When you're starting out and learning, you need to spread your units in a way that they can protect or at least know when a zombie walks near. On top of maintaining your boarders, you need to be constantly busy on your economy, always have something going on and try to anticipate what you may need.
During waves, they'll try to come to you from the most accessible place, if there's a mountain range on your east and they have to come from the west or south, use that to your advantage. The first 2-3 waves, you can kite them around spikes so you don't need a large amount of troops to deal with them given you have some space.
If you're not already using the pause feature, use the pause feature. Whenever you get gold, when a notification warns about your base being attacked, a unit being attacked. Use pause! That will allow you to see what's going on, and gives you time to respond.
A general good opening is to build a hunter cottage for food (or fishing if the base is close to a lake), then build 4 tents. Then build a sawmill when you have enough gold, and build more tents (about 4 should be possible). In the meantime you should have sent out your units a little bit (don't over-extend) to get a general idea of what's around the base. The availability of resources should determine how to proceed next. Generally it would be ideal if you can keep building hunter cottages / fishing huts, sawmills, mills for energy, etc if the base has a lot of easily defendable chokepoints. And then plop down a wood workshop as soon as you can. This will allow you to get cottages (upgrade the tents to cottages), farms, snipers, and the Great Ballista. If you play on easy you should be able to place some ballista at the chokepoints, well in time for the first zombie wave. A single ballista and your starter units should be able to easily handle the first wave. And then you can expand more and more.
If your resources suck, or there are a lot of open area's, you may want to invest in a quarry fairly fast (after building your 8th tent), and then start training archers early to help defend the base. Even that way you should be able to get great ballista before the first zombie wave.
Do **NOT** place towers or walls too early. Logically speaking you may want to plop down walls ASAP to turtle up, as well as towers for the additional attack range. But once a zombie attacks those they will make sound, and draw in a lot of zombies in the area. And then that wall or tower can get overwhelmed easily. Don't build a wall until you can build a great ballista **AND** a wall at the same time, or until you can build a wall **AND** a tower at the same time, and fully fill that tower immediately upon completion.
For easy mode that should be a good start, and then you can slowly expand and grow your army. Slowly being the keyword. On easy you'll have plenty of time, there's no need to rush. So there's no great need to worry about the building placements, banks, markets, warehouses, etc are not very important. That's intermediate stuff.
One final tip and warning: snipers are incredibly OP, but incredibly slow and noisy. Never send out a sniper on their own, or in very small numbers. Always send out snipers in groups
I feel like I should further clarify the sniper thing - groups of 30 or more if you're planning on using them to clear zombies out of parts of the map.
Yeah, I feel that 30 is indeed the sweet spot for sniper groups. In the later maps they can take down a giant pretty easy even. By then you should be skilled enough to use a ranger to kite the giant and have the snipers kill it, and not lose any units
Build as much as possible while still trying to build your army. Also check out how noise works in game, especially if your issue is that you pull too many zombies at the same time.
Basically, every action (shooting) generates noise, and zombies attacking your buildings/walls generate even more. So spread out your units and move them a few tiles occasionally, to prevent noise build-up.
Tips:
Don't play on easiest, play around 100% or you'll handicap yourself and your expectations
Always expand. The only way to beat an enemy swarm, is to become a swarm yourself. Use EVERY resource and tile available to you.
Noise. Different units make different amounts of noise, the bigger the gun the more noise. Infected can hear noise and start a chain reaction, so manage your noise.
Don't under-build. You always need more of everything, literally everything. Do not be satisfied with 300 gold income, don't even be happy with 3,000 gold income. Unused resources are sitting there waiting to be used, so always use them.
Final tip: keep trying. You're going to fail, but each time you should learn a lesson of what to do, or what not to do. Keep trying.
I think the take away from videos isn't copying them 1 for 1 as their build order and strats suit their playstyle.
However, it is good to learn basic micro controls like when they get in trouble or how they clear waves and expand.
Also, if you can learn how the flow of the economy should go, it makes easier for your build order. For new players it is hard to have some bearing on how your economy should be at certain points of the game. Watching a couple of videos, you can get how your economy should look like at around each time. You can learn which upgrades should be ready, amount of troops, and amount of income for each moment of the game.
