They Are Billions Early Access Review | Steampunk RTS Zombie Survival

Good mornin-afternoo-vening dear viewers and welcome to a very special review because I am super excited about They Are Billions from Numantian Games.

They Are Billions is a steampunk-themed real time strategy game taking place in a post zombie-apocalypse setting.

So that right there, there’s three factors that got me hooked, I’m a big fan of steampunk, since Jules Verne - stay tuned for my Vaporum review by the way - I am also a big fan of real time strategy games since Dune 2, and I am also partial to the post zombie-apocalypse setting - I would suggest anyone who is into this type of fiction read World War Z, in case you haven’t already.

But simply having good ideas means exactly zilch unless you can also implement those ideas from a technical standpoint.

Even though this is barely going into Early Access, I can only tip my imaginary hat to Numantian Games for managing to build not only a very cohesive game, mechanically speaking, but also a very engrossing and tense gameplay experience.

So let’s start breaking the game down into its main features and I’ll start with the steampunk theme, since this is the first word in the official description.

Steampunk setting

The steampunk part of the world is pretty well represented. The houses, as you upgrade them them look more Victorian, and the other buildings as well tend to feature a bunch of cogs, levers, gears and smoke billowing out of them. You won’t really notice all of these details though unless you zoom in close and take in the nice animations, because usually you’ll be zoomed out quite far in order to oversee as much of your settlement as possible.

The more advanced the buildings get, the steampunkyier they’ll look.

When you zoom in real close, you’ll notice that both the character and building models are quite detailed and very well animated. They went with a bit of a cell shaded look and rather bright colors for the human buildings, a good choice seeing as how the enemies are several nuances of grey. It’s a good way of contrasting the presence of life with the absence of it. So much so that when your buildings get overrun by the infected, they too become grey.

The infected

The infected - aka zombies, aka zed-heads, aka zombos - are spread all across the map. They can also just appear from off-map as well, so make sure you keep that in mind when expanding your settlement. One other thing to keep in mind about the edge of the map, the game won’t let you build things close to the edges, and that is something I learned the hard way, so make sure you don’t make the same mistake. But do wall off your settlement if you reach the edge because unless you benefit from a natural obstacle, zombos can simply come at you from there.

On the map you will undoubtedly find - usually quite close to your settlement - several bunches of infected and at the very least, one already-destroyed city. These are a major problem because they are usually very densely surrounded by zombies and if you attack the buildings, these will start spawning zombies.

If you’re feeling particularly secure in your defenses, you can put together a strike force of units and try to bring down some of the buildings for the extra resources that they leave behind once they’re destroyed.

However, taking on the 2000 HP buildings will result in a huge number of zombies being generated and I can’t really suggest doing that, unless you’ve really gotten a hang of using the various unit commands, but you can go for the much smaller Taverns of Doom, that only have 600 HP, and with a large enough force, you can destroy one quite fast, before it has time to generate a lot of zombies.

The infected come in a couple of varieties, most of them are the classic slow shambling zombies, but there’s also really fast ones which you have to deal with very carefully, and then there’s slightly tougher ones and I’ve also seen at least three, special types of infected which seemed to be heavily-inspired by the special zombies from Left 4 Dead.

Resource gathering

Constant expansion and simultaneous defense should be your guiding tactics in terms of expanding your settlement. Also, pausing the game. Don’t forget that the game has a very handy-dandy pause feature during which you can take your time with building placement. This means that not only will you be able to maximize the amount of resources each building will produce, because the amount they produce depends on their placement, but during paused mode, you can undo any building order for no penalty whatsoever. If you were to place a building order in real time mode, and then regret it, you’ll only get back half of the materials spent.

Sources of resource don’t disappear from the map - these being the forests, bodies of waters and stone and iron ore patches - which is a good thing because it makes digging-in and creating defenses that much easier, but you will still need to expand and gather more resources in order to both gain access to upgraded buildings, and also in order to be able to constantly build up your defenses.

Tesla towers are this game’s equivalent of protoss pylons, meaning that you can only build something as long as they are within the range of your Tesla tower network. So expanding always means that you’ll first have to build a tesla tower before you can build guard towers and walls, if you want to minimize resource spending. This means that your Tesla tower will be vulnerable to attack so I suggest you defend it with an army unit, especially while it’s being built.

Exploring your immediate surroundings as the game starts - using your initial troops, isn’t a good idea simply because it can show you where your closest resource patches are located and which direction you should focus on for immediate growing into, but you can also find bonus resources lying on the ground and in this game, any boost, especially at the start, can mean you’ll be better prepared for the first attack.

I do have to say that I found it a bit odd that in a steampunk setting, coal isn’t actually a resource. Even when you have access to building a power plant, it uses wood and stone in order to generate energy. I’m guessing there was some reasoning behind it, or maybe coal is going to be introduced later on, but from a setting and flavor standpoint, it’s something that’s lacking. Using stone as a resource makes sense because that’s one of your technological tiers, but using up stone in a power plant is just odd.

As your settlement grows you’ll get to elect a mayor, this is simply a choice between two different types of buffs, a military-focused one and a settlement-oriented one. You will usually get a limited number of a more advanced building - say if you’re still on the wood tier, you’ll get some stone walls and towers, or more food supply or similar buff on the other.

