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

[thesheeep]

Did people really buy those expensive editions? The fuck?
All that for a so far comically simple game with very little content...

Speaks volumes about the competition, eh?
Market is definitely ripe for some good non-multiplayer focused RTS games.

 

[Ezeekiel]

Did people really buy those expensive editions? The fuck?
All that for a so far comically simple game with very little content...

Speaks volumes about the competition, eh?
Market is definitely ripe for some good non-multiplayer focused RTS games.

Definitely... RTS was one of my starting genres on the pc, sad to see how dead it's been for ages now... Got hit as hard as the RPG genre, if not worse.
I think the defense part of this one also probably drew a lot of guys who play tower def. games on the phone, kongregate/newgrounds and the few decent steam titles.

 

[Dickie]

I haven't played in a while, but I was checking out the progress on the beta owners forum, and they're adding some cool stuff.

Next Features for v.0.4

Improved Majors
We are improving this feature, creating many more Mayors with different levels.The higher the level the better the bonus. When the colony reaches some specific population (20, 200, 500,1000), the player will be able to choose a new mayor with a higher level. The properties of the old mayors will be of course kept. We will add a new window to show the Mayors (the current and the old ones).

Thanatos
The missing unit is finally in the new version. It is quite different to the others and it will add more tactics to the game (if you have enough oil for their expensive weapons....).

New Building: The Tavern of Lost Souls
Would you like to attract mercenaries and strange travelers of all kinds to your colony? Nothing better than offering a beer near a fireplace.

Veteran Units (included in 0.3.22)
As the units kill infected, they earn experience and can level up improving some of their stats. The improvements are specific and automatic for every unit type.

Targets Selection Priority (included in 0.3.22)
For the units you can set the mode for auto-targeting enemies. Currently is just "The Nearest Enemy". There will be another mode to priorice "High Level Enemies first".

I particularly like the sound of target selection priority. I might have to play again just to check that out.

 

[Serus]

Did people really buy those expensive editions? The fuck?
All that for a so far comically simple game with very little content...

Speaks volumes about the competition, eh?
Market is definitely ripe for some good non-multiplayer focused RTS games.

Definitely... RTS was one of my starting genres on the pc, sad to see how dead it's been for ages now... Got hit as hard as the RPG genre, if not worse. (...)

Sometimes good things happen at the same time as bad ones.

Seriously though, I have nothing against people enjoying RTS - the problem with this genre in the past was that its popularity caused it to overflow into other genres. Resulting in pollution of the old good turn-based CRPG genre with rtwp abominations (remember Baldur's engine was at first meant to be for an RTS). But since the damage has been already done long time ago, people might as well have all the single-player RTSs they want. If anyone will make them.

 

[Ironmonk]

It's available on steam right now. I'm probably getting it this week.

 

[Infinitron]

THEY ARE BILLIONS UPDATE: SURVIVAL MODE AVAILABLE NOW!

Greetings!

Finally, They Are Billions Survival Mode is available on Steam! We know lots of people have been waiting patiently to play the game, especially the backers after we ran out beta keys. We have worked as if we were being chased by billions of zombies to launch the game much earlier than originally anticipated.

This version is now much more polished than the original. We have implemented lots of improvements suggested by the beta testers and also fixed billions of issues and bugs. This process will continue during the Early Access phase while we work on the epic Campaign Mode.

For the Backers of They Are Billions
The backing period and special editions are no longer available. Thank you so much for your support and patience. The overwhelming support for our game was so much more than we had ever dreamed of.

Your Steam key(s) are already available on your download page in Humble Store. Just use the link from the email you received as: “Your Ranger Edition is Ready.”

In January, we will start creating the special rewards for the Sniper, Lucifer, Thanatos, and Titan editions. We will contact all of you directly by email.

Last Version: V.0.4

From now on, we will announce the new versions and what’s next directly on the Steam Store updates section. As many of you may already know, these were the last changes to the game:


New Mayors System
Now the colony can choose a new Mayor when the colony reaches specific population levels. There are about 100 mayors with different levels and features.

Thanatos
The awesome Thanatos unit is now available. He can be very narcissistic, but his rocket launcher can blow up dozens of infected in one shot!

Veteran Units
Rangers, Soldiers, and Snipers earn experience and can level up, improving their attack power and speed.

Targets Selection Priority
For the units, you can set the mode for auto-targeting enemies. Currently, it is only “The Nearest Enemy”. There will be another mode, where you can set the priority “High Level Enemies first”.

