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They Are Billions - Hardcore Survival RTS
Flying Dice:
I've been tracking this for a while, and it just launched into early access on Steam. Very positive feedback from people who've had beta keys, and I just picked it up myself.
Here's the gist: It's a single-player only RTS oriented around building a steampunk-flavored colony in the post-zombie wastelands. The primary mode, and the only one available right now, is a timer-based survival deal where you're aiming to last for a certain amount of time against increasingly heavy waves of zombies, both spawned on timers and random hordes formed from the passive mobs of them on the map.
It's all sounding pretty generic, I'd bet. The hook is that the resource management is complex but clear, and really tightly wound. You're going to be spending every minute scrambling to macro as efficiently as possible while also juggling micro for the forces you're using to clear out new land, build up passive defenses, and save up for research. Even the default difficulty on the easiest map feels really damn tense. Speaking of difficulty, there are two adjustable settings: duration, and enemy density. The latter is obvious. The former scales difficulty up as the time you have to hold out for is lowered, because it's compressing the attacks that normally occur over 100 days ingame down to 80 or 60 or whatever. That, and there's no reloading saves. When your colony falls, your save gets deleted.
There's lots of well-planned little points. Walls are strong, but you can only build them two-thick. Units can't pass through buildings--if you turn your colony into a messy underhive dealie, your soldiers are going to get stuck walking single-file through crooked alleyways trying to get to the walls before they're breached. If you use soldiers armed with guns, they attract more zombies than your archer scouts. Whenever zombies infest a building that supplies population or workers, all of the people based in that building burst out as new zombies for the horde, making any breach that reaches your residential districts a likely game over. Most to the point, they're not kidding about the name: the devs have the engine set to support ~20,000 units onscreen at once. If you don't clear all of the passive zombies from the map, the last wave of the game will drag them all in on the final assault.
You unlock new maps by beating earlier ones at given difficulty levels. The maps are generated with a set of general characteristics and visuals unique to each-ferex the first map will always generate with a lot of natural chokepoints between forests, mountains, and lakes (all of which are impassable terrain), since it's the first map and they wanted it to always be a bit easier. They've got a full campaign slated for launch in early 2018. The game's $25 US, on a small 10% sale for a week or so for launch, and IMO well worth it even with only the survival mode. The music and sound are pretty good, the art style is tasteful, the gameplay feels solid.
HERE is the official trailer.
HERE is a screenshot they've had up that might give you a decent idea of what you're looking at on higher difficulties if you're sloppy.
HERE is the last bit of a 180% difficulty match on the first map played by one of the youtubers I watched before buying. FWIW earlier in the stream he mentioned being a Diamond league Starcraft II player. The other folks I watched didn't have as much RTS experience and got shitstomped even on 100% difficulty.
☼Another☼:
Yeah, I've seen a bit of this, and is seems incredibly brutal.
Images from their steam page
Criptfeind:
I picked this up and played it a good couple of hours earlier today. It's a very solid game thus far. Although it does feel a little bit... A little bit repetitive and mechanical in the survival mode. It very much feels sorta like a game all about squeezing out efficiencies and margins in order to macro up the most effective way to be ready for the zombies, which, if you like that sorta thing, great. If you're not really into that I don't think survival mode is going to have a lot of longevity, but it's all pretty high quality (except for the writing, you can tell whoever wrote a lot of the descriptions and stuff isn't a native English speaker, it's not terrible, but it's noticeable.) And eventually there's going to be a campaign, no idea what the quality of that will be like, they say on their blog they expect 40-50 hours of gameplay, but it's hard for me to imagaining it being like a star craft style campaign with lots of variety and stuff making it sorta worth playing though, but we'll see!
Flying Dice:
That's definitely worth noting, you're probably going to want to be invested in the mechanics of optimizing build orders and juggling resource shortages to get a good amount of time out of it.
The semi-random maps do help with that, since they can vary enough (mostly regarding resource placement) to seriously shift around your priorities and force you to play differently.
Criptfeind:
Well, I've been playing this some more, last night I managed to get my first win (on 100% difficulty), it took 3 games (Although I died like... day 5 my first game... Protect your tents people!).
Spoiler: A little bit spoliery about the final wave (click to show/hide)The ending wave was absolutely brutal, although the big danger with it was more the spitters then the masses of zombies (except in how the masses of zombies protect the spitters). I was ready for the thousands of zombies, I wasn't ready for like 100 spitters to come in and destroy my walls and towers from a distance. Once they broke though I ended up having to destroy about half my town ahead of the zombies in order to give my titans enough time to crush down all the various leaks, which, to be fair to the zombies, felt like I was cheating a bit :P. I'm not sure if I could have survived over a thousand new zombies spawning if they got into a housing district that I destroyed right before they got to it. Maybe not.
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