They Are Billions Update: Development Progress

Greetings!

As you know we are working on a big update for They Are Billions (V.0.8) with The Six Wonders, that we expect to publish on the 5th of May. Yes, it has been delayed, sorry about that! The main reason is that we have to translate all the new stuff into 12 languages which pushed back the release dates and also requires extra testing time.

Meanwhile we have used this time to add more features suggested by you, the players, to improve many aspects of the game. Apart from the Six Wonders, which we will go more in detail in our next post, we want to talk about the new features of the upcoming 0.8 version.

New Language Available: Italian

Finally, we have finished the translation to Italian and it will be included in the next version 0.8. They Are Billions is now available in twelve languages!

Flat Mode (F4)

This is really helpful! You can toggle the Flat Mode with the F4 key. When activated, mountains and forests will be displayed just as flat coloured cells, allowing you to see what’s behind them, making it easier to build near those hidden parts of the map.

More Building Assistance

The cells that are in the map limit, where building is not allowed, will be displayed without energy so that it is much easier to know where the limit is and plan your defences accordingly.

Also, when building, all existing objects will turn semi-transparent as the mouse moves over them, to improve the visibility behind them.

Chasing Command for Groups of Units

You will really love this feature! Now, all units in the same selection slot will automatically go in a group formation when they are in the chase command mode. Just select a group of units, save them in a slot with right click and then activate the command chase.

The Inn 2.0

The Inn has been improved in several ways. It’s influence radius is now bigger, and It’s building margin reduced by one.

Mercenaries come to the Inn every five days, except the first ones which will come after just one day. Also, the number of days remaining for new mercenaries to arrive and the percentage of prestige of the Inn is now shown in the features panel. The more prestige, the more powerful the group of mercenaries will be.

30 New Mayors!

We have added 30 new mayors to add more variety to your colonies. Also, if Mayors that bring resources to the colony (for example 200 wood) provide an excess that cannot be stored in the warehouses, they will be placed as bonus items next to the Command Centre, so you can use them when needed. This can be very useful when building the ultra-high expensive Wonders.

Lots of Balancing Improvements

We have made lots of balancing tweaks, so many that we cannot cite them all here. We have improved the Soldiers (that were not so useful compared to other units). Soldiers now level up faster, they do a bit more damage, they regenerate full life in just 24 seconds, their Armour is better and gives 50% more resistance to fire and venom.

Also, Lucifers do more damage, have more health and regenerate full life in just 12 seconds, and they have 75% resistance to venom.

Titans attack radius has been increased by 20% and deal more damage, also they have more life and Armour, but they are more expensive.

Many of the structures have also been tweaked, so now the game feels much more balanced. Also, the map generation is better now and the map scenario types have also been improved.

Now, more than ever, you will have a wider range of strategic options to fight the infected and develop a successful colony.

Units Health Regeneration

We have improved this mechanic to make it more relevant in game. First we have added a tooltip for the Life text in the selection panel which will tell you about the life regeneration rate of the unit. Units start to regenerate health after two seconds without having received any damage. It will then regenerate a fixed number of life points every second:
Ranger: 1 point / second. Full life in 60 seconds.
Soldier: 5 point / second. Full life in 24 seconds.
Sniper: 1 point / second. Full life in 150 seconds.
Lucifer: 40 point / second. Full life in 12 seconds.
Thanatos: 3 point / second. Full life in 83 seconds.
Titan: 8 point / second. Full life in 100 seconds.

Press F10 to take a Mega Screenshot of your entire colony!

This is just amazing! Have you ever wanted to show off your colony to your friends? Does your colony look amazing with your Six Wonders? Have you won the game without using walls or with any other crazy condition and you want to show it to the world? Now you can! 🙂

Just press F10 whenever you like and the game will render an ultra-big image of the full map. This is especially amazing when the final horde comes to the colony as all the map is revealed.

You can configure the resolution of the image in the options screen, the highest value being 256 mega pixels!! Just check this.

We hope you like the new changes for gameplay and the Survival Mode. Of course, we keep on working on the campaign secretly behind the scenes. After this big update on the 5th of May, we will share with you more details about the highly anticipated campaign.

Thank you all for your incredible support! See you soon!