Modern War Beginner’s Guide

Modern War Beginner’s Guide by Agent Orange

Preface
Modern War is an online war style game created by Funzio. It was released in Canada around the second week of November 2011 and is reported to be loosely based on Crime City another Funzio creation.

The purpose of the game is to build a base that will generate income allowing the player to purchase more items for their base, war units or defensive buildings. A player can only upgrade, build or ‘clear’ a new square of base one at a time in other words you cannot build two or more buildings or upgrade two or more buildings at the same time. The same goes for expanding the land or water area of your base.

Rivals
You can attack other players through the use of the rivals list which looks like a radar screen at the lower right of your screen. The game appears to loosely group your rivals based on the level they have achieved as well as the number of allies they have added to their profile.

When you bring up your rivals list you have two options, Raid or Attack. It is wise to use the Raid function in order to assess your rivals base before you attack it. By clicking the Raid button you travel to your rivals base where you can view their Profile which is located at the right side of the screen. The most critical pieces of information are their Alliance Attack and Alliance Defense values. The defense value should be lower than your attack value otherwise you will loose any attack you make on this rival.

it is also important to do a quick overview of your rivals base paying attention to any boost buildings they may have. A new strategy is to attack boost buildings first which will reduce your rivals strength especially the Composite Factory.

Allies
Allies are an important aspect of the game as they allow you to bring additional units into battle. The current formula is your Level x 5 allies x 4 units so if you were at level 50 the calculation would be 50x5x4= 1000 units you could bring to battle.

Note that we currently have a limit of 2000 units at Level 100 past this point even if you have more than 500 allies you are limited to 2000 units. You can still have more allies than the required 500 but that may or may not be such a good thing at that level. Many players are finding that they are being attacked non stop so have throttle back the number of allies they have to 498 or lower. Why this number? Because the last valour goal is attacking players with 499 or more allies giving you a nice valour bonus but it means that everyone is hunting players with 499 or more allies.

Attack and Defence values
The attack and defence values are compiled by the game by assessing the units you have in inventory. There is some debate as to what your army should be composed of though my feeling is that you need a fairly balanced army to be successful.

At the time I wrote that we were just starting to see the really strong gold players coming up through the ranks. Several months later we now have some extremely power players with all gold units in their armies. They are basically unbeatable, so it would be extremely wise to hit raid as opposed to attack! It would also be very wise to treat them with the respect they deserve.

Note that you must build Unit buildings and then upgrade them in order to unlock units shown in the Units area of the game. You have 4 main areas, Infantry, Ground, Air and Sea each with a variety of different units and all tagged with specific values. One for attack which is the top value beside the starburst and the other defense which is tagged with a shield. These units may be purchased with cash that you generate in the game or bought using gold which may also be with real money. You will see either a gold brick or stack of cash at the bottom right corner of each unit which tells you how they may be obtained.

Choosing a Nation
When you first configure your player’s profile you are asked to choose a nation. There are six to choose from and each one will give you player a specific advantage in one particular area. For example the UK gives you a 10% bonus to any sea units you possess. Germany gives a 10% bonus to ground forces, China 10% to infantry and Russia to air power. Iran gives you a faster energy recovery and the US faster stamina recovery.

This may now become a fairly important factor in the game so choose your nation wisely. I have since switched from the UK to Russia because I was building a very dense air force. JMC posted some interesting stats where he found the UK and building Stealth Frigates actually worked out the same as non boosted Super Hornets.

Energy
Energy is used to play the missions in the Map area of the game which can be accessed by clicking on the clipboard at the bottom right of the screen. The more energy you have the more missions you can attempt although most missions also require you to have a certain number of units already on hand in order to access them. Though the amount of energy you can accumulate through skill points appears to be unlimited one thing to keep in mind is that it takes some time for it to refill. I find that overnight is roughly equal to 1110 energy.

Stamina
Stamina is required in order to attack other players through your rivals list. The more stamina you have the more attacks you can carry out.

XP Points
In order to increase your staminia or energy as well as attack or defense skill points you need to accumulate XP points which are tracked at the top right of the screen. XP points are awarded every time you win an attack or raid. Each time you move from one level to the next you receive 3 skill points which can be used to add to your attack, defense, energy or stamina.

Depending on your strategy you may elect to use a balanced approach here or just top up one or two of the above.

Goals
At the top left side of a the screen is a folder called Goals, in it are various challenges you can do in order to gain more XP, Valor or cash. These goals are pretty much self explaining although a word of caution about moving too quickly through the levels by completing a lot of goals. If you level up too quickly you stand the risk of arriving at the top levels of the game where there are many powerful players with large quantities of attack and defense. Some of the most powerful of these players have well over 200,000 attack and 200,000 defense so unless you have a force of equal or higher power it might be wise to slow down.

