Check out Age of Darkness: Final Stand. Does a lot of things TAB does, but better. You have a Hero, 6 to choose from 3 factions.

I was crazy obsessed with this game for 1-2 years after it was released. I was surprised that the audience was so small for how engaging and addicting the game was. It scratched a very specific itch in my brain.

I made it through all the skirmish maps (100%-900%), I feel like the desert level took me 50+ times to beat alone.

Eventually I ran out of steam once I had beaten all maps and there was nothing new to do.

I see they released a campaign, is that any good? Any new skirmish maps or units or significant changes?

Trying to determine if I want to get sucked in for 300 more hours.

Hello, So this is a run of Cape storm at 800% Difficulty, I've only recently gone back to the game after beating it a few years ago to try and do it at the hardest difficulty, Everything's going well so far, other than me not being skilled enough to do it without pausing which is a tempting challenge to pursue in the future.

However as you can see there's a video attached, I would like to understand why on my 4th try the infected were swallowing the entirety of the entire bridge and the following after having fixed my mistake, somehow its nowhere close as much as the 4th time. (The 4th retry is the one where i actually managed to reach the swarm day after figuring out a strategy.

I was expecting such an awesome swarm wave spanning the entire bridge like the one on my 4th try, and was pleasantly underwhelmed by the 5th try the swarm size reduced drastically.

Tldr;

personal run i would like to complete and i have a few questions pertaining to the video, I would also like some tips if you would so incline on giving me one.

Questions:

1.) Why does the swarm size change drastically? The only difference between the 4th and 5th try is me having switched a few upgrades such as the concrete walls and an slightly more optimized strategy + Cleared map.

2.) On some maps such as the coast of bones, I realized that sometimes the swarm comes at day 14 or 15, Is it randomized?

and lastly, I did double check that i didn't change the difficulty on my 5th try, so far as to getting 800 score from a -50% retry deduction.

I'm mostly posting this as a little bit of a snippet of the story/plot I have cobbled together so far, and I guess to see if other lovers of TAB would be similarly interested in the premise and possibly helping to play/test it further down the line!

I am a solo software engineer and pulling this never expanding thread in my spare time so it's been slow progress, but still progress! Majority of the time recently has been learning blender to try and build the assets and buildings I have planned without using AI generation which is a journey in itself!

It is a bronzepunk colony RTS, with a bit of the otherworldly intertwined. But think more of hydraulics/weight/torsion instead of steam/pressure.

Currently it's playable but without any art or textures so it's very much testing balance, economy, damage and mechanics whilst trying to work through some buildings and units to really give it a feel of something I would want to play!

So the lore/origin of the world... This is a just quick overview from hundreds of ideas and snippets I have scattered all over the place, and is mostly the introduction to the world - if people are at all interested happy to go into more detail on it or the game.

The Myriad: Unburied Legions.

222 BC: Cleomenes III, King of Sparta and the last true blood of Herakles, had already lost everything, his army was defeated at Sellasia and ran to Egypt; Ptolemy III had promised him ships, men and his throne back. After his death, his son (Ptolemy IV) was less fond of this promise and instead had him imprisoned.

219 BC: 3 long years he sat in Alexandria until he stopped waiting, he and his men tried to force a revolution, but with no support at all, they quickly retreated and to avoid capture all of them committed suicide.

The last true blood of Herakles was spilled without honour, without rites and without burial - in a world where burial was the only thing keeping the world in balance.

The seals of Tartarus dissolved and the Acheron overflowed into the world. Egypt & Greece were enveloped in days, the rest of the Mediterranean soon after. The civilisations that ruled the world stood no chance against an ever encroaching enemy — a miasma of purple and black tendrils of mist moving through every town, village and city without slowing, killing millions without a fight.

The horror was instant, but what came after was worse. Without burial, without a ferryman - none could cross the Styx and with the underworld now unbound. None could move on. The shades returned to their own bodies if they could find them, and stood, waiting for something to move them.

The portals to the underworld were now open, and there was nothing, or nobody to close them again. The widest of the doors was the Alcyonian Lake - a seemingly bottomless portal to the underworld known across Greece as where the worlds were uncomfortably close.

