The developer of zombie plague RTS They Are Billions has released an official level editor that will let you build your own survival scenarios—and play through other custom creations via the Steam Workshop.
After you subscribe to a level in the Steam Workshop, you'll be able to play by hitting 'custom levels' when you launch a new game. The level editor has been in testing for a while and when it launched on Thursday more that 80 player-made scenarios were ready to go. Another 40 have been added since—the levels include a full episodic campaign called the Emperor Series and lots of ultra-hard challenges.
They also include a level created by developer Numantian Games called The 50 Days Challenge. As the name suggests, you have 50 days to build up your colony before the final swarm of zombies arrives.
As for the editor itself, you can access it in-game (hit 'more' and then 'launch editor') and it'll let you create a map from scratch or edit a randomly generated one. You can add custom events and scripts to help build a narrative for your level, and it supports multiple languages. You can find an official guide for it here and if you're stuck on anything then look in the comments on that page, where the developers are helping to troubleshoot problems. You can visit the forums here.
In a Steam post announcing the editor, Numantian also updated fans on the long-awaited campaign mode for the Early Access game. Now that the level editor has launched, the team said they will "focus on finishing the campaign mode", and are aiming for a spring 2019 launch.
Thanks, RPS.
Steampunk zombiefest RTS They Are Billions may not have a campaign yet (it’s coming), but I reckon this latest early access update might be more important in the long run. Released yesterday, developers Numantian Games rolled out their Steam Workshop-integrated editor after a couple weeks of testing. Players can build scenarios both hand-crafted or procedural, with custom rules, complex scripting and new victory conditions. They also released a new official challenge scenario – even with reinforcements, can you finish your defences when the horde is only 50 days away?
While Numantian Games continue work on the singleplayer campaign for Early Access RTS hit They Are Billions, they've also been sliding bonus stuff into the survival mode that's currently available. The latest patch adds a new zombie type called the Infected Giant, a behemoth so big they're marked on the minimap so you know not to expand in their direction until you're ready to take them on.
The giants only appear if you're playing on Challenging difficulty or above, but for those players who've already mastered their build queues there's also a new difficulty called Nightmare that adds three giants to the map and 30% more zombies than Brutal mode already has. A few tweaks to armor, new map features, and other bits of balancing have also taken place and you can read about that on their blog.
This brings They Are Billions up to version 0.9. It's available on Steam.
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