They are billions

Crone said:

What's the best way to push way out and stay safe? Push a little. Build a wall and towers, push a little more, build more walls and towers?

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While you are expanding you should use whatever army you have to continually push forward until you get to large populations of zombies or doomtowns. From there you can just patrol perpendicular to the swarm you need to clear and if you notice runners or too many mobs then kite back a bit until you can keep pushing. One ranger can clear a surprising amount solo and being solo it'll hit vet faster adding to its clear speed. Just pause periodically to work on economy while dealing with micro. Once you hit day 50+ you should be at the point where you have an army death ball (I tend to use 20-25 snipers and once they all hit vet they are pretty much invincible) clearing map while focusing purely on macro economy.

I personally don't build full walls until around day 80+ and that's usually just for the area that announces where the wave is coming. If you drop a ballista and put 2-3 posts in front of it that's enough to keep it safe. Same with teslas or whatever else you are pushing. The zombie AI will 99% of the time go right to the wall instead of whatever you've built allowing time to get some army to clear it if you don't have a ballista covering. I also can't overstate how kiting is super OP. You can split huge waves or kite them in circles while ballistas do the work with 1-2 rangers.

Pay attention to where swarms focus you'll notice that they tend to clump in one section leaving the majority of your wall/ballista defenses as wasted resources. It's not until that last wave where you really get them spreading out a bit.

Obviously it's all down to your preferences, but since swapping to this play style my success rate has gone up a ton compared to safe/slow expansion.

I lost on the last bit of the last fucking wave of map 2 despite having more than enough units because my command center placement was fucked from the start and couldn't fortify the weakest point of entry enough.

If the final horde is breaching your outer layer of walls you didn't economy hard enough, at least on normal zombie population.

ronne said:

If the final horde is breaching your outer layer of walls you didn't economy hard enough, at least on normal zombie population.

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Was a fucked situation tbh, and I could have played it better. Once I get snipers up and running map 2 seems much easier than map 1, however. I suspect I'll beat it tonight.

Yea map 2 is very easy once you learn to slow down your early game and not piss off the doomtowns too quickly. Infinite farmland and room to expand.

Final wave wall defenses are typically as many towers full of snipers as I can muster, with heavy shock tower coverage and however many thanatos I can build. I'm not a big fan of executor towers, as shocks are about eleventy billion times more efficient at clearing chaff, and executors don't do near as much damage to fatties as snipers do, so I basically skip them. General rule of thumb for normal zombie population is 4 towers of snipers per access point, with 2-3 thanatos and a shock tower should hold. Maybe more if it's like, your singular choke on an entire eastern front etc.

Yeah im having a hell of a time just on 60% on map two. My main issue is pushing my expansion too quickly and getting overwhelmed. This game was a nice change of a grindy game for me over my HS addiction so that't a plus i guess.

Finally won my first game! They only broke through one section, but perished on the second line right after that and some swiftly relocated Thanatos, and only one other section totally collapsed, and I even predicted in advance if that section got attacked (haha, big rookie mistake on my part I guess. *every* section gets attacked. No exceptions) it's not gonna hold. Good thing the area between that weak spot and the HQ was the last area I expanded into and it only held a few quarries which I could just raze without nuking my score.

Had a proper last stand with all Thanatos and snipers unloaded from the towers once their part was done and running towards the command center, arriving just in time as the horde started knocking down the very last stone wall protecting it maybe 5 tiles away. Threw down the 3 lightning towers the last mayor had as a bonus as well, and built some stone towers around the command center and won with the zombies taking down the wood workshop (couldn't raze that! argh! Never building that next to the CC again) right next to the CC.

That is some exciting and gratifying shit. What a game.

My biggest change to strategy was building ~20 soldiers and veteraning them asap, then place them near the command center so whenever my stupidity made me mess up and have the zombies infest a large part of my town, I had a strong response team between them and the CC so I wouldn't just autolose due to slow snipers not being able to keep up with the runners as they spawn more and more runners. That only happened three or four times, though.

LachiusTZ said:

Was on day 30? of the 2nd map, thought I had it under control. Was pumping out a ton of snipers, building ballistas . . . about to make the push to secure off my starting area etc.

"Zombies are attacking our buildings" or whatever the fuck it says . . .

Some lone fucking zombie had ninja'd past my patrolling guards and gotten into the goddamn tents.

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I would love a replay feature because every time this happens, I'd love to know where they came from. By the time I notice it, they're already balls deep in my people.

Beat the second map at lunch, definitely an easier end game, but that start can be brutal sometimes.

Yea some starts on the highlands map are just a dick kick with 2-3 doomtowns within sight of your command center, but once you get to day 20 or so and can start expanding it's easy mode.

The doomtowns aren't usually too bad, it's the goddamn runners that come at you from all sides that really fucks up my early games. Doomtowns just limit where I place my first expansion -- this map start had two in sight from the get go, and a third just off screen.

The runners come from the doom towns afaik. I've found just building a simple wooden tower in their path and putting rangers in there usually sufficient to defend against those probing attacks.

Nah, they come from all over depending on your sound output, which I haven't 100% figured out yet. I usually get my first set of runners between day 10 and 20, and if my patrols aren't properly staffed they can get overrun pretty easy.

The small runner packs spawn at the edges of the maps yea, not specifically from doom towns. They frequency of them seems to be pretty random, but they can start as early as day 11 after your first raid and they ramp up in size/frequency until the end of the game.

Doom towns can kind of amplify them though if the pack paths through a town, as it'll pick up stragglers that are just standing around there for some reason (it won't bring regular standing zombies from anywhere else that I've ever seen).

I'm pretty sure I won map 2 on first try. I quit for today before the final wave. It is just absolutely insane how much money you can roll in if you rush snipers, clear the doom towns for the loot and then just aggressively expand.

I've got map 3 paused at day 80 right now, but I have 0 Thanatos so far. The food sucks so much . Dunno if I'm gonna beat it, but I might.