Things I wish I'd known when I started

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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13. Keep track of the people who give you XP, and keep revisiting them.

14. Don't bother with counter attacks, axe slaps, or bounties. Just my personal preference, but while counter attacks do give you achievements (and can be useful if you're not going to be online), they quickly get expensive and unless you've been online for 500 days, you probably have better things to spend your money on. And if you have been online for 500 days, this guide is probably worthless to you. Also, just my opinion, but all three seem to be worthless. Maybe someone else can educate me on this, but every time someone does any of these to me, I see it in my log and I always make sure to hit them. Someone drops a bounty on me, I get killed by someone 1000 levels higher, I lose 200xp. Okay, fine. I'll then attack the guy who put the bounty on me and get 500xp back from him (or more). As for the counter attacks, I tend to always just keep attacking over and over until I get through and then I'll make sure to keep hitting you every chance I get. So again, unless you've been online for 500 days and money is no object, you've got better things to spend your money on. As for axe slaps, as far as I'm aware, all they do is get the attention of the person you're hitting. You get no XP, and if they're like me, they'll stop by to say hi afterward.

15. ...which leads me to the "Rival Clans" button and the "Home" tab. If you look at the Game History tab, you'll see everyone who's hit lately. If you look at the "Rival Clans" button, under "Battle," you'll see a more summarized list. This will often give you a great source of targets; attacks, counter attacks, bounties, axe slaps, etc.

16. Don't get too excited about the Blacksmith. The items dropped in adventures, as well as those in the Market, are often just as good or better (at least so far, at level 677).

17. Once your income is high enough, don't worry about upkeep. A few million (or even a few hundreds of million) gold isn't going to make that much difference, and I've often found that I'll need some item in order to build something or to qualify for an adventure, after I just dumped a few hundred of them.

18. Something that seems painfully obvious now, but that took me a while to figure out was how to add people. The process is relatively simple; go to their Facebook page, send them a friend request, and then add them in-game via the "Chieftains" tab. Make sure to click on "Friends Playing Viking Clan." For some reason, inviting people from the "All Friends" tab is really glitchy and often doesn't work. Although it says it adds them, your chieftain count does not go up.

19. Be aware that adding power lowers the XP gained from a target; It's not always a lot, but you might find that 100xp target you were hitting yesterday is now only worth 80, after you add a bunch of chieftains and gear. I'm not saying you shouldn't expand your power, but if you have a leveling partner (more with the next point), you might be shooting yourself in the foot if you're expanding beyond his/her ability to keep up with you.

20. I figured this one out pretty quickly, but given the large number of people who "joined 500 days ago" who are in the low hundreds, level-wise, I'm guessing this either isn't common knowledge or that some folks have a moral dilemma with doing this. If the latter is the case, feel free to skip ahead. For the rest, find someone who is very close to your level of power, and work out an arrangement to where the two of you attack each other constantly. If done correctly, you'll do it simultaneously (or take turns, I suppose). Just attack, over and over, and heal as often as needed. I'm sure there's much more efficient ways to do this, but the guy I partner with and I just get into click-fests where we're both attacking/healing/attacking/etc. If he ever responded to my Facebook messages, I'm sure we'd do it more efficiently, but at the moment we just go back and forth until he runs out of stamina. We average about 20-25 levels a day. Again, I'm sure we could do it a lot faster, but the in-game messaging is all he ever responds to, and it's not overly efficient.

21. Which leads to... Try to only add people to your clan that you can't get any XP from. Wish I'd thought of that earlier, since I tend to "friend" anyone and everyone and add anyone who asks.

22. This also leads to... The attack screen jumps around a lot when you're attacking (at least if you're doing it quickly). Get used to how this happens, and make sure you don't accidentally click on "Refill" or "Axe Slap" or any of the other really bad buttons. Exactly how I did this, I have no flippin' clue, but I've "refilled" my stamina at least three or four times when I didn't mean to. That's a lot of wasted God Points.

23. When expanding your empire, buy properties in groups of 10. This is because every time you buy a property, the price goes up. If you buy one, the price goes up. If you buy ten, you get all ten at the same price as that first one, and this saves you a lot of money. I'm embarrassed to say this one took a long time for me learn...

 

24. Don't annoy or bug the highest level players, they could make your life miserable.

 

Hey, I'm not quite that dumb.

 

Nice guide!

 

25. (with thanks to skjold) You can only lead a number of chieftains equal to your level. If you're level 500 and have 500 chieftains, the level 500 player with 1,000 chieftains is no stronger than you are (at least at the moment). The battle report doesn't directly show this, but you'll note that in such a fight, if your 500 warriors have a higher total attack than your target's 500 highest defenders, it'll show that your warriors are "stronger," even though the report might show you outnumbered two to one.

