"Here is a sandbox like no other. Create massive battles with absolutely no limits. Want to see 10,000 chickens fight an army of Romans?? Sure, why not. Want to see a company of WW2 U.S soldiers fight 11,000 Medieval soldiers?? There are simply no limits to the carnage you can achieve in UEBS."
— Official description on the game's Steam page
Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator is a Realtime Sandbox Strategy game where players can create battles between a wide variety of units.
Developed and previewed by indie developer Brilliant Game Studios (also known as "Ryan"), UEBS was available for early access on April 12 and then released on Steam in June 1, 2017
. Becoming a mainstream trend among gamers who want to let their creative and experimental imaginations run wild.
Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2 was announced in 2021 and released to Early Access on May 12, 2022. It significantly increases the number of units you can have on-screen at once; if you have a powerful enough graphics card, you can have over a million units on the field without performance issues.
Tropes:
- Anachronism Stew: The game goes beyond anachronism and throws in fiction to boot. Dinosaurs, Spartans, Persians, Romans, Orcs, Knights, Zombies, and World War II Americans, oh my!
- Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Heavily Averted. The developer of UEBS says that the game is cleanly optimized to allow 10,000 units to exist on-screen without making any sort of concessions on graphics quality or even having a noticeable drop in performance.
- Army of The Ages: There's no restriction on what unit composition a team can have.
- Artificial Stupidity: Updates since the games initial launch have since fixed some of these, but cases still remain:
- The AI for ranged units once caused them to try and fire at their targets through walls, even though they had no hope of hitting anything. This has since been patched.
- Pathfinding for some units was pretty terrible at one point, causing them to sometimes try and make a beeline at enemies with no regard for items such as hills that blocked the way. The developers have announced their intent to fix this with updates, although it is still possible for entire armies to neglect a hundred-foot-drop.
- Atop a Mountain of Corpses: Dead units will pile up on top of each other. Played especially straight if you pit a powerful character like Chunk Norris against an army of melee units.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Giant chickens are introduced in the sequel.
- Badass Army: The game is filled to the brim with them.
- Bare-Fisted Monk: Chunk Norriss, who will punch entire armies to death.
- Beam Spam: Having thousands of units firing away with guns or lasers makes for an impressive light show.
- Big Badass Battle Sequence: With multiple armies to choose from, surprisingly high numbers of units that can be generated at once and a wide range of battlefields on which to wage war, this trope is in full effect.
- Bloodier and Gorier: In UEBS2, blood from injured or dead units can form pools, and said pools can actually drown anyone caught underneath them.
- Butt-Monkey: Out of all the many units to get abuse, the chicken is often used as target practice by Let's Play videos.
- Crippling Overspecialization: So far, a unit can have either a melee attack or a range attack. But it can't have both.
- Dem Bones: The Skeleton Warrior unit, funnily enough.
- Dueling Games: Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, which has appeared earlier but has not been officially released yet.
- Eagleland: The American soldier units are the embodiment of this, alternating between yelling "Murica!" and spouting patriotic nonsense."If you're not American, you're a terrorist."
"Prepare to be liberated!"
"For freedom!"
"Mississippi is the best country in the world." - Game-Breaking Bug: Played for Laughs if Chunk Norris fights Chunk Norris.Error window: Error! Chunk Norris cannot fight Chunk Norris! Float value beyond infinity. Override of time space continuum failed!
- Historical Domain Superperson: Two of them in UEBS2: Cleopatra, who has the ability to throw fireballs, and Nikola Tesla, who wields a raygun.
- Hollywood Tactics: Due mainly to Artificial Stupidity. The most common strategy for any given unit is to simply move towards the enemy, then start attacking once in range. Concepts like cover, retreat, and any formation more complex than "vague blob shape" is beyond them.
- Joke Character:
- Some factions, most notably the 'furniture' subsets and chickens, are mostly added for comic effect and do not last long in a straight fight, since they have limited health and poor attack damage. Players can subvert this by spawning them en masse, at which point they can win through sheer numbers, or by tweaking stats so that chickens turn into beefed up killing machines.
- Unsurprisingly, with modding being a thing, some units are designed purely for comedy and can't really fight.
- Killer Rabbit: Chickens, Penguins, Kangaroos, and now Tortoises can kill in this game.
- Lawyer-Friendly Cameo:
- One of the first hero units that was previewed is Chunk Norris (a Chuck Norris impostor) who can single-handedly take on thousands of enemies all by himself.
- A new hero unit that was added on patch 1.1 is the "Laser Knight" which is clearly a Jedi.
- The Tornado Trooper of Patch 1.1 is a futuristic infantryman that was inspired by the Imperial Stormtrooper.
- The sequel introduces the Action Hero, a dead ringer for John Wick who dual-wields a pair of highly powerful pistols, as well as a Kool-Aid Man knock-off called the Juice Man.
- Lethal Joke Character:
- The 'furniture' category is surprisingly strong. The same is true of most "animals", which are dangerous in large numbers.
- Any sufficiently beefed up custom character such as a chicken may prove to be more than enemies were expecting.
- Mini-Mecha: Patch 1.1 introduces the Mech Walker.
- More Dakka: Whether with bullets, arrows, or any other ranged weapon, this game allows the user to experience almost enough Dakka.
- One-Man Army: Any sufficiently beefed up custom unit. Also, Chunk Norriss, who is literally unkillable.
- Player Mooks: The player can take direct control of a unit during battle and can issue commands or serve as a distraction for the enemy.
- Rain of Arrows: An inevitability whenever you have a large number of archers on the field.
- Shields Are Useless: Downplayed as shield-bearing units can block melee attacks, but not arrows. The sequel fixes this.
- Shout-Out:
- The Tornado Trooper takes inspiration from the Imperial Stormtrooper, and to a lesser extent the Clone Trooper.
- The "World of Thieves" map wouldn't look out of place in Game of Thrones, and the name is a clear nod too.
- Squad Controls: While possessing a single unit, you can rally other units on your team and issue commands to them. The sequel adds an RTS-style control system that allows you to command larger numbers of units from afar.
- Suicide Attack: Zombies in UEBS2 can counter enemies perched on high, unreachable obstacles by mass suiciding next to them, forming a hill of corpses that allows them to reach the top.
- Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: The entire point of the game is to see this happen, albeit with more of a focus on armies than individual characters.
- You Nuke 'Em: One of the keyboard buttons will trigger a Nuclear Explosion right where the crosshair is resting.
- Zerg Rush:
- Artificial Stupidity caused most enemies to just rush in with no regard for tactics and try to weigh foes down with sheer numbers. Updates to the game have since fixed this to an extent, though some factions such as zombies will do this by default anyway.
- Tactics such as this are the only way that factions such as chickens stand a chance of winning, at least without any additional help.
- Zombie Apocalypse: The zombies have this as their endgame, since for every enemy they kill there's a chance that the enemy will come back and bolster their own ranks.
- Zombie Gait: The regular zombie unit has the standard shamble, whereas the "Fast Zombie" averts this but has fewer hit points to spare.
