They Are Billions: How to Beat 900% (No Pause + All Wonders)

My first goal was to complete 900 % with pause and that was a LOT of struggle for me, but as I learned what strategy worked best the step to no pause + all wonders wasn’t that big.

After I started using the strategy below I could “quite consistently” reach the final wave, at first I had some successful runs without wonders, then runs with almost all wonders and now the last run was with all the wonders. This guide does not cover the absolute basics like “explore with your archers, grab free loot, walls are important” etc. I just wanted to share my strategy and hear about your experiences.

Remember that it will never go exactly as planned, sometimes your foundry will be delayed for a couple of days or maybe your economy allows your sniper army to appear much faster.

TL;DR
Be picky with starting position
Turtle in your base for the first 30 days
Clear the map with two groups of snipers while Thanatos defend your base

Don’t hesitate to reroll a new map if it doesn’t meet your criteria. Free loot like food boxes or gold is nice and can boost your early economy, but the most important factor is your starting position. After the initial exploration, ask yourself “can I have a blooming economy at day 20-30 with everything I see here?”. If not – get new map.

1. The most important part is large area to build houses on, this is essential. Being walled in by terrain is ideal but not a must. Having most sides unprotected can be fine, just make sure your archers are constantly pushing/patrolling where needed.
2. Food: Grass where you can build 1-2 early farms + additional grass you can expand to.
3. Wood: 20+ with easy access to 40+
4. Stone: 4+ with access to at least another 4 within 10-20 days
5. Iron: you don’t need iron at start but you MUST have iron production around day 15-20.

This is the minimum but normally you’ll want more than this. If you got “ok” building area or no free loot then double these figures would be a great start.

Determine which area you will build your houses on. You’ll want to build many houses, so let the archers start pushing there right away to make that area even bigger. Only let your soldier kill zombies close to your HQ to not attract runners. Often I just play safe and use him as a patrolling scout that kills stray zombies walking into his line of fire.

Pay attention to the zombie’s reactions; if you attract runners there’s a big chance there’s a village of doom or just a high density of runners in that direction. Be very gentle with that front and realize you won’t go deeper in that direction anytime soon. In some directions there may just be a bunch of slow walkers which means you can push quite hard.

Use animation cancelling to make your archers shoot faster (with an archer, press A and left-click on a zombie. Just as the arrow leaves the bow, press A and click on the zombie again).

Rush workshop to research farm. If you don’t know where you should push with your archers and have some spare gold, lookout towers can be a huge help. Before day 10 you probably want to research market if you have low food, or research cottage if you have much food and high wood production.

Since animation cancelling is so efficient I only build barracks if I need archers on patrol to cover up blind spots. Aim for at least +450 gold income, it’s very possible (but hard) to reach +6-700 income with good housing or gold mining. Kite first wave with archer and ballista.

Keep doing what you did the first 10 days, full focus on housing. No military units except for maybe up to 10 archers. You should have some understanding of your surroundings, build ballistas where needed, especially on a front facing a village of doom. Make a plan; what resources can I get my hands on with a little archer push? In what direction will I push once I get my sniper army ready around day 27?

No mayor land claiming is taking place but the constant pushing with archers have left you with a little more space to build on, maybe you could build a few extra sawmills, quarries or farms. If your economy allows you can slowly advance with ballistas; build one a few tiles in front of another, then demolish the one further away from the front = more space for your buildings.

Defeat the second wave with walls and 2-3 ballistas and possibly archer kite / stakes traps.

Your economy will eventually get capped when you reach an income of at least +800 gold (or preferably +1000 gold); no more space for houses and it’s hard to increase your income any further. Until this point you’ve had practically zero military besides from your ballistas – now is the time for military. Make sure you have 2 barracks ready to start pumping out snipers.

You will need 3-4 ballistas on the front facing the village of doom, that will handle the periodic waves from the village for the rest of the game.

2-3 ballistas will defeat the third wave at day 26 with the help of the snipers you produced.

