They Are Billions – Getting Started

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 at gamepedia. They’re both mostly complete.

Getting Started

1. Longer games aren’t harder, they’re easier. It’s the Swarms that bring difficulty; there’s only ever 10 of them and their size is strictly a function of the swarm number and the initial ‘Infected Population Size’ difficulty setting. A longer game gives you more time to prepare and you’ll pause less. (Press SPACE to pause.)
2. Use the first minute or so of the game to use all five of your troops to do some basic scouting around your base. Figure out where you’ll put housing (you’ll want a 23×23 area with few obstacles) and where you’ll put industry, and find some easy chokepoints to expand to.
3. Your first few goals should be to build a Soldier Center, a Warehouse, and a Wood Workshop. Along the way (and continuously) you should be clearing land of Infected, adding food gathering, and building Sawmills and Quarries.
4. Although the whole map has zombies, it’s not packed with zombies. You can get surprisingly far from the center with an adventurous Ranger, especially in the early game before the Infected start creeping towards your base. Plus a Ranger can easily outrun the slow zombies, and (less easily) also outrun the runners.
5. The key to getting rich is Cottages, Stone Houses, and the Bank. You’re far better off upgrading a Tent than building a new one, so keep those Sawmills busy.
6. The #1 cause of my early failures was leaving a hole in my defenses; not patrolling along 100% of my perimeter. If you really really can’t afford to leave a Ranger to watch every foot of your fenceline, you can try walling up a small hole and ignoring it (until you get a notification that it’s being attacked–but that’s better than having an Infected attack one of your tents).

Mechanics & Building

1. Food is used to build tents (to increase your taxable population) and to recruit troops (except for Rangers, who I guess can forage for food). There’s tons of grass, water, and trees on the first map, giving you a range of places to gather food. These ratios are different on later maps and, especially on the 4th map, finding food can be exceptionally difficult.
2. You get gold income every 8 hours. Buildings and units that consume gold (for troops this is considered ‘salary’) reduce this 8-hour tax value, which you can see at the bottom-right of the screen.
3. Sawmills, Quarries, and Oil Platforms will add goods (eg Wood) to your stockpile every 8 hours, although which hour they do it on depends on when the building was constructed.
4. You see the bars there at the bottom right? If the entire bar for Wood is filled, then any more wood you gather will be wasted, unless you have a Market, in which case it will automatically be sold off (ie, exchanged for gold). It used to be that having multiple Markets increased the price that you’d get, but I don’t think this is still true? Dunno. Selling excess goods is worse than not harvesting them at all; it’s better to not build an extra quarry than to sell the excess it produces.
5. The cost of items and troops can get pretty complex: in addition to Gold, buildings can require Wood, Stone, Iron, and/or Oil to build, and they’ll usually require a set number of Workers and Energy. Some buildings will consume goods (eg Wood) every tick (ie 8 hrs)!
6. Many buildings have a progress bar that you can see if you hover the mouse over the building. For the Command Center, this is the taxation payment cycle. For sawmills, etc it’s when they’ll deliver their next load of wood.
7. You can assign either troops or buildings to hotkeys. I normally set my Soldier Center to 8 and the Engineering Center to 7, and use 1 and 2 for my attack squads, and 3-6 for sub-parts of the attack squads (eg, 3 will be just the Soldiers and 4 will be just the Snipers from squad 1). Some players use multiple Soldier Centers; that’s up to you.
8. There are three buildings at which to research upgrades: the Wood Workshop, the Stone Workshop, and the Iron Foundry. By the end of the game, you’ll have researched nearly everything (except the Wonders, and perhaps not Titans).
9. Never stop adding food, power, and housing — until a few days before the final wave. Also, high-end stuff consumes (eg) wood each tick, so keep adding Sawmills and Quarries, too.
10. Keep an eye on your basic stats — workers, food, and energy. When one gets low, make a plan to add more. If they all go to 0 at the same time, fixing that problem will require (eg) pausing a Sawmill for a while, which will put a dent in your economy while you try to sort the problem out.
11. The buildings (eg Market and Bank) and Mayors that give, say, a 10% or 20% bonus, round that effect to the nearest integer. Strangely, Tents that take 20% less food take 3 instead of 4 and Cottages 6 instead of 8, but Houses take 13 instead of 16. The effects of the Bank and the Inn are cumulative. The Market and the Bank each affect a 27×27 tile area, while the Inn has a radius of 20+. Mayors that affect, eg, Farms do not affect Advanced Farms.
12. If your power drops into the negatives (cuz, eg, Infected ate one of your Mills), every single one of your static defenses will be offline, and every single one of them will remain offline until your power goes back into the black (ie, is 0 or higher). Also, you can’t selectively turn off defenses, but you can pause Sawmills and Quarries. Power should be protected just as much as your housing.
13. Building high-end units too early in the game can make you broke. Executors and the Engineering Center troops are all very expensive to maintain; in the mid-game, you’re probably better off investing money into growing your city more than in building “early” Executors.