Expanding your settlement

Expanding your settlement is closely linked to resource gathering. You need to carefully plan ahead, as much as possible, what your settlement will look like because as you gain access to more advanced buildings, you’ll get access to some large buildings capable of improving the function of your already existing ones. For example, building a warehouse will improve all the resource producing buildings in its range, this means that you not only need to plan ahead and keep a space available for the warehouse, but that in order to maximize its usefulness, you should cluster your resource generating buildings together as much as possible. The same thing goes for your houses. Markets and banks decrease the amount of food your houses require, respectively increase the amount of money your houses generate. But their range is also limited, so building your houses as bunched-up together as possible, in the shape of blocks, will allow you to benefit from these advantages.

This also means that it would be a good idea to keep your residential and industrial areas separate. Building things willy-nilly won’t allow you to maximize the benefits of these later buildings.

One more thing, since this isn’t precisely a city builder, but it definitely seems like one, you don’t have to build roads, which is good, because it take that bit of micro-management out of the way, on the other hand, you need to make sure to leave at least one square of distance between buildings or blocks of houses, so that your troops and colonists can move freely through your settlement. This is that much more relevant in the beginning parts of the game, when you won’t have enough troops to populate all your defenses and you’ll need to move units around in order to deal with the occasional random attack. But it continues to stay relevant in later stages as well, as you start having two or more layers of walled defenses and you’ll need to move the veteran units to wherever an invasion is happening. More on this later.

Building walls and towers

When planning out your defensive wall system, pause the game, and take your time to analyze what the natural obstacles are telling you. Each map will be procedurally generated so each game will have a different immediate surrounding and you need to be aware of it, sooner rather than later.

But the natural obstacles are much more than that though. At least two of the three are also resource generating areas so you need to plan out your walls and subsequent expansion carefully so that you can use them both as resource-producing areas as well as natural obstacles.

Before getting to when you can comfortably build walls and towers, keep a close eye on the minimap and place your troops at the outskirts to defend your most distant buildings. Infected can creep in quite easily and destroy your building, not only delaying your development but also generating new infected that you’ll have to deal with right there and then.

The infected in the game tend to attack the closest piece of man-made building to them. They won’t necessarily go for the tower if a piece of wall is closer to them so make sure you keep that in mind when planning your first guard towers, make sure that they are more likely the first things that the infected see.

There are a couple of offensive buildings that you can build to help you defend your settlements as well. The ballista and shocking tower. These can be very helpful but they do cost quite a bit of resources, and their range is limited, so building them anywhere is a bit of a calculated risk. I tend to build them whenever I have to manage large portions of walls, which I tend to avoid, but sometimes there’s just no helping that, because of how the map is generated and where resources are located.

Unit tactics

At the current time there are only three units available to the player. The ranger - a fast unit, that fires arrows, the soldier - a slower unit that fires bullets, but at a quicker fire rate than the ranger and the sniper - which is the slowest of the units, both in terms of movement and fire rate, but is a guaranteed one-shot kill for most infected, I don’t know if he can one-shot the special infected. Also the sniper becomes available only through research.

When not defending your walls, hit and run tactics are the name of the game in They Are Billions. Get yourself a solid number of rangers or soldiers, I’d say around 5 or 6, and use them to clear the immediately surrounding area around your settlement. Rangers are to be used if you feel you can do this at the beginning of the game, and soldiers for later on. Also rangers have a higher speed than the soldiers so you could technically, explore a bit deeper because you can outrun most of the infected even if they aggro on you. But I have had much more success with a strike team of 6 soldiers, thanks to their increased fire rate. A Ranger needs 4 arrows to down a basic zed-head, while the Soldier can do it in 3 shots, which will also be fired faster than the arrow.

Venturing out and doing these hit-and-run attacks results in three major advantages to you. First of all you’ll be discovering the map, and this will make it easier to make decisions when it comes to which direction to expand towards, when that moment comes. Secondly, you’ll be clearing the infected that can and will attack your settlement absolutely randomly, so clearing them out first is a very pro-active way of ensuring that you get to develop and expand your settlement with a somewhat degree of safety. Thirdly, in They Are Billions your units gain experience. For the time being they can reach only one level above their default state, they can reach veteran status - which upgrades their damage and fire rate - but I foresee that this could change in the future, either by adding further experience levels for the units, or adding upgrades to their stats via research.

I tend to employ these hit-and-run attacks as often as it seems safe, because having veteran units can really make a difference during an invasion.

Zombie invasions

And these massive zombie attacks tend to take place, once every 30 in-game days or so. The game won’t assault you with wave after wave of massive attacks but it will punish you if you have insufficient defenses. Also, as you might expect, each subsequent attack is that much larger than the last which means that you need to constantly strengthen, ie increase, your defences and upgrade your units to veteran status once you’ve survived an invasion.

The game likes to keep it vague where the invasions come from, but it does give you a bit of warning, 8 in-game hours. Which isn’t much, it’s not much at all, but it will tell you the point on the map that they’ll be coming from, so you can do your best to move troops to that compass point and hopefully you have sufficient defenses set up already, because you can’t build a whole lot of things in those 8 hours.

You can build some things sure, but you’ll also be risking those resources because there is not just one way into your settlement from any of the compass points, and depending on the size of the settlement, the larger it is, the more walls and towers you’ll have to build, maintain and populate with troops.

So that’s a relatively quick look at They Are Billions, a game that goes into Early Access starting today and promises to be an extremely interesting gaming experience, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the devs add to the game going forward. This one gets an unequivocal Nonsense seal of approval, get it, you won’t regret it. I’ll put a steam store link at the end of the article.

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They Are Billions on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/644930/They_Are_Billions/

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