We’re here in the third week of the Battle for Azeroth, and Uldir (OOL-deer) opens next week. I’m sure you’ve seen or heard about a bunch of great gear, but I bet you’re wondering, in general, what’s the best way to gear up for Uldir?
In this post I’m going to cover sixteen different tips and tricks for playing They Are Billions. If you’re looking for a review of the game, or some other info on getting started you can check out some of my other posts, and (coming soon) my Let’s Play series on YouTube. These tips & tricks are mostly information about gameplay mechanics that’s not obvious to the new player. I don’t cover strategy here; again, for that, look to other posts.
Are you having trouble surving the first swarm in They Are Billions? Having trouble staying alive until the second swarm? I’m going to cover a handful of points in this post; hopefully, boil strategy down to its bare essence. Your first three tents should go up within a couple hours, and then at hour 8 when your first income hits, build the fourth tent, and use the remaining gold to build a food building (hunter’s hut or fisherman’s) and a sawmill. If you can’t get to wood yet, or if there’s a much better place to put a sawmill a few tiles outside your zone, you might put up a…
When playing a game like They Are Billions it helps to know the relative advantage and cost of each troop and each building. How quickly will upgrading a tent to a cottage take to pay off? Cuz surely it’s a profitable upgrade, but if I do it just two days before the final wave, will I actually get money out of it? Should be easy! Let’s just take all the units and shove it in a spreadsheet and convert everything to gold. But… there’s a problem.
The 0.9 patch to They Are Billions added two things: a new difficulty setting (max population), and a new Special Infected, the Giant. The difficulty setting is a new population setting. The previous population choices were few, very low, low, medium, and high. This new choice, max, comes on the high end. The result is a new set of hard challenges, pushing the maximum score factor up to 800%. Of course, this doesn’t affect any existing games, as you only choose difficulty at the start of a new game. I’m currently working my way through a 160% difficulty game (80, low, Peaceful Lowlands) so I can’t really comment on the…
Are they worth building? Most of them are! There’s one of them I have yet to build, and another I tried once and don’t think I’ll ever use again. Which is which? What are they worth? Let’s take a look. Most of the Wonders are huge, meaning a big footprint — as much as 6×6. They require a good bit of space somewhere in your base that isn’t crowded by frickin’ Mills all over. One thing Wonders have pushed me to do is to stop planting Mills in the first available space, because Mills, really, are 4×4 buildings. They belong against mountains or lakes, where half their required spacing is…
I mean there’s guys out there that play at 500% difficulty without pausing and win, how hard can it be? Being good at a game is a combination of intelligence, memorization, planning, focus, situational awareness, and reflexes. It’s hard to plan well if you don’t understand mechanics, and there’s nothing to memorize if you’ve never seen something before. You can’t change your intelligence (and no I won’t make a cheap-shot at pot users here), and reflexes are also hard to tweak (but luckily there’s not much of that in TAB), and the rest is trainable. Which means that you have to play TAB for a while before you can even beat…
They Are Billions is a roguelike, and that means that it has a lot of mechanics that you only really learn by failing them, dying, and having to restart. Sometimes, figuring out exact mechanics is a bit tricky. Other times, there’s stuff that you can’t understand until you see it in action — which makes choosing a solution difficult sometimes. For example – What’s a Market do? You can’t really see the effect until you place one down, which you can’t do until you’ve both researched it and have the materials on hand to place it. The Wiki is one place for answers. There’s actually two wikis – one at wikia and one…
Are you thinking of buying They Are Billions? Maybe you’re looking for a new city-building, procedurally-generated, roguelike, RTS. TAB could be your next game! I’ll give you an outline of gameplay, tell you what I think of it, and hopefully help you make that decision. I’ve already mentioned some things that the game is, but here’s some things that it’s not: there’s no logistics, no multiplayer, it’s not easy or mindless, and games don’t go quick. This is definitely one of those games where you go “just one more wave” or “one more attempt” and find yourself watching the sun come up when you need to be at work in a…
Heya. I created this blog to contain some of the geekier data that I would otherwise put on YouTube, plus, probably, text versions of the reviews, guides, and whatnot I post there too. That is, it’s a text-based mirror of my YouTube site, with extras. That work in text. Or need download links, I guess? Enjoy! BTW the games I enjoy the most are city-builders and simulations, although I also like logistics and shooters and pixel-art (retro) stuff. Some of everything. I hope you find some games that you love, and some new games to love, too.