They Are Billions - Zombies Meet AOE

This looks like a good one. I came across it a couple of days ago and have since watched a number of YT videos done by SplatterCatGaming. He’s got an 8 or so episode playthrough that encompasses a number of games. The videos do a good job of showing just how quickly things can go to s**t. In addition, the videos do good job of showing how a person’s playstyle evolves once they gets more familiar with the game.

This game is an RTS crossed with a roguelike - when you start the game you choose a map, a game duration (i.e., how many days you want to try to survive) and the density of the enemy hordes. This results in some sort of modifier to your score. Achieving certain scores unlocks things like more maps, which offers more challenges, etc (not sure what else unlocks).

As with a roguelike, the maps are randomly generated and one of the big challenges seems to be evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the maps, and making use of what you have. If you make good use of the terrain you can survive a while. But make no mistake about it, it seems like you’ll be dying early more often than not.

Splattercat talked to someone familiar with the game development and it was said the AI has a decent amount of smarts - he talked about one game where he had some defenses set up that (as it turns out) had a small blind spot in coverage - a zombie ran up to his base and worked through the blind spot to get in without getting mowed down. And took down his base. Other behaviors include the zombie hordes probing different places in the defense and making for the weak spot. So the game is unforgiving (which I know a lot of people like).