The Game of Tent-Building

[Radagast]

So I just started, downloaded right before the campaign dropped (not even gonna touch my issues with the campaign) - but is there something I'm missing? It's not even about *difficult* it's about *monotonous!* I was excited for something more interesting than your garden variety RTS and somehow got something LESS interesting? I know everyone's talking about SC2, but let's go farther back in Blizzard to Warcraft3, right? Even ignoring the heroes (which were excellent), your first four units could afford to risk running around the map. Like, yes it was possible to be somewhat compromised for that but there was the potential for reward and also *it was something to do.* Early exploring was half the fun, seeing the shape of the thing, finding resources, maybe scrambling to zip back to base to deal with intruders! Something was happening.

The beginning of every single game here is tent-tent-tent, hut, hut, tent-tent, hut, sawmill, tent-tent-tent-tent....and in the meantime your starting units are *dedicated* to patrol. If you're not patrolling every possible avenue then one zombie will find a tent somehow (because you require billions of them; is that where the name comes from?) and it is destroyed before your rangers can get back to it. That's the end, might as well start over. Like...yes, fine, it's easy to avoid, just patrol, but then what am I *doing?* Drinking coffee, that's what. How long does it even take to get that first soldier center out? An hour? A year? I don't know. And when you do finally, that's one unit at a time for the foreseeable future, and they cost both food and workers - which means they both *require* and *compete* with...TENTS. :/

On the offchance that you were willing to slog through all that long enough to have a mobile force to play with...well, there isn't a lot to do with em anyway, is there? Park em somewhere, press hold or chase and...go reheat my coffee because it's been hours now and nothing has happened.

Are there any interesting decisions to be made in the base-building? Do I get to lean into one tech tree or another? Am I deciding between big expensive units or lots of small units, am I deciding between a central stronghold or many decentralized outposts? Nope. Am I deciding whether to use hunters or fishermen or farms ? Nope, you use them all and they are the same. Am I deciding whether to place them strategically or spam them at a lower production rate? No, the game tells me where I'm allowed to put them and they go there.

Am I deciding whether to spam tents or rush to upgrade them instead? Of course not - you *must* do both to whatever extent you are able. The decisionmaking in They Are Billions is on par with Candyland.

What am I missing? Is there something here to engage with that I haven't noticed? Because I was *really* excited for this game - I had so many thoughts on which direction they might go. It's just weird that they never picked a direction.

Guess I'ma go play Castle Creeps or something? That's a better made game and it costs me nothing but what I think it's worth.

[Lazy Dog Daddy]

I think you answered yourself , you mention exploring the map , finding ressources , etc from wc3 , in survival(because we are NOT talking about the campaign here right?) you should have a soldier center very early on , i get it usually by day 6 , then you start making units and explore ... find the villages of doom , the ressources crate , minerals seams and oil deposits .. try to locate the best chokepoint for the final wave .

The building decisions are more how to maximise your space and not overlap huts/farms . How to make settlements of tents that maximizes the market , bank and inn bonus . How you protect your base and from which choke point . And so on .

I find myself on your opposite , i have to go reheat my coffee after day 60-70 because im too lazy to keep expanding when i know im safe for the final wave -.-

[DaBa]

All I will say is that I really don't buy that you have played any of the most prominent classic RTS games. The beginning it's always just macro and executing the build order. You make a couple more tents? You build more peasants or spawn more drones. You build food production? You build farms or warp in Pylons. You build more tents? You take your expansion or tech up. Those old games have the same slow starts. You either don't realize that because you see those games through your rose tinted lenses, or are straight up lying and have not played them.

Also, you seem to fail to realize that there is a big difference between those old RTS games and TAB. Starcraft, Warcraft, Red Alert, Dune, TA, whatever old RTS you play it's always about destroying your enemy with your units. TAB is not about destroying your oponents with units, it's about surviving your enemy. It's just like those timed base defense missions that you for sure remember if you played those games. In those scenarios, building up and your economy, while focusing on defence is a much bigger focus. TAB does exactly that, there is a much bigger focus on proper base building and efficient macro. So, while in Starcraft you will be teching to hydralisk to do a hydra bust, or rushing carriers, in TAB you will be building more buildings instead of units. Units come later, when you establish your economy, and they are used is static defence or to clear the map. I don't see where the problem is. If you find base building a slog, then maybe don't play games that focus heavily on base building... I don't know what to tell you.

Also, it's not like you don't go out on the map with units. You want something exciting? Try to keep up your macro and expand your base, while exploring the map with 6 control groups of rangers, and making sure to micro every single one of them so they don't die to a group of runners they did just aggro. Here's your classic RTS experience.

[Radagast]

How long does it normally take to hit day 6, roughly? Honestly how long does it take you to reach day 60? How long does it take to clear one survival map? Because I haven't checked, exactly, but I'm wondering...

How much of that time do you suppose is spent actually doing those things? You know, the design and the clearing out and the deciding about choke points? What fraction of the game is it? Ten percent? Twenty?

And how much of that time is spent putting down tents and waiting for them to finish so you can put down farms so you can put down tents so you can build that bank or whatever?

[Radagast]

Yes, I am straight up lying and definitely did not spawn copies of Starcraft and Warcraft 3 on all my old university's computer labs so we could use the lan. You got me. :p

[holy-death]

Originally posted by Radagast:

So I just started, downloaded right before the campaign dropped (not even gonna touch my issues with the campaign) - but is there something I'm missing?

The big issue is that technology is locked, which makes playing certain missions harder that it should've been otherwise (Iack of Soldiers on Swarm, lack of Farms/Cottages/Ballistas on normal missions, etc.).

Another problem is that the maps are always the same, so I don't really see a lot of replayability value in the campaign (and that gets even worse, as it compunds the technology problem). In survival you have a fresh map each time, so expanding your base in order to survive is much interesting way to play the game.

All in all it feels like they tried to chop off parts of the survival gameplay and make a campaign out of it, and it didn't work out. At least with the way the took.

Strategy map isn't really a strategy map. It's an old school "select the next mission" screen. There is nothing interesting about it. I remember reading about the train, having to defend various colonies against wandering hordes of infected... It sounded way cooler in theory.

Long story short: survivial is a better game.

Originally posted by Radagast:

How long does it even take to get that first soldier center out? An hour? A year? I don't know. And when you do finally, that's one unit at a time for the foreseeable future, and they cost both food and workers - which means they both *require* and *compete* with...TENTS. :/

1) Focus on getting Training Center ASAP. All you really need for it is stone, so find the nearest stone deposit and survive long enough to get it operational and start expanding your force, so you can't protect your colony and then send expeditionary forces out.

2) Use Rangers if you don't have Farm tech. Rangers don't require food, only workers. If I recall correctly the Farm tech also unlocks Cottages (upgraded Tents basically), which does help save the space.