Video Game / They Are Billions

They are coming to get you... Commander

"Oh my God! Infected coming from every direction! THEY ARE BILLIONS!!!"

They Are Billions is a Post Apocalyptic Steampunk survival real-time strategy game developed and published by Spanish independent studio Numantian Games, previously best known for Lords of Xulima. The game was initially released for PC on Steam's Early Access in December 2017 with survival mode. The full game was officially launched with the addition of a "New Empire" campaign on June 18, 2019. Ports for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 followed on July 1st, 2019.

In the 22nd century a Zombie Apocalypse has destroyed civilization and nearly the entire human population of Earth. Technology for those who survived has regressed to somewhere around late 19th/early 20th century tech in a Steampunk/Tesla Tech Timeline. General Quintus Crane is attempting to establish a new Human civilization capable of withstanding zombie attacks and slowly reclaiming the planet. You are one of his field commanders, tasked with reconquering lands from the Infected and building new colonies.

The game is noteworthy for the sheer number of Infected units on screen and their ability to swarm over base defenses.

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The game contains examples of following tropes:

• After the End: The game takes place after a zombie apocalypse has caused the nations of Earth to collapse.
• The All-Seeing A.I.: A mild version, as the AI knows the entire map's layout and will send any hordes on a path toward your command center while bypassing dead ends.
• Ambidextrous Sprite: The game has 2D, sprite-based graphics that are essentially a high resolution take on the original StarCraft. All sprite are ambidextrous, but it's hard to notice because most depict symmetrical characters with two-handed weapons. The Hero Unit Caelus is where it's most noticeable, since he wields a Hand Cannon with one hand, so his shooting hand switches based on what direction he's facing.
• Antagonist Title: The "billions" in the title are the Infected.
• Apocalypse How: Straddling between Class 1 (Societal Disruption) and Class 2 (Societal Collapse) as the surviving civilization settled inside a massive crater was able to recreate an infrastructure in a 19th-century technological base.
• Apocalyptic Logistics: Averted, as the survivors have regressed in tech but have started manufacturing new equipment primarily around the late 19th, early 20th century level. There are some tactical missions in the campaign with the goal of obtaining advanced technology from the ruins of the old Human fortress and cities.
• Army Scout: Your Ranger units. They are some of the fastest units in the game with a long sight radius and pack a steampunk bow so they can silently pick off individual infected without alerting a large horde.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Top tier units and structures are spectacular to look at in action but also cost a ton not just to build but also to research, build the production structure for, and maintain. Most importantly, the versatile (and in campaign, powerful) Soldier is at the very start of the Tech Tree, and aside from the underwhelming Sniper, every more advanced unit type afterwards requires four more buildings and three technologies and the limited oil resource to even be able to produce.
  • The Lucifer gets a double helping as its flamethrower is one of the most powerful weapons in the game, but it has extremely slow speed and inflicts a permanent -1 penalty on oil production for every unit in service. They can't fire from behind walls, making it significantly harder to use than most other units in a game centered around hiding behind your walls. They can also fry your own men with friendly fire, meaning they require significant micromanagement when working with other troop types. They are, however, very effective at holding gates and narrow choke points, particularly using more than one of them since they can't can't damage each other. They also serve as a very effective final protective line in the event that your walls are breeched.
  • The Executor is the most powerful turret but it also has the highest maintenance cost at 50 gold, where the ballista it upgrades from only costs 15. Most players hold off on upgrading their ballista until the final wave to avoid tanking their economy.
  • The Titan is hit particularly badly with this; incredibly expensive just to unlock^note  you have to unlock and build an Engineering Center, itself expensive, and then research the Titan itself, which costs 6000 currency, hands-down the most expensive thing in the game and more money than you can even store without at least two Warehouses, it's expensive to build, has a high upkeep, and its damage output is not even close to high enough considering all the money and other resources you spent getting the thing. They can't even gain experience and become veterans like your other troops.
  • The Mutant as just as difficult and nearly as expensive as the Titan, but it fights in melee instead of at range. To compensate, it deals splash damage and has the highest hit point total among the buildable units. The catch is that it's passive health regeneration isn't any faster than that of other units, meaning it will be out of action for several minutes if it gets too badly hurt.
