I know I just made another thread, but rather than making one thread and asking a lot of questions, I decided to do multiple with a bit narrower field of inquiry.
Risk seems easy to accumulate and hard to get rid of, and what's more, a stronghold doesn't seem to keep out very many zombies. I'm wondering how that turns out in practical terms, though, before I start my first game.

The typical d6 rolls 3.5, so 2d6 normally ends up being about 7, etc. So, in the Tri-county scenario on the site, the starting stronghold has a rating of 16, so it takes an average of 5 risk to force an all-out Defense mission. That seems a bit low, given that leaving the stronghold generates one risk a person, so a group of 4 people, avoiding all contact with zombies, spending only one hour outside the stronghold scouting the nearby buildings will, on average, force an all-out defense. Am I doing that math correctly? I understand that your stronghold rating shows how many zombies your passive defenses can handle, but it seems weird that a police station can only handle 16 zombies before needing to do a desperate do-or-die stand that only heroes can deal with.

Linked in with that, can Risk accumulate through an All Out Defense mission? I'd want to say no, off the top of my head, since it seems that a horde of 100 zombies attacking my compound would make so much noise that if any other zombies were in the area they'd join in the fun, and me deciding to fire a handgun at the approaching wave of undead flesh probably couldn't be heard over the moans in any appreciable way. It also seems like it could death-spiral very quickly, where each all-out defense generating more zombies than the last, since you'd have to use more guns or 'loud' methods to deal with them, making more risk, making more zombies, making more all-out-defenses (as if you could deal with the first group without guns, you wouldn't make enough noise for a second wave to come in).


To continue, gaining risk in the field. You get 1 per daylight hour out and about, right? And 2 per night? And you get one risk for every Noise you make, so firing a handgun gives you 1 Risk. That means you're trading in a chance to kill a zombie now for an average of 3.5 later at your Stronghold. Barring avoiding instant death, why would a sane character EVER fire a gun without a silencer? If using a gun in a combat gave you 1 risk overall, or 1 risk per gun used, rather than 1 risk a shot, I could see them being useful... Does practical play prove differently than armchair observation? Or do gun-wielding characters carry around some constant Noise generating machine to make 1 constant noise to 'cover' the sound of their guns? It seems like a good strategy, but it seems weird that carrying around a boom-box or chainsaw just to make background noise generates LESS Risk than firing a gun twice.

Finding a stronghold in the field. It seems that 'hunkering down' for the night in a temporary stronghold is useless if you have any accumulation of risk at all. The demo, again, has an example where the heroes decide to get up on the roof of a building and wait out the night to return to the police station during the day. If they slept in the building, they'd have to make a trailing zombies roll, and since the best random building you can find seems to give you a stronghold rating of 6-ish, it seems like sleeping is a no-no. That being said, why do you have to make a trailing roll if you're sleeping for the night, but not if you're staying up through the night? If the heroes fell asleep on the rooftop that kept them safe from zombies all night (assuming they pulled an all-nighter), surely that wouldn't make the d6*risk zombies they attracted the attention of suddenly converge on them when staying up wouldn't, right? Theme-wise, and mechanically, what's the difference?