What’s next for V0.5?
New Building: The Tavern of Lost Souls
Would you like to attract mercenaries and strange travelers of all kinds to your colony? Nothing better than offering a beer by the fireplace.

Competitive Mode: Challenge of the Week
Every week you can play a specific map that will be the same for all players. All players will compete on the same map and their score will be registered on a Leaderboard. Players will only have one chance to play the Challenge of the Week.

New Languages Coming Soon!
We have decided to anticipate the translation of They Are Billions, so the Survival Mode can be enjoyed by all the players:
– Simplified Chinese: 汉语
– German: Deutsch
– French: Français
– Spanish: Español
– Russian: Pусский
– Polish: Polski
– Italian: Italiano
– Japanese: 日本
– Corean: 한국어

The Campaign
Don’t forget that the main mode of They Are Billions is the Campaign. Though the Survival Mode launch has taken us a lot of time, the development of the campaign is a bit delayed but don’t worry, it is going to be like a whole new game with a great story, characters, missions, and lots of new features like the steam trains, the old fortresses, the infected mutant… We expect that it will have about 40-50 hours of gameplay. And of course, it will be included for free for all the Backers and Early Access buyers.
We will talk about the campaign in the next updates!

Intel HD Graphics 2000 and 3000 Compatibility
We are aware of a problem with the Intel HD Graphics 2000 and 3000. We hope to fix it in the coming weeks ahead, but at the moment as the Store page says, the minimum requisites for Intel HD Graphics are HD4200+ (Haswell generation from late 2012).

Thanks for your Review
As you know, reviews on Steam are more important than ever. If you are enjoying the Survival Mode, please consider writing a review. The game is just in an early access phase, so we need all of your support to continue developing and improving the game. Thank you very much in advance for your time!

See you soon!

 

[circ]

zombies. Groooaaan.

 

[Havoc]

It's a tower defense game.

 

[thesheeep]

It's a tower defense game.

Your mom is a boss in tower defense games.

 

[Jimmious]

Buuuuurn

 

[Agesilaus]

purchased. Will give it a go sometime soon.

 

[LESS T_T]

Wow, this is pretty popular on Steam.

It's #2 global seller behind PUBG right now. Its number of peak players (6,262) is almost 10 times larger than that of Lords of Xulima (657). I would guess it would exceed Xulima's lifetime sales in a few weeks, if not in a week. (And it's a bit expensive than Xulima.)

 

[4249]

Bought! I trust in Numatian Games
Thought what the heck, LoX gave me more fun than what I paid for it and I even like TD's. Plus it's almost christmas, it's about time I started buying presents for me.

 

[BrotherFrank]

As much as I want to say anything rts/rpg making it into the top sales list is incline...

PUBG (even the acronym is disgusting) still being top seller is such decline that it drags everything down by proxy.

 

[Markman]

Watched a few streams and it looks sexy as fuck. It will be a xmas present to myself. Hopefully they'll notch it down another 10% when the sale starts.

 

[LESS T_T]

According to Steam's weekly chart, this game has generated more revenues than Fallout 4 VR:

#10 - Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy
#9 - OKAMI HD
#8 - ARK: Survival Evolved
#7 - Fallout 4 VR
#6 - They Are Billions
#5 - ARK: Aberration - Expansion Pack
#4 - Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege - Year 3 Pass
#3 - ARK: Survival Evolved Season Pass
#2 - Grand Theft Auto V
#1 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS

 

[Agesilaus]

Great game, played it a lot this weekend when I should have been doing other things. Definitely has a unique feel to it, and it's incredibly difficult. I can get to about day 66 or so before I just get crushed under a tidal wave of bodies. I know my problem, though: lack of area of effect weapons. The ballista is good early on, but it's clear to me that I need to rush towards the Thanatos unit. If I had some quality AoE, I know I could hold out a lot longer.

In terms of what could be better... I'd say the early game needs some work. It's just tedious; I wish the archers could auto-explore ("chase" is too aggressive), and I wish there were better things to find than just "+10 wood" or other generic resources. The mayors are a good feature, although I bet they'd be even better if they appeared on the map or had some other work put into them.

Anyway, great game, etc. I don't play much multiplayer but I bet this would be great with other people playing on the same map.


EDIT: Survived to day 80. The electric towers are incredibly powerful crowd control weapons, just a matter of placement.

