They Are Billions Swarm-All

I didn't see a topic for this so wanted to see if this is eating anyone else's brain (no pun intended) like it is mine? It's in Early Access but the survival mode that is currently in place seems to be complete and totally smooth.

I love RTS's and I love tower defense games and this combines them both in a really great way. But it is also a survival game and so far it is hard as nails (haven't completed a game yet). Seems like it will be great for score chasing!

I bought it when it came out and played a few games, it can be tough to start, but right now once you get going you are fairly safe until the last few waves. It is obviously in early access and can use a little more depth.

I'm looking forward to playing it after a few big updates.

I am pretty interested in it and I hope it isn’t one of those that stay in early access for years.

LeapingGnome wrote:

I am pretty interested in it and I hope it isn’t one of those that stay in early access for years.

I believe there is a hard launch date in late Spring.

So other than "your colony is annihilated" is there an endgame? I was close to buying this during the Winter sale but held off. Definitely on my Wishlist though.

Budo wrote:

So other than "your colony is annihilated" is there an endgame? I was close to buying this during the Winter sale but held off. Definitely on my Wishlist though.

I've won on 30% difficulty, 60%, and 100% so far. Difficulty is based on how many zombies there are, the map type you're playing on, and how many days you have until the final wave. If you survive that final wave, you win. One way or another, the game ends when you hit your day cap.

Have only started 3 games so far, but every single one of them my starting building has been sandwiched between a forest and a mountain or a body of water. Like literally, not even 1 space north or south. At first I thought that it would be good for defense, however this just made every one of my workers walk all the way out the west end of the base, around the forest, through a huge hoard of zombies and back in the east side. My first game lasted like 5 minutes. My second one, maybe half that as every worker was a zombie by the time they made it back to my base.

My 3rd game I turned down the number of zombies in the environment, but it still made every worker walk back and forth around the forest making it virtually impossible for me to defend when the wave came in.

I'm hoping this is just something in the version I tried and will be patched the next time I play, or I just had really horrible rolls on the RNG during map creation, because it was decidedly un-fun.

That’s odd that hasn’t happened to me. I’ve only seen my villagers get zombies when I lose a building, the random workers always seem to get to safety even when they are having to walk through the wilderness.

I keep dying on the final zombie wave and didn’t realize it was important to clear the whole map even if you don’t intend to expand to those areas. If you don’t, the final swarm is untenable (which it has been for me). So in my current game I’ve cleared the map including 2 zombie settlements (those are fun!) and digging in for the final onslaught.

Man I am digging this game.

I was pretty interested in the game, so I picked it up. Started playing...and my god, these ranger voice lines. Click on her a few times and you get to hear "So tired...last night was amazing."

The cringe. It's so bad.

the_poison_king wrote:

I was pretty interested in the game, so I picked it up. Started playing...and my god, these ranger voice lines. Click on her a few times and you get to hear "So tired...last night was amazing."

The cringe. It's so bad.

Yeah especially when their other lines are along the lines of "I'll do anything if you pay me" and "this will cost you double"

All of the audio could use a quality upgrade, hopefully the ranger voice lines get a maturity upgrade a well.

I've finally had a few games where the starting command center wasn't pinned in too tightly. It allowed me to play the game for a while. I'm doing better at getting into the midgame, but it is getting frustrating when it all comes crashing down because 1 lone zombie found a tent. There's good audio cues for when your soldier are under attack but unless you're squinting at the mini-map all the time, it is hard to know about that situation until it is too late.

After the recent Conference Call discussion, it made me wonder how close the gameplay in this is to Creeper World. It sounded similar with the flood mechanics and having to take back territory a little piece at the time. Has anyone played both?

LeapingGnome wrote:

After the recent Conference Call discussion, it made me wonder how close the gameplay in this is to Creeper World. It sounded similar with the flood mechanics and having to take back territory a little piece at the time. Has anyone played both?

*Billions is different. In Creeper World you try to beat the board as fast as you can and there are no "surges". *Billions on the other hand you need to prepare for waves of enemies. The constantly moving out your perimeter is somewhat the same; in creeper it is to attack while in * Billions it is more because you run out of space.

Hmmmm

You know you want it....

It's pretty good...
IMAGE(http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/37/37804b1b82132ee4475884a823cee2a1a520277f0492e225ae1803c63ee0f409.jpg)

I want to like this more than I do. I plan to give it some more time this weekend. I'm hoping it is just been because my real life has been pretty unforgiving, playing a game that very unforgiving hasn't been the highest of priorities as of late.

I picked this up on sale last week, and so far I am having a good time with it. I've settled in on trying it at the low zombie density, 120 day countdown difficulty level. I've gotten to the final horde once, but succumbed. My next game was going SO WELL, I loved my layout, I was far ahead of the previous game in preparation, but then I got cocky in two ways: first I spent a significant period of time doing only economic progression, not creating any Executors or Titans even after I had access to them. Heck, even a couple Thanatos would probably have turned the tide! Second when I got word of a mini-horde coming at around day 70 I didn't move my two Lucifers into position, because I didn't think they would be needed. Everyone in the colony paid for my hubris.

