I am watching the ever-masochistic AdmiralBahroo slog through a “no walls” run of the They Are Billions campaign and it got me thinking about that game and how it has an absolutely top-tier core gameplay loop. The constant and reinforcing pressures of clearing out and expanding into chunks of the map, plopping down buildings to gain resources so you can repeat elsewhere, slowly building up a large enough army to clear the map with enough time to fortify before the final wave… it’s just some of the best “core gameplay” I’ve encountered in 20 years of playing RTS, tower-defense, and city-builder type games. The various difficulty options and varied map types give it a ton of replayability. True lightning in a bottle and nothing has quite scratched that itch since. I totally get the draw to keep coming back to it – the gameplay is just the perfect combination of strategic, stressful, and satisfying.
However, so much of the rest of the …