Mafia Wars – Helpful Tips

Okay, so right about now Mafia Wars is super popular on Facebook and Myspace. Everybody either a) plays it or b) knows about it. I figured that you would enjoy some tips on how to make your game more enjoyable.

Leveling up.
This is one of the easiest things to do in the game, and also the most time consuming. The issue we all run into is that the amount of energy we have does not seem to fill back up quick enough! AHH! So we need to make the best use of our energy as we can. So here are some tips you can use.

1. Do the math. Before doing jobs, look at your experience level and your energy level. You need to figure out which jobs to do based upon your energy level. If you’ve got 12 energy and only like 15exp to go until you level up DONT do a job that takes 7 energy and only gives you 10 exp! Do some math and figure out if you can level up by doing other jobs that will make the best use of your energy. Sometimes you might even have to go down a Job Level (ie. Move from Enforcer to Soldier and do a job that uses less energy and gives you the most experience points. The main trick here is to level up when your energy is at it’s lowest point possible. This way you dont have unused energy left over right when you level up. There is nothing worse than having 100 max energy and leveling up when you have 99 energy left.

2. If you are almost going to level up (i.e. you need 8 exp) and you have NO energy. Dont go running off and using your Energy Pack that your family sends you. It’s a waste! What you *should* do is go fight somebody! You get 1 or 2 experience points for every fight you win so do that instead. When you level up you’ll get your energy back and still be able to use your Energy Pack later.

3. If you’re going for a quick leveling experience, you should put most of your profile points you get when you level up into the energy spot. I did this until I had around 150 or so. At the time of writing, I’m a level 42 “Skilled Enforcer” and have 152 energy, 125 health, and 14 stamina. Having 152 energy makes doing the jobs quick and painless. Just the other day I went from level 40 to level 42 in about 15 minutes. I did this by following the 2 suggestions above. But also having 152 energy helped ALOT. So my recommendation would be (for right now) to put as many of your profile points as you can into energy. I didnt do this from the start, but I wish I had.

Here is a “formula” I use:

1. If I don’t have enough energy to do any jobs, and I DO have an energy pack, and I am less than 15 experience points away from leveling up, than I go and do fights.
2. If I don’t have enough energy to do any jobs, and I DO have an energy pack, and I am MORE than 15 experience points away from leveling up, than I use the energy pack.
3. If I don’t have enough energy to do any jobs, and I DO NOT have an energy pack, and I am less than 15 experience points away from leveling up, I fight until my stamina is out.
4. If I have MAX energy, and I DO have an energy pack, but I am less than 15 experience points away from leveling up, I put all my money in the bank, and then fight until I level up.

Fighting
The thing with this, is that nobody likes getting attacked. So they are often times going to return the favor. So before you go into any fight, visit the bank and deposit all your money. No sense in having some sucker take your millions!

Also, when you fight, make sure you choose somebody who does not have a larger mafia than you do. I don’t do a lot of fighting, so any comments or suggestions would be welcomed!

Property
Property is a really important aspect of this game. It earns you your cash you need to buy all this fancy crap you need to do a lot of these jobs. So here are some tips that will help you out.

1. When buying your property, you need to do some basic math. You need to ask yourself “Is the income I get from this property better than another one?” What I mean by this is if you’re going to buy abandoned lots ($100 income) you need to make sure that if you were to buy 3 abandonded lots, would the cost of 3 abandonded lots be LESS than ONE commercial block? (info: abandonded lot = $100 income, commercial block = $300 income) If so, BUY 10 of them. If it is NOT, use the same question and method to determine if buying commercial blocks is better than downtown lots.

2. When buying property ALWAYS try to buy 10 of whatever your going to buy. The reason for this is the value of the property goes up after every transaction. So buying 10 properties at once is more cost effective than buying 1 property 10 times.

3. Always protect your property! It may not seem worth it, but unprotected property gets damaged much faster than one that isnt.

