Are you thinking of buying They Are Billions? Maybe you’re looking for a new city-building, procedurally-generated, roguelike, RTS. TAB could be your next game! I’ll give you an outline of gameplay, tell you what I think of it, and hopefully help you make that decision.
I’ve already mentioned some things that the game is, but here’s some things that it’s not: there’s no logistics, no multiplayer, it’s not easy or mindless, and games don’t go quick. This is definitely one of those games where you go “just one more wave” or “one more attempt” and find yourself watching the sun come up when you need to be at work in a couple hours. It’s a game that’s more fun than sleeping!
Here’s some basics: to do anything in the game takes gold. You get gold by building housing; when you build a tent, citizens immediately occupy it (there’s no ‘recruitment’ mechanic) and start paying their taxes — every eight hours, that’s three times a day. You use that gold to build, for example, energy-producing buildings like the Mill (aka Windmill, except without the actual milling of grain into flour), and then you use gold and energy to build food-production buildings like a Hunter’s Cottage or a Fisherman’s Hut, and then with more food you can build more housing.
But there’s zombies. Tens of thousands of them. Seriously: tens of thousands. There’s two ways to kill them: troops and defensive buildings. You start the game with four archers and one soldier, and can train more once you build a soldier center. Your normal peons aren’t controllable; the only thing you do is build stuff, order your troops around, research, and on very rare occasions change settings on buildings.
The whole map starts out with zombies filling it. Every 10 days or so, a wave of zombies comes from one direction. The direction is random, and as the game goes on the wave get larger and larger. Until, finally, there’s one giant wave that comes from all directions. If you survive that wave, you win the map! If you win the map with sufficiently high difficulty setting, you unlock the next map. You choose the difficulty each time you start a new map, and the default 100% difficulty is probably a bit high; I tuned it down to 22% after a few games, partly to start learning how games go. My latest attempt is at 110% and I expect to win handily – tho I pause a lot, and it’s taking many hours to finish because of that.
Each map has its own challenges but those are fairly minor compared to just surviving through the last wave. This game is a roguelike — you’re going to fail, perhaps a dozen of times, before you get a hang of the mechanics. This isn’t the sort of game where you grow your town “big enough” and then stop and just do combat until you win; you need to keep growing and growing and growing. You can’t stop searching for new places to put hunters or farm, or sawmills, or looking for new iron patches upon which to plunk down a quarry. You just researched some end-game Titans and want a dozen of them? Then you’re going to need to feed them and to constantly produce the oil that they need to keep running.
To me that’s a highlight of the game: you have to stay focused. (Although: you can pause the game if you want some time to think.) You do not absent-mindedly win the game. Hence when you do win it’s very satisfying.
There’s not really any overlap between the units; no unit is “just like that other unit, but stronger”. Everything has its place, although it’s required some tweaking from the devs to get them where they are now.
To me, the challenge in the game is in the balance between progress and safety. Clearing out some new property in order to build tents or sawmills or farms requires sending troops to their possible doom. You don’t have a surfeit of troops so you try to make do with as few as you can. Soldiers are more effective than archers (ugh, “Rangers”) but they’re more expensive and make more noise; make too much noise near a Town of Doom (that is, an old city that’s now infested with infected) and you’ll get a surge of zombies that have come to eat your tents and turn all of your colonists against you.
Also, many times, I’ve left one little hole unguarded, and, of course, eventually a zombie walks through — because zombies are everywhere. Tents are as weak as heck, so a single wimpy, 35-hitpoint zombie can take down a tent fairly quickly, which then produces two more zombies. There are economic reasons to build all of your tents close together, so now you’ve got three zombies attacking nearby tents. This quickly spirals out of control and ends the game. You can repair every structure for less than full cost, though, so it’s not a total loss if you’re able to fight off the infection — usually by manually destroying some of your tents and putting up walls to slow the zombies down to give you time to bring in some troops. Yet, sometimes, the cost of repairing after such a breakdown means you didn’t build up for the next wave and you’ll wind up losing the game anyway.
So far I’ve put 150 hours into this game. That’s a pretty good return on the game investment. Now for some negatives:
It’s a roguelike. When you start a game, you choose the difficulty setting. From there on, it’s Ironman – there’s never an option to go back and resume play from an earlier save point. When your Town Hall gets overrun, the game’s over, and you can’t reload from the previous save. Depending on how fast you play, this is probably at least a couple hours of play with nothing to show for it other than another reminder that you should stop leaving gaps unguarded.
Some of the wording is annoying to a grammar snob like me. There’s a powerful defensive structure called an Executor. This structure should be called an Executioner; an Executor is someone, typically a lawyer, named to execute a will. The turbines are called mills; although they look like windmills they don’t mill anything. They’re wind-powered electrical generators; the english word for that is Turbine, not Mill. The power-distribution nodes are called Tesla Towers and the electricity-fueled towers that look like things used in electromagnetism displays by Tesla (and others after him) are called Shocking Towers. The special infected are called called “Infected Harpy”, “Infected Venom”, and “Infected Chubby” cuz, like, non-infected harpies are hot redheads or something? Don’t want to call the 500-hitpoint monstrosity “fat” because it would hurt his feelings? The Venom doesn’t spray Poison in the normal RPG sense of the word; that is, damage-over-time; instead, it’s got a ranged AoE attack. I called it a Spitter, cuz that’s what it does.
Speaking of which, what’s the difference between an Infected Aged, Decrepit, and Young? There is none, other than their graphics. So why not call them “Slow Infected” and have three different graphics sets? Or four. Or ten.
Troops suck at moving through each other. Tell 10 soldiers to run to the front lines and the first two guys stop and start firing and the other 8 get stuck behind them. Unit AI is really bad about “oh, the guy in front of me is stopped, maybe I should path around him”. Instead they use their normal “run straight into the guy’s back and maybe slowly slide around him until you get in range of a bad guy” logic. And then they give up after a handful of seconds.
Four troops can fit within a single game tile, but often it’s hard to click on the right destination since many buildings are (roughly) two stories tall, blocking the two tiles behind them. There’s no way to rotate the screen or to force buildings to be transparent (or non-clickable) so getting troops to stand behind a tower is all but impossible.
And other similar annoyances. Really, all of these complaints are minor. There’s still some bugs, but they’re not crippling.
So, should you buy it? I recommend it — tho I say be aware of what you’re buying. You’re not going to win every game; many losses will be nothing but learning opportunities, and everything’s Ironman.