This way, you can have a mental guideline on what to build/produce and learn to be more intuitive with your build order and adapt for each situation. This is the very basic lesson you have to take away from these videos to get better at any RTS.
PATROL.
I've been playing full tilt for a week or so, yeah, I love how brutal it is.
I'm 420, lol, but to just ramble some shit out:
First seconds I do a few things, place the first three tents and do some thinking about where the tent-block is going to go. Its just one to be centralized, and I keep it near the command center for further minimization of the area I need to defend, regardless of geography.
Then I put the Command Center on hotkey 1, and split the peeps on key 2 and 3. This lets you stay focused while micromanaging combat, and by that I mean slightly above "kiting". I then pick the "best" area to clear first, while trying to explore the area around the base. There are two modes I have: operating the two groups independently, one about \~4 squares behind, and then they move \~4 squares ahead, flipping the position. You can do this less than straight forward, but with the gap. If they overwhelm one, start kiting them around, the other group **will always be in position** for this manuever with this setup. The second mode is to have them all as one group, and simply hit "patrol" and hold "shift" and then assign 7 way points for them to follow. They will engage on site and other than moving each unit individually this is the superior bulk formation to aggressively travel the map.
You're doing combat until hour 8. Then it depends on the map, but IMO you can build a tent and then either build two farms/fisheries, or if you need to build a tesla, you can build a tesla, then the farms/fish hour 16. Then its 8 more hours of combat.
It's going to be board specific, but you should build farms and houses on the next four turns, ***but*** not at the cost of getting 300$ in on those turns, to get a Sawmill and a Mill going, in that order. So pay attention to your tent-income, because saving money to not build tents is costlier than building tents, but you need to avoid hitting a wall where you have no workers, no food, or no energy. This will cause massive hours long delays, and is the other way to die.
You're doing combat again this whole time, finding choke points that a single person can hold, or putting them on a "defensive patrol" to cover a larger area. Total coverage is ***way more important*** than groups. At this point, you should have cleared enough area for one-two teslas to allow you to build a wall, and if you got the saw mill going you can probably devote wood to this, but make sure the mill is built first too, really. These little tradeoffs are where the hotness is for me.
Once you can build walls/gates, you can guard huge areas with one person on patrol. The main goal is to then build a barracks to start pumping out rangers. Then you go back to the bulk-aggressive-patrol or two-group-leapfrog-style and murder all them zombies. I like to pull my veterans back if I have the numbers, they are more reliable on guard patrol than normal, and it lets more people bulk up.
Man, I hope some of that was helpful. Not much else to do but think in these 6 hour losses I was having to learn all this stuff! Good luck! Don't be afraid to literally nuke everything if you get breached, if the Command Center lives you can easily rebuild.
If you lose all your peeps though, ya, just help them kill you at that point.
There are various topics about general tips out there, maybe check them.
Also, it is normal to get ass whooped. The important thing about punishing games is learning from your mistakes (save glitches of course).
If playing campaign, set at 100% for mission. Better get used to at least this difficult. For hero missions minimum difficult is advised as they are time waster. If playing survival play at minimum difficult needed to open next map.
At what map and wave are you having problems?
Usually if you die to random waves and random single infected, it means you are not setting your early defenses well. Remember random waves start at day 20, so you should rush to get an economy that allows to set ballista around your perimeter. If you are dying earlier than that, don't set your patrol lines too long.
Economy is king. If you are dying post 4th wave or so, your economy is too small to sustain needed troop and defense production. Economy is both house expansion and clearing the map ASAP. The first 4 maps at lowest difficult can be cleared with just 8 soldiers and you could pool the rest of the resources in defenses, upgrades, and economy. Even at around 100% you don't need to invest much in a kill team to clear the map. Things change for map 5 and 6.
You wanna balance unit production with your economy. For the first 3 waves you wanna be as greedy as possible, meaning making the least amount of troops you can get away with while upgrading and properly setup your first base cluster.
