For those of you having a tough time playing with the harder difficulty setting, here are some tip. Feel free to share some tips if you have. Enjoy!
a) scout early and fast
b) keep a low number of survivors so you dont need to feed so many. Keep your number of squares low and limited to what you need
c) aggressively clean out the areas
d) take risks. lots of em. a single man 35% danger rate means 1/3 hes gonna die. it also means 2/3 he succeeds. its a pretty good chance he will die. but as leader its for the greater good :P if he manages to clear the square everyone will be better off. but if he fails, you have one less survivor thats all.
e) early game be careful with your leaders. late game.. all you need are soldiers.
f) research - recommend the food and zombie ones early on. the food ones increase the limit 50 per as well as removes the bad events related to the research (food going bad, crops fail), zombie killing ones make your SOLDIERS more effective at killing zombies (with the last few you can have 0 risk with 5 soldiers typically) but early game its well worth it to send in soldiers solo into areas that are up to 25% risk. (i send the rest of the civvies in up to 35%)
once you get electricity you get a little more happiness (and random events about lack of it disappear)
once you get radio randomly every x turns survivors will come.
g) happiness: keep people happy as long as you can. surprisingly, if you run out of food they will be unhappy. random event people usually lone gunmen will come by your place and if its too unhappy they wont join and well... its kinda important to have free extra soldiers.
h) keep your people BUSY. First thing you should do especially on higher difficulties is REMOVE your defenders because they are active units eating your food and until there are zombie hordes at your door you shouldn't need them.(refer to d)early on its about capturing as much useful land as you can hold, scouting and emptying out the area of survivors to use in these risky missions.
i) change your play style as you advance. especially with the zombie killing technologies, your soldiers are very very useful. early on you use them to clean out areas that have high risk solo, but as you run lower on survivors to recruit, send them out in larger groups (and hopefully you will have the techs to make it less risky). by maintaining a good sized soldier force, you can consistently clean out x tiles surrounding your fort which is really all you need to win.
j) find your win condition! your best chances are finding city hall, training how ever many leaders you need to draft the constitution to grab your win condition. empty out the graveyard/city hall FAST by sending in groups as large as you can afford (as in if you have 25 soldiers, you can reserve say 10 for cleaning squares around your fort, then send the 15 left to clean out the city hall as they will kill ALOT more zombies reducing the number of sends you will need) for the victory location conditions clean them out hard and fast (its better to spend 1 kill mission with 15 than to send 3 kill missions with 5. )
Credits: http://jayisgames.com
