ZombieJ

Objective and the daily cycle

• Expand your village by day, keep economy and morale in balance, and fight off the horde by night.
• The first night stays quiet – time for your first huts and a palisade.
• The zombies rise out of the ground some distance away. The announced compass direction glows red on the minimap.
• In daylight the undead burn up. Only the colossus survives the sun.
• Lose your town hall and the game is lost. You win by surviving the set number of hordes or by meeting the objectives of the mission.

Economy and population

There are four resources: food, wood, stone and ore. The lumberjack's hut, forager's hut, farm, quarry and ore mine employ workers who walk visibly to trees, bushes, rocks and ore veins and carry their load back.

• Houses create room; new settlers arrive as long as food and morale hold up.
• A well, a tavern and a chapel lift morale – hunger, homelessness and casualties push it down.
• The game assigns idle villagers itself: building sites first, then the workplaces in turn.
• The barracks turn villagers into soldiers – whoever picks up a weapon is missing from the economy afterwards.

Defence

You drag walls across the map as a line: wooden palisades first, stone walls once they are researched. Gates let your own people through, but not the zombies.

The barracks train spearmen, archers, knights and snipers. Spearmen and knights hold the breach, archers shoot over the wall, and snipers pick off the dangerous special zombies first.

Research

The academy unlocks buildings, units and bonuses – one project at a time, paid for with resources and time.

• Economy: better tools, wheelbarrows and crop rotation speed up gathering and raise yields.
• Structures: trap building, stone walls, stone towers, ballistae and catapults add new blueprints.
• Combat power: fire arrows strengthen every tower, architecture every building and wall, forged weapons and armour your soldiers.
• Units: snipers and the order of knights unlock the two elite units, and medicine lets soldiers recover out of combat.

Types of zombie

Every horde brings new types along – eleven in all.

Campaign and single maps

The campaign consists of eight missions with a fixed map, their own story and their own objectives. Each mission unlocks the next one, and later on the threat starts at a higher level.

1. The First Night: build a settlement and survive two hordes
2. Winter of Hunger: build farms, feed 25 inhabitants, lay in supplies
3. Watch of Stone: put up an academy, research and build stone walls
4. Iron and Blood: mine ore, forge weapons, train soldiers
5. The Colossus: bring down a colossus the sun cannot touch
6. Demolition Expert: send snipers against the exploders
7. Over the Walls: fend off leapers and screamers
8. The Long Night: everything at once

For a single map you set everything yourself: difficulty, enemy numbers from 30 to 250 %, hordes until victory or endless, and a map code. The same code always produces the same map – which keeps results comparable.

Controls

The game saves automatically every morning and by hand at any time – the main menu then offers “Continue”.

Leaderboard and achievements

• You log in with your account under “Clanwirtschaft” in the main menu. The password is never stored.
• After that every finished game travels to the platform: map, difficulty, enemy numbers, win or loss, score, duration, hordes survived, kills by zombie type, losses, peak population and completed research.
• Without logging in nothing is sent – the game is fully playable offline.
• Without an internet connection the result waits in your profile and goes out the next time you log in.
• The score depends on hordes survived, kills and duration, multiplied by the factor of the difficulty level.
• 28 achievements range from your first zombie killed to finishing the campaign.