was weakening their immune systems so they were more likely to die of something else... that would actually be a problem.

And its is what happened. People died of normal things and came back.

Right- but you'd have to kill most or all of the population of an area, before the zombies become a serious problem for the armed forces. This is critical to understand.

The zombie apocalypse you're describing doesn't work like "Some people turned into zombies, then the zombies killed almost everyone."

It works like "Diseases killed almost everyone, and the people who died of disease are now zombies who are chasing the survivors."

This makes a big difference if, for example, you're worrying about what will happen if the zombie virus is released into a new environment. Because the threat isn't actually "zombies." It's "catching the zombie virus," which apparently makes you so immunocompromised that it kills off the majority of the population in a matter of weeks.

The zombie hordes just add insult to injury. It's the virus that's the problem, because that virus is as nasty as if HIV became a disease with airborne transmission vectors that could collapse your immune system in days instead of in years.

Tyranid tactics work because Tyranids are superhumanly strong, and fast, and are pretty damn bullet-resistant.

Not the termangants and hormogaunts.

As I understand it, even the base level 'gaunts are about as bullet-resistant as Imperial Guard soldiers... and Imperial Guard soldiers wear body armor that it takes an automatic grenade launcher (in other words, a bolter) to breach reliably. Just because they can't laugh off 40k weapons doesn't mean they wouldn't be resistant to modern firearms.

Zombies are, at most, tough. And unless bullets literally bounce off their bodies, the odds are they're not THAT much tougher.

Doesn't matter if they soak up five rounds each from a machine gun or several bursts of M-4 or M-16 rounds. Soldiers don't have infinite ammo. In show they got overran after firing off all their ammo.

Will you please stop repeating yourself? The supply of ammunition isn't infinite but it is huge, and it doesn't all evaporate just because transportation starts to break down. If nothing else, there is very little stopping a group of soldiers from hijacking an SUV or six, forming a convoy, driving to a known ammo dump, and loading up on tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Now, you can repeat a thousand times "they ran out of ammo," but you won't invalidate the basic point that in a scenario as you describe, the zombies honestly aren't the main threat causing a collapse of civilization. The virus is. And even if someone upgraded their anti-zombie tactics to the point of "press magic button, all zombies fall over dead," it still wouldn't be enough to save the population from disaster.

If you want an example of this look at the Battle of Omdurman. Fought with pre-1900 rifles and a handful of machine guns, and yet the British and Egyptian troops managed to slaughter and disperse tens of thousands of Dervish swordsmen and spearmen, even though the Dervishes actually had a significant number of riflemen of their own.

Who were killed by single shots and broke and ran. Zombies don't break and run, they move forward till head shotted or their spine is snapped. Also the Dervish attacked on a single side in a wide open space. The US Military got surrounded and decimated after running out of ammo.

The Dervishes attacked along multiple axes but failed to surround their enemies because of poor tactical coordination, not that the British could have done much better themselves given the technology of the era. Zombies have worse tactical coordination. They do not even, in any meaningful sense of the word, have scouts or fast communications of any kind over any distance farther than they can shout.

The Dervishes also advanced faster than a walking pace, and had men with guns of their own who could attack from a distance. Zombies might be drastically tougher- but an army like Kitchener's would still be able to slaughter great numbers of them IF it were prepared, especially if it had any motor vehicles at all.

Like it or not, the outbreak was sudden enough and caused enough panic fast enough, to rapidly collapse the US Economic System that supplies the military.

In which case the real threat must have been plague outbreaks, not zombies.

I think the point people are trying to make is that the outbreak simply won't get big enough for the military to run out of ammo, it will be put down too fast and too effectively.

All the "zombies overwhelming, military runs out of supply" scenarios basically put in their premise that the zombies already won and then ask whether they would win.

And the point I'm making is the virus causing the outbreak was already in people, weakening their immune systems, and all who died, regardless of reason, came back. On top of that, society broke down in mass panic, riots, and revolts, which caused the military to thin out, dispersing their firepower and mass, causing them to be overran...

Tywin has the advantage of having men who are trained melee fighters and have shields and armor to win shoving matches in the narrow streets of cities or in the open field, and are bite proof due to armor covering the extremities likely to be bit, and they have stronger immune systems having already been hit with the worse shit young and living to suffer even worse shit and still live.