  • The massively expensive Wonders that can be built all have incredibly powerful effects (like permanently revealing the entire map, instantly promoting all current and future units, or providing a bunch of oil). However you'll need several warehouses just to hold enough resources to start the very long research, then you'll have to spend even more to actually build the thing. That being said, in the later parts of the game, especially at easier difficulties, players will often find themselves with tons of resources to burn anyways.
    • The Silent Beholder gets an extra helping of this trope. It's built on top of the Command Center, which has to devote all of its attention to the installation. Meaning that you can't build any other structures while the Silent Beholder is building.
• Bag of Spilling: Any medkits or grenades your Hero was carrying at the end of a campaign mission do not carry over to subsequent missions.
• Baseless Mission: Campaign mode features two different kinds.
  • In the first, the player controls a single Hero Unit delving through a pre-apocalyptic ruin for valuable artifacts and information. Some of these missions have you rescue a handful of other units, while you'll only have your Hero for the rest. The goal is collect a specific Mission Artifact and as many Research and Empire points as you can find.
  • The second type are the result of mobs of Infected crowding the roads between mission areas. In order to reach the mission on the far side, you'll set up an outpost and requisition forces based on how many Empire points you've accumulated. Once the mission starts, you can't buy anything else. If the Outpost falls, you lose. If you kill all the Infected (and all but the first few of these missions sees them numbered in the thousands), you win.
• Booby Trap: You can build these. Examples include spike traps and land mines. Since the infected make no effort to avoid them, they tend to work pretty well.
• Boom, Headshot!: Snipers use these. They're quite effective at picking off elite zombies.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The most basic unit, the Ranger, is by far the most important unit in the early game. It is quickly and cheaply built, doesn't need special resources, is the fastest unit in the game and its silence makes it less prone to gather unwanted attention. They are also very useful for drawing mobs away from your walls during horde attacks or outposts during the swarm missions, since Rangers can easily outrun most enemies.
  • Due to upgrades available in the campaign, the humble Soldiers are likely to be backbone of your army on every difficulty and every map. They have a fast rate of fire that prevents overkill, a very low cost, good single target damage, are among the easiest units to produce, and have exceptional durability for their cost. They also have a moderately good speed rating, enabling them to outrun most lower tier zombie units and rush quickly to reinforce parts of your city defenses at risk for being overrun. The Academy of Immortals turns every one of them into veterans, making them inflict twice as much damage per second.
  • When filled with four of the upgraded veteran soldiers, the simple stone tower does more single target damage per second than anything in the entire game, including twenty foot tall Infected Giants and gatling cannons the size of trains. And unlike Balista or Gatling towers, the stone tower can't be infested, and will be fully functional so long as it has any hit points remaining.
  • Wooden walls are available from the beginning of the game. They're not particularly interesting, but they're critical for ensuring that zombies don't slip in past your perimeter as even a single infected can snowball into losing the game. Also they are extremely useful during mob defenses even after you've upgraded your walls to stone. You can still throw up large amount of wooden posts in front of your main walls, presenting a very significant additional obstacle to the enemy at a cheap price.
  • The Wasp is the cheapest defensive structure and the only one not to have splash damage. However, it is cheap to build, takes up a quarter of the space of other automated defenses, and has the lowest upkeep requirements of anything in the entire game. It is supposed to be useful against small numbers of zombies, but in terms of both cost and amount of space taken up it easily outclasses every other automated defense.
• Bottomless Magazines: Units reload, but they never run out of ammunition to reload with.
• Cannon Fodder: Your Soldier and Ranger units are the only units available without further research and will make up the bulk of your early game army. Rangers in particular can be produced cheaply in huge numbers. Even in the end game where the extremely destructive high tier units like the Thanatos and Lucifer are available, Soldiers remain so cost-effective in comparison that it’s a good idea to keep training them in significant numbers.
• Cassette Futurism: The ruins explored in the campaign's tactical missions date to the late 21st century, but have a very 1980s aesthetic to them. They feature desks with paper documentations and no workstation, green-on-black computer displays, and slide projectors instead of flat screen displays.
