RTS They Are Billions - steampunk/zombie RTS from Lords of Xulima dev

[LESS T_T]

http://www.numantiangames.com/theyarebillions/




https://af.gog.com/game/they_are_billions?as=1649904300

Spoiler

So this is the game they're doing alongside pre-production of Lords of Xulima II.

They Are Billions is a strategy game in a distant future about building and managing human colonies after a zombie apocalypse destroyed almost all of human kind. Now there are only a few thousand humans left alive that must struggle to survive under the threat of the infection. Billions of infected roam around the world in massive swarms seeking the last living human colonies.

Game Modes
Campaign
In the campaign mode, you have to help the surviving humans to reconquer their country. There are dozens of missions with different goals: building colonies, tactical missions, rescue missions... You can decide the path of progress and mission - research new technologies, advances and upgrades to improve your colonies and army.

Survival Mode
In this mode, a random world is generated with its own events, weather, geography, and infected population. You must build a successful colony that must survive for 100 days against the swarms of infected. It is a fast and ultra addictive game mode. We plan to release a challenge of the week where all players must play the same random map. The best scores will be published in a leaderboard.

Real Time with Pause

This is a real-time strategy game, but don’t get too nervous. You can pause the action to take the best strategic and tactical decisions.

In Pause Mode, you can place structures to build, give orders to your army, or consult all of the game’s information.
This game is all about strategy, not player performance or the player’s skill to memorize and quickly execute dozens of key commands. Pause the game and take all the time you need!

Build your Colony

Build dwellings and acquire food for the colonists. They will come to live and work for the colony.

Collect resources from the environment using various building structures. Upgrade buildings to make them more efficient.
Expand the energy distribution of the colony by placing Tesla Towers and build mills and power plants to feed the energy to your buildings.

Build walls, gates, towers, and structures to watch the surroundings. Don’t let the infected take over the colony!

Build an Army

What kind of people would want to combat the infected?

Only the maddest ones. Train and contract mercenaries to protect the colony. They demand their money and food, and you will have to listen to their awful comments, but these tormented heroes will be your best weapon to destroy the infected.
Every unit is unique and has their own skills and personality – discover them!

Thousands of Units on Screen

Yes! They are billions! The world is full of infected creatures… they roam, smell, and listen. Every one of them has their own AI. Make noise and they will come – kill some of them to access an oil deposit and hundred of them will come to investigate.

We have created our custom engine to handle hordes of thousands of the infected, up to 20,000 units in real time.

Do you think your colony is safe? Wait for the swarms of thousands of infected that are roaming the world. Sometimes your colony is in their path!

Prevent the Infection

If just one of the infected breaks into a building, all the colonies and workers inside will become infected. The infected workers will then run rabid to infect more buildings. Infections must be eradicated from the beginning, otherwise, it will grow exponentially becoming impossible to contain.

Beautiful 4K Graphics!

Prepare to enjoy these ultra high definition graphics. Our artists have created tons of art pieces: Beautiful buildings with their own animations, thousands of frames of animation to get the smoothest movements and everything with a crazy Steampunk and Victorian style!

 

[Comte]

Yawn zombies and steampunk.

 

[thesheeep]

That's... quite a lot of units.
What engine do they use? Most usually struggle with so many entities in the same scene.

Also... zombies. Yeah, not the most interesting thing, really
But despite that, I'm always eager to try any RTS if it isn't shitty.

 

[Jimmious]

Zombies as the main enemy of an RTS though is something new. This seems interesting generally

 

[Ezeekiel]

Well, consider me somewhat interested.
Defending against swarms can be fun, but I wonder if the enemy variety etc would get boring quickly.

A.I. -related calculations also tend to cause microstutter/regular short freezes of the units if they're too much. Like, every 1 second or whatever, every unit gets checked if it has to realign it's heading to target whatever and if you have 10000 units...
Maybe if they form swarms automatically and the swarm becomes the "unit", with the zombie sprites/models' positions not really mattering as physical objects individually and just having a border that counts as the front (where the swarm starts damagin your units)?

Or maybe m&b warband's engine was just trash and a properly used modern multicore cpu can easily handle this on top of everything else, idk.

Those mechs should be firing something explosive though.

 

[LESS T_T]

From Xulima Kickstarter update: https://www.kickstarter.com/project...n-epic-story-of-gods-and-humans/posts/1899201

What kind of game is They Are Billions?
Imagine a world devastated by billions of infected humans after a zombie-like apocalypse. You must build colonies for the few surviving humans. The colonies must defend themselves against swarms of the infected that roam the world using retro technology because all knowledge has rewound back to that of similar to the XIX century.

They Are Billions is a strategic game where you build colonies and armies and manage resources. As with Lords of Xulima, there is no single game as the main inspiration. It shares aspects from the classic RTS like Starcraft, city building and resource management like Anno or Age of Empires games, army management and tactics like war games, and even some tower defense games. Combined, you get a unique playstyle, just like how Lords of Xulima was.


What? A Real-Time game from Numantian?

They Are Billions

Yes, it is a real-time strategy game, but don’t get too nervous. You can pause the action to make the best strategic and tactical decision. In Pause Mode, you can place structures to build, give orders to your army, or consult all of the game’s information. This game is all about strategy, not player performance or the player’s skill to memorize and quickly execute dozens of key commands. Just pause the game, take all the time you need to decide what to do and then unpause it to watch the show.


