They are Billions - The Dark Souls of RTS

[Chazore]

Yesterday I was gifted the game "They are BIllions". It is a Steampunk RTS/building sim game, where you build your own colony in an apocalyptic wasteland surrounded by the undead.

Your mission is to survive for the amount of days you set per game session. The longer the mode of play, the easier it is to survive, but the shorter session you go for, the harder it is to survive, as you not only have to suvive against the undead that close in on your base, but also survive against waves of undead that spawn randomly around the map that head straight towards your colony.

Now I think that this game is practically a Dark Souls type game, simply because you have to manage your economy as well as expanding your base, managing your resources and building armies to protect your base and expanding efforts. You produce tents, which produce colonists that provide you with an income of gold, but they also spawn 2 workers per tent, and workers need to work in production facilities like food farms, lumber mills, stone quarries and oil rigs. Not only do you need workers for those facilities, but you also need one worker per military unit you build, meaning you will naturally have to build more tends and further expand your base, which also risks attracting the undead as you try to expand and secure more land.

 

I had one such experience just last night as follows:

I was building my base, walling the surrounding open areas with wooden walls and towers to defend with. I sent out one lone soldier to scout an area I was wanting to expand towards. he came across a "doomed city", which was sprawling with undead. He came close to one of the city buildings and shot at it, which made a lot of noise and seemingly attracted the entire city's worth of undead. THey then came down on him like a swath of locusts, killing him instantly and I thought that was it for him.

What I failed to realise, was that not only had I attacked a hornets nest of undead, but I had also created enough noise in the surrounding area that in turn, attracted even more undead hordes to join up. They slowly made their way towards my lightly defended colony and proceeded to infect and demolish it within 2 minutes.

My town centre was then infected and it was game over. The game then deleted my save file and I had to start the game all over again, this time in a totally different area on the map with different resources and different clumps of undead shambling around. 

 

I've played a total of 13 playthroughs of it so far, each with a different setting, from hardest to easiest, and I've still managed to die one way or the other.

It's still a lot of fun to play with though. I'm loving the concept of a building/RTS sim that deals with the troubles of the undead and expanding, while also trying to manage an army/colony. I'd totally suggest giving the game a shot and their art style is quite nice, while also allowing for a close and far zoom out option via the mousewheel.

 

If anyone is interested in buying the game, there are a few handy tips for playing it here:

(Current game file size is basically 1gb)

Last edited by Chazore - on 26 December 2017