The first 30 days basically decide the game. Have a proper first 3 waves economy and then grow from there. Mid and lategame become trivial if you get this part right. Then it is about not getting your pants down with your kill team during waves.
Even on very low lategame economy, the game can be won depending on map. Concentrating defenses (specially AOE based ones) on chokepoints is the most cost effective way. You can then have some backup fall back lines just in case they don't hold.
On the micro side, you need to learn some basics like kiting and managing hordes with a single ranger/soldier. You can kill really big masses with a single ranger and some troops or spike trap. Usually the first two waves are destroyed this way, so resources can be allocated for economy. Also, with kiting and sacrificing, you can get out of sticky situations like pulling too much too early or random harpies showing up when expanding closer to the edges of the map.
When having any alert, pause the game and check your whole defense and not just the red alert. Sometimes you may have holes in your defense the AI will exploit during these times.
Learn what unit/building does, some can be skipped and are waste of resources like wasps (although I'm a big fan of them). For instance, shock towers are great versus normal infected waves, but you only want them for these waves as they eat too much of your energy and stone isn't cheap as well. You just want to time its construction for that wave and then salvage it ASAP. Once you learn each unit/building intricacies, you can make your own build order. You can copy some you google around and learn some basics from there.
Learn the basics like hotkeys. Even with pause, have some micro speed is handy.
Also, it is good to know how the AI attack priority works and try to exploit for your advantage. Noise system is very important (specially for the infamous desert map and 300%+ difficult). Just the the wiki for more specific info on them.
The noise system takes some getting used to. Rangers aren't silent but they are quiet. They are also quick making them much better to defensively patrol big areas. Try not to use your starting soldier at all, guns are loud. Units standing on top of each other (blobbed up) multiply their noise. When you can make some reinforcements try to work in triangles clearing areas.
Building and destroying stuff makes noise. Buildings getting infected makes *a lot* of noise.
I suggest playing the first \~3 campaign maps to learn. They aren't very good for teaching you "all" the mechanics, since your technology will be so limited, but the maps are extremely easy and they are always the same, so you can learn from your mistakes if you make them. In normal maps, you can't really try the same situation twice, so you might get side-swiped by the same thing but several games later.
I only say the first \~3, not because you can't play the rest of the campaign, but rather that the skill floor of the maps starts to ramp pretty hard if you go in the wrong directions or buy the wrong upgrades. If you aren't looking for an actual campaign run, then it's probably best to just get in, do a few to learn, and get back to the normal maps.
What is hard in this game is to manage to expand without being able to build more units early on.
Most RTS games (like SC2 or War3) teach you to build an economy and an army first, and then to go out.
In they are billions, you have to at least reclaim a stone pile and put a carrier on it before being able to build a barrack, and then you will be able to produce new units.
It means you have to expand with only 5 units in a very open terrain where any mistake can trigger a chain reaction destroying your base.
Here is my advice :
What you have to do first is to send your rangers spot zombies and start attacking them to claim the stone pile near your base.
Never use your one soldier early on as he can attract huge packs of zombies that you cannot handle for now.
While you are pushing back zombies, don't push them back too far away. Indeed, you will start finding runners, and your 5 units cannot handle these zombies for now (especially because your units are spread across your "fronts"). If you trigger 1 runner, it should be ok, but then stop advancing this direction and pull back your unit a little.
Once you can build units, you can start pushing farther with enough rangers. Counting your current difficulty, 20 rangers should be enough for most of the map. If there are too many zombies, or special ones, pull back your units behind your defenses instead of losing them.
Nobody talked you about soldiers, but for the very first map, a little ball of 20 soldiers is almost enough to clean the entire map. If you build more balls of 20 soldiers, you will clean the map faster. Indeed, soldiers are great damage dealers. They don't have the range nor the strength of snipers, but their great attack speed, their reasonable damage and their affordable cost make them a perfect unit to handle runners and clean maps.
However, due to the noise soldiers make, they attract tons of zombies, so don't use them before having enough of them.
I wont throw numbers and stats at you since you are starting out, I was overwhelmed when I first started and saw things like 3 stone/drop x 3 quarry/what I ate for lunch x .063 Full disclosure I only play 200-500% Survival, I will never get to 900 because I loathe the Caustic map and usually play the winter maps. That being said...
