None of this is going to be helpful to anyone who's played for longer than a month, but I have a laundry list of things I screwed up or just didn't do as well as I could have and since I haven't seen any posts like this over the past few weeks, I figured I'd make a list of stuff to help anyone who's more of a noob than I am (if there are any), in no particular order:
1. Spend God Points on chieftains only. The "Gods" link (under your Energy meter) will show how many of these you have (you get one per level, plus a bunch for other stuff), and buying chieftains will help you more than anything else in the long run (that I've found so far).
2. Equip all four of your loadout slots (under Profile, Customize Your Loadout). Under the big picture of your avatar is a two-sided button. The left side (which you see by default) is your weapons list. The right side of that button shows your warriors list, and you can add something there too.
3. Maximize your strength by ensuring you have the best possible weapons and warriors for your level (you can do this by selling off excess stuff and buying the latest and greatest warriors/weapons available). If you're leveling really fast or there isn't a lot of difference, you may wish to wait, but even two extra points of attack can make a pretty big difference when you're using a couple thousand (or more) warriors or weapons.
4. When you fight someone, look at your battle report on occasion (especially when you lose). Equipment is listed in order from highest attack rating to lowest (with ties listing in random order?), so if you see a bunch of stuff listed under your "latest and greatest," then you need to buy more. Here's an example:
This army:
1500 Total Warriors
10 Aegir Guards
1490 Hel Minions
Is actually stronger than this army:
9000 Total Warriors
10 Aegir Guards
10 Norse Princes
10 Hel Minions
10 Royal Hersirs
10 Elite Hersirs
100 Assassins
100 War Marshalls
100 Snipers
150 Spear Berzerkers
1000 Axe Berzerkers
1000 Sword Berzerkers
1000 Spear Warriors
1000 Archers
1000 Sword Warriors
1000 Warriors
1000 Axe Warriors
1500 Scouts
...despite being 1/6 the size. This is a lesson I never learned in Mafia Wars, but somehow figured out here. Duh!
5. As a follow up to that, note the difference in Attack rating for a unit as opposed to the Defense (you can have a great Attack rating, but suck on Defense).
6. As another follow up to that, you might not want to overdevelop your Defense (or maybe you do, depending on play style). Personally, I put everything into Attack because it encourages people to attack me. Sounds stupid, but I can then attack those people back, and gain XP a lot faster than when I don't have people available to hit back.
7. Another follow up; battle strength is expanded via the number of chieftains you have. You can have 100,000 warriors and 50,000 weapons, but if your clan only has 100 chieftains, you're only using 1% of that army. You can easily find people via the "AddMe" thread, but I also found that watching the clan feed and adding people that other people are adding can help, and I also tend to add people who are way bigger than I am (although I stopped doing that when I realized a lot of the "bigger" clans weren't always "stronger").
8. Make sure not to ignore your Empire. Putting money into this is required in order to field any kind of army, and later on, will be essentially for upgrading items. You can bank this stuff for long periods of time (or not; eventually the gold you lose when you're attacked while offline becomes economically insignificant).
9. Make sure not to forget to do Adventures. You get 500 energy and 50 stamina back (or your max, whichever is lower) when you gain a level. When you're leveling quickly, this becomes a major source of income. For me, this is bigger than my Empire income, and I can't count the number of times I've forgotten to get this as I went through a level and suddenly found myself maxed out. For example, if I had 700 energy, with a max of 1000, and then gained a level, I'd end up with 1000, not 1200. That "extra" 200 points is lost. Stamina's not quite as big a deal for me, since it regenerates faster and I'm typically running out of targets before I run out of stamina, but the same principle applies to that as well.
10. Also, note that you can get some decent stuff with the Adventures. For me, I've seen several stretches where the available gear dropped during an adventure was better than what I could buy at the Market. For that reason, I'll often do an earlier adventure than what I qualify for, sometimes ignoring everything in a given location except for the one that gives me the item I'm looking for.
11. Another thing with the adventures and the boss challenges. Note that the boss challenges have requirements, which are listed below. For example, I currently can't do the Jotunheim Rock Giant challenge, even thought I've been a high enough level for a couple days, because I didn't do the adventure required for it. Also, I didn't kill the level five Minotaur and the level five Yeti. Neither the Minotaur nor the Yeti have anything I want, but both are a requirement for the Rock Giant. So... I guess I should have looked at the big picture before just pummeling away at other stuff.
12. Not everyone who's bigger than you is stronger than you. From point #4, above, I'll often find people with clans that are twice my size that I can beat regularly. If I remember correctly, this was especially true prior to about level 200, but even at 677, it's still true. Conversely, people who are a lot smaller than you can still give you a lot of XP, so with a clan size of 592, I'll often hit people from 100 to 1100.
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