  • The historical documents recovered on said missions are also presented in the style of a printed newspaper.
• Citadel City: The game allows you to build a Steampunk version.
  • The Great Crater in campaign mode is this up to eleven. It has held fast for two centuries, while attempts to settle beyond it have failed constantly for 13 years.
• Clown-Car Base: Villages of Doom have a big case of this when disturbed. A small house will spawn a dozen or so while a Town Hall will spawn hundreds. Player houses also apparently house a large number of colonists each, although this isn't visually represented.
• Cold Sniper: The flavor text for your Sniper units specifically says "this sadistic killer would be in jail in times before the apocalypse." They are slow to move and reload but have a very long attack range and deal a ton of damage, killing weaker infected with one shot and even tougher infected in just a few more.
• Command & Conquer Economy: Nothing gets built unless you order it but all resources harvest automatically once the appropriate structure is built.
• Construct Additional Pylons: Somewhat more justified than many other RTS games. Your goal is actually to push back the infected and establish a new Colony, not a military base. Most of your structures will be generating food, wood, stone and power used to construct a bigger and better city. Of course you will still need military training grounds and defensive structures to protect your growing colony.
• Crapsack World: Well what can you expect from a zombified world?
  • Even the pre-apocalypse Earth wasn't rosy either. The population of Earth by 22nd century has peaked around 90 Billion, majority of whom lived in crowded Mega City with increasing shortages of arable lands to feed the populace. As basic necessities became harder for the majority of citizens, the scientists turned to Human Protein Processors with criminals, infirmed, and the homeless serving as "raw materials". Three decades after the implementation of technology, a rabies-like disease—implied to have come from food sources made from Human Protein Processors—began to spread among the populace that led to the Zombie Apocalypse.
• Cycle of Hurting: Losing part of your colony to a horde makes surviving the rest of the mission that much harder. All the resources from the lost section are unavailable until you repair them, but if you lost something vitally important to restoring services, such as enough colonists to man the Tesla Coils, this process can be agonizingly slow. Rebuilding is needed to start advancing again, but by the time you're recovered odds are good it'll be too late to fight the next horde.
• Dead Weight: The Infected Chubbies move as fast as Infected Fresh but are massive in comparison. They are also the second most durable type of zombie.
• Disaster Dominoes: Even a single, slow-moving zombie can destroy a building, turning the people within in to more, faster zombies. Since space is at a premium, building also tend to be built packed in as tightly as possible. As a result, the horde will typically spiral out of control far too fast for early game units to possibly control. Losing the game to a single zombie slipping in before the player has walls surrounding their colony is easily the most common way of losing.
• Double Unlock: Workshops must be constructed to research technology to unlock new buildings and units. In the campaign, those workshops, buildings, and units are also locked behind the tech tree and must be researched there before becoming available in missions.
• Early Game Hell:
  • You start each mission with only a command center and a tiny handful of troops, which you have to use to both defend your base and clear mobs for expansion. Since it can take a lot time to acquire the resources and buildings needed to recruit new soldiers and fortify your base with walls, it can be quite simple for a single zombie to slip past your few starting troops and set off a chain reaction among your buildings that will overwhelm your whole base.
  • The campaign is very slow to start as so much of the technology is locked behind the tech tree. Attempting to do one of the colony-building missions before unlocking Cottages and Farms will result in a massively overgrown tent town just to meet the population requirements.
• Elite Army: Building an Academy of Immortals will turn all your rangers, snipers, and soldiers into veterans for the entire duration of the level. While building it is extremely costly and time consuming, if you manage to get one up and running, it's pretty hard to lose after that.
• Elite Mooks: The soldiers (and arguably snipers) fulfill that role, being stronger than the rangers, but still being basic infantry.
• Elite Zombie: The game will soon start throwing increasingly tougher varieties at you as time goes on. Some examples include:
  • Infected Fresh and Colonist Infected, which are faster.
  • Infected Executives, which are both faster and tougher than normal Infected. They have a nice suit, too.
  • Infected Chubbies, which are massive and extremely durable. They hit very hard, of course.
  • Infected Venoms, which have a powerful area-of-effect ranged attack.
  • Infected Harpies, which are extremely fast and can jump over walls.
