They are Billions is a single player macro strategy game, where you try to conquer a map that is full of tens of thousands of zombies. It has a special steampunk style and elements of games like Tower Defense and Factorio. You're trying to expand your control over territority and ressources, which then in turn attracts more zombies to attack your base.
The game is pretty difficult and one small mistake has crippling effects as once zombies infect one of your buildings it will spawn even more zombies. The maps are randomly generated and that will influence your strategy a lot.
I bought the game for 17,50 Euros and at some point later they're adding a single player campaign. The full release is planned for 2018 and right now it's in a beta with some bugs but pretty playable.
The only strong criticism is that i don't find a method to make better use of hotkeys, so right now you have to build your stuff mainly with the mouse in a Command and Conquer style, which obviously slows your macro down. Micro seems relatively hard to do, you can't properly stutter step the soldiers you're using to clean out zombie spots.
So after 8 hours i can tell that this game is really hard.
Partly due to the effect that it has a steep learning curve, as well as the fact that you have to make mistakes in order to avoid them in the future.
Partly because there are some minor control issues, that makes it unnecessarily difficult to control certain aspects of the colony. Like double clicking a building is selecting every copy of that building, which makes it hard to remove walls that are no longer needed, because you have to select every single piece of wall and delete it. Double clicking would target all your walls, even the ones that are important to have.
Right now i'm still motivated to get better at the game, so i can't really comment yet on late game, depth and such things.
So since this has been fairly popular on Twitch lately I decided to try it out. The game has bad controls and terrible pacing in my experience. The middle 80% of the game felt completely worthless to play through.
There seems to be a lot of time spent just mindlessly adding stuff with no real challenge while you afk clear the map and wait for the end to come. This was on like 100 days and the hardest zombie difficulty so not the absolute hardest it could be, but it didn't give me any incentive to play again.
From an RTS perspective, the hotkeys and UI are indeed terrible, but it's also very early access, and the main game mode is supposed to be story mode (only survival is out so far).
Still, it is pretty fun, maps offer a bit of a different challenge, and last map is genuinely hard (but not particularly fun).
While I don't quite understand the popularity on Twitch yet, it has huge potential.
Its popular on twitch for much of the same reasons games like Darkest Dungeon are: Easy to follow, very difficult and makes the streamer rage, which people love to watch.
I have a lot of fun watching people play it but i won't get it myself untill near release when they add more content.
This definitely could use a speed up time-function. Theres not really enough to do between waves, and few incentives to send out scavengers past the early game.
Ita a fun game for a spin or two, but once you've beaten it once, you've seen it all. It is early access so variety could be added eventually i suppose, but for now, it's rather empty.
Graphic style is gorgeous, but audio, both in sfx and voice acting, is uninspired.
Been playing 100day second most difficult, by the way.
I beat the first two maps on 120 and 100 day, brutal horde size. Then I had to seriously think about whether I wanted to play maps 3 and 4 or wait until the game is more complete with more features and stuff. It would be a shame to burn out on this game before it's fully featured. However, I do enjoy the difficulty level. But snipers need to be nerfed. They are better than every other unit until you get Titans.
Anyway I started map 3 and I'm still hooked after like 15 hours of game play. This is a fun game. But it reminds me of a UMS game for SC:BW, rather than a full game in its own right.
I like the game for what I do. It allows me to pause and alt tab any time I need to take care of something.
Snipers are strong. Thanatos are also really strong, even more so than titans imo since you get them so much faster, and their splash wipes out all the low level infected.
I would love to see a co-op type play added later, be fun to see a bigger map and the 2 of you having to work towards each other to link up and make a strong town.
Archon mode would also be a lot of fun. No-pause solo is currently not a pleasant experience. But if you could practice with a few coop partners, and assuming they fix the terrible controls, it could work.
Snipers and Thanatos are insanely strong, but they make a lot of noise. There are high tier infected close to your start on map 4, so a bit too much noise can get you killed very easily unless you have a solid wall to lure them to. But yeah, soldiers and Lucifer could use some buffs.
As for sending out troops, if you don't clear most the map before the final wave, everything attacks at once and you simply die. There are ways to cheese it, but it's easier to simply have a sniper stack out there clearing the map as soon as you have 15+.
Imo, everyone should play on 80 days and start with smaller hordes. It's more fun and you'll learn timings/build orders faster. And map 4 is much, much harder than the rest. Map 3 might actually be the easiest.
I thought I was gonna play a map or two as well and get bored, but ended up clearing the four maps on 2nd hardest, and then going back to Map 1 on hardest felt really good. Games also get much shorter as you pause less and less. First win took 8h+ hours, and now it's around 4h for a full run (I think no-pause is about 2h). Feels more like a roguelike now.
My first 2 games were on 120 days since I am particularly bad at some of these games. I found by day ~45-55 I had enough to clear the map and I had enough defense to handle the rest of the waves so I definitely am going to lower the days to have less downtime late game after map is cleared.
If you’re looking to play some custom content for the game, check out the community made level editor, which allows you to make custom maps.
Here’s a link to a video about the level editor: Here’s a link to a video that shows off one of the community made maps, which features an endless mode:
EPT![[image loading]](http://www.numantiangames.com/wp-content/uploads/TheyAreBillions6.jpg)
![[image loading]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/qve9DM6ojZw/maxresdefault.jpg)
