They Are Billions is an RTS/building simulation game in early access on Steam. I got it last week, and have been completely hooked since; Steam says that I've played it about 23 hours, and that's probably accurate. The game has issues, and I can see why there is a bunch of controversy in the games' Steam forum, but overall it's a great and really addictive game. I'm really liking it, so I thought I should make a thread.
Basically, They Are Billions is a base-building-focused strategy game that runs in pausable real time. As in building sims like The Settlers, Tropico, or to a lesser extent Caesar, the core of this game is building up a large base and dealing with the nested requirements therein. Unlike a standard RTS such as Starcraft or Command & Conquer, but like those aforementioned titles, here resources do not run out, the challenge is getting all of the ones you need. There are a bunch of resources, and all buildings require not only a build cost, but also an upkeep cost in several resources. So, you need to keep scaling up every element of your base in order to expand and go up the tech tree, which requires a lot of space and planning. Fortunately you can pause at any time, and that is key for base-building purposes! I don't love management sims like The Settlers as much as I do traditional RTSes, as learning and managing this kind of games' complex, nested trees of building and resource dependency are not my favorite thing, but this game balances it well: it has more than enough depth to be hard to master, but is not as complex as some in the field, thankfully.
Building your base is the main focus of the game, but you do also control combat units. You don't need to manage peasants or such, once you build a building they do their thing automatically, but the army does need to be controlled. You only have five or six types of units you can build, so far at least, but it's a decent variety and the several types of towers add to your ability to defend your base as well. The unit-control element of this game still needs work, though -- the pathfinding is REALLY terrible, and trying to target a specific enemy may or may not work, which can be a big problem. I really hope that they refine the games' pathfinding and unit control systems before the final release. You really need to micromanage units. At least you can pause though...
As for the game, so far there is only one mode, survival. The devs promise a campaign of some kind will be in the game eventually, but it's not yet. In survival mode you control a human colony, and try to survive the zombies in that area. Maps here are randomly generated, though you do aways start in the center. This survival mode is not endless, however -- if you manage to survive 100 days, you win. Over the course of those 100 days waves of zombies attack you. Additionally, the map is full of zombies you can go out and try to kill, or deal with when they get close to your base. You will need to kill some in order to expand, or to reduce the number of zombies that will get attached to waves or attack you during a wave. It's a simple formula, but it works very well and leads to great tension as you try to get a base that will be able to withstand the next wave. On the downside though, the game is repetitive. Outside of the random factor of the map and where zombie waves come from, every game plays pretty similarly, as you build your base going on the same tech tree, expand, wait for waves that roughly attack at the same times every game (though, again, from random directions), and such. It's a great game and so far I'm definitely not bored of it, but They Are Billions doesn't have the variety you might expect from a great RTS.
Still, overall so far I love this game and am hooked to it. I've been playing it some almost every day...
So to say a bit more about this great but repetitious game, in each game you start out with a town center, four ranger units, and a soldier unit. You always start in the center of the map, and explore out from there to see what your environs look like, while also starting to build your base. There are five main resources, gold, wood, stone, iron, and oil. These resources each start out with a cap, for 4000 for gold and 100 for the others, that you can increase by building Warehouse buildings. Oil is only used lategame, but you'll need the others earlier. Additionally, you also need to pay attention to your current number of available workers, and the amount of available food and power you have available as well. At the beginning, the only resource you are getting is gold, which generates from your population, ie, from taxes presumably. You'll need to build buildings to get the rest of them, including various buildings to get food from different sources, and quarries and sawmills for wood or stone and iron, so long as they are built near trees or ore patches. Again as in The Settlers and such mineral deposits do not run out, but nor will this complex tree of nested dependencies ever not keep costing you money. All buildings except for your command center require maintenance resources to continue working, including workers, power, and such. So, to expand your base you need to build more of everything -- more farms or fishing shacks for food, more power plants or mills for power, more quarries and sawmills for wood, stone, and metal, more warehouses, markets, and such to reduce costs and increase income and resource maximums, etc. A lot of these buildings are large, too, so I can definitely see that planning out your base ahead of time is a good idea, though I'm not great at that yet; maps are so broken up by forests, lakes, and such that it's hard to fit everything in neatly!
