In my first playthrough, I pretty quickly switched from my starting house to a bigger one and started to secure it with barricades. The roles were simple enough to assign since my characters didn't have a lot of skills: One was only good for searching so she did that, while a couple of guys made barricades and two others went around town, investigating. I had a good enough supply of food, medical items and tools: the problem was, I only got one handgun and like ~50 bullets during the whole game. The guys investigating eventually got hit, and later my main search party did as well. All that was left was a lone police officer woman, with only a couple of dozen bullets. I had only found one clue, and every building seemed to be swarming with zombies. It was basically game over at that point.

You know, for a police officer, the gal was pretty crappy with weapons. One time I sent her assaulting a place filled with zombies, she got like one down. The game even told me she failed miserably that time.