They are billions

First game ever played, and I lasted 5 days. Lol. Oops. It's a bit rough on the learning curve. I never once heard a message of what resources I needed vs others, so it was kinda hard to figure out priorities, but even right off the bat it made me want to try again.

I've cleared the first 3 maps on maximum zombie density and 80 days, but can't beat the desert map even on base difficulty. The zombie aggro on this fucking map just changes the entire way the game works.

Put 2 hours into it. Pretty much at my limit if I want to refund it on Steam. I was playing game after game to get used to it, and was having fun. My issue now is that I got up to 16 days, my best yet, and I failed, and now I'm like oh, do I want to go through that all again? The whole thing to me seems to be getting stale really fast. I'm not "progressing" my character, through items or otherwise to make the next run a little easier, or have a chance to go a little further. Does that make any sense? I suppose that's what these games are all about though, right? Your progression is your skill?

Crone said:

Your progression is your skill?

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Yup, and once something clicks it will make sense. It gets easier and easier to make it to the later days the more you play.

Build tents until you can't build anymore, make sure you have plenty of food and energy to build tents! Tents are life!

Micro can be fudged by liberal use of the pause button for the most part. Build order is more of a rough outline than it is an actual blueprint. Most of the learning curve involves being able to adapt to shitty map layouts to be able to expand properly, find enough farmland/stone/iron etc. Knowing what kind of troop counts you need to be at for each assault helps too, and how many it takes to safely clear our a doomed town and whatnot.

The biggest mistake I see people make is not aggressively clearing the map enough. They tend to turtle up inside walls and only very slowly expand outward. Once you have a sufficient deathball of troops they need to be out there constantly clearing everything off the map. By the final wave arrives there should be 0, or nearly 0, unexplored area elft on the map and no random straggler zombies around. This is both for economy reasons (having enough space to build multiple market/bank clusters, or just even getting more farmland), but also because the final wave aggros everything on the map so every zombie you leave standing around is just more you have to deal with.

James said:

Build tents until you can't build anymore, make sure you have plenty of food and energy to build tents! Tents are life!

Click to expand...

I always found it better to upgrade my existing tents to cottages and stone houses before focusing on spamming down more tents

Some stats on tents vs cottages vs stone houses: Comparison of the housing resource:cost ratios • r/TheyAreBillions

At least on the default map I find space to be the most precious resource. It is so chokey with rock formations everywhere I had a hard time spamming housing without making it super awkward to defend. But maybe that is why I always ran into gold and stone issues towards the day 100 time.

Those stats are magical christmas land of infinite room to spam tents, and the math falls apart badly vs a proper bank/market cluster with stone houses. Past day 40 or so your gold income is basically the only resource that matters anymore, as once you have access to advanced farms/quarry and the gold to upgrade them the other resources become relatively plentiful.

On an 80 day game you need to have bare minimum one market/bank cluster up and producing by day 30, and you really need a 2nd one online by day 45-50 in order to have an economy capable of producing enough snipers/shock towers/thanatos to survive the final wave.

I think it's pretty clear that if you can build 10 tents, it's the superior route to go, but yes eventually you will want to upgrade rather than build new due to space requirements. How it usually ends up playing out in my games is that I'll build some tents wherever I can until I can expand, and then the first thing I look for in an expansion is a good market+bank tent cluster. That cluster usually gets upgraded once (and the initial tents destroyed) before my second expansion.

Yea that sounds about right. It gets a little complicated on the desert map because claiming more space is so difficult, so you wind up with a lot of shitty non-bank cottages and shit just to try and assemble enough of a deathball to start clearing safely.

Day 35, a new personal record. My first Mayor had Sniper tech bonus, so not sure how much that sped things up? Having a few snipers around certain helped, however making liberal use of the Patrol feature I think helped the most. Was able to pick off easily those solo zombies that before I think would eventually wreck me.

Snipers are what you eventually want to deathball but getting the tech for free doesn't speed things up too much. I generally don't try and spam out snipers until I'm ready to have them roam the map. I generally stick with soldiers to get me through the early game. Free sniper tech still saves you a decent chunk of gold, though.