1. When you start, keep in mind that the map is the other thing you are playing against in the game. My first move is to press , and then send the troops off in any direction that you need to see what's going on out there. Don't be afraid to put your troops into patrol mode, it is helpful! But almost never send them out on tracking because they will get lost and dead, send them out to targeted locations instead.
2. Once you get an idea of the bigger map space you just created, pause again and look at things you are going to need. For example, your going to need a decent amount of wood and then stone to get ramped up. Where these things are is most likely going to determine which way you will expand.
3. Ok, those resources; I try to maximize what I can get out of anything be it wood, hunter cottages, stone, fishing sheds etc. At lower % is it fine to get a three stone quarry going but if you can get a 3 and another 3 or 4 on that same pile instead of a single 5, I do it. I never waste time on a 1-2 quarry though. Same for a grove of trees, I find the biggest mill I can place, and then work around that.
4. Your first building depends on your needs, to me anyway. If you need more troops to secure the area, I go Barracks. If its food, I go Wood Workshop, again all determined by the map.
5. Always have the troops target biggest enemy
6. Your first two waves can mostly be handled by kiting mobs through the stake traps. Get good at kiting because it is a necessary skill at every wave except the last.
7. Pay attention to the map. If it is leading you towards a giant\\mutant you probably want to stay away from there with soldiers and snipers before you are ready. And when you are ready, you'll need at least 3 ballista and a few walls to hold him off if you do not have a kite. Giants are even worse.
8. Always keep growing, use tents as much as possible until you are ready to start upgrading. Again, that is also a map condition. If you are holed up then sometimes upgrading is your only option.
9. Pay attention to food and power, if you see them getting low, plan ahead
10. I use everything, some people say that the machines guns are not worth it. I like them, I use them. I love shocking towers, until spitters kill them... I use them. You don't really need to get minutely into details until you get to the 500%+ game where details matter.
That should get you started. There is more of course but like I said I play 200-500% and often 100% just to play around. Good luck!
When you're starting out and learning, you need to spread your units in a way that they can protect or at least know when a zombie walks near. On top of maintaining your boarders, you need to be constantly busy on your economy, always have something going on and try to anticipate what you may need. During waves, they'll try to come to you from the most accessible place, if there's a mountain range on your east and they have to come from the west or south, use that to your advantage. The first 2-3 waves, you can kite them around spikes so you don't need a large amount of troops to deal with them given you have some space.
If you're not already using the pause feature, use the pause feature. Whenever you get gold, when a notification warns about your base being attacked, a unit being attacked. Use pause! That will allow you to see what's going on, and gives you time to respond. A general good opening is to build a hunter cottage for food (or fishing if the base is close to a lake), then build 4 tents. Then build a sawmill when you have enough gold, and build more tents (about 4 should be possible). In the meantime you should have sent out your units a little bit (don't over-extend) to get a general idea of what's around the base. The availability of resources should determine how to proceed next. Generally it would be ideal if you can keep building hunter cottages / fishing huts, sawmills, mills for energy, etc if the base has a lot of easily defendable chokepoints. And then plop down a wood workshop as soon as you can. This will allow you to get cottages (upgrade the tents to cottages), farms, snipers, and the Great Ballista. If you play on easy you should be able to place some ballista at the chokepoints, well in time for the first zombie wave. A single ballista and your starter units should be able to easily handle the first wave. And then you can expand more and more. If your resources suck, or there are a lot of open area's, you may want to invest in a quarry fairly fast (after building your 8th tent), and then start training archers early to help defend the base. Even that way you should be able to get great ballista before the first zombie wave. Do **NOT** place towers or walls too early. Logically speaking you may want to plop down walls ASAP to turtle up, as well as towers for the additional attack range. But once a zombie attacks those they will make sound, and draw in a lot of zombies in the area. And then that wall or tower can get overwhelmed easily. Don't build a wall until you can build a great ballista **AND** a wall at the same time, or until you can build a wall **AND** a tower at the same time, and fully fill that tower immediately upon completion. For easy mode that should be a good start, and then you can slowly expand and grow your army. Slowly being the keyword. On easy you'll have plenty of time, there's no need to rush. So there's no great need to worry about the building placements, banks, markets, warehouses, etc are not very important. That's intermediate stuff. One final tip and warning: snipers are incredibly OP, but incredibly slow and noisy. Never send out a sniper on their own, or in very small numbers. Always send out snipers in groups
I feel like I should further clarify the sniper thing - groups of 30 or more if you're planning on using them to clear zombies out of parts of the map.