So... don't be afraid to attack people who are supposedly "stronger" then you, because they probably aren't.

 

26. Once you start making serious money stop hiding it away in your Hoard. Even with a Fortune Hunter in place you will loose 2,5% of what you put in the Hoard as a deposit fee. This will most likely be a lot more than you can loose in fights.

Do the math!

Example: You have a profit of 1 bill. every turn (lets call it every hour here). Thats 24 bill every day. Putting that into the Hoard will cost you 2,5% of 24 bill. = 600 mill.

Max. you can loose in a fight is 500.000 so you can loose 1.200 fight every day before that gets more expencive than hiding your money in the Hoard.

 

27: The boss weapons are very powerful so the object is to be in as many as possible. Better to save your stam by doing other people's bosses than to continue to do yours once it reaches a given level.

For example: A level 67 Fire Dragon uses too much stamina. You'll end up going through an entire refill if you attempt to post it by asking for help.

Also a good idea to share your bosses rather than hoard them within your own guild. The more that other people do yours then the more likely they are to send you their links.

 

sometimes under the tab "friends playing viking clan" it shows friends that are not playing......

 

I completely forgot about this... This was something else I meant to post about.

When you attack the bosses, click on the "Rewards" tab. Quite often, they will list the minimum amount of damage required to gain the items listed. It's optional whether you wish to do more, and there's a discussion on the forum (I don't have the exact link) as to whether it's considered polite to do more. Personally, given that the XP/stamina ratio for boss fights sucks at my level (856), I'll usually only do enough to get the reward, unless I really like the random drops.

Which reminds me of another point:

28. The best way I've found to level is to FIGHT. Considering that the game is called "Viking Clan," I would have assumed this was common knowledge, but given the reactions of a lot of my targets, I'm guessing it isn't. Maybe 5% of the people I hit will actually hit back, but hitting someone back (and exchanging blows) gains levels very quickly. Also, I've found that leaving yourself at full health is very useful for finding targets afterward, and quite often, these are the folks that actually are willing to battle.

 

That only seems to be a problem with VC on Myspace. It doesn't do that on FB

 

Just something to keep in mind for new players (low level). Put your skill points into Stamina early. Like after you hit 500 energy. While it is true that you only get it refilled by 50 at each new level, they refill quicker than your energy does. Battles and Boss Battles end up being your bread and butter for leveling XP as you get closer to Lvl1000.

And, take this advice... DO NOT throw away thing in your inventory, such as drop items. You never know what you'll end up needing now that there is a Blacksmith. Wish I knew there'd be one 6 months ago when I cleaned a crapload outta my inventory.

A helpful way to buy empire properties is to save your money in your hoard, except for what you need to buy weapons and soldiers, and then when a new property is unlocked to buy, unload your hoard into buying as many properties as you can afford at that time. This ends up being a sound strategy later on when the prices start to skyrocket. I've found having 300 of each property a good amount. Especially since when you get to new weapons like the Legendary Knife, the upkeep on it is 10 million coins...EACH.

 

Yeah, I can second that. I had a comment from someone on FB who suggested I probably ought to level a bit slower, as I would be "chewed n spitted (sic) out in no time at higher levels." He didn't expand on that any further when I asked, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the 9.2 billion in income I currently have is going to be woefully inadequate once I reach 1100. Just buying 4500 of the Legendary Helmet would cost me 54 trillion coins, which would take six and a half months at my current income.

And of course, the helmet is pretty well worthless for me, since I'm exclusively focused on attacking. The Legendary Knife is the one that's going to take forever.

 

a good example for rule #10 is the aegir's guard drop. you can't buy a more powerful warrior than that until level 480, so it makes sense to stock up on them. I'm level 412 and have 814 of them. so my warrior count looks like this:

1,820 Warriors

1 Freyja's Follower
814 Aegir Guards
1,005 Njord Warlords

 

29. This is more of an expansion on #27, above, but I'll expand further, as I'm starting to see the importance of this more and more as I gain levels:

Grab as many boss item drops, adventure drops, and blacksmith items (when appropriate; see point #16) as you can. The items available in the market are often better at the lower (1-800 range, maybe?), but as I'm heading into the 1000's, I'm noticing certain "other items" are a lot better. Given that the market is available 24/7 (assuming you have money), but adventure and especially boss drops are only available at certain times, the items dropped by the bosses should be focused on more often.

Whether you participated or not, you can always click on the "Collect Reward" link and look at the Rewards tab to see what was dropped. Granted, you'll have to actually earn these items at some point in order to see the stats (or just ask someone), but you'll eventually learn which bosses drop items that are useful to you, and this will in turn tell you what boss fights to join.