A good player will quickly and steadily expand their base, never letting themself get to a point where you're completely out of free food, workers, or power, since in such a case you're frozen and have to disable or destroy a building in order to get your base moving again (unless it's workers and you solve it by letting some troops get killed, but that's not a great solution obviously.) I'm far from a good player, as is usual in this kind of game once I get a good base set up I like to sit in it and not keep expanding like you should to really do great at this game, but still I really like it, base-building is a lot of fun!
As I said though, the combat side of the game has issues. First, the pathfinding and targeting are particularly problematic. Unit pathfinding is HORRIBLE and your troops will run straight into corners instead of going around them from the start, first. Also, figuring out exactly where you can and can't get through with troops is not clear and is a big trial-and-error issue. Can I, or the zombies, get through that gap, or can't I? You'll pretty much just need to move a unit to the point to see if they start moving the right way or way off in the opposite direction. During battle, trying to give movement orders is finicky because of this, as it's way too easy to accidentally send troops the wrong way, maybe dooming the whole colony as a result. It also can be quite hard to get your troops to attack one specific zombie in a group, if you need to do that to save a building. Buildings can only take a relatively few hits before they become infected and spit out a bunch of new zombies themselves, so this can be a huge issue.
Making things worse, you'll never know exactly where enemy waves will hit your base. Now, during the 100 days of each game, at certain preset points waves of zombies attack you from a random direction, north, south, east, or west. The number and types of zombies scale up in each wave, and they're pretty much the same in every game, so you know what you will be facing every time; the problem is trying to survive it. Zombies start from a point along one of the four sides of the map, and then take the most direct path from there to your command center. But unless you have explored the whole map and figured out that pathing, which is unlikely until deep into the game because units move somewhat slowly and clearing out zombie groups takes quite a while, figuring out where they will attack can be an exercise in frustration. I've lost games more than a few times because I reinforced the wrong wall before a wave, or sent my troops to the wrong place, because it can be nearly impossible to guess this correctly and you need troops in position to have any chance at stopping most of the waves! I really wish the game would give a much better indicator of where zombie waves were going to go, it's kind of unfair as it is.
On that note, one issue with the game is that luck plays a significant factor. First, the layout of the map is always random, and where those zombies, resources, and potential choke points are will determine a lot in every game. Second, zombie waves attack from random directions as I said, and which way they come from often will decide if you can stop them or not, not only for those times that I defend the wrong wall, but simply -- do they come at a point you have well defended, or your weakest wall? You'll never know for sure and this can get very frustrating, as you lose games you were doing well because of random factors like that. Additionally, at four points in each game you get a choice between two people for mayor of your colony. These are essentially random bonuses, as each mayor gives you a thing. Some give you a free military unit or two, some resources, some walls or a building, some a specific tech-tree advance; you never know, and some are MUCH better than others. Being given a great mayor bonus can be a huge boost to a game, such as the time that midgame I was offered a mech unit, which is fantastic and the best unit in the game; I was doing well, but wasn't even CLOSE to that in the tech tree, so it helped me immensely! In fact, to date that game is the one I got the farthest in. That was fun, but it's not repeatable. These random elements do keep you coming back, as you hope for better luck the next time, but I'd rather have it be about skill and not luck.
As for the other issues with the game, looking at the Steam forums it's clear that many people are frustrated by the slow pace of game updates, which makes sense; it's been in early access for months now, and few of the major issues are any different, and that single player campaign is still not in the game either. I'm fine with it taking a while to do it right, myself, but fixing up the interface and improving on quality-of-life issues like pathing, that sometimes the game doesn't recognize mouse clicks, and such should get priority. I'm sure it's hard, but the game needs it. Still though, I'm loving this game, the mixture of RTS and bilding simulation works really well and both elements, exploring around with troops to kill zombies and building up a base, are great fun. I still haven't beaten the first map, but I'm sure I will eventually... because this is a great and really addictive game. I hope the developers keep working on it and add a lot more to the game. It's fantastic as it is, but it can get even better.