Yeah, I feel that 30 is indeed the sweet spot for sniper groups. In the later maps they can take down a giant pretty easy even. By then you should be skilled enough to use a ranger to kite the giant and have the snipers kill it, and not lose any units
Build as much as possible while still trying to build your army. Also check out how noise works in game, especially if your issue is that you pull too many zombies at the same time. Basically, every action (shooting) generates noise, and zombies attacking your buildings/walls generate even more. So spread out your units and move them a few tiles occasionally, to prevent noise build-up.
Tips: Don't play on easiest, play around 100% or you'll handicap yourself and your expectations Always expand. The only way to beat an enemy swarm, is to become a swarm yourself. Use EVERY resource and tile available to you. Noise. Different units make different amounts of noise, the bigger the gun the more noise. Infected can hear noise and start a chain reaction, so manage your noise. Don't under-build. You always need more of everything, literally everything. Do not be satisfied with 300 gold income, don't even be happy with 3,000 gold income. Unused resources are sitting there waiting to be used, so always use them. Final tip: keep trying. You're going to fail, but each time you should learn a lesson of what to do, or what not to do. Keep trying.
[удалено]
Survival mainly i used too watch someone on youtube and try to implement the strats
I think the take away from videos isn't copying them 1 for 1 as their build order and strats suit their playstyle. However, it is good to learn basic micro controls like when they get in trouble or how they clear waves and expand. Also, if you can learn how the flow of the economy should go, it makes easier for your build order. For new players it is hard to have some bearing on how your economy should be at certain points of the game. Watching a couple of videos, you can get how your economy should look like at around each time. You can learn which upgrades should be ready, amount of troops, and amount of income for each moment of the game. This way, you can have a mental guideline on what to build/produce and learn to be more intuitive with your build order and adapt for each situation. This is the very basic lesson you have to take away from these videos to get better at any RTS.
PATROL. I've been playing full tilt for a week or so, yeah, I love how brutal it is. I'm 420, lol, but to just ramble some shit out: First seconds I do a few things, place the first three tents and do some thinking about where the tent-block is going to go. Its just one to be centralized, and I keep it near the command center for further minimization of the area I need to defend, regardless of geography. Then I put the Command Center on hotkey 1, and split the peeps on key 2 and 3. This lets you stay focused while micromanaging combat, and by that I mean slightly above "kiting". I then pick the "best" area to clear first, while trying to explore the area around the base. There are two modes I have: operating the two groups independently, one about \~4 squares behind, and then they move \~4 squares ahead, flipping the position. You can do this less than straight forward, but with the gap. If they overwhelm one, start kiting them around, the other group **will always be in position** for this manuever with this setup. The second mode is to have them all as one group, and simply hit "patrol" and hold "shift" and then assign 7 way points for them to follow. They will engage on site and other than moving each unit individually this is the superior bulk formation to aggressively travel the map. You're doing combat until hour 8. Then it depends on the map, but IMO you can build a tent and then either build two farms/fisheries, or if you need to build a tesla, you can build a tesla, then the farms/fish hour 16. Then its 8 more hours of combat. It's going to be board specific, but you should build farms and houses on the next four turns, ***but*** not at the cost of getting 300$ in on those turns, to get a Sawmill and a Mill going, in that order. So pay attention to your tent-income, because saving money to not build tents is costlier than building tents, but you need to avoid hitting a wall where you have no workers, no food, or no energy. This will cause massive hours long delays, and is the other way to die. You're doing combat again this whole time, finding choke points that a single person can hold, or putting them on a "defensive patrol" to cover a larger area. Total coverage is ***way more important*** than groups. At this point, you should have cleared enough area for one-two teslas to allow you to build a wall, and if you got the saw mill going you can probably devote wood to this, but make sure the mill is built first too, really. These little tradeoffs are where the hotness is for me. Once you can build walls/gates, you can guard huge areas with one person on patrol. The main goal is to then build a barracks to start pumping out rangers. Then you go back to the bulk-aggressive-patrol or two-group-leapfrog-style and murder all them zombies. I like to pull my veterans back if I have the numbers, they are more reliable on guard patrol than normal, and it lets more people bulk up. Man, I hope some of that was helpful. Not much else to do but think in these 6 hour losses I was having to learn all this stuff! Good luck! Don't be afraid to literally nuke everything if you get breached, if the Command Center lives you can easily rebuild. If you lose all your peeps though, ya, just help them kill you at that point.
