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Campaign Tech Tree Guide
They Are Billions: Survival Guide This survival guide will help you make it out alive in They Are Billions, a zombie-themed, survival RTS where you need to protect your town against waves of incoming zombie hordes. Build human colonies that must survive in a post-apocalyptic planet where billions of infected human try to annihilate the the few remaining alive humans.
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The technology tree in the campaign mode of They Are Billions functions a bit differently than in survival. First off, to be able to gain technologies, not only you have to build the appropiate Workshop (Wood, Stone and Foundry), but Technology has to be unlocked with technology points that you gain by completing missions. This means that if you go ahead and build a Wood Workshop without unlocking any technology, it will be completely useless as you won't be able to research anything.
This guide will help you decide what to learn first. I'm gonna share my own thoughts on why to go for something first and you can decide for yourself if you're convinced.
Early Priorities
The first few missions are about getting to X number of Colonists, but you don't have Cottages or Farms available right away. This makes it extremely difficult to get to the required population. Personally, I was able to kill all zombies in the map before I was able to reach the population needed, and Cereal Farming along with Expert Workshops technologies would've been an amazing help. You should definitely have Cottages and/or Farms before you attempt the mission The Hunter's Meadow. You will need to have a population of 600 Colonists before day 60.
Next up is Assault Rifle to unlock Soldiers. Soldiers are a step up from Rangers and you're gonna need them eventually. Reinforced Armor will increase the Soldiers armour by 20%, this is really gonna come in handy for the Swarm missions that are blocking your way to the next mission. The missions start with a simple outpost that lets you recruit barricades and units depending on your empire points. Increasing your units stats is the only way to make these missions easier.
You're also gonna want Logistics and Gold Transportation. This will lead you to more resources every 24 hours from the train. This is an amazing bonus and there's nothing better in the early game. Get all the Transportation technologies, not necessarily all of them in a row, but prioritise them. Once you have everything mentioned here, plus Telescopic Sight (Snipers), you can consider yourself out of the early game.
Advanced Construction
The Advanced Construction technology will unlock the Stone Workshop. There aren't many essential technologies you have to research here. Arguably, the most important technologies are Concrete to unlock Stone Walls, Thermal Energy to unlock Power Plants which will give you an amazing +120 Energy, and Currency to unlock the Bank, which boosts the Gold generation of the surrounding dwellings.
Those are the essentials, other situational and worth considering technologies are Autonomous Weapons, which unlock the Wasp, a very cheap and solid defence gun, and Plasma Spheres that unlock the Shocking Tower. The Shocking Tower is one of the best defence structures in the game. It's amazing at taking out large groups of infected at a time, but you can do without it for a while.
Food, energy and workers are resources that stay static until you build again. You’ll always have the same amount of energy until you make another mill, or power plant, and you won’t run out of energy until you build something that saps it.Wood, Stone, Iron, and Oil operate more traditionally — your buildings keep generating them, and they’ll stockpile forever. That stockpile has a maximum number (depending on how many you have), and anything above that is either wasted or automatically sold at the market. A strong start is super importantJust like any RTS, an efficient start is paramount. Your build order will vary slightly, but there are some things you’ll want to do no matter what. For example: Right at the start, there’s a small window to build three tents before the next round of income arrives. If you’re too slow, you miss out on the gold those tents would provide. Don't miss out on that early gold.It may seem small, but that little bit of gold has a cascading effect throughout the game, with bigger and bigger ramifications over the next four hours.
It’s why build orders are so exact in games like Starcraft and Age of Empires, and this is no different.So what’s generally a good guide?On the first map, you’ll want to get these things done, mostly in this order:. Build housing and food, expand towards resources as necessary. Build, make rangers and start clearing space.
Farms, Cottages, Great Ballista, Market, Sniper. Have a ballista on all choke points while rangers clear space. Stone Walls, Bank,From there people start to vary in their playstyles, but you should aim to get up a Foundry, an, and pump out endgame units. Cover more space with guard units using Patrol (P).You can’t delete workshops to free up space. Doing so makes the techs you bought there unavailable. Expanding into large areas with good chokepoints is a must.It’s unfortunate that you’ll have to spend several hours before you get late game experience. Suffice to say you’ll need more than one town’s worth of gold for the upkeep costs of units like, towers, and armies of.
Fight or KiteIn the early game, it’s possible to use the ranger’s speed to kite around a large group of zombies while a tower or other rangers fire freely.You’ll find this tougher as the swarms become bigger though, and as more special zombies are mixed in. A cheap ranger is used to take some heat off the emergency wallsOnce the waves get too large, you can use a ranger to attract a blob of zombies away from the main horde. Perhaps you’ll bring them to another chokepoint, or perhaps you’ll just kite them around for a while to take some heat off your main section. Plan for the late gameTake lots of space early, make sure it’s protected, and then build inside your walls.