Ugh, I'm at 45 hours played now and still haven't beaten the first map. I'm still quite addicted though despite this, They Are Billions is pretty great... hard, but great.
Yes, I'm still playing this stupid game. I'm not convinced it's actually fun, and still can't beat anything, but I'm hooked... it's addictive, for good or bad. There are things about the game I really like, to be clear. It's really good in a lot of ways! But it's also very frustrating. One way it's frustrating is that most games end with you losing because a random zombie got through somewhere and once that happens it's pretty much over, the zombies will infect your houses and you've almost certainly lost.
Even worse, though, is the final wave. So, They Are Billions starts out hard. The game starts out tough, and gets even harder as you go along. In particular, that day 60 wave is very hard, and more often than not wipes me out, when I get that far. But if I actually do manage to survive day 60... well, the next couple of waves are pretty easy. If you get past day 60, you're almost guaranteed to make it to the final wave, pretty much, unless you badly mess something else. Until the second-to-last wave, waves attack from one point on the map. By this time you should have the potential attack points defended decently, and in those few times I get past wave 60 it's not hard to survive to the end.
However, the final wave is different, very different. Again, the final wave attacks from all directions. The zombies attack from almost every point they can, so you need every single potential attack point defended STRONGLY if you want even the slightest chance of surviving. I haven't survived yet, again. Usually I manage to stop the zombies on some fronts, but they blow through on others. It's crazy hard.
The problem is that you need a massive amount of defenses to survive the final wave. The difference between every other wave and the final wave cannot be understated, because it's orders of magnitude harder due to how many directions you need to defend from at the same time. I have a problem with this because games of They Are Billions last fairly long if you don't lose early, so in games where I survive I have to wait a LONG time before I finally, at long last, learn where I didn't have enough defenses and will lose because of. It's a bit like SNK Boss Syndrome, named for all those fighting games where most of the game is pretty easy, except for the final boss which is crazy hard and will kill you a hundred times after you probably didn't die even once up to that point. Sure, this game is harder than that along the way, but it's still on that scale! The gulf between the kind of base you need to survive any other wave and the massive fortress you need to have any chance at the last one is obnoxious and, honestly, is kind of bad design in my opinion.
I mean, this is a base-building / defense focused game. Why is focusing on defense a guaranteed-loss strategy? Because it is. You'll need a very large, aggressively expanded base to survive the end, and I never expand fast enough because I do not like playing strategy games that way. You can get TO the final wave just fine, with some luck, with the way I like to play RTSes... but then I lose for sure because of the stupid-huge difficulty spike right at the end. It's frustrating and not fun at all, and really SHOULD get me to stop playing the game, because come on, this isn't good.
This isn't just about this game, either. I have long believed that great games scale their difficulty well, and don't have sudden massive spikes in challenge. This is one of the reasons why my favorite fighting game is The Last Blade 2; yes, it is an SNK game, but it entirely avoids SNK Boss Syndrome, and instead has a nice, smooth difficulty curve though each playthrough of the single player game. It's a fantastic game for a lot of reasons beyond that, but this helps too. They Are Billions does the opposite of that and it holds the game back a lot. There is a definite audience for the kind of play this game requires, but that isn't what I want.
I hope that as they continue to work on it they adjust the final wave at some point, at least optionally, because it needs it. Either the final wave should be easier or the earlier waves should be even harder, pretty much. There should be no insane spike at the end; it should just be a summation of everything you have seen in the game so far, not a totally different insane challenge you have no hope of surviving without some very specific strategies. I like that the game is challenging, that is part of the appeal. It's just that it should be more balanced in how it applies that challenge.