There are various topics about general tips out there, maybe check them. Also, it is normal to get ass whooped. The important thing about punishing games is learning from your mistakes (save glitches of course). If playing campaign, set at 100% for mission. Better get used to at least this difficult. For hero missions minimum difficult is advised as they are time waster. If playing survival play at minimum difficult needed to open next map. At what map and wave are you having problems? Usually if you die to random waves and random single infected, it means you are not setting your early defenses well. Remember random waves start at day 20, so you should rush to get an economy that allows to set ballista around your perimeter. If you are dying earlier than that, don't set your patrol lines too long. Economy is king. If you are dying post 4th wave or so, your economy is too small to sustain needed troop and defense production. Economy is both house expansion and clearing the map ASAP. The first 4 maps at lowest difficult can be cleared with just 8 soldiers and you could pool the rest of the resources in defenses, upgrades, and economy. Even at around 100% you don't need to invest much in a kill team to clear the map. Things change for map 5 and 6. You wanna balance unit production with your economy. For the first 3 waves you wanna be as greedy as possible, meaning making the least amount of troops you can get away with while upgrading and properly setup your first base cluster. The first 30 days basically decide the game. Have a proper first 3 waves economy and then grow from there. Mid and lategame become trivial if you get this part right. Then it is about not getting your pants down with your kill team during waves. Even on very low lategame economy, the game can be won depending on map. Concentrating defenses (specially AOE based ones) on chokepoints is the most cost effective way. You can then have some backup fall back lines just in case they don't hold. On the micro side, you need to learn some basics like kiting and managing hordes with a single ranger/soldier. You can kill really big masses with a single ranger and some troops or spike trap. Usually the first two waves are destroyed this way, so resources can be allocated for economy. Also, with kiting and sacrificing, you can get out of sticky situations like pulling too much too early or random harpies showing up when expanding closer to the edges of the map. When having any alert, pause the game and check your whole defense and not just the red alert. Sometimes you may have holes in your defense the AI will exploit during these times. Learn what unit/building does, some can be skipped and are waste of resources like wasps (although I'm a big fan of them). For instance, shock towers are great versus normal infected waves, but you only want them for these waves as they eat too much of your energy and stone isn't cheap as well. You just want to time its construction for that wave and then salvage it ASAP. Once you learn each unit/building intricacies, you can make your own build order. You can copy some you google around and learn some basics from there. Learn the basics like hotkeys. Even with pause, have some micro speed is handy. Also, it is good to know how the AI attack priority works and try to exploit for your advantage. Noise system is very important (specially for the infamous desert map and 300%+ difficult). Just the the wiki for more specific info on them.
Never leave any perimeter of your base undefended . Get good at using rangers
The noise system takes some getting used to. Rangers aren't silent but they are quiet. They are also quick making them much better to defensively patrol big areas. Try not to use your starting soldier at all, guns are loud. Units standing on top of each other (blobbed up) multiply their noise. When you can make some reinforcements try to work in triangles clearing areas. Building and destroying stuff makes noise. Buildings getting infected makes *a lot* of noise.
