54 They Are Billions

Command and conquer a zombie apocalypse

PC

What happens when you put zombies into an RTS? The answer almost writes itself. You get a defence-based survival game in which instead of a rival army, you face hordes of shambling walkers, something guaranteed to instantly capture the attention of hundreds of thousands of players. And that’s exactly what the histrionically titled They Are Billions has achieved in its opening weeks in Steam’s Early Access.

One of the game’s great strengths is that it feels utterly familiar to anyone who’s commanded and conquered. You start the game with a command centre, from where you construct all other buildings. There’s a Protoss-style pylon system: you must power areas of the map with Tesla towers before you can build on them. There are Warcraft- like resources scattered around the randomly generated map which you must exploit in order to gather the materials to construct further buildings. Forests provide wood if you build a sawmill next to them. Iron and stone deposits require quarries. You need workers to man each building and provide offensive units, and that means building tents and cottages to house them; they in turn demand food, which you can provide by building hunter and fisherman’s cottages near plains, forests and bodies of water. And then you can invest gold into researching new technologies, which unlock better tiers of structures. This cascade of resource requirements continually pushes and pulls you to expand your base to produce the stuff you need to build better defences. It’s perhaps unfair to call They Are Billions’ title histrionic, since one of its immediate party tricks is that it really does throw hordes of undead at the player. Though single zombies can be picked off in a few shots from a bow-slinging Ranger, groups of them can reach outer defences surprisingly effortlessly. A good They Are Billions player, therefore, does not only manage resources but also the art of tower defence – of anticipating from where attacks will come, using terrain as natural defences and devising various ways of diverting the hordes into wicked kill-corridors to expose them to turret fire, placing stakes to slow and damage them.

As such, the focus is not on building armies of its six unit types and micro-ing them into constant combat. Nevertheless, you’ll still be sending troops outside the walls of your settlement to clear areas, particularly Doom Villages, groups of buildings that fill with the infected. They Are Billions’ zombies are attracted to sound, so these thickets of the dead could bring tens of attackers to attack your settlement. Higher-level units, such as the flame-throwing Lucifer and melee-specialist Thanatos, are designed specifically for attack rather than defence.

One of its party tricks is that it really does throw hordes of undead at the player

But really, you’ll be preparing for the ten large-scale waves of infected that you’ll face in each game. Rather counter-intuitively, setting yourself a shorter time to survive increases the challenge, because you’ll have less time to prepare for each wave. Balancing building strong defences with base expansion, all the while reducing the size of the hordes, is critical to success, since any undead doing damage to your buildings will infect them, turning their inhabitants into new walkers. Even a small incursion can lead to the start of a chain reaction which ends in your command centre being destroyed.

As a game which has only just launched in Early Access with a single mode, Survival, across four map types and different skill levels, They Are Billions is only just getting started. Developer Numantian Games is touting a forthcoming campaign as the core of the game, promising a 40-hour storyline and various new systems and structures, such as steam trains and fortresses, to find in the world. But one thing it would also do well to build upon is greater choice over different approaches to survival. At present, specialised settlements are never as strong as those which cover the full spectrum of defences and resource gathering. Such immediate success, however, is likely to provide the necessary feedback to push

They Are Billions in all the right directions.

ABOVE By the end of a game, the hordes you face are truly vast. Survival is often a matter of retreating to the centre of your city, having cashed in all superfluous buildings so you can invest in troops and towers in a final, last-ditch defence

Defensive walls are restricted by the rule that you can only build them three layers deep. Early on, turrets have to be occupied by units, raising their range. Later you get the far more powerful Ballista

LEFT Each building has a health bar topped by an orange section, which when exhausted means the building is disabled until you repair it, once no zombies are nearby. BELOW The Ranger makes no noise, and is as such a good raiding unit for the early...