Thanks for the responses! Given my appreciation for tower defense games, I’ll probably pick this up, even if it doesn’t scratch my RTS campaign itch.
Did they ever “fix” the design decision of not being able to save a game in progress?
The campaign features a large, interesting strategic layer tech tree, branching mission choices (at times), some interesting mission objectives (at times; at other times, not so much), and some interesting mechanics not found in the base game. On paper, that sounds amazing.
In execution, not so much.
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The campaign locks about 90% of the stuff you could build in the regular game behind the strategic layer tech tree. This makes early missions bland, and also early tech decisions revolve around making the missions less bland. Teching up gets expensive quickly, but you get tech points from 2 of the 3 available type sof missions. Which are: “typical TAB stuff”, “horde defense missions”, and “hero infiltrate facility missions”. Also, you need to be very deliberate in how you spend points. The campaign can become impossible if you aren’t ready for certain missions at certain points (with the right techs). You don’t get tech points from horde defense missions, but you get a shitload from the hero missions. This is great except that it’s not because. . .
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The Hero Missions are tedious. They might have been fun in other circumstances.The two heroes each have their own tech trees (you get 1 point per hero mission completed). But the game balance is such that again there’s a lot of wrong choices and you will get frustrated if you find yourself incapable of killing a Chubby or a Banshee before they close on your hero. Further, the missions randomize the location of the tech points/empire points (these are used in the horde missions, representing your maximum deployed stuff). Finding these things is behind tedious, it’s obnoxious. The devs added this little glow that pulses periodically when you are in a room with them. It will catch your eye at times. You will still be wandering around going “Fuck I need the last 20 tech points whedre the hell are they”.
Also, several of the hero missions are just. . . ugh.
- The horde missions, wherein you deploy a limited amount of troops and possibly also certain structures (based on unlocked tech in the strategic tree as well as empire points) just aren’t that interesting and eventually become boring. Or occasionally rarely laughably hard no matter what.
This is all deeply unfortunate. There are positives:
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The other parts of the strategic tree are fun. You can get extra starting units (and occasionally certain structures), powerful upgrades to units and buildings not normally available (only partly covered by the standbox games’ mayor system), and do some fun stuff. The campaign “TAB” maps involve a train that brings colonists once a day. You can upgrade it to bring other materials and gold and it’s awesome.
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There are some challenging but legitimately fun missions.
I have a mostly 300% campaign I have going that I will probably win (if I finish it), but I had to drop to 200% a couple of times )you can change difficutly before each mission, it only affects score).
Wow, awesome response, thank you!
I think you’ll want to give the campaign a try. That said, the early missions are not indicative of the base game or the rest of the campaign. And they are on the boring side.
You’ll want to start in standox anyway. There’s a lot to learn in this game beyond “here’s the techs and units and here’s whats good/etc”. learning to defend colonies from various threats - hordes, soft hordes, isolated zombies, your own aggro mistakes - is crucially important and you won’t get all of those skills even in the first third of the campaign. Sandbox is the place to start. The Campaign will always be there if you want to check it out later.
FWIw, I got a couple of hundred hours playing sandbox mode when the game was in Early Access. I do think it’s terrific.
I have been trying to beat the lowlands level at 100% over and over again. My best run i survived until the final swarm but then got annihilated because they came from all sides. I just can’t figure out how to survive and get my population to 1200 before the final swarm. If I work on population I usually end up with a breach, otherwise working on defense I end up out of time.
ChristopherOdd did a play through of the campaign on his YouTube channel if you want to sample a random level or see what the hero levels were like.
What are you doing for defenses? One of the things you learn to do in the game is do both of these things simultaneously. But a big factor there is learning how to defend. Not every front needs a major defensive emplacement. Also, what are the specifics on Lowlands 100% (I can’t recall sadly), in terms of # of days and population size.
it’s a tiny map so you need to pretty much fill 3/4s of it with homes. looking at other playthroughs it seems the best bet is to hit the 1200 before the final wave, but I hate having to play through the whole level over and over again. I’ve pretty much shelved the game at this point.
Last weekend I was suffering from ennui. Three day weekend, nothing to do, and I just couldn’t get excited by any of the hundreds of games in the backlog. I tried some action games, city builders, tactics games, etc. Nope, half an hour and it’s uninstalled. What I wanted was some really grindy optimization that would make it feel like I was thinking really hard, but without too much chrome so that I could actually get to the game rather than tutorials.
So I bought They Are Billions. On one hand, it certainly was exactly what I was looking for. On the other hand, this feels like a masterclass in bad design.
The base building is totally one-dimensional. What’s going to be your bottleneck resource next? Build some copies of the cheapest kind of building doing that. Low on defended space? Upgrade instead. The adjacency effects are extremely minor, there’s no interesting optimization there. It’s a huge amount of busywork and inconsequential decisions. (Ok, I did lose a couple of early games to economic stagnation by building stone huts instead of tents, before thinking about the numbers).
The same goes for the defense building. The placement of turrets is really constrained, there are few types, and they don’t interact in interesting ways. The structure of the game discourages experimentation, since interesting waves take a long time to get to, and you won’t know in advance which front to build the experimental defense on for testing. On the final wave you’re pretty much guaranteed that every defense gets hit.
And it is sooo fucking slow. I just played a game on map 1 at 140%, which I think went on for something like 10-12 hours of real time. (Was at 2800 population at day 75, and then stopped building econ and just built units and idled). That was not 10 hours worth of active gameplay. But the game encourages using pause really heavily for pretty much the entire duration of the run: the more you pause, the faster you ramp up the exponential growth by not having resources idle. The more you pause, the less likely you are to get fucked over by a single enemy making it through.
(No regrets on the purchase though. It delivered on what it promised, and I got a bunch of gameplay out of it, even though I think it is ultimately a failure.)
I like it, but it very much doesn’t respect your time. But it’s a decent concept, I assume they decided they wanted to go all in on the difficulty once players started hyping up how hard it was and that just a mistake could undo everything, like a roguelike city builder.
Yeah, I kept holding out hope that they were going to address the whole “take forever to build up, then the tiniest leak in your borders becomes an unrecoverable snowballing catastrophe” thing, but they just…didn’t.
Failure to use early access for actual gameplay beta testing rather than another fundraising round, and/or a creative director who Knew Better Than Everyone. Or both, who knows.