 

[Alienman]

Holy hell this game is hard. On attempt 5 on the first map now, lowered the difficulty/score to 22%. I can make it to around day 90-100 on a 150 day campaign, but after that the hordes just tear down my defenses like it's a low effort shanty town. Really fun game, feels more like an RTS than a tower defense game. I do wonder though if the campaign will maintain this difficulty. Going to take a long time to complete

 

[Alienman]

After losing colony number 6 to the zombie hordes, I'm convinced you have to use your rangers to bait the zombies away and try to spread them out. Gonna try this but my micro is terrible (my macro also).

 

[Alienman]

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh... building base for several hours, just to make one tiny mistake. One super tiny mistake and the whole colony falls. RIP number seven! Agesilaus How is your housing layout? It's always game over for me when the reach the housing area, but before that a breach is containable (sometimes).

 

[Agesilaus]

Holy hell this game is hard. On attempt 5 on the first map now, lowered the difficulty/score to 22%. I can make it to around day 90-100 on a 150 day campaign, but after that the hordes just tear down my defenses like it's a low effort shanty town. Really fun game, feels more like an RTS than a tower defense game. I do wonder though if the campaign will maintain this difficulty. Going to take a long time to complete

After losing colony number 6 to the zombie hordes, I'm convinced you have to use your rangers to bait the zombies away and try to spread them out. Gonna try this but my micro is terrible (my macro also).

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh... building base for several hours, just to make one tiny mistake. One super tiny mistake and the whole colony falls. RIP number seven! Agesilaus How is your housing layout? It's always game over for me when the reach the housing area, but before that a breach is containable (sometimes).

You must be doing something wrong, because I play on the default 100% difficulty (100 day campaign, challenging) and I consistently survive up to somewhere between days 50 and 70. No kiting or anything unusual that would require rapid clicking (actually you can just pause by hitting spacebar if you don't want to race around giving orders).



In terms of housing, I build all my houses in a bunch near my command centre. Not only are they incredibly fragile and create a lot of zombies when destroyed, but you need them in a clump so you can apply the Market and Bank bonuses. Depending on farmland availability, food can be a real issue mid-late game, so this special bonus is kind of helpful. The bank bonus is huge, though; I'm in a game right now (day 80) where at one point I had over +1000 gold coming in.

So, basically, build your houses in such a way that they will be safe from any contact with zombies, and so they can obtain the market and bank bonuses.


In general, I don't know what your current strategy is, but here's what I do. I start the game by plonking down a couple of houses by my command centre and a sawmill. While I'm waiting to do that, I will run the rangers around so they can scout the area. I'm looking for a good place for additional sawmills; I want about 3 well-positioned sawmills because wood is extremely important early game.

Once I know the lay of the land and where the zombies are waiting, I will start expanding. You have 4 rangers and 1 soldier, so never open up more than 5 ways into your base. In a pinch, you can just build a wooden wall and leave it unmanned; you'll get a warning if any zombies start trying to break it down.

At some point you should have a few sawmills up, a number of tents, a windmill or two, a number of hunting lodges and wharfs, and all the approaches to your buildings should be sealed off with walls. You don't need towers everywhere, you just need to completely seal off your base so nothing can wander in and knock down your tents. A simple wooden wall is enough to stop the first invasion, probably the second one, too.

Your next goals are to start researching, increase your population, and recruit a small army of 4 soldiers. You will need iron for the soldiers, so keep an eye out for that. You don't need stone just yet, but it is going to become extremely important soon. Helpful tip: be careful with where you place the research buildings in this game. You cannot destroy them.



At this point, you're kind of safe for a while. Your wooden defenses can withstand the first couple of invasions; with 4 soldiers you can basically gun everyone down before they break through. When you know which direction the attack is coming from, upgrade to a double-layer wooden wall and place a tower behind it. Maybe even build a backup layer of wooden walls if you are really worried.


During this safe period, you need to achieve the following goals: Increase population so you have a higher income, new mayor, and a market. Build quarries to increase your stone production as much as possible. Keep an eye on all the measurements of your economy; it's a delicate balancing act to make sure that every resource (that includes workers, electricity, food) is available.


If you have enough stone, you should easily survive until day 40-something. Before you reach day 50, you need to be able to create area of attack weapons on a moment's notice. The obvious choice is the electricity tower. You can research it in the stone workhouse; this tower will basically destroy any attack before day 70. Keep enough resources to construct it on hand at any given time (always be aware of your electricity and manpower limits). When the game says that they're coming from the east, wait for the timer to reach 0. Look at the red arrow on the minimap, and figure out which wall they're likely to hit. Build the tower next to that wall so that it can just zap everything that approaches. If you can't figure out which wall... build the towers everywhere? lmao good luck idiot, learn to scout and design a better base.