Exposure to diseases doesn't work that way. If it did, then medieval times would have experienced NO epidemic disease because the spread of resistance through the population would make it nearly impossible for such diseases to spread to human hosts.

Sure, Tywin's men might mostly have survived a bout of smallpox or whatever, but they won't be immune to whatever variants on the flu we have in the US, or to whatever bacteria in local water supplies might cause them diarrhea.

Plus, of course, their diseases would be hitting our survivors.

It also helps Tywin, the worse is over, the US Military destroyed the largest herds before collapsing and most of the warlords who rose up in the chaos and most of the survivors are scattered and disorganized with the major villains yet to really get started or just starting out. He can likely sweep up large numbers of small groups with minimal fuss and might even find willing adherents to his banner due to all trained troops he has which can provide protection.

[/quote]Except the virus that makes you a zombie if you die and weakens your immune system is presumably still around, and the only thing that stopped it from killing literally everyone is that the population density fell off so fast that the immunocompromised survivors were able to retreat and avoid even catching diseases. That, plus whatever small percentage of survivors are naturally immune to zombie virus.

Tywin's soldiers aren't immune to zombie virus, so they'll catch it in short order. And then they will rapidly fall over dead and rise as zombies, because their hygiene practices and so on are literally shit, so they'll all catch colds and diarrhea in short order, and with zombie virus in their system that'll be enough to kill them.

[Honorius]

That's my point.

It's almost impossible to wipe out determined, intelligent guerilla fighters. It's very easy to wipe out a bunch of mindless shambling zombies. Zombies would be, at most, about as hard to kill as massive tribal armies with swords and a handful of rifles. And armies like that stopped posing a threat to people with rifles and machine guns and artillery around 1900...

1. Walkers do not break contact, they keep coming till their brain is destroyed. Quite a few survived napalm strikes or walked right through them. The Military was hit from all sides by overwhelming force and ran out of ammo after racking up large kill counts and then joined the ranks of the undead. Nor were all Walkers mindless, some still had vestiges of past lives and could open doors, use keys, pick up teddy bears,use a rock to bash in a Plexiglas door, etc.

2. The military was also fighting riots and militia groups during the outbreak and had massive refugee columns to contend with which further diluted their strength and used up ammo while adding to the ranks of the dead.

3. Artillery was either not used or used little. Hopefully explained in the Spinoff tonight. But the ROE given to the US Military seemed to preclude use of massed artillery and air strikes as the operating mentality most likely was to preserve the infrastructure since it was America's and not some other nation's infrastructure. Nor were nukes used.

You haven't refuted my point. I'm not sure you understood it.

What I'm getting at is that in most zombie fiction, five or six people with no military training, armed with hand-to-hand weapons, pistols, and small amounts of ammunition, can defeat five or six zombies... and have a good chance of escaping to do it all over again tomorrow.

Nor did you get mine. These are small groups on the run, avoiding the undead and picking off small groups of them in the way while fleeing larger hordes, and protecting themselves from bandits.

They aren't fighting the dead, they are running from them.

By that standard, organized bodies of a few dozen trained soldiers with rifles and grenades should be able to stop huge numbers of zombies, over and over. And to be able to train other people into such efficient zombie-killers in a matter of weeks. While you can explain such groups of soldiers being overwhelmed a few times by bad orders and bad policy, you cannot explain this happening every single time over and over until the army is utterly annihilated.

Except that is not what happened in the show. The part you miss, is that the virus was already loose and in people. All who died regardless of reason came back. When Wildfire went global, it was rapid. Within two weeks tens of millions of US Citizens were dead and refugee columns clogged up roads causing the economic system that keeps the military supplied to break down. The military was stretched thin fighting multiple crisises in penny packets and overran. That is what happened in show. Its the canon we have to work with.

That is an irrelevant point and a ridiculous argument. It's like saying "the US sent twelve men to the moon, so the US has a moon base." The fact that five people catch a disease despite CDC efforts does not prove that fifty million could catch a similar disease despite CDC efforts. If anything it disproves it.