Strategies
There are a number of strategies that you can employ in the game. The most important thing you can do is upgrade and USE your vault which is accessed via the clipboard icon. By using this you can protect your cash from rival attacks. Otherwise your unprotected cash can be ‘stolen’ by a rival during an attack.

Building a strong economic base is also important since building a war machine is quite expensive. Therefore building and upgrading money buildings is also important.

A strong defense is also important, there is some debate as to whether defense buildings actually do anything. My feeling is that they do and therefore I use them on my base. There is a point at which your rivals may be so powerful that defences are of little help to yo. Also be aware of the blue halo around defence buildings as that indicates the area that their protection covers.

Overview
My general observation is that the game is still in the process of being developed and therefore some things seem to be quite fluid in nature. That can be pretty frustrating if you are trying to develop a long term strategy but there are enough key areas to consider that even with changes you should still be ok.

You will find mention of whales or gold buyers, these players have purchased units or buildings in game. This can become quite expensive over the long term but can pretty much guarantee you of a very powerful base and army. The sky is the limit in terms of what you can spend although the total number of units you can bring into battle is currently set to 2000. You can certainly own more than that but only your best 2000 units come into play.

My personal feeling is that if you want to spend a small amount of money it is best spent at the beginning of the game where it will do you the most goods the key things most new players do is leave cash lying around either outside their vaults or in uncollected money buildings.

Some new twists to the game are ‘events’ where you go about collecting ‘containers’ which may contain specific items. This is sort of an easter egg hunt in that you want to find 3, 5, 7 or 10 of an item in order to get a prize with is an indestructible unit. Of note, these events are not available to players lower than L10 and the values of the prizes vary depending on your level. You have three options for opening these containers, free, cash which is 1000 x your level, or 15 gold which gives you a sure open. The other two are not guaranteed with free being the least likely to cause a container to open.

The first two events had very useful prizes at the 10 item mark but your odds of actually finding 10 are quite low. I would recommend if you are going to be keen on getting the final prize to start early as it seems your best odds of opening these containers decreases as the event wears on.

In any event have fun and treat your fellow players with respect. I have noticed some pretty nasty messages on peoples walls which were totally uncalled for, it is as many people say ‘just a game’ so no reason to get all bent out of shape over.

Part #2 Originally Posted 1/19/2012

Mock Turtling….

I think the most important thing at the moment is to level up slowly and build your base as many have suggested. In terms of turtling I’m noticing a few things if you are starting new or over. When I first started to play things were a lot different, for one thing there were no goals for completing the missions in the maps nor were there green arrows pointing to the units you needed to attack.

Sometime a month or more ago that changed and the game now makes it a lot easier for players to figure out which missions they still needed to complete in order to finish a map challenge. Now in the goals folder you get two missions in the maps that you should complete in order to finish that map. The real bonus is now when you finish those two missions you get a cash bonus as well as an xp bonus. That’s handy in some cases but could speed you up if you are trying to turtle your way through the early levels of the game.

The following is what I’ve noticed with my new player who is now trying to stay around L7.

The game moves you up quickly from the start so you wind up beginning the game at L2. It’s very hard to try and stay here since the completion of some buildings and their upgrades trigger bonuses which include XP which will force a level up.

The rivals list tries very hard to group players within your level and number of allies. From L2 to L7 I notice the rivals list will try and keep only players at your level on this list. I also notice that most of the players since they are new and haven’t seen the forums or haven’t had any coaching will do some interesting things. Mainly not building a strong economic base or defense so if you built a strong defense and offense you could easily beat these opponents. Problem is this also causes you to level up which is something you might not want to do.

Your vault does not upgrade fast enough to cover you if you are aggressively building your money buildings so buy some good defensive units if you can’t spend on land upgrades, buildings or building upgrades.

I’m currently using a two pronged approach with my new player, building like mad including unit buildings and upgrading these as fast as I can because I want to be able to buy the most expensive units I can because at the lower levels I actually think since you have a limited number of units that can be brought into battle you want to be as strong as possible (what many refer to as unit density). Of course the game has other ideas at the moment and it seems to want to penalize anyone with too powerful a force by taking away your most expensive units. But perhaps at some point this might change and at that point those with weak armies are going to be screwed. (note, it hasn’t changed and in fact PvP seems to be worse now)

Part of the plan is to only buy energy with skill points, this is where I think different strategies will come into play and why I would only recommend doing this if your ultimate game plan is to harvest as much cash and loot from the map missions as possible. Keep in mind that after a certain point your energy will take a long time to completely fill it may be more useful at say 1110 Energy to start putting skill points into defence.

If you game plan is to attack like mad in order to get cash then I might try buying all attack skill points and play like the alien ship in the Star Trek episode Journey to Babel. The jury is still out as to what if any real effect the attack and defense skill points have though in the past I have stocked up on defensive skill points and they seem to give me almost a 2000 pt advantage over some attackers. (note, I have now seen as much as a 10,000 point advantage depending on how many skill points you have vs your attacker.