When the third wave is over and you have an army of 20+ snipers that’s constantly growing, it’s time for the first real push of the game. To know what front to go for, determine what you need to get your economy blooming. Maybe you have much stone but need to place more farms so you can upgrade all your cottages to stone houses, or maybe you just need big space to build on.

As you advance forward with your snipers, remember to always place tesla towers + walls along the way to immediately secure the area. When you’ve taken what you need, place ballistas to defend so the snipers can push another front or fall back to defeat another wave.

Increasing income is the main priority, producing snipers is secondary. Often there is a bottle neck like low stone income, which means you can upgrade as many stone houses as possible but still have gold over for snipers.

At this point you should be working on your second city in some open area you scouted long ago, with rows of houses and market + bank.

It’s not very efficient for snipers to bounce back and forth between pushing fronts and defending waves, too much walking. When you can afford, get an engineering center (at latest day 50) to build a bunch of Thanatos which defend waves as your snipers are pushing.

Keep building snipers – the more the better. At this point 50 snipers will handle any resistance they encounter.

A huge difficulty on no pause is that it’s easy to get capped with resources so it’s super important to build many warehouses throughout the game, you never want your gold income to arrive when the gold storage is already full, that leads to a huge gold loss. Aside from that, you want a large storage so you can build all the wonders in the very end of the game. If you even consider building a warehouse at some spot, it most certainly is a good idea to build it.

Your income should be at least +2500 gold.

If the engineering center was late and your Thanatos defense didn’t go as planned you can always defend waves with a thick layer of stone walls and executors + ballistas (consider demolishing the executor afterwards to regain resources and avoid it’s upkeep cost).

Using only one army to clear the map will take too much time so you have to split your snipers in two groups for faster map clearing. A group of 80-100 snipers is so strong you don’t even need to supervise them, you can just make an attack move across the map and they will destroy any giants or mutants in their way. To keep down the losses when encountering giants, you can let 1-3 snipers sacrifice themselves for the greater good to keep the rest of the army safe (or let a titan kite the giant).

If you have not yet found a useful placement for your third market, consider building it anyway just to get better sell price if you produce lots of resources.

Don’t always expand your base to the very edge of the map; often it’s a good idea to stop at bottlenecks when they are close to the edge (easier to defend final wave). This is more important later in the game when you are not that desperate for small portions of extra building space.

The first wonder you should build is The Silent Beholder which reveals the map so you get more information on where to expand, the other wonders can wait.

With only 3 days left to the final wave your top priority should be defense, you’ll be surprised how fast this time passes. I can’t count how many games I’ve thought “oboy, with three full days of planning my defenses will be impenetrable!” only to find in the very last minute that I still have fronts with only wood walls and ballistas.

Remember that for each direction (up, down, left, right) there will come more zombies in the center and probably no zombies at all in the very corners of the map, so plan your defense accordingly.

Spread out your snipers and Thanatos along your defenses, but remember it may take them days (!!!) to walk across the map. Spam thick layers of walls, build executors.

Unless you had an amazing economy, it’s a bad idea to research and build every single the wonder before the final wave because you need those resources for defense buildings, most wonders can be built after the final wave. Just make sure to research them in time, you don’t want to end up in a situation where there are 2 days until game end and you can’t start the research of The Victorious because the stone workshop is already busy researching The Academy of Immortals.

As the final wave gets thinner some fronts will have defeated all the zombies coming at them, demolish the defense buildings there so you can afford creating new defense where needed.

When the final wave is complete you still have until day 80 to finish all your wonders (just don’t kill the last zombie, there will always be some slow zombie getting stuck clawing at some wall somewhere).

Demolish all defense buildings to gain resources for wonders, also move your Thanatos to the engineering center so you can delete them for extra resources. You can also delete snipers but that takes a looong time since you must delete them one by one, and you’re probably busy building tesla towers, wonders and mills (and of course houses if you want a nice score).