I'm still not 100% sold on the Rogue-like forced Ironman aspect of the game. Somehow it feels more out of place than it does in a game like Dwarf Fortress, but I'm not entirely sure why. A big part of it is that while Dwarf Fortress can also see a minor error spiral into a destroyed Fortress, those spirals are usually a bit longer term and give you more opportunity to correct them. When you combine the slow move-speed of most units, and the rate that an infection can spread through your city if your defenses falter, you can be almost immediately punished with a loss for even minor mistakes.

The decision is slowly growing on me though, most of it is just setting expectation that that's the way it is, but a lot of it is also learning some mistakes to avoid and especially some ways to make mistakes more survivable. For example going through your city and walling it into discrete districts can give you the extra response time you need to change the loss of the colony into the loss of a district. A surprisingly forgiving mechanic is that anything less than a total loss is typically surprisingly easy to recover from. Only your defensive structures (wall and towers) are destroyed, everything else is just broken into as the zombies get inside and turn your helpless citizens into more undead. After their neighbors are put down the survivors can clean everything up for the next set of tenants surprisingly quickly.

Just got this. Tips for a beginner?

  • Dont build houses near walls, banshees will jump over your walls and start an infection chain
  • Thanos(?) is really good against hordes. Treat him like a turret because wow is he slow
  • Get the Market quickly, it helps your gold income by auto-selling any overrunning supplies
  • Gold is probably your primary limiter, so look to that by building more houses, building banks near houses etc
  • Sometimes you can get stuck with a need for more workers but not enough food/energy to build a house and not enough workers to fix that problem. If you do, just turn a building off. You dont need to dismantle it. Dont forget to turn it back on later.
  • Its super cheesy, but if you're at risk of an infection chain reaction you can sell a bunch of houses and other buildings to stop the chain. They keep you from selling them if enemies are too close I think, but you're probably at risk of losing anyway so be aggressive with it. You can fix it later.
  • Most troops are just too slow to be a reactionary group, so station people around your defense points and consider them essentially stationary. Make a group of Rangers your reactionary force. A Titan can tag along and may be useful but everyone else is too slow.

Make sure to balance expansion with layered defences.

Look at halting expansion beyond ideal choke points and focus on defences there.

Those are the two things I get wrong when I contrast my games to games I have watched.

Edit - also look to clear as many starting zombies off the map since I believe they will otherwise join the final assault.

Yes, if you're just killing time in the last few days, send multiple roaming squads throughout the map to clear out groups. They all join the final assault

Another early tip is 1. Level up your guys as early as possibly. Carefully pull enemies and keep your troops fighting and pull out the leveled ones so the others get upgraded. Pretty much you want your troops clearing zombies as constantly as you can manage while doing it safely. 2. Try to get snipers early, they are much more useful late game than archers.

I haven’t touched this one in a few months, but I remember using roving teams of 20 plus snipers to clear the map with great effect. Once the map is cleared then you can stack those guys in towers to help with the final wave.

JEEBUS! One zombie inside of your camp can spread sooooooooooooo fast!

Yeah I haven't played it in a few months either and put it down because of that. Wanted to wait for some more balancing and hopefully campaign mode.

It gets significantly better once you upgrade your houses. Upgraded houses spit out significantly more zombies once they do get broken into though, so it's about a wash . A very small group of stragglers that barely breaks past your defenses can be handled easier, but any non-trivial containment failure is still going to be a huge problem for the district, and possibly the whole colony depending on your internal defenses.

Thanksgiving put a damper on my play time, but I have had two more attempts. Still no victory, I keep failing at around the 70 day mark because my defense doesn't match my expansion. I think that I need to aim for at least a couple Thanatoses by that time period. If not them, I probably need to have double walls and razor wire.

My issue is that both of the last hordes that killed me came at my most recent expansion that I wasn't even quite ready to wall, so by the time I got the warning I barely had the time to do the last tesla towers and one set of walls, let alone anything more fancy.

I am nearly positive the occasional swarm prefers the part of the map your most recent building was placed (it may be a specific building like a house), so assume your badass old defenses are useless until the end of the game. There's probably a way to game that (build and demolish a new house somewhere)

In mid game I've started expanding much more all at once. So its rows and rows of the stupid tesla pole things to claim territory until I can reach the good bottlenecks, then build walls, then secure the walls, then actually use all that space.

Ive also found you can pretty reliably use space just outside your walls for things like hunters' huts, fishing huts, mines etc. They might go down in a swarm but they'll come right back up after.

Yeah I've started doing the isolated buildings outside as well. When 30 zombies are coming a single add of 2 or 3 at the start isn't going to make a difference. Well, other than to those two or three saps.

I've gotten really into this. I've yet to win any game, mind you, but I have seen the final wave a couple of times.

Is there no tutorial for this?

It is still technically Early Access from my understanding