  • Infected Giants, which are the strongest of all the Infected.
• Expy: The Infected Chubbies are obvious one for The Tank and to some extent Abominations. The Harpies are basically The Witch (in particular the one from The Passing), and the spitting zombie is an expy of the Boomer.
• Faction Calculus:
  • Crane's forces are Powerhouse. Their forces are nowhere near as large as the zombies but on an individual basis they are much stronger. A handful of even basic rangers can clear an entire horde given enough time. They also have far stronger ranged attacks (with most infected having none), and can build bases with walls and enormous fixed defenses.
  • The zombies are the Horde. They are all about having massive numbers of weak units to overwhelm enemies through sheer numbers, with a few special units mixed in to take advantage of any gaps in the enemy defenses.
• Flavor Text: Most of the units and buildings have a paragraph description of what they do in-game.
• Fog of War: Of the standard variant, with the map being completely hidden until you map it out and any zombies only showing up when units or buildings can see them. Lookouts remove larger portions of the fog than standard buildings, while Radars reveal even more; this is useful for last minute unit adjustments when a horde arrives. If you have the time and resources, the Silent Beholder Wonder puts an observation deck on top of your Commander Center, revealing the entire map for the duration of the current mission.
• Fragile Speedster:
  • Rangers are the fastest infantry unit you can build early on but are by far the most fragile of your units with only 60 hp.
  • Harpies, considering what they are expies of run extremely fast, can jump over walls, and have very deadly attack. However, they are only slightly tougher than an average zombie, 2 shots from your snipers will put them down for good.
• Future Imperfect: Shows up in the campaign on a few occasions. For example, the Statue of Liberty is called the Goddess of Destiny in one mission.
• Garrisonable Structures: You can build guard towers as part of your base defenses and they can be garrisoned with up to four soldiers.
• Gatling Good: Titan mechs are armed with dual gatling guns, and the Executor, the most powerful defensive turret, mounts a truly huge gatling gun that chews through zombies.
• Glass Cannon: Calliope, one of the two heroes chosen at the beginning of the campaign, has a high movement and attack speed, but a much smaller hit point pool than Caelus. Your units are also this in general, being quite vulnerable when attacked directly.
  • The Wasp turret can quickly shred through most infected, but if the infected actually manage to reach it, it will be quickly torn apart.
  • Snipers have a powerful attack that will kill most standard zombies with 1 hit, but they are virtually unarmored and will go down from just a few hits themselves. This, combined with their slow speed, means they require heavy escort when patrolling outside your city walls.
• Gradual Regeneration: Units that have been wounded heal gradually over time but buildings have to be repaired manually at the cost of resources.
• Hero Unit: Introduced with the campaign mode. Currently there are Caelus, a Mighty Glacier, and Calliope, a Glass Cannon. Unusually, they are only somewhat stronger than basic infantry and are completely outclassed by higher tier units. This is not a problem, as they only appear in exploration missions where you can't produce units anyway.
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: A preferred way to clear out the map is to send a small raider group to aggro a bunch of zombies from the main horde, fall back with them pursuing you, than halting and wiping out the pursuers. This allows you to thin the massive hordes outside your walls without getting overwhelmed. Rinse and repeat.
• Hold the Line:
  • The objective of the survival campaign is for your colony to survive for a certain number of days, with 100 being the default setting, against waves of undead hordes. Alternatively, defeating the final horde will automatically count as a win.
    • Note that difficulty is increased by reducing the number of days, as it will just spawn the same hordes, faster.
  • The campaign has more variation in victory goals, but many missions include the goal of surviving the horde attacks.
• Hopeless War: Since Quintus Crane commenced his speech on reclamation of zombie-infested Earth two centuries after building up an entire civilization inside a crater, the entire liberation efforts experienced constant failures within 13 years. The players themselves are the latest among the lines of generals who had either died or driven insane from the disastrous results of their campaigns.
• Human Resources: The lore on the 22nd century, two centuries before the game's present time, had Human Protein Processors, where the "undesirables" were turned into food products to cope with overpopulated Earth. It is implied that the "Zombies" are caused by mutated rabies-like diseases from food made from this process.
