Ballista deal well with Doom Villages, although you'll need to chain a few, as otherwise zombies will destroy them in production.

Don't delete old walls - they give you a little bit of breathing room in a worst case scenario. You'll still have quite possibly lost, but you might manage to spam enough units to deal with it.

Walls can be built two deep easily, and can be staggered to be built more so. Zombies don't actually path through, they'll attack walls that are in their way, so you can build outwards from proper walls with ones to throw away.

One thing I found quite useful in the final wave was building a machine turret just outside my city, surrounding it with a double wall, and then actually having a double wall with guns/towers between that and your city. But beware the power/gold/worker costs.

 

I watched a few streams of this but while the idea looked interesting it didn't look like there is enough variation (be it in units, buildings or strategies) in it to keep me interested in playing it for more than a few hours (or buying it myself).

 

Just finished the first level. They games somehow moves super slow, yet super fast at the same time. Like, when you get an alert that zombies are coming in 8 hours, they literally arrive before my army can get there from the other side of the base. Part of that is my fault since I didn't really know how to play so I chose a 150 day thing, and that took forever, even though the final wave actually came at like day 135. That was weird, but I was just thankful it was over. I had a literal colonist count of over 9000.

I don't know... I didn't find it to be that fun and I can't imagine getting to the final wave, losing, and having to redo like 10+ hours of play. I love zombie survival games, but I guess I'm more into the actual survival aspects of it. I guess it feels too much like an rts, and not enough of a zombie game.

 

Playing it via a friend's shared Steam library, enjoying it so far. Lost my first match on the fifth wave because I thought I could go it with bulk Rangers. On my second now, and I may have fucked up with walls that are too long, but I can build Executor guns now so YOLO. The game itself is pretty much made for my particular style of RTS playing. I can't micro for shit so I'm all about that turret/tower life.

Is the zombie/horde pathing pretty much 'murder whatever they see first'? Will a horde ignore a small fortified square to go deeper into your settlement, or is the scratch post strategy always viable?

 

I believe they will go for the first target, but once all space is occupied and they can't hit it the next zombies will movie on.

One very important thing to note is having some units/turrets on highest level target priority. It sucks to have double/triple walls blocking some turrets, only to have them disabled by the ranged zombies.

 

So there've been a few updates since the last post, with new buildings, the music all recorded by a proper orchestra, and a ton of bug fixes.

The new building is the Inn, which lets you buy mercenaries which are veteran tier units. Pretty cool, but of limited utility by the time it's practical to have it built.

Also finally managed to complete a round at the proper difficulty for the first time. Constantly getting nailed by wandering Davids was driving me batty, and I can't believe it took me over forty hours to do so. Haven't had my ass kicked by an AI on an RTS like this since before I grew my first chin hair.

 

I know this is the flavor of the month from 3 years ago, but I decided to pick it back up on a whim recently, see what's been done with it since the last time I played.

Anyways, there's a campaign in the game now. Bunch of levels. The credits said there's 24 levels, but I'm not sure what it counts as levels, as there's 3 different flavors of maps now. There are the normal survival levels, which I'll take about later. To unlock some survival levels, you need to go through a tower defense type scenario. I wish it was actual tower defense, but as is, it's not too difficult on normal difficulty, though the difficulty mostly depends on how much side content you did, since beating levels gives you unit points to purchase units with. You essentially purchase walls and units from this currency, and when you've got it all set up, you hit the start wave button. A simple box of walls is enough of normal difficult, and then once you start adding wasps its easy.

The second type of level is a hero scenario. I liked this a lot. You essentially breech old world facilities looking for research and such, and it explains the lore of the world. For the most part, they're pretty fun, but they are quite hard. The first level where they introduce the harpy is brutal, as you are pretty much forced to take a death halfway through since you don't know they are there, and one of them spawns in random rooms. You get a skill point after each one of these levels, but the issue with that is that you can't undo it, and the game doesn't tell you that the skill tree unlocks diagonally as well as orthogonally. Meaning, by the time I got to the last level, my skill tree was super unoptimized, and there was nothing I could do about it except restart or live with it. Kind of annoying, but the whole game is built around iron man mode.

Lastly, the actual scenario maps. It starts off with 1/5 difficulty, and ramps up to 5/5. Essentially, these are what the game was 3 years ago, packed into a campaign, with a difficulty curve. The harder the map, the more congested it is, and the more difficult the mobs you encounter are. There's some maps that introduce a mob, like there's a map with a crater that is full of like 1000 harpies, and another with giant berserkers, and another with plague spitter waves.

The trick to this is that the game builds up like a traditional rts. Like, in command and conquer, in the first scenario, you only have access to basic tech. It's the same thing here, except you get to control it, as it's a tech tree in which you acquire research points to unlock whatever research you want. It's a fun part of the game. I rushed upgraded soldiers and never got snipers, for example. And there's wonders you can get. One that is a super farm that gives +800 food, a super tesla tower that has massive range and gives +800 power, a super oil pump that converts wood into oil, one that is a telescope that shows the whole map with no fog of war. There's a couple others that I didn't get, as you don't get enough research points to unlock anything.

As for gameplay, the Wasps are quite good. I got them fairly early, and it made a huge difference. They are machine gun turrets with low power and gold upkeep, with the only downside being the initial iron investment. After that, soldiers were my go-to, but the best unit I think is the thanatos, which is the rocket launcher guy. A couple of them can keep the masses of undead away with ease. The titan is good as well, and expensive, really only useful for tanking and being a quick response unit. Lucifer is useless I feel like. One thing I'm not sure about is the executer, which is the upgraded great ballista. I got it late in the game, and didn't really notice a difference. Never got the shock tower, but there's a bunch of upgrades for it.

Anyways, it was really fun. There's a few plot twists that I found amusing. The main issue is the length of some of the scenarios. Like, 2 hours at a minimum, up to 6 hours for the very last one. And there's no way to speed up waves, so it can turn into quite a drag. Add in the fact that every map is iron man mode. That's part of the game, but it makes it a drag. Like, if I lost the last scenario after 6+ hours, I'd probably never open the game again. Past a certain point, I just wanted it all the be over, and even on normal difficulty, there's some close calls. All in all, it was an extra 75 hours of content (which is really length for an rts campaign, and thats with minimal failures), so for anyone who already owns the game from back when it was early access, it's definitely worth looking in on again. There's also a weekly challenge scenario which is a new map every week with a leader board.

 

I had no idea the campaign mode was new! I picked up the game not too long ago (before Valheim stole my interest) and I was happily munching my way through the campaign. Still haven't tried sandbox mode.

I don't usually play campaign mode on games but it's quite nice getting to unlock stuff gradually. I thought it was a little odd that we were asked to unlock tech long before actually seeing what it can do as a new player, but the player base already being used to the buildings available before the campaign mode makes more sense!

I would say don't stay on normal difficulty once you're slightly used to how the game works: it's dull when you're not being pushed hard enough.

Edit: I like the game a lot. It's relaxing and punishing all at once. Haha zombie hordes go splat.

Hero missions are awful though! I hate them! I'm too unwilling to die so I very painfully slowly inch around the map...