At some point, probably late 60s, you will get hit with an attack so large that the horde will smash down a double-layer stone wall before the electric tower can kill them all. I think it's because you start to find more and more of those big fat zombies, and the electric tower really doesn't do a lot of damage to them. My recommendation is this:


If you have a lot of stone, which should be the case, then defend in depth. Instead of blocking a chokepoint with one wall, make 2 or 3 walls. Your army of soldiers and snipers can fall back when the first double-layer stone wall is breached. The electric tower will get destroyed, but it will already have inflicted massive casualties on the enemy.

Get the foundry and research the engineering building, and then research the Thanatos unit. I think the Lucifer unit is shit, but whatever. Thanatos has a rocket launcher and is basically a mobile AoE tower. He's not as strong as the electric tower, but if you have 2 or 3 of them it can be very effective. Also, get some snipers and check the setting so that they focus on high-threat targets.

During the down time, keep developing your economy, but also take a moment to examine your base and think about its weaknesses. If you expanded to the south and west, then is there only a single stone wall on your northern and eastern side? As you progress past the early-mid game stage, all land becomes valuable. Expand to the north so that you can develop more defenses in that direction, just plonk down some windmills if there's nothing but wasteland there. Do the same to the east. The goal is to have every path into your base protected by multiple layers of stone walls.

Yes, I said stone walls. That's why you need a lot of stone in this game. Remember that power plants (which I never build) use valuable stone. Wooden walls will do nothing to stop a late game horde. If your economy is really hurting, then just make the outer layer stone. However, you better have stone and gold on hand so that, when the horde comes charging, you can quickly upgrade the walls facing the invasion force. If it looks like your defenses will be overcome, well, don't forget that you can build a wall behind your wall mid-attack, and then just retreat behind this newly constructed wall.


Also, in terms of general advice: be wary about raiding far from your base. Even a decent army can get overwhelmed and destroyed. However, if you do manage to destroy the enemy base (not an impossible feat), then don't grab the resources right away. Just hit pause, figure out what you want to build and what your current resource situation is, and remember that you have a resource cap. If you see several piles of gold, and you already have a lot of gold, then spend your money before you grab it.



In my current game, I'm on day 80. I have a bunch of titans (meh) and thanatos units (great) that I deploy to whichever wall is about to be hit. I have snipers, the original rangers, and some soldiers deployed to specific walls just as a matter of course. I wiped the floor with the last invasion force, so perhaps I've won. It seems that if you build near the edge of the map, invasions won't come from that direction (regardless, I have a few layers of stone wall defenses). As the game progresses, you will find that you have electric towers on every side, backed up by executioner guns, and invasions are just these absurd massacres where billions of zombies are reduced to explosions of blood.

 

[Alienman]

Haha, yeah, I think I'm doing something wrong, or I just plain suck. Nice tips though. Kinda have the same overall strategy, but I think I'm just too damn slow even on 150 days. I do get to tier 3 research but it's already around day 70-80 by then, so yeah, bit slow. I think I have to invest in more walls, I'm going for a more pleasant aesthetic look before functionally

Not complaining about the difficulty though, I really enjoy it, and I feel hooked by the game.

 

[Agesilaus]

I won't spoil the final attack, but let's say that it's different and you basically need to be aware of what's coming if you want to survive.

In light of the final round... I would say the final, end-game goal is to figure out a select few chokepoints whereby you can block all entrances to your base, and then stack electric towers and executioner guns and snipers on all of them, along with multiple layers of brick walls and enough resources to build towers once the first layer falls (or, if you have the electricity to sustain it, multiple layers of towers pre-constructed.

I am doubtful as to whether Thanatos, Titans, and Lucifers are ultimately worth it in lieu of turrets and snipers/soldiers. I was caught by surprise in the end, and the side that fell first consisted of 3 layers of brick wall, 1 electric tower, 1 executioner gun, a tower of snipers, 1 titan, and 1 thanatos.


EDIT: to be fair, I am to blame for this loss; I thought I was invincible (and to be fair I was until the final attack mixed things up). I stopped expanding and improving defenses, and that was my downfall. You can't rest on your laurels in this game.

 

[Alienman]

Here is my score list so far:

Spoiler

The save names reflect my increased frustration

 

[sser]

How's the replay value? Worth it for EA?