I heard Vinny mention on the Beastcast(the best podcast in the universe) that he couldn't find any guides or anything on YouTube given that the game has only been out for less than a month. My question is for the people that have actually played it, how the fuck do you win? I feel like the proceduraly generated geographical spawn is the clear determiner on whether you win or not and so i'm not enjoying it when i'm playing it but I CONSTANTLY find myself wanting to get back into the game and trying again... its so fucking addicting but god... I fucking suck at it... any suggestions?

The primary lesson I learned was expand, expand, expand. Considering the premise etc it's easy to get into the mindset of creating a small settlement with a tightly knit defense, but your victory is solely bound to how much gold you have, which requires houses, lots of houses. Once you figure that out it's all the basics. Build towers and turrets and build walls upon walls upon walls. Both the minigun turret and snipers in towers can hit enemies beyond a third set of walls, and in case that falls have another set of walls to fall back behind. But again, expand expand expand. You won't get anywhere if you don't get the gold and stone you need. And if you're afraid of clearing zombies, you'll find that the starting units you get can do a lot more work than you'd expect.

Didn't Vinny say there'd be a Quick Look of this? I thought he did, but maybe I mis-heard.

I've been playing a bit and I've found a decent strategy to start with is prioritize the needs to get a barracks early on. Also if you can pick the mayor bonuses that give you longer term advantages. Like technology and production rates over items. As said above you will need to expand quickly.

edit: I've been playing on default 100%

@numberthirtyone: there is an unfinished https://www.giantbomb.com/videos/unfinished-they-are-billions-12222017/2300-12687/

This was the first game I ever got a refund for on Steam. The game is totally unbalanced and is far too punishing in a way that feels unfair rather than fun. Shame, because it's a fine concept.

Never made it much past the initial "rush". I've had awful luck with getting a starting location with decent resources.

Was able to hold it off once with a double wood wall, and all my archers positioned to take the them out. Fell shortly after that due to one zombie sneaking in from a side I wasn't watching.

The best advice I can give, if you can stand to watch, is to go on twitch and find anyone playing this game at the ungoddly '280%' or whatever it is. Look at what they do to survive the insane difficulty increase, and try and learn some basic leasons from them.

Off the top of my head just spending 10 minutes watching a vod of someone who completed such a challenge on twitch (or maybe it was youtube) I learned things I wasn't immediately aware of. Like..There are free resource pick-ups scattered around the map and so scouting everywhere that isn't zombie invested at the begining is a good idea. Multi-walls are important. Apparently the secret too surviving 280% is to have ballasts ready before it hits (which I assume is way easier to do at 100%). Finally, and this was absolutely key. You can place buildings while the game is paused. A lot of the stuff i watched was the player debating where to put huts and etc, and laying down a bunch of buildings all at once all while the game was paused (or so it seemed). That fact alone, if I am not utterly mistaken (i've not gotten into this game cause I fear it would eat my free-time away drasticly) should make things a heck of a lot easier.

So tl;dr Watch youtube/twitch players tackling 280% to get a base-line ideas. Use the pause feature, you can set buildings while paused it seemed like, and can move them around the map (while paused) and still get '## food/wood' for each potential spot. Take your time with placements.

How do you win? I can't tell you. I was able to get near the end one time but then the game decided I needed to lose and it threw at me, quite literally, billions of zombies in the last horde rush. The zombies kept pouring in from all sides with no end and I was supposed to survive that for like 2 minutes. The difficulty curve is not even funny. It went from 7 to 140. I'm not even exaggerating.

After that, I stopped playing it and uninstalled it. Fuck this game!

Same. I'd still like to see the final product but it just wasn't working for me in this state.

@nickhead: thats a shame but its understandable for early access. My only return on steam was ARK. the game just ran like ass for me even though I met the requirements and my ping was in the 60s-80s. But hey it's cool we can return, remember in the golden age when you would just lose money? haha

So I've now completed up to map three and have not started map 4 yet. Some of the best tips I can give is dont stop producing units. Rangers early game and snipers after that. Normally by the time I switch to snipers ~day 15 I will have 30 rangers. your next goal should be clearing the map. You can do this with rangers but they struggle with large groups of special zombies. So normally I will wait until I have about 30 snipers and then I will just deathball them around the map clearing everything from random zombies to Doom Cities. This is important because when hordes come in they will pull these roamers in with them and they can activate Doom cities.

You will basically do this until you can get engineering tech up and start producing Thanatos's. Most of my games that end in me winning I have roughly 50 of them plus some static defenses and 2 sets of double walls.

It took me roughly 15-20 failed attempts before I finally even made it to day 50 and now i'd say I finish a map roughly 70% of the time. The best advice I can give is always expand and be mindful of noise as it will pull more zombies and can activate Doom cities.

Also i'd say watch at least the first 20 min of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej5erezJ1vY

this is what made me start thinking about tent placement and made me make sure that I had 200 villagers by day 10. If you have any questions let me know! I'm hoping to beat the final map today then I'll be starting max difficulty runs on each map again.

In my personal opinion, I dislike it when people say something is "too hard". Simply giving up because something is 'too hard' sounds to me like "I didn't want to apply a lot of brainpower or strategy to this game, so I am going to refund it." Now if RTS/Resource management isn't your strong point, that's perfectly fine. If you are not someone who can adapt to a problem thrown at you, well that's also fine I suppose. but simply giving up and getting a refund because its too hard for you... well, I don't know what to say. HOWEVER, for those of you who enjoy the game and wish to learn a few things that might help you on your journey through this world of hell, well here are some pointers that will help guide you.