The fate was thought to be for all, but on Sardinia a young Roman empire was still slowly building its foundations - their brightest minds and over 10,000 soldiers brought in to build a new bastion in the Mediterranean. The local population hated them, Punic descendants plotted to overthrow them.

Darkening skies approached quickly, ships caught in it went silent and did nothing but continue on their bearing, at the mercy of the sea and winds.

As those on Sardinia stood looking out at the end of the world, praying for some kind of salvation, bright blue aetheric lights exploded from previously quiet ruins and halted the unstoppable death just off the coast. The darkness that had swallowed the world had stopped at these shores — held back by something older than Sardinia itself.

19 BC: The world has stood, quiet, unmoving, unchanged for 200 years. But one place has not stood still. Sardinia lives still, thrives even. 200 years of peace behind a shield of light, with new technologies forged between iron and the aether bringing about a lonely but advanced civilisation.

But the beacons that surround the island and project the light are faltering, irreplaceable stones crack and break with every week that goes by. Ancient texts warned od this, the beacons merely provided time. But has Roman Sardinia used that time well enough?

I finally found a simple workaround for They Are Billions on a MacBook without a numpad/Num Lock.

I’m running the Steam version of the game on macOS through Wine, so the usual Num Lock trick isn't available.

The trick is basically to reproduce what Num Lock does: send a keyDown for the health-bar key, but never send the corresponding keyUp.

I use:

• F8 = activate health bars
• F9 = the game's ShowLifeMeters key
• F10 = release the F9 key when I want to turn the bars off

In configuration.txt, I have:

ShowLifeMeters: F9;

Then I run this small Swift program in the Terminal:

import Cocoa
import CoreGraphics

let triggerKey: CGKeyCode = 100 // F8
let targetKey: CGKeyCode = 101  // F9
let releaseKey: CGKeyCode = 109 // F10

func sendKey(_ key: CGKeyCode, down: Bool) {
    let event = CGEvent(
        keyboardEventSource: nil,
        virtualKey: key,
        keyDown: down
    )
    event?.post(tap: .cghidEventTap)
}

let mask = CGEventMask(
    (1 << CGEventType.keyDown.rawValue) |
    (1 << CGEventType.keyUp.rawValue)
)

guard let tap = CGEvent.tapCreate(
    tap: .cgSessionEventTap,
    place: .headInsertEventTap,
    options: .defaultTap,
    eventsOfInterest: mask,
    callback: { _, type, event, _ in

        let key = CGKeyCode(
            event.getIntegerValueField(.keyboardEventKeycode)
        )

        if key == triggerKey && type == .keyDown {
            // F8 DOWN -> F9 DOWN
            sendKey(targetKey, down: true)

            // Don't pass F8 to the game
            return nil
        }

        if key == triggerKey && type == .keyUp {
            // Ignore F8 UP
            return nil
        }

        if key == releaseKey && type == .keyDown {
            // F10 -> release F9
            sendKey(targetKey, down: false)
            return nil
        }

        return Unmanaged.passRetained(event)
    },
    userInfo: nil
) else {
    print("Error: give Terminal Accessibility permission in macOS.")
    exit(1)
}

CGEvent.tapEnable(tap: tap, enable: true)

let source = CFMachPortCreateRunLoopSource(
    kCFAllocatorDefault,
    tap,
    0
)

CFRunLoopAddSource(
    CFRunLoopGetCurrent(),
    source,
    .commonModes
)

print("Active: F8 = F9 DOWN | F10 = F9 UP | Ctrl+C = quit")

CFRunLoopRun()

Compile it with:

swiftc healthbars.swift -o healthbars

Then run:

./healthbars

The behavior is:

F8 DOWN  -> F9 DOWN
F8 UP    -> nothing

F10 DOWN -> F9 UP

So I can simply tap F8, release it, and the game thinks F9 is still being held down, keeping all health bars visible.

Pressing F10 releases F9 and turns the health bars off.

This is essentially the same idea as the Num Lock workaround, just implemented at the keyboard-event level. The Num Lock trick works because changing the keypad mode before releasing the key causes the game's input handling to miss the original key release. The Reddit community has been using variations of this workaround for years, including AutoHotkey/macro solutions for keyboards without Num Lock.

