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.
Tips & Tricks
Tip 1: You can pause! Hit space. When you build when paused, you can undo construction for no cost. This is great if you’re looking to maximize the return from a sawmill, or need to place a lot of tents.
Tip 2: Here’s a few other helpful keyboard shortcuts:
- A for attack
- R for repair
- U for undo
- Backspace for destroy
- F4 toggles between normal and “flat grid” view
- Alt displays the health of units, buildings, and Infected
Tip 3: Destroying a building, either complete or partially under construction, only returns 50% of what you spent on it. Once a single game tick has passed, you can no longer undo for free.
Tip 4: If you destroy a Workshop (Wood, Stone, or Foundry), you lose all of the technologies it researched. Anything you’ve already built with those techs you can keep, but you can’t build anything new with the advanced tech until you build a new Workshop and pay for the research a second time.
Tip 5: Houses need four of their 12 adjacent tiles empty (or occupied by walls, towers, or Tesla Towers). It needn’t be a contiguous 4 tiles. If even one of those adjacent tiles is occupied by forest, mountains, or water, then they only need 3 tiles empty.
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- Mostly this means that you have to build in 2-by-X chunks
- And also that you can only have one “layer” up against a (say) Mountain wall.
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Tip 6: Warehouses, Markets, and Banks influence buildings that are 12 tiles or less from their edges; in the case of Markets and Banks, this means a big 27×27 square; for Warehouses, it’s 28×28. Inns and the Wonders have a greater range; 20? 24?
- To be influenced, any building must be completely within the influence zone; any building half-in and half-out gains no benefit.
Tip 7: Two of the same type of buildings do not stack their influences. Any tent built within the influence range of two Markets gets no extra benefit from the second market.
- Different types of buildings can stack. An Inn, Bank, Victorious and a Mayor can all add their extra-gold-production influence onto buildings.
Tip 8: The food reduction value provided by a Market is rounded, which means that a tent only consumes 3 food, not 4; a cottage consumes 6, not 8; but a house under the influence of a market is reduced from 16 to 13 — not the expected 12.
Tip 9: One Quarry can mine multiple types of resources
- The amount of resources it produces is half the number of tiles of that resource, rounded up.
- Even if it’s only adjacent to one gold tile, eventually such a quarry will pay off.
Tip 10: You can chain unit commands. Once you’ve told a unit to Move, Attack, or Patrol to a different location, you can hit M, A, or P and then [Shift]-Click a second location. The unit will move (or attack) towards the first point, and then once there move on to the second point. In the case of Patrol, this acts as a third node, since where the unit started is counted as a patrol waypoint. The limit is six waypoints.
- You can chain an archer to run circles around a small number of slow zombies and let other units kill them all, and then go pay attention to something else (although this requires a bit of practice to get just right).
- Kiting zombies around, in front of, or just nearby other units or (say) a Ballista is an effective tactic.
Tip 11: Noise attracts zombies. The louder the noise, the more zombies get attracted and the further away they’ll come from.
- Some zombies (of the same type) seem to take a bit more noise to wake up than others. In other words, one soldier won’t attract every zombie in (say) an 8-tile radius when he shoots his rifle, but as he continues to shoot eventually more will come.
- Infected head towards the location where the sound was, not the unit, so if you run the unit in one direction and then turn and run perpendicular for a ways, the Infected will be sooo lost
- Rangers, Snipers, and Ballistas are relatively quiet. Shocking towers, Executors, and Soldiers are all noisy. I’m not sure about the rest.
- Buildings getting infected or walls/towers getting destroyed generates a lot of noise
Tip 12: As you get further and further away from the center of the map, Infected get tougher and tougher. It’s a factor of radius, not distance that you travel around mountains and other obstacles. In the center are walkers; slow Infected that have just 35 hitpoints. A bit further out are runners — Colonists and Executives that move more quickly and have more hitpoints. At the edges are Special Infected, with a high concentration of Specials in the corners.
- If you’re pushing in one direction and start seeing a lot of runners, be careful — you’ll soon encounter Special Infected.
Tip 13: Buildings of Doom hold Infected inside; each time you damage one, it’ll spill out some of those units — up to 8. Keep poking and eventually the building will be empty, and a lonely Ranger will be able to take out the building without being threatened.
- They build a new stock of infected after some number of days; maybe 10 or so? I don’t know. VODs aren’t too dangerous early in the game, but towards the end of the game they’ll contain Special Infected in addition to their full complement of runners, executives, and other threats.
Tip 14: Wood & Stone Towers are best used to protect your troops from Harpies and Venoms, or in those cases where you want a few more tiles of range.
- Against waves that won’t have harpies or venoms, walls are just as effective as Wood (or Stone) Towers and cheaper to build.
- The added range and defense from all sides makes towers an effective defense if they’re used to guard a large, open, and empty area.
- Note that if an Infected gets drawn to a building, such as a Tesla Tower on Fisherman’s Hut, they’ll attack it, even while taking damage from a unit in a Tower.
Tip 15: Wood Stakes and Wire Fence Traps cause damage while any enemy unit stands within it; it’s a damage-over-time effect, not a one-time thing. If they’re in the tile, whether moving or standing still, they’re taking damage.
Tip 16: Infected can attack diagonally. Walls will be drawn to look like they connect diagonally — and Infected won’t be able to move through the walls until one goes down — but they can attack a structure that’s diagonally adjacent.
Hopefully these tips have given you a better understanding of the game, and help you play more effectively, survive more waves, and clean up many of the game’s achievements!
Check out my Econ post for a comparative examination of many units, and my Getting Started or Surviving the First Swarm posts for some strategy hints.