Sound

1. Sound draws nearby infected. The louder the sound, the further it travels and the more likely it’ll wake up a unit. The “wake up” process isn’t 100%; sometimes a quiet noise will draw a zombie, sometimes it won’t.
2. Rangers, Ballistas, and (relatively) Snipers are fairly quiet.
3. Soldiers are loud, Shocking Towers are very loud.
4. Buildings (both yours and VOD) getting smashed, units firing, and units dying all make noise. If there’s a Village of Doom nearby, you’ll draw a bunch of runners. For example, a poorly handled Swarm attack that happens to hit your defenses near a VOD could result in one very, very long assault on your base.

Infected & Combat

1. There are three types of Infected: basic, 35-hitpoint weenies; fast runners with either 45hp or the Executives (80hp, in suits); and the three Specials, which are the Harpy (120hp), Venom (120hp), and Chubby (500hp).
2. Infected, including Specials, can’t damage troops inside a Tower. They’ll all attack the tower, though.
3. Lower difficulties can be won with 70 troops; over 100% difficulty you’ll probably want over 100 troops (and/or more static defenses).
4. Selecting units can be tricky. Be careful when using attack-click to command troops that you do not target a friendly unit, because they will kill his ass. Attacking enemy troops can be just as difficult; try to aim for open ground rather than clicking arbitrarily in a direction, or else you’ll get troops running through infected to get to their target.
5. Troops, groups of troops, and troops in a tower all have a setting to either “Attack Nearest” or “Attack Highest Level”. I generally set Snipers to Highest Level, and I go back and forth on whether I use Soldiers or Rangers to attack nearest.
6. The edges of the map have more Runners and Special Infected than the center of the map does, and the corners doubly so.
7. Swarms will come at a set schedule based upon the game length. For a normal 100-day game, the first swarm comes on day 13, and then a new one each 10 days after that til 43, then each 7 days after that til 78, then a break before the final wave.
8. You’ll get 8 hours of warning before a Swarm. At around 100% difficulty, the first swarm can be handled by a half-dozen troops. Towers reduce the troops requirement, but note that both towers and walls can be completely destroyed. For the middle swarms you’ll need a dozen troops and at least one static defense — although you can, of course, defend with nothing but troops or nothing but defenses.
9. The final swarm is Swarm 10, and comes on day 93 (or 72, 110, or 138). You’ll get 24 hours of notice. So a 100-day game doesn’t really last 100 days; chances are you’ll win or lose by day 95. If you get to Day 100 you win; if you kill every Infected on the map, you win.
10. There’ll also be a mini-swarm that’s offset from the big swarm by a few days. A lone troop watching a hole in your walls might suddenly get overwhelmed by a string of 4-6 runners.
11. VODs can generate a near-infinite number of Infected over the course of a game. However, they’ll only generate so many every few game days. Sometimes the best way to take down a VOD is to micro a group of Snipers close enough to take down (or heavily damage) one building, retreat out of sonic range of the VOD and let static defenses (or Soldiers) clean up the mess, and repeat. VOD buildings, unlike both your troops and Infected, do not heal over time, so if you don’t take it out completely your progress will be “saved” until you come back later.

Questions? Comments? Let me know.