You still don't get it. The virus got loose in the US. Only the fact it wasn't very contagious, and the initial number small enough, prevented an embarrassment from being a pandemic. Had Ebola spread like the flu, the consequences would have been far worse. That we dodged that bullet says less about the competence of CDC than it does of how hard it is for Ebola to spread and thankfully its a virus with low communicability amongst populations and highly treatable if caught early and aggressively fought.

The point you tried and failed to counter is that if there was a major pandemic of a disease that rapidly kills people and turns them into zombies, then this pandemic would not be covered up to avoid mass panic. It would be countered fairly effectively and quickly. The only way to explain this not happening is if the zombie disease has already infected nearly everyone before there's time to do anything about it.

Which is what happened in show. Everyone was infected, when they died for whatever reason they came back. When it went global, millions just died and rose up leading to a rapid crisis breaking out all across the US. Again, Rick's hometown was rural small town, day one saw large numbers of walkers invest the town too fast for news to get out, with Judy giving CPR to a man she thought was having a heart attack, which is how she got bit. No one knew it was coming as the initial cases were reported as hopped up on drugs or dismissed as crazy talk of druggies.

Will you please stop repeating yourself? The supply of ammunition isn't infinite but it is huge, and it doesn't all evaporate just because transportation starts to break down. If nothing else, there is very little stopping a group of soldiers from hijacking an SUV or six, forming a convoy, driving to a known ammo dump, and loading up on tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Yeah, if we ignore the in universe fact they were overran before they could, the Walkers can jog, and that the roads were jammed up, their bases overran from within, and complete breakdown in command and control. They had millions of undead to combat and large refugee columns to navigate. Its also possible soldiers deserted their units as well in the chaos.

The Dervishes attacked along multiple axes but failed to surround their enemies because of poor tactical coordination, not that the British could have done much better themselves given the technology of the era. Zombies have worse tactical coordination. They do not even, in any meaningful sense of the word, have scouts or fast communications of any kind over any distance farther than they can shout.

The Dervishes also advanced faster than a walking pace, and had men with guns of their own who could attack from a distance. Zombies might be drastically tougher- but an army like Kitchener's would still be able to slaughter great numbers of them IF it were prepared, especially if it had any motor vehicles at all.

The Dervishes were also human and stayed down when you shot them. British troops didn't lose morale. Not so with the walkers. Also you seem to overlook the Battle of Isandlwana where the spear armed Zulus won.

But still this doesn't change the in-universe facts of the Walking Deadverse which showed the military got overran after firing off their ammo. You don't have to like it, but its what we have to work with. Blame the authors for bad writing if you will, but it is what happened in universe.

Exposure to diseases doesn't work that way. If it did, then medieval times would have experienced NO epidemic disease because the spread of resistance through the population would make it nearly impossible for such diseases to spread to human hosts.

True, but large segments of the population did indeed have resistance to the various diseases, it just wasn't the same as immunity. As for the epidemics, large parts of that had to do with lack of knowledge about disease and contributing factors such as food disruption leading to malnutrition.

Sure, Tywin's men might mostly have survived a bout of smallpox or whatever, but they won't be immune to whatever variants on the flu we have in the US, or to whatever bacteria in local water supplies might cause them diarrhea.

Plus, of course, their diseases would be hitting our survivors.

Flu is unavoidable and will likely kill hundreds of Tywin's troops assuming the survivors they encountered were currently down with it, but diarrhea they would know enough to treat, but then they would be more disposed to drinking beer instead of water thus avoiding it largely till boiling water catches on.

Except the virus that makes you a zombie if you die and weakens your immune system is presumably still around, and the only thing that stopped it from killing literally everyone is that the population density fell off so fast that the immunocompromised survivors were able to retreat and avoid even catching diseases. That, plus whatever small percentage of survivors are naturally immune to zombie virus.

True somewhat, but once Tywin learns what is going on from the survivors, he can take precautions such as head stabs for the terminally ill or dead followed by cremation.

Tywin's soldiers aren't immune to zombie virus, so they'll catch it in short order. And then they will rapidly fall over dead and rise as zombies, because their hygiene practices and so on are literally shit, so they'll all catch colds and diarrhea in short order, and with zombie virus in their system that'll be enough to kill them.

