They Are Billions - Zombies Meet AOE

Spare me having to go look please, why rage over a $22 game? Re-playability pretty low after beating it I guess?

It was quite predictable, and I am surprised Numantian made the misstep (or they do not care). Price was $19.99 in pre-sales off their site. There were many people asking as to the price on Steam with no official answer in their Steam discussion boards. You were evidently able to buy for that price up to the moment it launched from their site.

Right when they opened on Steam, the price was $24.99 retail with the customary 10% first week discount, for $22.49 and this the same pricing was immediately reflected on the Numantian website. This gives the average triggered Steam responder the ability to rage, because the price went up $2.49.

Numantian should have announced they were ending the sale 24, or even just 12…8 hours before the launch. Then these people would not have this to complain about. Of course, they would rage about the design and unfinished nature of the game, as some are.

They really need to come up with an easier way to restart from a save. Right now, you need to go into MyDocuments/My Games/TheyAreBillions/Saves and do the file copy / rename yourself.

I had a good game going, probably over an hour invested and the speed at which things go to shit is too much IMO.

The game is trying to tell me I’m being attacked, but I’m colorblind so the red on the minimap doesn’t help very much, and it just takes a single zombie breaking through, infecting a building and everything just cascades very quickly.

The game is too chatty. “Building complete” is competing with “your soldiers are getting attacked” and “they are attacking a building”. So imagine all this flashing red, some of it I’m completely aware of because I’m taking my horde forward to wipe out a nearby infected city, and trying to inch forward my electrical tesla towers so I can start building in a more forward position, and some I’m just completely missing and then my entire city goes dark.

What I really want is the minimap on my 2nd screen, big as my primary map and I want the ability to create my own colors and for heavens sake I want to turn off all the unnecessary dialogue.

I also am having a real hard time identifying all my idle soldiers so I can rally them to somewhere they are needed. In the beginning it’s not too bad, but by day 66, I’ve got a shit-ton of cottages, warehouses, quarries, farms with so many things walking around, I can’t pick them out.

This game can be quite frustrating sometimes.

I start a new game that looks like it is going good. I’m a little spread out but i have a pretty decent amount of land locked down. I do the first horde no problem. Then for no reason at all that i can tell, a mob of 30+ zombies just swarm one wall. At this point in the game it is basically impossible for me to counter this.

I did nothing i can tell to trigger this massive early game swarm. I didn’t have any troops manning the wall and nobody was fighting near it before the attack. It was seemingly just a random game ender.

Yes, those mini hordes are deathbringers. The strange thing is on the larger waves, you get this announcement, a flashing skull on the mini-map that marches across the map so you can see precisely where it is going and then you have these 20-30 size hordes without any announcement (other than a building / wall is being attacked), and it occurs so fast, there is simply no way to react. You are either ready (walls with some guys behind it & waiting), or you are dead.

This reminds me (unfavorably I might add) of planetary annihilation - where anything can come from any direction.

I saw one of the research buildings to unlock was a radar dish, has anyone built it yet?

This game would be a lot better if you could tell what the hell is going on.

Here is every game I’ve played so far:

Things seem to be going fairly well.
There are now 40 zombies in the middle of town.

There is nothing between those two things.

You gather materials stupidly slow and everything takes tons to make. Then a horde attacks so you have to throw everything you have to stop it, then apparently a lone zombie walks into town and converts the whole thing with no warning at all.

If my unit gets attacked I get a warning, but if a zombie attacks a building I know about it around the time 50 of them are attacking my main building and I lose. Also building units takes way too much material. Especially since the units you get aren’t especially good. Maybe if the main building could make them or something. Add in that iron sometimes doesn’t spawn within a mile… bleh.

Early Access and all that. The game’s systems seem good and it shows a metric shitton of promise, but right now it’s just frustrating, at least to me. I literally lose every game to “suddenly everyone is a zombie”. There is no way to recover from it, you just can’t make the units fast enough (or have the workers to do it even if you could).

Turrets can help a lot in the early game to defend your walls, as can traps. It’s not easy, but it’s possible with very good play. You can have turrets available and placed around your completely walled town by the second wave of zombies. Not that I’ve done it yet, but I’ve seen it done.

I mean… those things aren’t something you start with and I’ve never even been able to get the research building up, much less research them, which ties back into the expense thing. If I feel like taking another shot at it, maybe I’ll focus on trying to get that thing up, but it’s crazy expensive and I suspect I’ll be dead from the first wave.

I’m just playing on Easy, but I think I’m learning some tactics that might help when I bump up the difficulty. I lost my first game due to a lone zombie infiltration.

This game really wants you to make of use of choke points. Building walls is great, but you only need a Ranger or two in each choke point to keep those wandering zeds away. I’ve repelled two invasions, but on Easy, the first was really wimpy. The second was exacerbated by my soldiers blasting away at the horde right next to the zombie town. If I hadn’t brought in some Rangers that had been scouting abroad, it could have been game over.

