They Are Billions - Zombies Meet AOE

There are also quite a few custom maps available via workshop.

Woohoo! This has been on the “c’mon, finish EA already!” shelf for a minute.

Is there a good video summary of all the changes made since it went into EA? I’ve played about 15 hours of EA 7-8 months ago but I’ve put it aside until now. Not sure what has changed since then aside from the looming campaign mode.

I do not know if there is a video summary. The vast majority of the work has been on the campaign but off the top of my head:

  1. Polish, polish, polish. The core game is the same but everything has been refined. Things like the flat map view were not in the game when I was playing. Areas like health generation were tweaked
  2. Adding in Giants, Wonders and a couple of other buildings like the Inn
  3. Villages of Doom were added
  4. Multi-language support
  5. Survival mode
  6. Steam Workshop support / scenario editor
  7. Chase mode, path way points and other unit commands

The campaign adds in a tech tree, different map types, different mission types, etc.

To piggyback on what @Granath is saying, there has been also been quite bit of tweaking regarding how “attention generation” and soft hordes work. Both of these things got a little harder a couple of months back (and I think the soft hordes then got adjusted backwards again, but are still harder than they were say 6 months ago). There’s also another population density difficulty setting that’s basically “zombies as far as the eye can see”. Definitely makes clearing harder (a big blob of snipers can get overrun if you aren’t careful).

There’s also more a bit more variety in the stuff lying around in the outside world. You can find food and power “packs” that boost your maximum values, and sometimes find abandoned towers/radar stations that can be repaired (or scrapped for materials).

Playing at the highest zombie count is an amusing game every once in a while. It gets old quickly but the chain swarms that happen on those maps are amazing. I had a map where the zombie count including the final rush was about 50,000. That is a lot of dead zeds.

Patch is up now on Steam. 2.6GB worth of changes.

And I failed the first mission of the campaign. I am not good at this, and forgot much of the game play mechanics. Round 2 will go better.

Is this a fun game (for $30)?

Fun per price is always subjective, but for me, yes, I think it’s a great value.

I couldnt ever get past the first map. I only even got to the end rush a few times. By the time i read i was doing it all wrong I’d moved on to another in my list of unplayed games. I might take a look again now.

Me too. Although… I’m under the impression I just wasn’t fast enough with everything. It’s the first mission… of course I took some time to just read stuff, zoom in, zoom out, …, well I didn’t survive the first wave.

Yeah, same. I feel like the devs figured everyone was familiar with how to play, and the difficulty of the first map is high. You really have to be on point. There’s no time to dawdle.

same, played the 1st campaign mission three times and failed, it took me a while to get some basic concepts, how to expand, how to get stone and finally building rangers. On day 18 I had 60 pop, and I noticed your goal is 400 pop. Also 20 rangers don’t seem enough for the wave on day 20 … maybe I should have more walls.

I see you can lower the difficulty, but not yet.

Still 1,999,950,000 short of the “billions” promised.

Humble Store deal is good if you are a monthly subscriber and were on the fence.

19% off and if you adjust your humble charity donation $2.70 cash back.

You know you can change the difficulty in the campaign, correct?

No doubt this campaign is difficult though, especially to new players. I played the 2nd map - Hunter’s Meadow - and failed twice. It is a wide open green map and the goal is to get 800 population. This actually is not easy at all on this map. I did not have the wood workshop discovered yet and while you can win it with hunter’s lodges, you have to use almost the entire map to get enough food to do so. You really have to spam the hunter food truck and build about 50 or so rangers to eliminate the zeds. The first time I was not prepared from an attack from the north from 20 zombies. They broke through my walls and hit my homes. It was over quickly. The second time it bugged out a bit on me and did not trigger the correct population count. So I replayed it a third time and won.

Then it really got hard. I tried a defense mission against a horde and had not unlocked soldiers or built up enough map points (whatever those were called). I was totally and completely overrun in seconds. Rangers suck when it comes to defense.

So I am trying the campaign again just to see if different tech choices make a big difference. I will unlock the wood workshop first to get farms - which if allowed to be built would make the Hunter’s Meadow a cakewalk - and a couple of other base upgrades and then go after soldiers.

Watching some people stream the campaign. . . it looks really hard. I’m not sure what difficulty they are using though.

I died on the first mission, normal difficulty. Made it all the way to the end. Completely missed one of the two horde indicators.

building walls is like telling the zombies, hey, come over here, here are people. It’s like a magnet for them