• Incongruously-Dressed Zombie: Zombie Executives wear a nice suit while Harpies wear immaculate white dresses. Harpies also stand out due to having bright red hair, while the other zombies are largely greyscale.
• Instant Awesome: Just Add Mecha!: Titan units are steampunk mechs armed with dual gatling guns.
• Instant-Win Condition: On non campaign maps, surviving until the specified day wins you the game. It doesn't matter if the hordes of infected are right on your Command Center's door. As long as the hour ticks over to the victory day, you win.
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: All forests in the game are impassable for both your units and the zombies.
• Invulnerable Civilians: The colonists walking around the colony cannot be attacked. However the zombies can infect your buildings and turn the occupants into more zombies.
• Kill It with Fire: Lucifer units are heavily armored soldiers armed with flamethrowers.
• Large Ham: Judging by the unit dialogue about half your army is this.
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • The Titan mechs pack a hell of a lot of firepower, are extremely durable, and are almost as fast the Rangers.
  • On the infected side you have the Infected Chubbies which move as fast as Fresh Zombies and are also the most durable Zombie unit.
  • Despite their huge size, zombie giants have a speed rating of 4, the same rating as the player's rangers. This makes it extremely difficult to deal with in the open world, as they can outrun almost all human units, and can even catch up to Rangers unless they start running as soon as the Giant is in visual range.
  • The one human unit that can outrun a giant is the mutant, which has a speed rating of 6. This, combined with their high survivability and damage output, makes them extremely effective for for performing crowd control duties when dealing with big mobs.
• Luck-Based Mission: Survival mode can go very well or very poorly depending on a few factors.
  • The resources that are available near the starting point have a huge impact on how quickly you are able to gain access to higher tech trees.
  • Local terrain features may or may not include several natural choke points, which can greatly improve your ability to defend against large hordes.
  • The choices of mayor that are made available at each population tier are completely random. Some of them come with amazing benefits that will benefit the entire play-though such as reduced build times or reduced research costs. Others offer small bonuses like a few units or resources.
• Mercenary Units: Once you've constructed an Inn, mercenaries will occasionally show up available for hire. They are significantly more expensive than regular troops, but they start out as veterans and are hired instantly with no training time. Sometimes elite high tier units like Thanatos and Lucifer will show up, enabling you to purchase them without the cost and time of researching the required tech or constructing their required buildings. However, the negative penalty inflicted on your oil production for maintaining them will still apply.
• Mighty Glacier:
  • Lucifer troops, heavily armored soldiers armed with powerful flamethrowers, have a large pool of hitpoints (600) and a powerful area-of-effect attack that allows them to kill multiple zombies at once very quickly. They are also extremely slow. They are best used as a slightly mobile base defense force to be deployed in front of your defensive lines when dealing with horde attacks.
  • Thanatos troops have slightly less hitpoints than the Lucifers (250) and are not much faster but they have a powerful long ranged missile attack and are capable of meleeing any zombies that get too close.
  • Caelus, one of the two Hero units chosen at the start of a campaign, is this. He one-shots most basic Infected, but attacks and moves slowly. Contrast with Calliope, who is more of a Glass Cannon.
• More Dakka:
  • Your base defense tends to naturally end up like this as you add more and more troops and base defense
  • Soldier units are armed with rapid-fire sub-machine guns.
  • Titan mechs are armed with dual gatling guns.
  • The Wasp is a automated machine gun turret that is very cheap to build and easy to spam in large numbers.
  • The Executor is the most powerful turret in the game and mounts a truly massive gatling gun.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Some, okay almost all, of your high-tier units have sinister and intimidating names. Lucifer, Thanatos, Titan, etc...
• Nintendo Hard: The game is pretty damn tough even on the default difficulty settings for the survival campaign. Don't be surprised if you lose your first colony. Or your second. Or third...
• Nonindicative Name: The Peaceful Lowlands, as the description warns, house multiple Villages of Doom which will unleash a small horde if disturbed.
• Not Hyperbole: While a single player will most likely never face such numbers, the game can track a total of Infected killed across all players, and at the time of this writing the count is now OVER ONE TRILLION. So now They Are Trillions.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: In-game, zombies are referred to as "the infected".
