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 500% with pausing. The good news is that your progress will be very visible.
Even 100% is hard. There’s 46 different score factors, and the median difficulty is 60%. I recommend giving 10% a try until you beat the first map. Ain’t no-one gotta know you played at 10%. They’ve changed the requirements to unlock each map, but I think the requirements are 22%, 85%, and 100%. So why try 10%? To see more of the game before you have to start over. This is a roguelike; you have to enjoy the challenge of building your city faster, better, stronger (and harder?). Once you see the final wave you’ll understand better what you need to do to prepare for it.
I think if you’re reading this, you can beat all four maps. I mean: worst case, you barely scrape through Map 3, and then just do map four at 5%, right? It could take dozens of games. For me it took about 50 games to beat all four maps — tho (sadly) many, many of those ended shortly after day 23. Don’t ignore gaps!
Let’s look at this “Score Factor” and see what the options are.
There are four maps, four possible lengths, and five different densities, for a total of 80 different combinations, which get represented by a number between 3 and 500. This number is called “score factor” and, yes, affects your final score. There’s only 46 different score factors (for example, four different settings result in a SF of 10%). Yet one combination might seem much harder to you than another — plus if you’re still fairly new to the game you’re going to be limited to only the maps you’ve unlocked. And, since you have to beat a map at a certain score factor in order to open up the next map, you can’t just “few/150” your way to finishing the game.
One thing you could do is stick to, say, 100-day games. Then the waves always show up at the same time: day 13, every 10 days for a while, day 50, every 7 days through 78, then 92. Memorizing the sequence makes it a bit easier to prep while you’re actually playing, eg, to put troops someplace central and convenient so that you can get them to the correct front when the Swarm hits. 13, 23, 33, 43, 50, 57, 64, 71, 78, 92. You can write down what you’re building and how big the population is right before each Swarm and compare your notes to see how well you’re doing on each map.
There’s three big recommendations I can make to beating They Are Billions:
- Play a lot. Don’t worry about failing; just restart and keep looking.
- Have a plan: what building are you going to focus on getting next? What after that?
- Focus on one thing at a time. If you desperately need to find more food, or more stone, then use Lookout Towers to find some, and focus on expanding there. You might have an idea that you wanna go clear over thar and establish that choke point and yadda yadda — but if it doesn’t help you grow your city fast and furious, you need to put that task off for later.
So, like, what are the score factors? The SF for the four maps are in the image to the right.
What are the 46 different score factors? Here:
3 4 5 7 8, 10 12 14 16 18, 22 26 28 30 34, 42 48 50 55 60, 65 70 75 80 85, 100 110 120 130 140, 150 160 170 180 190, 200 210 220 240 260, 270 290 320 370 440, 500
Let’s say you want to stick to 100-day games. Your difficulty choices are 10 12 14 16 30 34 42 48 75 85 100 110 120 140 160 180 200 240 270. I mostly stuck to 100 days when I played out of familiarity, and now I’m working on 140%+, still sticking to 100 days. Even though the maps are changing (DL to FW to PL etc), there’s still a good number of Infected, and with each Swarm at the same time, it’s easier for me to compare building progress.