Research tree: the green researched spine converging on Advanced Construction

About this game

Developer: Numantian Games · Publisher: Numantian Games · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Painterly illustration · Screen type: Tech / Research

More They Are Billions screens in the Gallery

What to study

They Are Billions' research tree is a strategy game stating its thesis in one layout: survival is a tech ladder, and the ladder has a choke point. Every node carries the same three facts, icon, name, price in research points, and the only colour in the system is progress itself: green means researched, grey means not yet, so the player's campaign reads as a green path carving through a dark graph. That the military, economy and logistics chains all route through ADVANCED CONSTRUCTION at the centre is the design decision worth studying: unlike trees that branch freely, this one forces a single shared investment before the late game opens, which means every campaign, whatever its mission, passes through the same gate. The transport chain at the bottom prices that gate honestly, wood 140, stone 160, iron 200, logistics as a cost curve, not an afterthought. Frame at about 2:07 in The New Empire trailer (Steam; manual extraction, the settled tree sits between the trailer's scene cuts, so scene-change extraction missed it).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

tech-tree cost-list node-graph

Components

Parts on screen.

Tree / web

Screen inventory

• the tree is laid out as horizontal chains on a near-black green field, read left to right: each technology is a brass-rimmed pill with a circular icon at left, a name in the middle, and a research-point cost at right, 80 to 200 points across the visible nodes
• researched nodes glow green and gold, REINFORCED ARMOR, PROFESSIONAL SOLDIER, MECHANIZED WEAPONS, PREFABRICATED PARTS, OPTICS, LONG RANGE RIFLE, GLOBAL VISION, ADVANCED TRAINING, THERMAL ENERGY, TESLA COILS, while unresearched nodes sit dark grey with white text, so the player's progress reads at a glance as a green spine through a grey lattice
• the chains converge on a single hub: ADVANCED CONSTRUCTION sits at centre in an ornate double-ringed node, with red and white prerequisite lines fanning in from the military chains at left and out to the late-game branches at right, TESLA COILS, CONCRETE, CHEMISTRY, ADVANCED TESLA TRANSFER, MILITARY TACTICS, the tree's one bottleneck, drawn as its visual centre of gravity
• the bottom chain is the economy made explicit: WOOD TRANSPORTATION 140, STONE TRANSPORTATION 160, IRON TRANSPORTATION 200, a rising cost ladder that prices the colony's logistics as its own research line, separate from weapons and defenses above it
• two small green scroll arrows at bottom right admit the tree continues off-screen, the visible field is a window onto a larger graph, not the whole graph, and the trailer's slow pan across it is the only reason this settled screen exists in the footage at all

Top 3 colors

#000000 25%#0b170b 19%#151e13 18%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Numantian Games, They Are Billions screenshot: Steam trailer (The New Empire), Numantian Games, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Numantian Games.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-28. verified 2026-10-28: manual extraction manual-techtree-127.png @ 127.0s in The New Empire trailer, MD5 20a42dc12bb7e32be1089776861257d3, from the Steam download (107,935,753 B, MD5 954b5d8f28053cced1349bc9eaf0c495); keeper PNG decodes clean (ffmpeg to null, exit 0, zero error lines) and the 120-135s segment decodes clean; inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); ADVANCED CONSTRUCTION hub, the green researched nodes, the cost figures and the transport chain all legible; no trailer text or marketing overlay in frame; neighbouring probes at 125s (ember transition) and 128s (same tree panned right, left nodes clipped) confirm 127s is the fully-framed settled shot

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-28); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.