How Many Dudes? Corporate Casualty Build Guide

To run an employee casualty build in How Many Dudes?, recruit a frontline of cheap disposable workers to absorb enemy hits and trigger on-death explosions, position Middle Managers directly behind them to accelerate attack speed and sacrifice yields, and place the CEO in the deep backline to turn total casualties into scaling cash and board-wide stat buffs.

Unit Hierarchy and Roles

This build operates by treating low-tier units as expendable fuel rather than durable tanks:

Disposable Workers (Interns / Low-Tier Labor): Fill the frontline with these cheap, high-spawn units. Their job is to die quickly, detonating for area-of-effect (AoE) damage and dropping currency.
Middle Managers: Stand in the second row to provide movement and attack speed buffs to adjacent workers. Their abilities trigger sacrifices, boost death yields, and speed up backline cooldowns when subordinates fall.
The CEO: Anchors the back corner. The CEO must remain alive to collect dividends, converting cumulative run casualties into passive gold, statutory combat buffs, and late-round personal damage.

Board Positioning

Maintain a strict three-tier layout to feed enemies into your death triggers while keeping command units alive:

Front Row (Disposable Workers): Spread low-tier workers across the leading edge of the board. Stagger their placement slightly to intercept flanking enemies before they reach your middle row.
Second Row (Middle Managers): Place managers two tiles behind the front line. This keeps them within buff aura range while protecting their moderate health pools from direct melee cleaves.
Backline Corner (The CEO): Seat the CEO in the back corner furthest from heavy enemy pathing. If a wave features backline infiltrators or ranged threats, position one or two proxy workers beside the CEO to absorb target-lock skills.

Core Relics and Selection Priorities

Relics turn standard unit attrition into lethal clear speed and shop currency. Prioritize damage-scaling relics before pure economic pickups so your explosions can clear dense enemy waves.

Relic / Upgrade	Priority	Primary Function	Trade-Off
Explosive Severance	High	Triggers an AoE explosion based on max HP when a corporate unit dies.	Reduces base defense, making frontline units die faster to chip damage.
Golden Parachute	High	Grants instant gold payouts whenever a non-CEO corporate unit falls.	Lowers round-end interest gains slightly in exchange for immediate cash.
High Turnover Rate	Medium	Reduces the shop recruitment cost for low-tier worker units.	Lowers shop reroll efficiency for finding high-tier units.
Severance Package	Medium	Spawns shrapnel and debris upon an employee's death.	Adds visual debris that can obscure charging enemy animations.

Managing Shop Rerolls and the Economy Loop

This build generates most of its income mid-round through casualty payouts rather than end-of-round interest. Manage each shopping phase with the following priority:

Buy Low-Tier Workers First: Purchase available frontline units before spending gold on shop rerolls. An empty front line breaks your damage loop and leaves managers vulnerable.
Split Your Earnings: Reinvest roughly 60% of each round's payout into frontline volume and 40% into board capacity, CEO upgrades, or relics.
Monitor Recruitment Inflation: As wave costs rise, ensure your per-death payout relic values stay higher than the base purchase price of replacement workers.

Adjustments for Boss Rounds

Single-target bosses do not spawn the dense minion clusters that feed passive casualty chains. Adjust your tactics when entering boss fights:

Choke the Boss Hitbox: Group disposable workers tightly around the boss's melee range. Heavy boss cleaves and ground slams will detonate multiple workers simultaneously, overlapping their severance blasts.
Cash Out on the CEO: Invest your accumulated mid-game casualty gold into the CEO's personal stat upgrades. The CEO converts the volume of preceding deaths into high single-target cleanup damage to finish the boss once the frontline workforce is depleted.