4. Always repair your property! Broken stores earn less money than repaired ones.

5. Undeveloped space CAN NOT BE ATTACKED. So if you’re just starting out. Use the tips 1 and 2 to buy as many of them as you can, as often as you can. These properties earn you some great income in the beginning with no upkeep and nothing to repair/protect. After awhile you will use them to buy bigger and better things.

6. If you followed tip #5 and are moving into the purchasing of larger properties, you will notice that you no longer need abandonded lots for the things you’re building. Go ahead and sell all your Undeveloped Space and buy it when you need it. If you’re at a point in your game where your income is over $1million than a $1,000 abandoned lot is not a big deal. You often earn more than enough from the jobs you do.

Hitlist Attacking
This is my favorite thing to do so far. I have noticed that there are lots of Mafia Wars players that have like 200+ mafia in their family. If you attack them with anything less than 100 mafia you will lose. No matter if you’ve got a ton of weapons and armor, you’re going to lose because everybody in their mafia has the same weapons and armor that you do. So dont even try it! The best thing to do at this point is to put them on the hitlist with a huge bounty. If you followed the tips for buying proptery than you’ll have lots of money to do this.

But there is a problem! As of this writing, there is no feature to add them to a “I hate this guy” list that you can come back to over and over again. This is probably a good idea in the long run, but if I were in organized crime I’m sure I’d want a list like this! So what can we do!?

1. Make sure you have Firefox. I dont believe in Internet Explorer so I wont help you with it, nor will I use it.

2. Up top in your tool bar where all the menu items are, Right Click and choose “New Folder…” give it a name like “Mafia Hits”.

3. When you have a rival (somebody who constantly attacks you) click on their name. This will take you that person’s Mafia Wars profile. From here you can “Attack, Sucker Punch, Add to Hitlist, etc…”

4. Press and hold LEFT CLICK on “Add to Hitlist” and drag this link onto the new folder you named “Mafia Hits” and release the button. This just created a bookmark to the page where you could hitlist that person.

5. Click on “Mafia Hits” folder. You’ll see it says “add to hitlist” but who is this link going to? Right click on that link and rename it to whoever you’re hitlisting.

After you do this a few times with a few people you can then right click on the “Mafia Hits” folder and choose “Open in tabs” Make sure you’re logged into facebook/myspace first! This will open a hitlist page for every person you want to hit. If it says “You cant do this because they’re too weak or dead” then Huzzah! mission accomplished! Try them again later! If it is allowing you to input a money value, make it over 10000 if you want a decent hit. Nobody is going to try to fight them if they lose for a mere $8000, but $800,000 is better!

So far I’ve done this to over 20 people and did it for almost every hour. What this does is makes them weak enough that they can’t fight anybody. The only down side I see to this is that it says in your home page “So and So added you to the hitlist” so they could then add you too. Oh well. If you followed the info in “Leveling Up” as well as the “Property” tips you should be at a point where you can start putting all your profile points into defense. I’ve noticed I win a lot more battles and take a lot less damage becase my defense is redicuous.

Top Mafia List
This is an awesome feature of the game. It allows you to select the best guy for the job (in a sense). The thing here that you should remember and keep in mind is that “it’s nothing personal, just business” which means dont put all your best friends as your top mafia because they are your best friend. You need to select the best possible combination of people. So here is how we do this:

1. Goto you my mafia page, you’ll see the list of everybody you have. On the right you will see a “Promote” button, click it. It will bring up a “position” screen where you can choose where to put them.

2. If every position is in the red, then obviously dont choose them for anything and just scroll down and choose the next person in your list. You need to find somebody who has GREEN in any position. The method I use is to select the highest value of green for the job. So if a person has +5 in everything and +8 in “wheel man” then obviously you will choose the +8 job.

3. After you have gone through your list, GO through it again! I do this because there may have been somebody I missed, OR somebody I already promoted might do better than somebody else I promoted later on. So just go through it twice. If things go well, you wont have anybody with green.

Next important thing to remember is to do this every so often and especially if you’ve gained mafia members. People level up and things change so you need to make sure they are the best person for the job!

Anyways, comments or other suggestions are welcome. I’m still learning this stuff too!

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