This reminds me, by the way... I'm slowly starting to get clued in on the "chewed n spitted (sic) out in no time at higher levels" thing that was mentioned to me a while back. With the higher boss items being so much more powerful by way of comparison to the market-available items, any long-term player who's been active enough is going to have a significant advantage over a newer player, even with clans of similar or smaller size. This seems to be entirely due to boss items. A player who's been around for 500 days and whose weapon stock is composed 100% of boss drops that are stronger than the market available items is going to wipe the floor with someone (like me) who hasn't had the time to accumulate those drops.

These folks are still pretty rare for me, but I'm guessing the situation is only going to get worse as I get higher in level.

30. Share hits. This one is probably going to be pretty iffy for some folks, but I've noticed that while I can out-click a lot of people I run into here and thus pile on 130 hits when they're only doing 30, I run into a lot more people who are willing to level with me when I slow down and let them get some hits in. If I find someone who has attacked me and I click away like crazy and bury them in hits, it seems they usually either stop hitting me back and hide in the hospital, or they call for the axe slap/bounty campaign. However, if I occasionally look at the Counter Attack button, see where we're at, and slow down when needed, I usually get the "Nice Battle" at the end, and I can typically follow up with them later.

In other words, a little politeness can convert the guy who axe slaps, bounties, and then is left 150 levels behind in a week into the guy who battles with you on a daily basis and helps you gain a few levels every day.

 

Yeah, before you go into switching all of your Surtr Fire Swords over to the Legendary Knifes, you're gonna wanna make sure you have a significant hourly profit. Like over 60 billion an hour, because depending on how many chieftains you have, the upkeep on, say 5000 Legendary Knifes is obscene. I went from around 58 billion an hour to around 43 billion an hour, and I've split my numbers on weapons between the knife and fire sword. This way I can still make some kind of profit.

Legends are freaking expensive to upkeep.

 

And they are actually costing you much more than that. The Legendary Light Axe cost 60 bill. So to change out my 6.000 Surtr Fire Swords with those would cost me $ 3,6 10^14 (I think thats the same as 360 trill?)

Those 360 trill spend on empire items would give me an extra income of ~70-80 bill./turn

 

31. "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." - Napolean Bonaparte If, like me, you're one of these insufferable idjits that likes to be nice to people online and offer clan alliances to people who can't defeat you in a combat, for the love of God, wait until after they're doing attacking, losing, and giving you XP.

Had someone attack me just now and so I attacked her back. Didn't realize until a little later on that she was losing each of these attacks and that she was still attacking. Since I don't like taking advantage of people, I offered to join up with her and she did. D'uh!


32. Finding people: this is central to the game's mechanics, and my belief is that the ability to find people is going to really help a new player. You need to be able to find chieftains you can add in order to grow your clan and become more powerful, and you need to find targets you can attack for XP in order to gain levels.

Since there's no search function (that I'm aware of), you're limited in your options:

- The most obvious, of course, is the AddMe thread: http://forums.kanoapps.com/forumdisplay.php?f=51. Make sure to put your own link in there, unlike at least a few folks who put http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home (that just leads to the Facebook page of whoever clicks on it) or just "add me to your clan" without an actual link.

- Any boss feed, including the World Boss feed. Usually this is only good for a handful of players, though, and moreso towards the end of the boss battle.

- General Updates on the Social Feed. This one is an easy one: just do a search for "joined" and send an invite to everyone that your clan mates have joined clans with. Note that you can click on the “Older Posts” link repeatedly in order to show more history.

- With each player link you look at, scroll down and look at their Elite Chieftains list. I'll usually right-click and open each of them in a new tab, and then look at their EC lists, and so on. Done properly, you can keep this going all day long, although you are limited in the number of messages you can send at any one time. Typically, I’ll right-click and “Open in a new tab” with everyone I don’t recognize, and invite them (if they’re a lower level or so far ahead that I don’t anticipate attacking them for a while).

- There's also the Battle tab (obvious), and especially the Rival Clans tab (less obvious). Be careful not to accidentally attack the guy (or gal) 3000 levels above you that just claimed the latest bounty on you.

If I had to do it again, I would avoid inviting anyone into my clan who was higher level than me, after I got to about the 900 range, since available targets start to thin out a bit and I like to try and spread the love around a bit more. If you don’t mind pounding the same target over and over again, even if they’re not hitting you back, this is going to be less of an issue for you, but even so I’m starting to realize that I’ve added quite a few folks to my clan that I wish I hadn’t, simply because I could still use them for XP.