1. ITS OK TO RESET THE MAP, YOU MAY HAVE TO DO IT OFTEN! (it also saves you time from trying to just trudge through it, because knowing when to accept a loss early is better then being over confident!)

• If there is not a decent forest by the start point, RESET! although you may think "but it only takes a couple minutes to put a tesla tower and get to the forest!" WRONG! OVER CONFIDENCE! you wasted too much time already, although this may not seem like a big deal if you are practicing on 20-30% difficulty, on the higher % time is of the essence.
• spawn next to a village of doom. sometimes the Random Map Generation likes to place these next to you. Why? I don't know. Lets do the ol' "blame early access" excuse.
• something just goes wrong. This includes having a building near game start getting infected, loosing your starting troops, other bad luck ect

2. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ENOUGH HOUSING!

• One objective that took me awhile to learn and hone in on, is making sure you always have enough housing. what happen to me when I first started playing, was the mindset of "Oh i'll build that house right after this quarry, right aftert this sawmill, right after this farm.... oh... gold income is now below +300...." You NEVER want to be this low early-mid to late game, well anytime really, but you got to start somewhere.
• UPGRADE! people may argue with me on this one, but it is cheaper to upgrade an existing tent/wood house then to build a whole new one, plus it increases the output of those tiles you placed the original structure on.
• Try to have your gold income be above 800-1000+ or even higher, although you may max out, it is better to have a high income of gold, its used for everything unlike some of the other resources

3. UTILIZE THE UTILITY STRUCTURES!

• BANKS! Increases the income of your housing. although it may not seem like much when you read the description, but it makes a hell of a difference when you have all stone houses and you have a bank running.
• MARKET! not only does it help reduce the food upkeep of houses, but adds to your gold income if your resources cap for all the other resources goes over (for example if your max is 100 wood and you produce excess it automatically gets converted to gold)
• RADAR AND WATCH TOWERS! Scouting is good, having permanent sight over an area is even better. sometimes its better then scouting depending on your situation

4. TROOPS!

• some people like to say "you GOT to use the rangers to clear out the zombies because they are faster!" I say there is more then one way to kill a zombie I say! although rangers have speed to there advantage, there firepower is, well, not so fast, and not as deadly either, especially when you start seeing those executive zombies coming at you. In my playthrough's and my experience, I always go with soldiers and snipers. I use snipers behind the group of soldiers to help provide them covering fire. While the soldiers not only soak up frontal damage, but do a decent amount of damage on their own as well.
• RANGERS! I prefer to use for early game scouting/clearing, while the zombies are still manageable and weak.

5. DO NOT THINK YOU CAN MASTER THIS GAME IN UNDER THE 2 HOUR STEAM REFUND POLICY! YOU WON'T!

• to stop myself from writing a full on strategy guide which I noticed myself starting to do at a certain point (was starting to take screenshots and draw arrows for TO-DO's and NOT TO-DO's!) i will end with this to say to those of you who got refunds or are on the fence about this game.
• DO NOT think you can buy this game and be good at it in 2 hours.
• DO NOT think this is an easy game, it is not, I have restarted and failed many a time, but given enough practice, and failures, and more practice, I have succeeded with the current build of the game.
• DO NOT buy this game if you are not someone who is good at Strategy/Resource management under pressure of a doom clock counting down on you.
• DO NOT buy this game with the mindset of "ok i got 2 hours to play this game and beat it so i can get my 25$ back" (in my opinion, this is ridicules... 25$ is like on average 3 to 4 hours of minimum wage work after taxes... maybe less or more depending on where you live. its not a lot of money. If you are on a budget, wait for a sale, steam has a lot of those, or have a friend buy it for you or share their library with you if they have it [and if you trust them ;)].)
• DO NOT buy this game if you don't like hard video games. I see similar complaints about Darkest Dungeon, and yea, it took me a couple hundred hours, but I felt a real sense of accomplishment when I did beat it. No one is forcing you to beat a game in one sitting, take your time! play a round each night or every few nights, no matter how often you do it, practice make perfection, and since there truly is no such thing as perfection, the more you practice, the increasingly better you will be to a point of near perfection.
• BUY THIS GAME if you ARE looking for a challenge, something to test your mind against. The pointers I made above is only a sliver of information I have to share about this game. I might consider writing a full guide when I have the time.
• I WISH ALL OF YOU WHO STILL OWN IT OR WILL BE BUYING IT GOOD LUCK! and i hope your settlement will survive, like mine did, after countless defeats. :-)
• ALSO! Everything in this post is an OPINION! My ways of playing the game are not Right or Wrong, just a different way of approaching a situation that has worked for me.

If it was easy, what would be the point?

Beat first three maps so far. My biggest tips would be:

1 - Resources - when you start a game, if you don't see a good amount of food sources, stone, wood and iron near your base quit and re-roll the map.

2 - Never stop expanding. <- this is the most important

3 - Build double-double walls (two walls, space, two walls) everywhere before final wave.

4 - Only your Command Center needs to survive the final wave. When your first set of double walls fall: retreat everyone to your Command Center, build walls & turrets, clench butt.