• Obviously Evil: Subverted with the Emperor, who comes off as a cackling villain... but backs the player relentlessly in single player mode, and never betrays them.
• One-Hit Kill: Your Snipers and many higher tier units or defenses are capable of doing this to weaker zombie variants.
• Only in It for the Money: Soldiers will abandon the colony if you can't pay their wage. The Rangers in particular make it clear they're just there to get paid. Fortunately they only leave in small numbers at a time no matter how much debt you're in.
• Pixel Hunt: Campaign mode features a common Baseless Mission type where you'll guide either Caelus or Calliope through a pre-apocalyptic facility in order to search for valuable artifacts. Said artifacts are mostly found by moving your cursor over any boxes, lockers, and papers you can see and seeing if it changes. As a small mercy, artifacts will flicker every so often.
• Plague Zombie: And they will merrily spread the infection to your colonists. If one manages to get to your housing area it is pretty much game over.
• Private Military Contractors: Background material, and some of the unit dialogue, on the game states that most of your army is composed of mercenaries.
• Rain of Arrows: A preferred way to clear out sections of the map to expand your colony, especially early on, is to use a group of Rangers as showering the undead with arrows generates much less noise and attracts less attention from other zombies than the gunpowder units.
• Real-Time with Pause: The game allows the issuing of orders during paused mode, including ordering building and unit construction in addition to move and attack orders.
• Reinventing the Wheel: Research options at the wood and stone workshops, and the foundry, have to be purchased and re-purchased for each scenario. This holds doubly true for the campaign, where even the ability to build more advanced builds must be researched in the tech tree before a mission.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: As usual for a Real-Time Strategy game. A large town with a population of a couple of thousand people and large defensive fortifications along with an army can be built from scratch in less than one hundred days. Gets even more ridiculous if you get a mayor who reduces build time.
• RPG Elements: The campaign mode lets the player upgrade the stats of their Hero Unit, picking and choosing what to upgrade and what to work around.
• Ruins of the Modern Age: The final campaign mission has the colony start beneath a ruined Statue of Liberty with, "Where's God?" painted across it.
• Scenery Porn: The game is actually quite nice to look at.
• Schizo Tech: Justified since it is the future after civilization collapsed. You are only able to manufacture new lower tech equipment and utilize high-tech items, such as night-vision goggles, found in the old world cities.
• Scoring Points:
  • Survival maps have a final score based on a number of factors including: Number of infected killed; maximum colony population; and number of colonists infected. An overall score modifier is applied to this score based on the difficulty settings.
  • Campaign mode tracks Victory points. These are tracked independently from Empire points (used to clear Infected mobs from the map) and Research points (used to improve the tech tree). Unlike the other two, Victory points have no practical application in-game. Failing a mission permanently reduces your score on that mission by 10% per failure, but the amount of Empire and Research points don't change.
• Settling the Frontier: Every survival game has you attempting to establish settlements in the zombie wild-lands and pacify the surrounding territory. The same holds true for many of the campaign missions where you are building a colony to expand the Empire's reach.
• Shock and Awe: The aptly named Shock Tower which discharges a massive electrical burst that hits all zombies in its area of effect. Weaker zombies will be killed instantly, and it can hit as many zombies as can fit in its range, but it's range is relatively short and there is a long recharge between shots.
• Siege Engines: The first weapon tower that you can build in the game is the Great Ballista. It is very effective against small and medium sized groups and will serve you well for a long time to come.
• The Smurfette Principle: The Ranger is the only female unit in the game.
• Sociopathic Hero: Caelus' battle chatter paints him as very enthusiastic to put bullets in skulls. The Sniper unit speaks similarly, but is explicitly noted as being a psychopath, while Caelus is treated as a hero.
• Sociopathic Soldier: The Sniper units you can get are implied to be Ax-Crazy and would have been in jail if not for the situation which allows them to put their desire to shoot something to good use.
• Starting Units: In the survival campaign you start the missions with four Rangers and a Soldier. The campaign starts you with four Rangers, with the Soldier being a tech tree unlock.
• Steampunk: The game is set in the future after an apocalypse so they have a strange combination of vaguely 19th/20th century technology combined with some far more advanced tech as well.
