They Are Billions - Zombies Meet AOE

Can you save mid-game and come back where you left off?

Yah, you can “save and exit” as much as you want.

Great, thanks.

Wow, just spotted this on Humble Bumble… looks awesome (I’m a total turtler myself).

Well worth buying if you are even remotely interested. I’ve got about 50 hours into at this point, and it’s not a genre that I usually get much play time out of.

Is there a tutorial or something? I jumped in and I’m not really sure where to start with my buildings and orders. I’ve read through the help and I know what they do but I just need a gentle nudge in the right direction .

I just downloaded a large patch, but not sure I see the patch notes.

I watched a bunch of Youtubes, glad I did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej5erezJ1vY

Check the Guides section for the game on Steam. The guide about how to win in 80 days is excellent.

Thanks, I eneded up watching a bunch of youtube videos as well to get the build basics down. I’m still struggling with a few things, like building too many Tesla towers and not having enough workers to build a cottage when I need more workers to build a mill to get more power.

That and optimal building placement to fit things in more efficiently and not affect pathing. Last night I dropped a market in the only spot I had that would benefit the surrounding buildings. Turns out that it also blocked my troops from moving to a choke point to the north, so they ran out a gate to the east and circled around through some zombies and died.

The good thing is I’m learning from my mistakes and I’m enjoying it immensely. I’m glad someone has created something to cater to my turtling habits in these sorts of games.

New patch adds more languages, house models, and weekly challenge mode.

Holy shit, you guys, this is real damn fun.

I’m going in pretty much spoiler free, and playing this like a roguelike where I’m learning from each failure is amazing. Really, really fun.

I can say that now since I’m a fan of games only ;)

Very fun foundation but it feels like it needs tweaking. There’s no challenge at all to the hordes until the final wave. Prior to that, the biggest threat is somehow missing some annoying hidden gap in your wall that a randomly spawning out of thin air zombie crept through. One game a zombie spawn inside a mountain, then was glitch pushed out into my what should have been airtight base and destroyed it. It’s very frustrating that you have to go through hours of playtime just to get another crack at the final wave.

The map generation needs some big time tweaking. Feels like every map has a 50/50 chance of being completely unwinnable; either through total lack of starting wood or food production, or starting you within sight of a doom village.

Some of the units and upgrades seem pointless. Soldiers are never worth it. You go rangers early game then jump straight to snipers, totally bypassing soldiers. Shock towers never seem worth it. Titans are extremely not worth it because that oil could go towards 2 Thanatos and the gold could go towards an executioner tower. I haven’t found any situation where the titan is worth its cost or upkeep. On offense you’re better with lucifers/thanatos/snipers and on defense you’re better with thanatos and towers.

I’ve put in about 70 hours now and definitely enjoyed the first three maps. Map 4 is another beast all together and I’m not finding it much fun. The starting position is so RNG dependent which combined with the increased aggro range for the zombies means you’re on the back foot from the start and you need to babysit your rangers for ages. I’m fine with an increased challenge but I don’t have the patience to kite zombies around the map just to have a chance.

This is what sort of killed the game for me. I wrote a letter to the devs about their save idea. I think as a developer, you’re much better off just making an iron man mode with extra rewards, than forcing people to play it as a roguelike. It takes much too long to resolve a game for one mistake to tank you. I can handle roguelike in a 45 minute game, but not a 3 hour one.

To me, this would be such a fun game to play with save points, and be able to reload and fix things, at least until you really had the game down and wanted to try iron man. Even if they had a map locked behind an iron man victory I’d be ok with it.

Yeah, I’ve lost all interest in the game because of how much of a drag it is to set up a base and then lose over and over again.

There is a way around the lack of save ability.

The save game files are in the Documents\My Games\They are Billions\Saves (or something very close) folder. Just create another folder there and copy in the save files. There are two. If something goes haywire, exit out to the main screen, alt+tab out, overwrite the save files from your backup, then restart.

It’s not a perfect method (save files are updated every 20 minutes or on exit), but it’s helped me save scum my way to victory several times.

It’s not just the aggro range. Two rangers standing side by side shooting will trigger a stream of zombies on the last map. I do not want to micromanage dozens of rangers to be “just far enough apart” while still clearing effectively until I can roll out enough other units that I can blob.

That’s what ultimately tanked Darkest Dungeons for me. It was stuck between between making your party members disposable like true Lovecraft characters, and an RPG where you had to pour dozens of hours into leveling them up and the loss of a high level one was disastrous. 30 hours to grind to the final dungeon and suddenly its perma death everywhere? No thanks. If they wanted to make it a roguelike, they should have quintupled the rate of leveling and gold collection.

This is also annoying. I know ballistas are the best option for map four because they generate less sound but you can’t get them without getting farms first because your food is limited.

The first few three maps were great because they presented you with challenges you had to think your way out of. The fourth map presents you with all these challenges combined and adds a new one that can only be resolved by endless micromanaging. And that is if you get a good map roll without a village of doom near you or stone that isn’t three tesla towers away.

I’m time poor as it is, I’m not wasting what little spare time I do have moving 20+ rangers square by square for three hours+ just so I can put down some farms or grab a stone mine. I don’t mind losing a base because I made a mistake and didn’t wall off an area, but the pathing on waves is spotty at best and notifications on attacks sometimes doesn’t fire.

A scenario/challenge mode for this game would be great - give you 15 minutes to build a base with certain limitations (no walls/towers/snipers/oil/stone etc…) or resource caps (500 stone to defend an entire base) and survive the final wave. I don’t feel that the campaign will solve anything other than linking together some maps.