The second horde, assisted by the zombie town led to a pretty dramatic defense. My Soldiers were blasting away, Snipers adding a steady drumbeat of death, and my Rangers dancing in and out of harms way to distract the stream coming from the undead town was pretty epic even on Easy. I am looking forward to dying further into the Easy campaign.

Can anyone with experience of both games comment on how similar it is to Stronghold? I loved that game alot, and I can’t think of another game since then that scratches that exact same itch (not even the sequels or tower defense games which have a different focus).

For those who are struggling let me see if I can help a bit.

Before I start you have to understand that you are going to lose. A LOT. This game is challenging even on the very lowest (22%) difficulty level. It does not tell you everything. In the last 10 posts of this thread we have someone complaining that it talks too much and someone else who moans it does not point out enough. It is up to you to constantly scan and figure out what happened.

There is a balance between starting off too slowly and too quickly. Both are deadly in this game though you get more immediate feedback from the latter. When you start you have only 5 troops. Scout until you see enemy troops and then bring them back close to your base. Use the patrol function to keep them running back and forth over exposed areas but try to place them near choke points.

Keep restarting until you find a decent map. In order of importance you need food, room to build, wood, ore and iron. You can get away with little or no iron for a while but the first 4 are non-negotiable. Food means water, forest and green grass. Room to build means large open patches of dirt to concentrate houses. Once you find a decent map (I wish it had a map seed that could be entered) then you build 3 houses on the dirt immediately. Then you build your best food production building - hunting or fishing. Hopefully you find some extra resources while scouting and can quickly build a lumber mill of 11+ wood. Then build a couple of more houses and expand your territory in whichever way allows you to build the most with a Tesla tower or two.

By now your troops are back close to town. Put them on patrol. Build a mine and start building up your ore. Now you have a choice depending on the map. Either you build a barracks and start pumping out Rangers or you build the first research building depending on your need. If the map is low on food, go research and instantly research farms. If you have lots of food, keep pumping out tents because they will increase your gold production which allows you to build more units quickly.

In my experience, it is about this time where people start to fail. It is that second or third expansion that they do not properly guard. All it takes is for one infected to get to a decent building or tent and there is no recovery. Yet you will not have the wood to fence yourself in. You have to set up picket lines, patrols and choke points BEFORE you expand and you need to leave them at those tasks. It is so tempting to add in another troop or two into your offensive squad to make better headway but you always have to think defensively in this game. You have your attack squad and you have your defenders. I like to move Rangers into the attack squad and make the defenders Soldiers if I have the cash.

Now since you have chosen an expansion direction, work on walling off the other avenues of approach to your base. Do not be tempted to go exploring that way. Just double wall off the other avenues and stick a soldier or two at each wall. Forget the towers. Expand in your chosen direction and keep concentrating on that way. Note that as you get closer to the edge of the map the spawns will get more and more difficult. So find a choke point about halfway between your base and the edge and STOP. Leave that damn horde there. Wall it off and set up TWO ballista towers. Those and a soldier or two should be enough to defend from most attacks. Pick another direction and start to expand that way.

When you get the notification that an attack is about to take place, rush your attack squad back to base and figure out where the attack is coming from. If you do not have defenses in that direction then be prepared to take casualties.

Do not forget to build warehouses. The extra storage means you do not waste resources.

Do NOT pick fights with infected towns until quite later in the game. They provide a lot of resources but without 30-50 troops (and not rangers) you will be overrun. I have lost too many games getting cute with infected towns. Pull back out of site and leave the damn things alone until day 50 or 60. My favorite tactic is to have about 20 - 30 soldiers in front of about 5 snipers. Let the snipers shoot the buildings while the soldiers protect them.

As for the waves, they are all about preparation and concentration of force. In my experience the waves are not the thing that kills my bases most often. It is a handful of infected finding a way through a lightly-defended area of my base (or even worse a gap) and getting to my buildings. With only one or two exceptions, the loss has been my fault. Overaggressive attempts to clear infected. Not redeploying my patrols. Inadequate defenses. Getting too close to an infected town. So learn from it and take those lessons to the next game.

finding out you can shoot through walls is a game changer.

I’m going to stream this tonight, I think.

For some reason this never even crossed my mind. Huh - so you can just build last minute walls in front of the defenders to buy time?

Even Lucifer can do it. You do have to do careful positioning so they are as close as possible., I have never tried double walling, but I don’t see why that would not work. And towers are expensive.

Final horde was able to breakthrough my outer walls in a couple of spots, but they were only able to infect a little over a hundred people, because I had very few resources outside my main perimeter.

Now it will be interesting to see what strategies I learned that will actually apply to a non-superEasy game.

Congratulations!

Thanks!

I like to turtle, and this game rewards that with the Easy difficulty. However, it did drag a little at the end for me, so I think my sweet spot may be at a higher difficulty, with a little more action. However, I’ll probably get rolled at this next level.

So, this looks a bit like a more complex and involved TD game. Or is that just what it looks like to me and it’s actually more of a traditional RTS where you need to have your focus spread over a bunch of different things at the same time?