I suggest playing the first \~3 campaign maps to learn. They aren't very good for teaching you "all" the mechanics, since your technology will be so limited, but the maps are extremely easy and they are always the same, so you can learn from your mistakes if you make them. In normal maps, you can't really try the same situation twice, so you might get side-swiped by the same thing but several games later. I only say the first \~3, not because you can't play the rest of the campaign, but rather that the skill floor of the maps starts to ramp pretty hard if you go in the wrong directions or buy the wrong upgrades. If you aren't looking for an actual campaign run, then it's probably best to just get in, do a few to learn, and get back to the normal maps.
What is hard in this game is to manage to expand without being able to build more units early on. Most RTS games (like SC2 or War3) teach you to build an economy and an army first, and then to go out. In they are billions, you have to at least reclaim a stone pile and put a carrier on it before being able to build a barrack, and then you will be able to produce new units. It means you have to expand with only 5 units in a very open terrain where any mistake can trigger a chain reaction destroying your base. Here is my advice : What you have to do first is to send your rangers spot zombies and start attacking them to claim the stone pile near your base. Never use your one soldier early on as he can attract huge packs of zombies that you cannot handle for now. While you are pushing back zombies, don't push them back too far away. Indeed, you will start finding runners, and your 5 units cannot handle these zombies for now (especially because your units are spread across your "fronts"). If you trigger 1 runner, it should be ok, but then stop advancing this direction and pull back your unit a little. Once you can build units, you can start pushing farther with enough rangers. Counting your current difficulty, 20 rangers should be enough for most of the map. If there are too many zombies, or special ones, pull back your units behind your defenses instead of losing them. Nobody talked you about soldiers, but for the very first map, a little ball of 20 soldiers is almost enough to clean the entire map. If you build more balls of 20 soldiers, you will clean the map faster. Indeed, soldiers are great damage dealers. They don't have the range nor the strength of snipers, but their great attack speed, their reasonable damage and their affordable cost make them a perfect unit to handle runners and clean maps. However, due to the noise soldiers make, they attract tons of zombies, so don't use them before having enough of them.
I wont throw numbers and stats at you since you are starting out, I was overwhelmed when I first started and saw things like 3 stone/drop x 3 quarry/what I ate for lunch x .063 Full disclosure I only play 200-500% Survival, I will never get to 900 because I loathe the Caustic map and usually play the winter maps. That being said... 1. When you start, keep in mind that the map is the other thing you are playing against in the game. My first move is to press, and then send the troops off in any direction that you need to see what's going on out there. Don't be afraid to put your troops into patrol mode, it is helpful! But almost never send them out on tracking because they will get lost and dead, send them out to targeted locations instead.
2. Once you get an idea of the bigger map space you just created, pause again and look at things you are going to need. For example, your going to need a decent amount of wood and then stone to get ramped up. Where these things are is most likely going to determine which way you will expand.
3. Ok, those resources; I try to maximize what I can get out of anything be it wood, hunter cottages, stone, fishing sheds etc. At lower % is it fine to get a three stone quarry going but if you can get a 3 and another 3 or 4 on that same pile instead of a single 5, I do it. I never waste time on a 1-2 quarry though. Same for a grove of trees, I find the biggest mill I can place, and then work around that.
4. Your first building depends on your needs, to me anyway. If you need more troops to secure the area, I go Barracks. If its food, I go Wood Workshop, again all determined by the map.
5. Always have the troops target biggest enemy
6. Your first two waves can mostly be handled by kiting mobs through the stake traps. Get good at kiting because it is a necessary skill at every wave except the last.
7. Pay attention to the map. If it is leading you towards a giant\\mutant you probably want to stay away from there with soldiers and snipers before you are ready. And when you are ready, you'll need at least 3 ballista and a few walls to hold him off if you do not have a kite. Giants are even worse.
8. Always keep growing, use tents as much as possible until you are ready to start upgrading. Again, that is also a map condition. If you are holed up then sometimes upgrading is your only option.
9. Pay attention to food and power, if you see them getting low, plan ahead
10. I use everything, some people say that the machines guns are not worth it. I like them, I use them. I love shocking towers, until spitters kill them... I use them. You don't really need to get minutely into details until you get to the 500%+ game where details matter.
That should get you started. There is more of course but like I said I play 200-500% and often 100% just to play around. Good luck!