Tuesday, December 18, 2007

How to Play Warbook in Facebook

I've joined Facebook for awhile but never took it seriously until last week. It was impressive to see how that simple social networking site has evolved into a democratic application portal that in the end has given a lot of choice for its community members.

One of the application that I got to try is Warbook. I am not a gaming fanatic of sort but this one really got me hooked. As the game becomes more popular, new players may have a tough time scaling up. So here's a simple guide that I give to fellow new players:

Choose your hero and strengthen it
  1. You need to decide whether you'll be a visionary (ultimate defense), general (balance defense/offense), warmonger (ultimate offense), mogul (trader), magician (prefers magic over brute force), slayer (assasins), necromancer (can use the dead), or automator (low elite upkeep).
  2. You can also invite 20 friends in your Facebook account everyday and earn 25,000 gold for each of them. If one eventually joins, through your invitation, you'll get 150,000 gold too.
  3. As you level up, either through attacking or be attacked, you can decide to use the experience points to increase powers in attack, defense, spells, and mana. You can do this in Your Hero's page.
Expand your kingdom
  1. Create Mines to increase your income. (priority)
    Note that your kingdom earns on an hourly basis that you can use to expand it further and build infrastructure. Make sure that your kingdom generates more income than its hourly upkeep or cost.
  2. Build Forts (priority) and Training Grounds equally to protect your kingdom and strengthen your attack.
  3. Build Barracks to reduce your army recruitment and upgrade cost.
  4. Build Amplifiers and Barriers (priority) to strengthen and protect yourself from magical attacks.
  5. Use your Mana to cast spells such as alchemy (create gold) and boundary shift (enlarge your kingdom). This gets partially replenished every hour so make sure to use it whenever possible.
  6. Update (10/17/2007): I had to admit that as you level higher, improving your kingdom takes a setback as it can be frustrating whenever you get attacked after major work in this area. I ended up focusing more on my army build-up. However, due to an increase earthquake and fireball attacks, I now focus as well on increasing my barriers.
Build your army
  • It is best to protect your kingdom by having at least 2 to 12 personnel per acre of land you have. (Thanks Toby for additional tip there!) Whether you are attacking or the one on the defensive, it is best to convert your soldiers to their strongest form as possible such as knights (offense), pikemen (defense), elites (strong on both offense and defense). Depending on your hero type, the elites are also referred to as defender (2 attack and 8 defense score), elite (5 attack and 5 defense score), berserker (8 attack and 2 defense score), legionnaire (3 attack and 5 defense score), wizard (5 attack and 3 defense score), assasins (6 attack and 2 defense score), zombies (3 attack and 3 defense score), machina (5 attack and 5 defense score).
    • Update (10/17/2007): As I leveled higher, I stopped upgrading my soldiers to elite. When computing amount paid to get an elite, it appears to be more cheaper and practical to invest instead on knights and pikemen.
  • Whether you win or lose during attacks, spend your gold immediately to replenish your army. When your attackers can't extract any gold from you, it deters their motivation to attack.
Attack / conquer enemy lands or repel attackers
Upon sign-up in Warbook, you go through a 2-hour period of protection. Make sure to use this time to set-up your infrastructure and army utilizing your hourly kingdom's income.

You can level up by either attacking (offense) or be able to repel attacks (defense). Winning or losing can be influenced by:
  1. The number of forts, training ground, amplifiers, barriers.
  2. The strength of your army (number of personnel, attack or defense score per personnel, hero's attack or defense rating, % of training ground or defense ports)
When attacking or counter-attacking, note that:
  • You can size up your enemy or target by casting a spell using your mana in their hero's page. This can be used to anonymously spy (show hero's gold and army resources) and/or survey (shows infrastructure of the kingdom) them.
  • You can attack or counter-attack a hero as much as you can (and vice-versa). However, Warbook does not let a hero to be brought completely down and bar further attacks once it reaches the limit a hero's kingdom can take.
    • Update (10/17/2007): Attacking a hero more than 2x may be considered a multi-attack, especially if they are part of an alliance.
    • Update (10/17/2007): On the other hand, if you are being multi-attack, you can consider joining an alliance. If you have lots of friends in Warbook, forming an alliance can be a good option too.
    • Update (10/17/2007): To survive and grow in Warbook, hit the smallest kingdom that you are allowed to attack but the strongest hero to increase chances of success and get high exp to level up.
      • As of December 18, I now focus on attacking heroes with the same land size as I am but lower levels. I think it is useless to be a high rank hero if your land is small.
      • As of January 2008, I now attack heroes of levels higher than mine but smaller in land size.
    • Update: (11/8/2007): Warbook just added the Super Search feature and this is now what I use to find heroes that can be attacked. Although I only focus on those whose level is higher than mine. The good thing about it is that leveling up became faster and chances of chain attack gets minimized. Although I had to admit that the game is beginning to be less exciting since I start using it. (As of December 18, this is no longer the case for this feature, I stopped using it).
  • Another option in attacking is by casting spells such as magic vortex (drain half of opponent's mana), fireball (destroys opponent's army), and earthquake (destroys opponent's infrastructure). This is dependent on how much spell power and mana you have and which you can increase as you level-up in the hero's page. This is an option if you find that an opponent's barrier is not that strong during your survey.
    • Note that magicians with higher rank can also land grab (get opponent's land and convert to own) using their mana.
    • Note that warmonger and slayer can use their bloodlust mana to increase their attack score for a period of time.
    • The necromancer can use its raise dead mana to resurrect its dead army members to zombie.
Trade agreement, aid package, and alliances (subject to Warbook tax as applicable)
  • Note that you can enter into a trade agreement with other heros. This is where you can trade gold in exchange for soldiers or vice versa. As a newbie, I find that sending a trade agreement proposal while being attacked is also like a white flag being waived.
  • You can also send an aid package to another hero such as soldiers or gold that they can use to rebuild their kingdom.
  • You can also join alliances to help out or be helped by fellow heroes. When you have enough gold, you can also start your own alliance.
  • I'm still figuring out how Factions work.
I'm still a newbie in Warbook and hope to update this guide as I learn the game more. For now, my goal is to reach Level 50 in Warbook which is considered the maximum level that you can attain in the game. Don't forget to monitor and join the discussion to get a feel of the community too. Additional tips are more than welcome. Thanks!

