I’m not a big fan of removing control from the player, so it’s unlikely someone who’s a complete bastard is going to start randomly killing other survivors, or run away because they’re scared. There are survivor “events” that are affected by things like personality, that you can leave active or remove. They’ll often be double-edged swords – give a bonus with a penalty. The flavour of these events will be determined by just how kind or ruthless the survivor is.

I like to leave stuff like morale in the hands of the player… if they’re scared of losing a survivor, they’ll make them run themselves without me doing anything. :)

And sorry about the turn confusion. Each turn is about 8-12 minutes in game time, and maybe a couple of seconds to a few minutes in real time, depending on the actions you need to take. Late game a turn could potentially take 15 minutes, if you’re the super-contemplative sort.

A survivor can carry two items, which can both be weapons. I’ll probably have a basic order system so you can decide what weapons a survivor uses at different ranges – say Weapon A for Far and Close, and Weapon B for Melee, or Weapon A for Far and Weapon B for Close and Melee. Something like that.

I don’t think I’ve done a great job of describing actions and the passage of time in ZH2, as I believe a clear explaination would answer most of your questions. Firstly, combat isn’t a do-or-die event like it was in ZH. If you happen to have guys in a combat situation, hitting the “next turn” button will execute a single round of that combat, along with any other events that might happen that turn, such as searching or barricading a room. So, you can do any retreating, rearming, re-barricading or whatever between those turns.

As an aside, the combat stuff you just described is similar to how Deadshed’s combat worked. I’ve borrowed a bit from that with far/close/melee system.

I should mention that being outside is a binary thing. Once a survivor is outside, they don’t move around the map like you would in an RTS. They get lumped together with any other survivors that happen to be outside. When combat occurs outside, a UI element will let you know how many are left and their proximity to the outside survivors. If another outside combat event is triggered while there are already zombies present outside, they’ll just be added to the count on this UI element. Fighting outside will be dangerous, maybe flying in the face a little of the “open spaces” logic, mainly because I want to encourage people to barricade and negotiate buildings (which is the core of the game), and because stacking melee survivors outside was a (very) dominant strategy in ZH. I don’t want this to be the case in ZH2.

As for ranged survivors behind melee survivors, that should be handled automatically. I’ll use the basic rule that if at least one survivor has a melee weapon and is present in a fight with ranged survivors, he’ll attack at Melee range (and be the focus of zombie attacks) while the others will fight at Close. I’m sure the complexity of this rule will evolve as development progresses, and will be customisable to some degree.