They Are Billions

They Are Billions (2019) stands as one of the most critical, hyper-stressful, and mechanically defining turning points in the history of the real-time strategy and survival tower-defense subgenres. Following the exhausting market fatigue of traditional player-vs-player fast-click RTS clones, the future of macro-focused single-player strategy was highly uncertain.

Spanish independent developer Numantian Games stepped in, discarding conventional competitive templates, and focused development duties on a grueling, asymmetric PvE survival engine. Faced with the intense task of matching traditional base-building management with rogue-like survival tension, Numantian delivered a stellar chapter that beautifully bridged dark steampunk world-building with intense crowd-rendering technology.

The Grand Reset: A Steampunk Reconquest

They Are Billions completely severed ties with standard near-future sci-fi sandboxes or traditional modern zombie tropes. Instead, it established a tightly constructed, bleak steampunk post-apocalyptic lore continuity: The Kingdom of the New Empire.

Set in the late 22nd century following a global pandemic caused by “Rabies Z,” billions of ravenous infected have entirely overrun the planet, leaving only a few thousand human survivors holed up inside a protective volcanic crater. The massive 48-mission single-player campaign, The New Empire, tracks players acting as colony administrators answering directly to the imperialist Emperor Quintus Crane. Tasked with executing a massive railway-driven expansion outward from the crater, players must reclaim infected wild lands, discover ancient pre-apocalypse human tech labs, and rebuild a sprawling steam-powered civilization.

The Core Evolution: Real-Time with Pause & The Infection Chain

Numantian Games boldly turned away from standard competitive RTS parameters to engineer an unyielding macro-defense framework built on mathematical pathfinding and structural spatial management:

• The 20,000-Unit Custom Engine: Real-time battlefield calculation broke traditional software limits. Numantian built a custom, native 64-bit engine explicitly capable of rendering and executing independent pathfinding routines for up to 20,000 individual infected units on screen simultaneously.
• Real-Time with Pause (RTP): The game completely decoupled success from actions-per-minute (APM) speed-clicking metrics. Players can pause the entire match timeline at any millisecond to review base parameters, place miles of structural wooden barriers, or assign firing targets to their army, turning panic scenarios into an analytical game of defense chess.
• The Chaotic Infection Chain: The game introduced a terrifyingly strict approach to structural security. Units and civilian housing do not feature abstract health pools that safely regenerate out of combat. Letting a single low-tier zombie bypass a wall to touch a civilian tent or cottage immediately infects that building. It instantaneously turns the workers inside into fresh, aggressive zombies that burst out to assault adjacent structures, sparking an exponential, catastrophic domestic collapse within seconds.

The Deep Meta: Logistical Interdependence & The Six Wonders

To maximize survival strategy, They Are Billions engineered a hyper-interlocking, multi-tiered economy pipeline. Resources are completely split into spatial parameters (Food and Energy) and physical materials (Gold, Wood, Stone, Iron, Oil). Expanding your workforce requires upgrading housing, which draws a continuous maintenance drain on your food fields and power plants. This is paired with expanding your physical boundaries across the map using Tesla Towers—specialized structural nodes that cast a localized energy grid matrix required to place any building.

This micro-management loop culminates in the construction of The Six Wonders. These massive, hyper-expensive end-game monuments dictate your final survival scoring metrics and grant game-breaking, faction-wide passive abilities:

• The Crystal Palace: Generates immense, self-sufficient food reserves completely independently of surrounding terrain fertility.
• The Victorious: Boosts nearby residential gold generation by 20% while doubling the defensive health values of adjacent stone structures.
• The Academy of Immortals: Instantly trains all current and future army mercenaries to maximum veteran status, maximizing their damage outputs and health regeneration rates.
• The Lightning Spire: Functions as an ultimate power generator, broadcasting massive energy arrays across the colony while acting as a heavy defensive shock coil.
• The Atlas Transmutator: Progressively converts raw wood and stone deposits into fuel pipelines, granting continuous oil generation to fuel mechanized units.
• The Silent Beholder: Instantly clears the global fog of war permanently across the entire map, tracking zombie swarm routes in real time.

The Asymmetric Survival Roster Matrix

Tactical field management relies on balancing the distinct sound signatures and combat roles of your human mercenaries against specialized infected archetypes:

The Modern Standard: The Iron-Man Survival Meta & Custom Campaigns

The modern standard of They Are Billions remains heavily populated today as an absolute monument to hardcore strategy endurance. The core survival engine natively enforces an unyielding Iron-Man save policy—manually backing up saves or reloading old checkpoints to undo a sudden base infection is entirely locked out by the software, forcing a high-anxiety, single-chance playstyle where a single pathfinding error permanently erases hours of colony planning.

The game operates seamlessly on modern 64-bit systems under Windows 10 and Windows 11, scaling cleanly into sharp 1440p and native 4K display configurations with zero interface stretching out-of-the-box. While Numantian Games has kept the game in its completed, definitive version, the thriving community platform via the Steam Workshop has sparked an incredible custom map renaissance. Players leverage the game’s deep level editor to deploy fully voiced, multi-chapter custom survival campaigns, keeping the title permanently preserved as a high-stakes masterclass in real-time tactical isolation.

Release History

• Steam Early Access Launch: December 12, 2017 (Debuted with baseline Survival Mode maps)
• Version 1.0 Full Commercial Launch: June 18, 2019 (Formally integrated The New Empire campaign)
• Console Port Launches: July 2019 (Published on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One via BlitWorks frameworks)