I think it's a very nice addition! What I think is wrong is actually the alarm don't start with zombies. It would be a nice dynamic event: a zombie randomly beats a door, the alarms goes off, robots arrive and clean it up.
You could pretend the alarms are thermally based, and as such won't pick up the cold walking dead.
Well, you can pretend a lot of things, but why not have this and other things happen? it makes the world feel more alive, and presents the player with more surprises to deal with, which imo is always fun.
Also, I hardly believe someone would pick thermal detection instead of motion for a security system in a time where robots can hover about. Wanna rob a bank? Sure, just send a robot in!
I'm in favour of having the player be at the same level as other entities on a game. Having "special conditions" feels like cheating.
Yes, but almost all successful games that aren't Dwarf Fortress do that. And you can see from it, giving player-like attributes to almost everything is less than stellar in both resource usage and implementation.
In the very end all those enemies are meant to kill you, and what matters is their efficiency at doing so.
Hell, in Megaman, all enemies were really unequal to the player, that didn't stop players from feeling it's the enemies who were cheating.
Maybe it's time to change the formula of successful games that aren't dwarf fortress?
I do understand the technical difficulty that it generates. It's just my way of seeing how a game should work.
Any way it gets implemented in Cataclysm, I'm sure it'll be a fun one 
Enemies are just devices to provide challenge. You can make them challenging, interesting or clever, without needing immense frameworks that impact memory and performance. After all, if one enemy only has the task of shooting you, why should we calculate every possible piece of equipment and bonuses like with the player? After all, the player IS special, just because it has actual goals, needs, and code interfaces. The only goal the enemies have is "kill the player", you have plenty others.
And if you make enemies tend to needs, they will tend to them. Instead of doing their job. Like in Dwarf Fortress. Lazy dorfs.
NOTE that this doesn't mean enemies cannot have built-in strategies and such. But it's not that hard to do, and certainly doesn't require to elevate enemies to player-like entities. Players are players, enemies are enemies, they have different purposes and should be coded accordingly.
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Topic: Cataclysm: A Zombie-Survival Roguelike (Read 1316555 times)