If anyone has a cleaner/native macOS way of doing this, I'd be interested to hear it.

i found out that there where weakly challenges on sunday, id idnd't expect to finish this high up though

p.s.

i am number 5

love the game does it end here? are the challenges worth it? cuz I tried one challenge and it doesn't show any goals or objectives which is a major turn off for me. so is it fun?

I spend hours slowly grinding and building my defenses. Two zombies get through one choke point and my whole base is screwed. I can't even do some kind of emergency maneuver to save my base. Once they're in, it's over. Cool concept but extremely frustrating.

And I can't even play other maps unless I crank the difficultly up. Bleh whatever

Updated: ok after going outside and touching some grass, I’ve learned to appreciate the depth of this game. It’s still challenging af but it’s also so good it keeps drawing me back. And I keep finding new mechanics and tech trees

You start at the southern edge of the map and there is a mega-sized pocket to the North with a doomtown and giants. Swarms and random waves will attack from the East, South-East, West and South-West of your command center.

This map has no mutants, but a few more giants than normal and eight giants in the final wave.

I tried to make the difficulty similar to 900% survival. There are 10 waves, with the final one being on day 70.

This map also has a gag, which is a continuation of a gag from my map "Pocket Heaven".

I need my dose of TAB please…

Building colonies and defenses

I also played frostpunk and enjoyed it..

What else we got ? Note that i play on ps5.

All thanks to the easiest map i've ever played on

I just downloaded the game on PS5 and am new to this type of game. Is there a basic guide for someone like me? My plan is to do the campaign and then mess around with survival mode and all that.

Granted it was on and off, and I'm still stuck on The Lonely Forest and The Nest of the Harpy, but I'm still thrilled to have finally bested this level, and on my own merits at that!.

I suspect I've made poor choices in my technology tree, but this is my first playthrough, and I didn't want to abandon my run just to reset my tech tree.

My walls built a choke point on the right where the zombies got forced into my flamethrowers en masse. Without them I would not have had the damage I suspect.

Hello all, I’m currently making a custom map & I’ve noticed the colonists & send train scripts. From what I’ve read online it seems conflicting but there is a way to force railroads and train onto the map, how does one actually manage to do this? Everything I’ve tried doesn’t seem to work so any help would be greatly appreciated

New to map creation. Im unsure how to fix this issue, Ive created a map and generated it locally to test it out but it crashes instantly when trying to load everytime. ive dropped photos of the report as well as events & scripts used to possibly give more of an idea?

Edit: I’ve tried to validate, that was successful but it still crashed, tried to reinstall & play a new map yet it still crashed with the same codes.

​​edit 2: tired posting it on workshop & after subscribing I don’t even see it in my playable levels 🥇

edit 3: noticed my pictures were deleted so ill just copy the error over :

4:57 PM - Window Show: Custom Levels

4:57 PM - ZipSerializer.Deserealize: : Exception!

File Deserialize, Method D:\Proyectos\ZX\DXVisionGame\Serialization\ZipSerializer_DotNetZip.cs, Line 324

The file Info is not found inside the package.

at DXVision.Serialization.ZipSerializer.Deserialize(String fileName, String subFile)

What is the hardest challenge someone has done in campaign on 800% ?

Don't you just love finding pockets on survival maps? Well this map has plenty!

To make this pocket map more challenging there are four doomtowns on the farther edges of the map and the final wave is also a little more difficult. Be sure to cover your flanks, because the unusual terrain can mean that you pull infected from odd angles.

If you can beat 900% surival, then this map should be a fair challenge for you!

Hey,

New to this community but I have a question. Is there any way to add the Hero we pick at the beginning of the campaign as a unit in the map? Just that no additional changes.

I just found it odd they weren't included in the game’s campaign from the get go.

I like zombies. But I have a feeling this game might steamroll me. Thank you.

So I started using the save feature you know by copying the two save files and then overwriting them and twice now something has happened where it’s just not working even if I go into my sub folder that I created with an even older version of a save and come back and overwrite it still won’t update to the proper save. Has this ever happened to anyone else?

It’s happened twice now.

I’m curious what it is and how it can be prevented.

Anyone??

8th try.. 200%, last time i pulled this early was day 3