33. Never put someone 2500 levels above you on the bounty list. Okay, this is just a guess here, and maybe I'm missing something, but at least on the surface I thought this was pretty funny

Names have been changed. "Bob" is a higher level clan member of mine, and "Sally" is not only on the world leaderboard, but 2500 levels higher.

5 minutes ago Bob has just been placed on the Bounty list by Sally!
5 minutes ago Bob has just been placed on the Bounty list by Sally!
5 minutes ago Bob has just been placed on the Bounty list by Sally!
11 minutes ago Bob has bountied Sally. Go for the Kill and collect the bounty now!
11 minutes ago Bob has been killed by bounty trap while attempting to bounty Sally.


34. Heal Up before going offline (or at least make sure you're not in the hospital). I know, it sounds dumb, but you can "fish" for rivals this way. If you're in the hospital when you go offline, people can't attack you, and while that sounds all well and good it also means that when you come back online you have the battle list and whatever list of targets you have saved to go after. Having a few more people available to hit when you come back can be very helpful. Also, I'm not sure why they do this but quite often players will only hit you a few times, even when they're willing, and will leave you with plenty of health for the next person to come along and hit you. I've often come online and found 5-6 targets. Also, check out the ones that axe slap you. Usually they're a lot lower or higher level than you, but occasionally those people are worth XP also.

 

35. Don't boost your stats too much. This one is huge. As I've been going up in levels, I've noticed certain trends that occur whenever I boost any of my stats. A few hundred levels ago, I noticed I would defeat about 90% of the people I saw in the Battle list. Since I wanted to be able to defeat everyone, I pumped a lot of points into my Attack rating to where I could defeat everyone (I'm now running into the guys at my level who have nothing but boss drops for weapons, so the percentage is down to 97-98%), but I noticed that every time I boosted Attack by any significant amount, the XP I received from everyone else dropped by a bit.

In addition to this, I boosted my Health quite a bit as well, going from around 5,000 to 14,000. This helps out a lot in boss fights, and it does mean I can attack more often, but it also means that anyone who wants to "ambush" me (i.e., hit and hide) has a field day, and quite often I'm running into situations where someone gets 10 hits on me before I even know what's going on. Also, back when I was at the 5,000 range, an extended battle with someone would result in 250 hits for him, and maybe 300 hits for me. Often, the ratio would be even more in my favor, and I would simply slow down my attacks to encourage my opponent to continue fighting. However, with the disparity in Health, this kind of situation is much less frequent than the ones where I see 500 hits for him, 250 hits for me (or less; some opponents get a three to one ratio on me now).

Boosting Defense isn't something I've done a lot, but in experimenting with others, I've found there are only two practical effects to this. The first is that you increase your XP values to others (assuming they can still defeat you). The second is that you limit the number of people who will hit you back. I saw two examples of this over the past 24 hours. One of my former leveling partners just boosted his defense to the point where I can no longer defeat him. On the surface, that might sound like a good idea (he's stronger now, right?), but am I going to continue leveling with him? No. If I can't beat him even with a 10% boost, what's in it for me? So... a week or two from now, he'll still be in the mid 1200's, and I'll be 200 or more levels above him and out of his XP range.

Another leveling partner of mine has his defense boosted to the point where most of the people who attack him end up losing. Okay, that's great, but as he's telling me about the guys losing against him, I'm realizing that each one of them has given me a lot of XP (and, in turn, have gotten a lot of XP from me). One or two defensive victories sounds great, and certainly there are players dumb enough (or just using macros or bots, I wonder?) who will attack you 15 times and lose each time, but that doesn't hold a candle to someone who will attack you 500 times over the course of a couple days, while you hit him 500 times and gain several levels of XP.

This game is far more cooperative than a lot of players realize, and it occurs to me that clinging to the notion of being stronger than everyone else and avoiding defeats at all cost is completely counter productive to actually becoming stronger. If "Bob" spends all his time becoming "stronger" by boosting stats, grabbing boss drops, and generally dominating all the players around him, while "Steve" spends his time fighting other players around him, getting his butt kicked constantly, and consciously *not* boosting his stats so that other players have an incentive to continue fighting him, then as time progresses, Steve will consistently get higher in level (and thus stronger), while Bob is left in the dust.

 

36. Disarm! Okay, I know this sounds dumb and I've never seen anyone else do this, but I've recently swapped my personal load out for the worst weapons I have. Yes, that means I'm coming after you with a lump of coal and a Norse Prince, despite the fact that I've actually purchase a couple of the God items.

So why in the world would I do this? Simple; XP gained is a function of the difficulty of a given fight, and using a lump of coal (and other assorted crap items) makes the fight more difficult, therefore I get more XP. In practice, I've noticed this results in a boost of 4-5 xp in each fight.