Not necessarily. Season 4 saw a flu outbreak hit the prison, not all who caught it died, most lived. Being soldiers, Tywin's troops have more access to food and more organization to seize the warehouses they be stored, and protect the fields they may be grown in.

In addition, Tywin will likely be breaking his forces up to forage better and build fortified posts to mark his territory, which will drive the population density down and improve hygiene which they are not totally ignorant of.

[Guardsman Bass]

3. Artillery was either not used or used little. Hopefully explained in the Spinoff tonight. But the ROE given to the US Military seemed to preclude use of massed artillery and air strikes as the operating mentality most likely was to preserve the infrastructure since it was America's and not some other nation's infrastructure. Nor were nukes used.

I'll second this point. The US government isn't exactly going to be thrilled at the prospect of simply shooting a ton of "people" they see as sick Americans or blowing up a ton of city infrastructure until the situation is already really bad. As I mentioned, the only weakness in the outbreak of chaos with "everybody comes back" is that there should have been concentrated outbreaks at hospitals tipping off the government early on that these are dead people returning to "life" to attack others - otherwise, it might actually be a while before they even figure out that these are dead people walking around attacking others. They might initially treat them as dangerous but sick, and spend a ton of resources trying to round them up and contain them in the hopes of finding a cure for the zombie plague.

Of course, I'm not entirely convinced you'd get a total break-down of society. Zombies just aren't that difficult to kill once you know how to do it, so sooner or later folks - be it in their towns, in cities hit later on, or in refugee groups - are going to start clearing them out and taking the appropriate steps to deal with folks who die and turn. It's just that it might happen after a massive panic and the deaths of tens of millions of Americans.

Side-note, but that's why I never bought the idea in Season 3 of the Walking Dead show that Fort Benning was overrun because they somehow didn't know that everyone was coming back. That's plausible with small groups, but with much bigger groups you're going to have people dying of disease, injury, old age, lack of medication - and they'll come back without being bit, tipping off the game to the other survivors.

[Simon_Jester]

That's my point.

It's almost impossible to wipe out determined, intelligent guerilla fighters. It's very easy to wipe out a bunch of mindless shambling zombies. Zombies would be, at most, about as hard to kill as massive tribal armies with swords and a handful of rifles. And armies like that stopped posing a threat to people with rifles and machine guns and artillery around 1900...

1. Walkers do not break contact, they keep coming till their brain is destroyed. Quite a few survived napalm strikes or walked right through them.

After walking through napalm they would be blind and their muscles would be physically seared through in short order because that's what napalm-inflicted third degree burns do, they cook your muscles like a steak or outright char them.

It's like, their brain may not be destroyed but they're not really a threat to a group that can just fucking walk away.

The Military was hit from all sides by overwhelming force and ran out of ammo after racking up large kill counts and then joined the ranks of the undead...

Didn't I just ask you to stop repeating yourself?

Nor were all Walkers mindless, some still had vestiges of past lives and could open doors, use keys, pick up teddy bears,use a rock to bash in a Plexiglas door, etc.

Okay, see, THAT is something new. Now, have we ever seen a zombie take cover in this setting? Have we seen them show evidence of tactical coordination, even on a rudimentary level? Have we seen them use weapons? I can imagine a few zombie riflemen providing enough covering fire for a herd of shamblers to have a much better chance of actually getting through to a target... but I can't remember ever seeing an armed zombie in fiction.

2. The military was also fighting riots and militia groups during the outbreak and had massive refugee columns to contend with which further diluted their strength and used up ammo while adding to the ranks of the dead.

The riots and militia groups would also be in the process

3. Artillery was either not used or used little. Hopefully explained in the Spinoff tonight. But the ROE given to the US Military seemed to preclude use of massed artillery and air strikes as the operating mentality most likely was to preserve the infrastructure since it was America's and not some other nation's infrastructure. Nor were nukes used.

The obvious military response would be to lure hordes of zombies into the open and blast them. Sure, you don't want to shell your own cities,* but there's no reason not to shell a random wide spot on State Highway 234 or whatever.

It is much more believable that the command structure (in particular the high-level parts responsible for coordinating the use of artillery and air support) were breaking down due to disease outbreaks.
______________

*(although if Assad will do that to preserve his own hold on power, I imagine a lot of US politicians and generals would do that to stop us all from being devoured by the undead, I hope).