• Super-Soldier: Mutants were originally created by the National Infectious Diseases Institution's Project Phoenix to to combat the zombies. You eventually get the ability to restart production of them. They have a massive HP pool and powerful area of effect melee attack but very slow health regeneration. They are also extremely expensive.
• Tactical Superweapon Unit: The two end-game units the Titan and the Mutant.
  • The Mutant has the highest health of any controllable unit, along with a high movement speed. It also inflicts Area of Effect damage to any units in melee range, making it capable of devastating hordes of Infected. However, it's not as suited for holding of the Special Infected for long periods of time.
  • The Titan is the most expensive and time-consuming unit available to the player. Best described as a mobile Executor turret, the Titan has a good movement speed and inflicts Area of Effect damage at a good range. Its high health also allows it to act as a temporary wall and physically hold back the Infected if only for a few seconds. A small squad of Titans is easily able to clear an entire map of the Infected.
• Technically-Living Zombie: According to the journals, the zombies in They Are Billions are humans infected with rabies-like neurological disease.
• Tesla Tech Timeline: In addition to the overall Steam Punk tone, there are also hints of Tesla Tech. Tesla Towers transmit wireless energy to all buildings with their range. The Shock Towers also look closer to a Tesla invention than Steam Punk.
• Title Drop: The final wave of every Survival game is announced with, "The infected approach from every direction. Oh my God, they are billions!"
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Unless one your combat units aggro some infected, their default behavior, once they make a beeline to your colony, is to attack the nearest unit or building, even if it is a wall or an empty tower. So it is possible for zombies to stupidly strike your walls and ignoring the very obvious gaping hole nearby. Even the Infected Venoms will stupidly try to attack your walls rather than a building behind it. Your actual combat units aren't much better. They fire at nearby targets, but will otherwise just stand there and let the infected kill them
  • Likewise, zombies who wander the open world will always attack the closest human, with no concern for anyone else. Thus the player can use a ranger to literally run circles around huge mobs of zombies, drawing all their attention while soldiers behind the ranger safely gun them all down.
• Tower Defense: A more complex version than most but building layered defenses with various types of guard and artillery towers to withstand massive attack waves is a core game-play mechanic. Yes, you slowly expand and clear out the map but roughly eighty-percent of the time you are focusing on base defense rather than on offensive actions.
• Undead Child: One of the weakest zombies you encounter.
• Unlockable Content: In Survival Mode only one map type is available immediately. Additional maps are unlocked by successfully completing Survival games with a certain score modifier.
• Veteran Unit: Units that manage to kill enough zombies get a veterancy upgrade, which results in a stat boost and a new skin so you can tell them apart from regular troops. However, only Soldiers Center's units (the Ranger, the Soldier and the Sniper) can be promoted to veteran, advanced units from the Engineering Center cannot be veteran at all.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: If the Command Center is overrun it's an instant game over, even if the rest of the colony is still intact and fighting.
• We Have Reserves: The zombies obviously do. Players can also spam out Rangers and Soldiers and send them out to clear as many as they can before dying. The workers spent to build them will eventually replenish, so the only permanent loss are the time and resources spent training them.
• Worker Unit: Colonists, who work, gather resources, transport goods and are used to train soldiers. You don't actually control them because the developers stated that large numbers of them would bog the player down in micromanagement.
• You Have Failed Me: Downplayed. The emperor tells the general to succeed in his mission or not to return.
• You Require More Vespene Gas: The game has a bunch of resources. Gold, Lumber, Stone, Iron and Oil are gathered over time by various buildings. Power, Food and Workers are added to a static pool whenever the appropriate buildings are finished, so if you need more you'll have to build more of them.
• Zerg Rush: The only tactic the zombies have. Stronger units start to show up eventually, but even then the hordes will consist primarily of enormous numbers of standard zombies. The game could be considered a master-class in defending against zerg rushes.
• Zombie Apocalypse: And you are in charge of undoing the damage.
• Zombie Gait: What the regular Infected do, as their bodies have decayed too much to move faster. The elite infected variants are little bit more varied.
• Zombie Puke Attack: There is a ranged Infected variant that has this as a base attack. Can be shot over walls and infect buildings.

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