Bolt Action Zombie - the findings so far

Ok, following hot on the heels of my previous post today, I have some observations on what I was doing with my Bolt Action Zombie idea.

 After about six turns none of the zombies even made it in to pistol range.  This left the commando officer standing around not doing much at all.

 The British forces were:

 1 Officer with pistol
 1 Sniper
 1 Bren Gunner
 2 SMG toting Commandos

The officer was dead weight, but had melee occurred or some game objectives needed to be reached he would have been busy.

 The sniper only had a 50% at best strike rate. He hit a lot, but only scored a couple of kills.

 The bren gunner and the SMG types were the most useful in the game, but generated a lot of noise counters for the spawn pool.

 In regards to the spawn pool - I had two turns were no zombies turned up at all, and out of eight dice in the pool, the best result for spawning zombies was three at once.

 Rather than needing to roll a 6 for a zombie to appear, I might make a threat rating that allows for different results to see a zombie appear.  Thus one could turn up for every 4 or 5+ rolled on 1d6.  My next game will have a threat level of 5+ to see how that goes.

 Zombie stuns - I think this was actually a game stopper, as it prevented any zombies from actually posing a threat to the commandos.  The zombies in the front rank were stopped in their tracks and picked off by the superior fire power - the closest a zombie made it was 8".

 To fix this, I think I will either get rid of the stuns, or change the mechanic so that they automatically go at the start of the next turn, meaning the zombies get to act.

 This should up the tension a lot as it will mean unless you kill a zombie there is a far better chance they will get into melee with the commandos.

I will play a few turns tonight with the suggested changes in play to see what happens.

Apart from that, the movement and allocation of orders/actions worked well. Bolt Action lends itself well to solo play through the use of drawing order dice, or in my case, order counters.

Edit: I just played out five turns with the stuns removed and the 5+ spawn changes.  The no stuns is a real killer - the zombies are almost upon the commandos and after about 32 shots fired, only two zombies were killed - one by the sniper and the other by the bren gunner.

 I currently have 12 zombies on the table at the start of turn 6. The 5+ spawn chance works well - more zombies, but not so many that it is overwhelming.

 I will either need to put the stuns back in, or make the zombies easier to kill, say on a 5+.  I will think about it over night and play out some turns tomorrow and post the results.