Save those grassy areas for farms later.When building large housing districts, make sure to leave two holes in the middle for a and a. These will raise income and reduce food usage, respectively. Be sure to plan for those 3x3 holes in your townsBoth the Bank and Market are 3×3 tiles, and can’t be placed next to another building. Here’s an example of an optimal layout, with the houses producting +30% gold and -30% food usage.You may want to start building power plants later on (though some prefer ), and these consume 5 stone and wood every so often. Plan for this ahead of time by building more quarries and lumber mills than you need.The rarest resource is stone. Later on you’ll want to build lots of, upgrade every to a and power plants will suck stone.Plan for this by building several quarries and upgrading to.
Military MicroLeft to their own devices, units will wait until they see an enemy, then prepare to fire, and then fire. Setting them to Hold (H) causes them to prepare in advance.They’ll effectively shoulder their weapon and aim before the unit comes along. A big deal when it comes to the long aiming time of snipers. More sniper towers would be better, but this setup barely survivedIt’s also a great idea to tell your snipers, ballistas, executors and Thanatos to focus on high priority infected. The latter three are area of effect, so they’ll actually kill more infected by targeting VIP zombies in the middle of large groups.I’ve even seen some Youtubers pausing often enough to carefully guide their Thanatos shots into the middle of standard zombie crowds for maximum effect, but that’s a level of pause micro I’m not willing to engage in.Everyone beats the waves in their own way, but you’ll need to remember that the are ranged, and can take out shock towers and other defensive buildings from afar. Especially so if your are focusing on other special zombies.A tower full of snipers set to target can work well. Be sure to put it close to the front of your tower formation, so they outrange the spitters.
Time To Kill (TTK)On the subject of unit strategies, here’s a table put together by Reddit user. This shows how many seconds it takes for each unit to kill each type of infected.It doesn’t take into account factors like range, noise, armour and speed. But sometimes noise can be a good thing, as it makes luring and clearing large areas of zombies quick. It’s clear to see just how much an advantage you have when you can start spending iron on soldiers and snipers.Young, Aged,DecrepitFresh, ColonistExecutiveHarpy, VenomChubbyRanger4591475V Ranger1.52.545.530Soldier1.5234.523.5V Soldier0.80.81.62.411.2Sniper2.22.22.24.415.6V Sniper1.11.11.12.26.6Titan0.40.611.46.8The “V” before some entries marks that as a veteran unit, obtained after killing many infected.The Lucifer and Thanatos are omitted because they’re moreso instant kills within an area of effect. But it’s worth bearing in mind Thanatos has a large reload time on his rocket launcher. Reject the Early ThanatosSome mayors will offer you units like very early on.
It’s tempting, but units like this will agro a whole section of the map when a swarm comes. It’s pretty much impossible to deal with in the early game.I found this out the hard way. Learn from my mistakes. Clearing space can start straight away. Clear the map, grab spaceThis is key to making sure your units are veterans when the later waves come.Taking out the villages of doom can also give you some nice resource boosts.
If you’re ever in a tight spot, you can run over those crates and just keep building.Once you have a large group of snipers, there’s not much they can’t handle. They’ll help a lot in the tougher edges of the map where a lot of special zombies reside. The Scratching PostZombies are dumb and will attack whatever is in front of them. Putting a solitary wood wall tile at the edge of your base will attract the lone zombies wandering in to test your defences. It’ll give you enough time for your rangers to run over and save the day.It also costs next to nothing and is infinitely better than just having houses on the very edge of your base. Pausing and DestroyingYou might initially feel queasy about pausing the game, or destroying buildings.
That’ll pass.Every time you hear an attack alert, your reaction should be to pause the game, check it out, and then continue. If you see some red dots rushing at you on the minimap, pause. If you have a lot of building decisions to make at once, pause. Pausing allowed me to build these emergency walls and tower. I still died.Same thing goes with destroying buildings.
If you’ve expanded beyond your initial perimeter, you might have ballistas sucking up gold upkeep for no reason.You can also pause buildings, such as quarries producing stone when you’re at maximum and don’t have a market. If you get into a tight spot and need a little bit of emergency power to get your economy running again, this can be a good option. The Last Wave Is BrutalIt’s much harder than the periodic waves. It comes from all sides and they are Well. Not quite billions, but it’ll feel like it.At this point in the game, success will depend on your chokepoints, and whether or not you build an economy strong enough to support an army of Engineers Center units, snipers, and lots of towers and walls.Hopefully that helps you take on the first map and beyond. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t win for a while. The long nature of the game means you have to invest three hours just to get some late game experience.
It’ll be worth it to get that elusive win.
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