Good day to you all, I've been playing a lot of They Are Billions and Divinity 2 lately and the two had an amazing baby in my dreams last night; I'd like to share that baby with you all.

TL;DR: It's TAB played with your buddies, lots of infected, lots of loot, lots of gratuitous violence.

Setting: Basically the same as TAB. It's still a steampunk theme, Victorian-era fashion, lots of gears and copper clockwork stuff, that sort of thing. Not sure with regards to the timeline, but we'll say a few decades after the events of TAB to give credence to the emergence of new types of infected, and their leaders. This also fits nicely with humanity wanting to spread out and reclaim more lands; necessitating you, the players, to go out to new areas, clear them of infected, and build new settlements while defending them from hordes of undead.

Enemies: Whole bunches and bunches and "Oh my God, there's still more of them" numbers of infected, as well as their less numerous but more powerful versions from the game (Chubbies, Harpies, Spitters, etc.) as well as "Generals" who aren't just mindless human flesh gourmands, though they still do the whole drinking blood for sustenance thing. These smart infected are pretty much carbon copies of Vampires who direct their swarms toward human settlements and act as the primary antagonists to the players. They can be as varied as the players, either being powerful individual fighters or giving buffs to any infected within their area of influence.

Protagonists: Character creation would be fairly simple, allocating a starting point pool into whatever stats you want to craft your character in the direction you want them to go. Want to create the classic Ranger who's fast with great vision and a silent but somewhat underwhelming bow and arrow, go for it. How about a sniper with long but limited vision, hunting down and assassinating vampires for massive amounts of xp? Sweet, do it! It'll delay their next wave against your fledgling colony which would be great for the fortification engineer, who's been building walls and towers between choke-points of Old-World wrecks and the river to the East.

Gameplay: In the dream it was squad-based with up to 16 players on a single server. My POV was looking at it isometrically, but thinking about it now, it might be better as a 3rd person sort of thing or some kind of hybrid of the two(?). Suggestions welcomed. The game could be played solo or maxed out with players, the difficulty would scale with the number of players. Instead of infected being harder to kill, there would just be more of them, with the percentages of special infected rising slowly but the actual numbers of them rising very rapidly. One thing that was prominent in the dream was specializing in skills that individually wouldn't do so well but together would be great combinations.

For example, we had 3 teams of 2 clearing open spaces of infected and one dedicated 4-person team of door-kickers that would go inside buildings packed with infected and clear them out. The two groups mutually supported each other and once buildings were cleared, they would be reinforced by our 2 builders and turned into strongpoints/settlement housing once "The line" had sufficiently moved up.

There would also be skills and abilities (and this is where Divinity 2 comes in) that would take players down paths of, essentially, 1) Small amounts of damage over large areas, dealing with swarms of infected much more efficiently but lacking sufficient punch to deal with tougher enemies quickly. Or 2) The polar opposite, dealing large amounts of damage to single targets but being very lacking in the ability to do crowd control. One could spec into both of these and achieve a good middle ground but they'd never be able to be as good at either end of the spectrum.

Players could also have building abilities that speed up or cheapen the process of fleshing out your town. Some could be healers or tanks, you know, the usual tropes but with steampunk guns, armor, and old-timey mannerisms, Tallyho!

Random blurbs/dream bits:

1) One player got an incredibly rare ability called 'Marked by the Sun' that lets you kill every special infected in a given Vampire General's (dumb name and I'm very much open to suggestions, haha) army if the General has been marked before they were killed.

2) The towns aren't there just for the sake of being vulnerable McGuffins, they're where you sell any artifacts of the Old World that you find, leading to better base defenses/town upgrades. They're where you improve your gear (level 1/2/3 armoursmith, gunsmith, etc.) and where you can get all sorts of survival-odds-increasing gadgets. They're where you recruit NPC units (Soldiers, Snipers, etc.) to help with town defense. They'd behave in a very similar manner as in TAB, being able to be given simple orders like patrol, hold this building, or if you gather enough of them they could just go in a death ball around the map, seeking out the closest infected.

3) Oh yeah, player death is a very real possibility. If you are sufficiently wounded by the infected with no healer to stitch you back up, your character dies. Fear not, their loot will be on their shambling (sprinting if they had high dex) corpse and they will come back as powerful infected. If they're wounded by a General and they die, well now you have another General to deal with. The player resets with half (or 3/4 if they had the "Strong family line" trait for example) the total XP their last one had and comes back as their avenging offspring. I distinctly remember one player in the dream had the name Wilhelm Terwilliger the 11th.

4) Vision and enemy detection played a big role in the dream. Regular vision can see pretty far but only at what's in front of you, passive observation has more of a radius that's pretty bad to start with as it's only what you can hear and smell. Of course, gadgets can help out with this, giving a wide array of randomly generated benefits.

5) GEAR!!! So yeah, definitely an "Old technology is better than what we can make now" sort of thing, driving exploration into the ruins of cities to find the best stuff. Towns will sell better and better stuff as they get larger and more complex but the really good stuff is surrounded by lots and lots of infected.

There's so much more developing in my head, even as I type this but after several rewrites of this post, this is as coherently as I can put it. Please hit me with any questions/suggestions you have and I'll get back to you ASAP. Thanks and have a great day!