You haven't refuted my point. I'm not sure you understood it.

What I'm getting at is that in most zombie fiction, five or six people with no military training, armed with hand-to-hand weapons, pistols, and small amounts of ammunition, can defeat five or six zombies... and have a good chance of escaping to do it all over again tomorrow.

Nor did you get mine. These are small groups on the run, avoiding the undead and picking off small groups of them in the way while fleeing larger hordes, and protecting themselves from bandits.

They aren't fighting the dead, they are running from them.

That doesn't refute my point. The point here is not that the small groups are 'fighting back' versus 'running.' It's that, unless "Walking Dead" violates all the normal tropes of zombie fiction... if they wanted to fight, then five survivors with light weapons and minimal combat training would still stand a chance against five zombies. The danger is simply that there are a lot more than five zombies, and that the risk of losing even one member of your group is unacceptable to your group.

But the point is simply that IF five zombies cannot reliably defeat five lightly armed civilians, it is highly unlikely that 100 zombies, or even 1000 zombies could truly defeat ten well armed soldiers. Not unless those ten soldiers do something truly stupid. Or unless those thousand zombies are strategically placed by a hostile film director who wants the soldiers dead.

Except that is not what happened in the show. The part you miss, is that the virus was already loose and in people. All who died regardless of reason came back. When Wildfire went global, it was rapid. Within two weeks tens of millions of US Citizens were dead and refugee columns clogged up roads causing the economic system that keeps the military supplied to break down. The military was stretched thin fighting multiple crisises in penny packets and overran. That is what happened in show. Its the canon we have to work with.

My points are:

1) Stupid canon is still stupid, even if it's canon, and I reserve the right to condemn it.
2) Repeating "it's canon" does not refute "it's stupid."
3) I have explicitly not missed the point where the disease killed most people (directly or indirectly) and zombies did not.

The point is, bluntly, that when we think about the threat the zombies of the Walking Dead setting pose, we really shouldn't be worried about the zombies themselves. We should be worried about the threat posed by the virus that created them, which is apparently capable of causing a massive pandemic even without the zombies.

That is an irrelevant point and a ridiculous argument. It's like saying "the US sent twelve men to the moon, so the US has a moon base." The fact that five people catch a disease despite CDC efforts does not prove that fifty million could catch a similar disease despite CDC efforts. If anything it disproves it.

You still don't get it. The virus got loose in the US. Only the fact it wasn't very contagious, and the initial number small enough, prevented an embarrassment from being a pandemic. Had Ebola spread like the flu, the consequences would have been far worse. That we dodged that bullet says less about the competence of CDC than it does of how hard it is for Ebola to spread and thankfully its a virus with low communicability amongst populations and highly treatable if caught early and aggressively fought.

Of course, realistically any ultra-lethal pathogen that is also ultra-infectious would burn itself out in short order in nature. So there's a reason why diseases tend to be highly lethal, or highly contagious, but not both.

But no, again, I am not missing the point, the point is simply that realistically you can at least reasonably expect the CDC (or similar organizations) to identify a rapidly spreading and dangerous disease, identify its most obvious symptoms like "anyone infected by this disease rises from the dead as a zombie."

Now, given that the disease apparently spread universally throughout the world before anyone started rising from the dead, that "reasonable expectation" may not apply in this particular case.

However, that just further underlines the point that the zombie 'virus' in this setting is basically a magic evil curse, not an actual disease.

The Dervishes were also human and stayed down when you shot them. British troops didn't lose morale. Not so with the walkers. Also you seem to overlook the Battle of Isandlwana where the spear armed Zulus won.

The British at Isandlwana were a lot less well-armed than those at Omdurman, and were further hamstrung by poor handling of ammunition.

Exposure to diseases doesn't work that way. If it did, then medieval times would have experienced NO epidemic disease because the spread of resistance through the population would make it nearly impossible for such diseases to spread to human hosts.

True, but large segments of the population did indeed have resistance to the various diseases, it just wasn't the same as immunity. As for the epidemics, large parts of that had to do with lack of knowledge about disease and contributing factors such as food disruption leading to malnutrition.

