30th March 2018, 7:51 PM
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.
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.