9 comments:

tobyglynn said...

hey man
cool post
1 thing though, if u only got 2 soldiers per acre your way overxtended, 10 soldiers per acre's a stronger basis.

Anonymous said...

Linear Programming (LP) exercises are a lot more fun if we integrate Warbook into the lesson, because students can test the results of their LP computations when they play Warbook. :-)

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the tips. I was somewhat lost when I first started.

Michael
ThreePogi.com

Anonymous said...

attacking the smallest kingdom available (/3 your size) is called bottomfeeding, and regarded as "unethical" gamplay.
you also dont earn XP points for this attack and receive less land.

so attack someone in your size and rank (around the default values at "conquer enemy land" option), and if you cant then attack someone much smaller

Anonymous said...

Yeah..there are many different types of people who play..those who extend their own personality and moral codes and apply ethics and then those who just think of it as a game and don't care. Also something to consider is that everyone from secondary school aged to someone in their 50s or beyond play so many dynamics come into play.

IMO generally people will attack someone 1/2 or 1/3 their size partially to guarantee a win and also to reduce loss in troops. But if you do this, doing it once is the "ethical" way to do it. 95% of the times I generally attack only once and move on. The alliance I'm in strongly opposes striking those smaller than me more than once, and only once and at most 2 x in general.

And your DPA (defense per acre) grows exponentially as you level up. Right now I'm at about 65 DPA. It's helping with repelling 80% of the times though.

With the new HEROES added it should get a lot more interesting.

Anonymous said...

I don't think training grounds or forts are priority. Rather more important are your mines and barracks. Barracks has to be 25% at all times. This is because most of your $$ goes into troops, therefore your are essentially using 25% of your land to increase both your attack and defense by 50%. Forts or Training grounds however, uses up 30% to enhance defense OR attack by only 45%.

Anonymous said...

Whoever said that you want barracks at 25% at all times is a newb.
You only have barracks at 25% when you buy troops, the other times you should have forts and mines. If you have problems with magic attacks then you want barriers but thats it. A for mages...Amps should be 25% at all times and the rest in mines unless you want to be one of those mages who actually tries to keep land.

Second. Elites are worthwhile for most heroes because their upkeep is less than that of pikes and knights. Though it depends on hero type (i.e., warmongers want to have pikemen because their elites suck as defense and visionaries want knights because of their low attack.)

As of now, I play automator and keep most points in defense, a few in attack and have 70 mana (alchemy and spying when necessary)
I don't bother expanding until I get around 250Million gold, then I just buy hordes of soldiers with that from a dealer, expand, turn 25% to barracks and build as many eilites as possible. Then finally turn those barracks back into forts. (70% mines, 30% forts)
I've repelled every attack within the last 2 weeks so its working for me fairly well. Even when I get bottom fed I win)

Just some basic strategy there and what I know works. One of the best things you can do is join an alliance though. One that has good morals and a good background for diplomacy. When all else fails though, you want the power to make people delete their kingdoms and start over when absolutely necessary =)

Anonymous said...

Also keep in mind that your forts can only provide up to a 45% increase in defense, at least in my experience (maybe I'm doing something wrong). What this means is that so as long as I was at 30% of my land devoted to forts, it didn't matter if I went above that because it didn't give me more, so I could use the land for more mines, which always give me money.

Anonymous said...

In my experience as a Monger I recommend spending your gold on mines and barracks. Only build your barracks to 25% (as anything over that will not reduce the cost of men). At least 75% mines should always be avaiable and if you know that you're not going to attack for a few days you might raise all your barracks and buy all mines. Money is power and as a Monger you get the cheapest troops of all character types.