All of which is still in play if you drop a medieval population into a modern setting with diseases. Or if you drop a modern population with a magic curse masquerading as a 'disease' into a medieval population.

Flu is unavoidable and will likely kill hundreds of Tywin's troops assuming the survivors they encountered were currently down with it, but diarrhea they would know enough to treat, but then they would be more disposed to drinking beer instead of water thus avoiding it largely till boiling water catches on.

I assume they're going to be brewing their own beer? Weren't you the one talking about how distribution of supplies breaks down? Do you think every town in America has its own brewery?

Also, innumerable armies throughout history were decimated by outbreaks of diarrhea (or more accurately, diseases with diarrhea as a symptom, such as cholera). Beer-drinking is not an antidote to that.

Except the virus that makes you a zombie if you die and weakens your immune system is presumably still around, and the only thing that stopped it from killing literally everyone is that the population density fell off so fast that the immunocompromised survivors were able to retreat and avoid even catching diseases. That, plus whatever small percentage of survivors are naturally immune to zombie virus.

True somewhat, but once Tywin learns what is going on from the survivors, he can take precautions such as head stabs for the terminally ill or dead followed by cremation.

This is largely irrelevant because the 'magic curse masquerading as a disease' will still kill off most of his army, either directly or indirectly.

I mean, for crying out loud, according to you, this outbreak of 'magic curse masquerading as a disease' the US army couldn't maintain a coherent chain of command on its own soil, with a command and control structure designed to survive a nuclear war.

How on Earth would Tywin Lannister's army manage to maintain unit cohesion with a feudal chain of command, on foreign soil, with essentially nothing to accomplish or protect except "loot and carve out some territory?"

Tywin's soldiers aren't immune to zombie virus, so they'll catch it in short order. And then they will rapidly fall over dead and rise as zombies, because their hygiene practices and so on are literally shit, so they'll all catch colds and diarrhea in short order, and with zombie virus in their system that'll be enough to kill them.

Not necessarily. Season 4 saw a flu outbreak hit the prison, not all who caught it died, most lived. Being soldiers, Tywin's troops have more access to food and more organization to seize the warehouses they be stored, and protect the fields they may be grown in.

Access to food is irrelevant because the magic curse reliably kills people in First World societies who are at least as well fed as anyone could ever be in a post-apocalpytic zombie hellhole. Plus their organization won't last more than a week or so because if the modern US military couldn't keep its shit together while trying to defend its own territory, a medieval army in foreign land isn't going to be able to do it either.

And... do people who die still come back as zombies? Because if so, then clearly the immunocompromising magic zombie curse is still in operation, and it doesn't matter at all that some random prison had a flu outbreak that 'only' killed a minority of the population. Hell, for all we know, that flu would have been a tiny un-noticeable cold with no symptoms beyond a couple of sniffles... except for the magic immunocompromising curse that turns you into a zombie.

In addition, Tywin will likely be breaking his forces up to forage better and build fortified posts to mark his territory, which will drive the population density down and improve hygiene which they are not totally ignorant of.

There is no evidence for the germ theory of disease, no use of disinfectants other than alcohol (and that is only used for surgery), and in large cities the conditions that made such cities a mortality sink (like massive amounts of untreated sewage) are still in play. They may not be completely ignorant of hygiene, but their standards sure aren't good enough to stop disease from wrecking their army.

Moreover, Tywin trying to spread his army out to forage may reduce the population density and disease threat, but it will also accelerate the natural process of the chain of command falling apart on him.

[SilverDragonRed]

So, 'Walking Dead' makes the most sense if you view the planet as Granpappy Nurgle's testing ground?

[Guardsman Bass]

It doesn't quite make sense with the whole "everyone who dies come back", but it makes more sense if you figure that it's a zombie pandemic happening in a society already weakened by the immune system effects of the "passive" form of the Zombie Plague, where a ton of people are dying/getting incapacitated by diseases that used to be more manageable.

I haven't watched "Fear the Walking Dead", but I've read that the show kind of shows that, with public areas/schools gradually emptying out because everyone is sick.

[SilverDragonRed]

Either way, without this 'magical curse' the zombies wouldn't have been able to inflict damage of any significant amount. They're easier to take of than the Word War WolfZ zombies.