At some point our mock turtle is going to have to emerge from it’s shell either because it starts to appear on the radar screen of more powerful rivals or because you get bored of just upgrading and expanding your base. This is why I have been upgrading my unit buildings ahead of time. Mainly my airfield since my goal is to buy B-52’s but also my shipyard to get the Sea Scout. Since then I have realized that having as dense an army as possible is the only way to survive in the highest levels so I now recommend going for the Stealth Bombers. Something new is about to be released called PvP values and these appear to be levels based on your PvP score whatever that may be.

Also at some point you will have to make a decision as to how many allies you want to add since having 1-2 will only allow you to bring a handful of units into a battle thus severely limiting your ability to fight. At the present time it looks like this is only going to be a real problem much further along in the game, I think once you cross into the 100’s level wise though it could be as early as the 95’s. In the early stages of the game having strong gold units could be a real advantage and probably the best place to spend your money since there are players in the higher levels that have spent thousands of dollars for their armies.

Meat shields, I used to use them though lately not as much since they can dilute your overall attack total. If you do use them it’s cheaper to pick off the Insurgent Leader in the Insurgent Camp for the Desert Leader which is the same value as a $1000 Scout. Since I wrote that part PvP loot has turned up and in some cases it is quite good so now I would not recommend spending money on meat shields since you can now use the PvP loot instead and that is free.

Finally, the other wild card in all of this are the units themselves. Some units are tagged as being strong against Sea, or Air or Ground and that makes me wonder if there is another value assigned to these units that we can’t see and perhaps why we loose such high value units such as Stealth Frigates and Super Hornets for no good reason. A strategy I recommend for those being attacked a lot is to study your rivals inventory and target their high value valour items.

Part #3 Originally posted 3/24/2012
I posted this to another thread but it a quick and dirty method of trying to get out from under constant attacks.

I think it’s important to analyze this player, in other words hit revenge to see their base.

What you want to do is have a look at their inventory with special attention to valor units such as super hornets and stealth frigates. If they happen to have more of one type then pick defensive units that will take them out such as the drones or anti aircraft units. What you want to do is make it uneconomical for this player to keep hitting you up, unless they are really thick they will realize that loosing a bunch of high value units for a handful of valor is a really dumb thing to be doing.

But there are a few tricks as well, vault is probably the most important item to upgrade and right from the beginning of the game you should be constantly upgrading until you hit the limit of 10 million. I’m on the fence about money buildings, yes nice to have but also makes you a target and one of the main reasons that cloaking works so well.

What I might want to look at are your unit buildings. If you want to go all out attack but are a free player I would consider trying this.

Upgrade your air field to L10 and your advanced airbase to at least L8 so that you can buy the Super Hornet and Stealth Bomber if you are playing under the Russian flag that is even better as that will give you a 10% boost to your air units. When you can build the airship hanger and upgrade it. What you are trying to do is get to the point where you can build strong attack units because you want to have a higher than average attack score vs all the opponents at your level.

If you are tired of being raided consider building SAM sites and Mine Fields, I skipped across bunkers and holding cells because they waste too much valuable area in your base. Also look carefully at the range of your defences as you want to position them in such a way that they actually protect your most valuable money making buildings. I don’t bother trying to protect my unit buildings but I do protect my boost buildings. The single biggest thing I see with most bases is that they have not figured out how to maximize the spread pattern of their defensive buildings. Overlapping of spread pattern is also a very useful thing to do. Then look at your defensive units, remember the comment about upgrading unit buildings, this comes into play here as well the most popular defensive units are the Drone to take out air units, anti aircraft units to also take out air units, Sea Scouts to take out sea units but with my current strategy I am trying to equip myself with the most powerful defensive units available other than gold units because you really want to make sure you don’t dilute your units overall score by having weak units in the mix. One reason I’m not keen on meat shields any more, IMHO I think they are wasting valuable cash which could be better spent on upgrades, and most players are now attacking for valor so you wind up with quite a bit of PvP loot units which are free and make great meat shields.

The next most common mistake is to take on too many allies at the beginning. With my LLP I experimented with 1-5 allies up to about L10 but made the mistake of not upgrading unit buildings so I could give them a better attack and defence units. Currently they are at L50 with 38 allies and that may be a bit on the low side for that level.

Events Posted 4/9/2012

With a new event on the horizon here are a couple of things I’m doing in advance.

1) saving my Energy in order to hit up some of the better spots where we got suitcases and boxes in the past events.
2) getting as much free Tapjoy gold as possible including downloading Funzio’s new app Kingdom Age which gave me 18 gold.
3) taking a quick nap since I suspect I will be up all night.
4) coming out of the gate hot and heavy since the 9th and 10th items tend to be next to impossible to get as each day lapses.

Good luck all.