Technology

They Are Billions

Our main goal with this game was to simulate a realistic scenery of a zombie-apocalypse. We have worked hard to evolve our old Lords of Xulima game engine to become an ultra-performance machine. The engine can move up to 20,000 units simultaneously smoothly. And every unit has their own AI and personality. The infected have a natural behavior: they react to sound and activity, they watch what other infected do, and share their tension and feelings like a swarm. Just imagine, when you start a new game and begin to build a colony, the world generated already has thousands of infected roaming.

We want the player to feel that oppressive atmosphere, feel the colony is surrounded by thousands of infected, and consider that every step to expand the colony to reach a new resource or to grow the colony can be lethal. Combine that oppression with the constant fear that it only takes one infected to break into the colony and cause the infection to spread exponentially.

As you already know, we love hardcore games. They Are Billions in this regards is similar to Lords of Xulima - it has a lot of depth, is fairly easy to play but very difficult to master. We are sure that LoX fans will love it, give it a try!


Art

They Are Billions


Our artists have worked very hard to give a unique style and feel to the game. The action is set in a distant future but with a level of technology comparable to the XIX century. As a result, the game has a steampunk and Victorian look. Just imagine crazy steampunk machines combating against a legion of zombies... And everything with a nice hand drawn touch and ultra-detailed, just watch 4K screenshots of the game.

Development
The game has two main game modes: the survival mode that it is already working and the campaign mode which is what we are working now. In the survival mode, a random world is generated with its own events, weather, geography, and infected population. You must build a successful colony that survives for 100 days against the swarms of infected. It is a fast and ultra-addictive game mode.

For the campaign, we want to create a very in-depth, single-player campaign with lots of options and an extensive variety of different development paths such as researching new structures, units, upgrades, and improvements. We also wanted deep strategic options, as you are free to choose the missions you want to do but the world will change depending on your actions.

We expect to launch the game as Early Access this fall. There we will polish and balance it better with the feedback of the users. We hope to release the final game after only a couple of months of Early Access.

The Steam Store page is now available so you can follow the game updates there. Here we will continue talking about the sequel to Lords of Xulima.

 

[Infinitron]

Second, They Are Billions is a much more commercial game.

Shades of Pierre Begue/Battle of the Sands.

 

[Chamezero]

massive amounts of bloom is exactly what RTSs needed

 

[barker_s]

Maybe if they form swarms automatically and the swarm becomes the "unit", with the zombie sprites/models' positions not really mattering as physical objects individually and just having a border that counts as the front (where the swarm starts damagin your units)?

Or maybe m&b warband's engine was just trash and a properly used modern multicore cpu can easily handle this on top of everything else, idk.

There are many ways to implement and optimize pathfinding. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what they're using:

 

[thesheeep]

There are many ways to implement and optimize pathfinding. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what they're using:

Huh! Good idea. If the number of units is large enough, putting the calculations into the map/field itself will actually be faster. And more consistent...
Each unit just has to look at the next neighbor to go to.

 

[Jimmious]

Isn't there also this "Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator" that supposedly handles thousands of units well and with good pathfinding? Only seen videos though

 

[Severian Silk]

RTS

 

[ArchAngel]

I am not interested in tower defense games, even if they are packaged a bit differently to try to fool people.

 

[Ezeekiel]

Maybe if they form swarms automatically and the swarm becomes the "unit", with the zombie sprites/models' positions not really mattering as physical objects individually and just having a border that counts as the front (where the swarm starts damagin your units)?

Or maybe m&b warband's engine was just trash and a properly used modern multicore cpu can easily handle this on top of everything else, idk.

There are many ways to implement and optimize pathfinding. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what they're using:

Thanks, never occured to me before.
I'd rate the post informative if I could, so just imagine the "informative" rating below your post or something :D

 

[Ezeekiel]

massive amounts of bloom is exactly what RTSs needed

It does look awfully bloomy... Going for that 2006 look haha

 

[Jimmious]

Btw the trailer is p.nice and the game shows promise, but the complete lack of collisions at 0:58 annoyed me. The zombies pretty much run through the soldiers

 

[Dickie]

Btw the trailer is p.nice and the game shows promise, but the complete lack of collisions at 0:58 annoyed me. The zombies pretty much run through the soldiers

I'm pretty sure those are civilians running from the zombies. They might not have any collision to keep your guys from getting all tangled up on people you're trying to save and getting everyone killed.

 

[Jimmious]

Btw the trailer is p.nice and the game shows promise, but the complete lack of collisions at 0:58 annoyed me. The zombies pretty much run through the soldiers

I'm pretty sure those are civilians running from the zombies. They might not have any collision to keep your guys from getting all tangled up on people you're trying to save and getting everyone killed.

You probably have a point now that I see it again.

 

[Johannes]

So it's a tower defense game not a proper RTS? BSB.

 

[Galdred]

RTS

I would really lot look forward to having 20000 zombies taking their turn one at a time!
That said, it looks more like Tower Defense indeed.

 

[thesheeep]

It reminds me a bit of Harvest, which is also an RTS/TD mixture with massive amounts of enemies.
At least from the images so far.

Of course, in Harvest you have no soldiers, only structures. So there's already more to it in this one.

 

[Alienman]

Stronghold but zombies.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

Zombies, why it is always zombies... can't imagine anything more bland, boring and generic than zombies. ;x

 

[Lostpleb]

Zombies, why it is always zombies... can't imagine anything more bland, boring and generic than zombies. ;x

What would you rather have? Orcs?

And even zombies can have a little personality. Have you played Infectonator: Survivors?

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Ok, the concept seems quite interesting to me in a lot of ways.