Hitlist Strategy

Hitlist riding is a really good way to gain a lot of experience for fighter characters without spending stamina or energy. To successfully ride a hitlist you need to get at least 7 experience before you die, netting you 1 free experience. The maximum net amount of exp you can get for a successful ride is 44. That means 50 max exp, minus 6 from the desired (more about that later) and inevitable death.

Preparation

The type of character that will benefit most from getting hitlisted, is a heavy defense biased fighter. Sure an all around balanced character will also benefit as long as you have sufficient defense to win most fights while on the hitlist. If you have mostly skills in energy (you are an energy account) then hitlist isn’t for you and you should check out leveling strategies for energy accounts.

A checklist for what you are going to need:

• At least 501 sized mafia, with best defensive equipment possible. The easiest way to get very high defense as of this moment is 501 private jets, 501 camouflage body armors and 501 cane knives. These items are second rate (but still good) which means people will gift them away and their trade worth is low.
• At least 300 defense skill. Given 501 mafia with at least the gear I mentioned, 300 defense skill will already give you rides where you net exp. Beyond this point, anyone hitlisting you is actually doing you a favor! They are using their stamina to give you free exp, how nice of them.
• At least 240 health but do not exceed 300 health. The optimal amount of health is the amount where you can take an amount of hits enough for the 50 exp maximum and then die instantly. This is somewhere between 240 and 300. I personally have 246. Yes, you want to die as soon as you have gotten the max exp from a ride. The reason is that you can only be on one hitlist at a time, and the only way to get out is either dying or waiting 2 hours. If you die right away, you can get hitlisted for another 50 exp right away and so on. So you can get a lot more exp than 50 per 2 hours, you just have to die.
• Street Thug title. This title attracts the most noobs and low level people on the hitlist, thus netting you the most exp.
• Someone to hitlist you. This can be a friend of yours, someone from your mafia, someone you pissed off or another account of yours. You want at least a $800,000 bounty on your head. Low level people who still need NY cash might not even care if they are losing, as long as they get a chance to get nice chunk of money from a kill. So if the hitlist is full of people hitlisted for $8,000 you will attract the most low level players for sure.

How to ride the hitlist efficiently

First make sure that the one who hitlists you is on a hitlist server that doesn’t have lag and isn’t overpopulated. If you get placed on an overpopulated hitlist, it is very likely you will be stuck there for 2 hours with minimal exp. The hitlister determines on which hitlist you will be placed on, so they should check the situation from Fight -> Hitlist tab.

Now, when you are placed on hitlist, the first instinct for most people is probably to use the hospital. DON’T. You should have enough health to sustain hits for maximum experience without using the hospital. The reason is that if you use the hospital, you will linger on the hitlist too long getting hits for 0 exp and in worst case risk getting stuck on the hitlist. And if you die soon after using hospital, you can’t heal and get relisted because the hospital has a 60 second cooldown which will hurt your exp gains in the end. So only use hospital after you are dead and are ready to be hitlisted again.

Do not take it personally when someone stronger whacks you on the hitlist in seconds and you lose 6 exp. Even with 1900 defense, this happens to me occasionally. The most important thing is the overall net exp. If it seems that the overall net exp gains on multiple hitlist rides are negative, build up your defense before trying again. Don’t ever hitlist anyone that is stronger than you, you will just hand them over free exp and make your Mafia Wars profile link appear all over their newsfeed for their convenience if they want to harass you again.

That should pretty much cover it. If you’ve ever wondered how some characters have such a high fights won stat, it is because they are constantly riding the hitlist and making other people work their fights won stat.

Usin' Skill Points

When you first start your journey into a wild life of crime you have the following skills:

• 1 Attack
• 1 Defense
• 100 Health
• 10 Energy
• 3 Stamina

Every time you gain a level, you get 5 more skill points to spend. The introductory sequence to the game causes you to jump to level 2 and you will immediately find yourself with some skill points to assign to these skills. Google search queries indicate that a fair number of people are searching for some answers over how to use these skill points and what exactly they mean in the context of developing your mafia.

The skill breakdown

Attack

Your attack skill has two main uses. When you initiate an attack (whether through Fight, Rob, or attempting a Hit), your total attack value is compared to your defender's total defense value. Your attack value also has a minor impact on the amount of damage you cause whether attacking or defending.

Fightin' and Robbin' gets into more details over how the fight rolls are actually made, but here is a quick summary. For your mafia size, X, the game chooses your X best items with the highest attack value, X best armors, and X best vehicles. Outside of special loot items and before level 100, this means a Chain Gun at 16/14, a Body Armor at 4/7, and a Town Car at 10/12. So roughly every member of your family (assuming you have enough items for all of them) will add 30 attack and 33 defense. So 6 levels worth of skill points in attack is the equivalent of bumping your mafia size by 1 (whether through real people or the Godfather hired guns). Once your level is above 150 and a lot of your opponents will have a mafia size of 501, attack points can be useful. At low levels, it is a complete waste and dwarfed by your mafia size.

Defense

Defense works the same way as attack except it doesn't seem to have an affect on damage other than as a point of comparison to your opponent's health. Now since property robberies are limited by your level as far as the number of mafia that can be brought, having extra defense points will help defend your properties assuming that your mafia size is at least equal to your level. Once again though, at higher levels this becomes way more meaningful.

Health

Health is the most meaningless of attributes to dump skill points in to. You can go to the hospital and completely refill your health every 45 seconds. If you are getting attacked by other players, unless it is from a hit, they can no longer hurt you once your health drops below 20. The only place where more health helps rather than hurts is in the boss fights in the game, as outlined in Doin' the Job, but as there is no special reward for completing the boss fights and there are bonus items you get from doing jobs to make the boss fights easier, you don't need more health. Finally, most of the time you are logged in, you will be wanting to keep your health as low as possible to minimize the number of fights lost, so it is highly recommended you never bump your health.

It may seems a high health will help you survive better if someone puts a hit on you, since if your health was high enough, you could heal every 45 seconds and never be knocked out. The problem with this theory is the hit never goes away until it is completed. You will have to sleep eventually and then that huge pool of health will just turn into a huge number of lost fights before you are inevitably knocked out. Since there is no defense from a hit and no way to get it cancelled, you are better off just dying in as few fights as possible so the hit gets cleared and you are back in the "protected" health range of 0-19.

Energy

Energy is currently the bread and butter of leveling, generating more skill points, and collecting special bonuses. Later in this section of the strategy guide, a plan is outlined for sinking every skill point you get into just energy and what this gains you (and costs you). Even if you don't want to go a pure energy route, it is highly recommended at least 40% of your skill points be allocated to energy. Unless more changes come in to the game to reward the other attributes more, by far the biggest bang for the buck in terms of money, items, and levels all come from a skill point assigned to energy. Finally, different jobs require more and more energy to do. You will not be able to complete all the jobs unless your energy is at least at 60 (not counting Top Mafia bonuses and the Energy Pack 25% bonus).

Stamina

Stamina is perhaps the single attribute with the most variation on its importance based off of a given player's play style. It takes two skill points to boost your stamina just one point, but to judge the relative effectiveness of that skill point usage, let's take a breakdown on how it can be used.

Unless you are a Maniac, stamina will regenerate at the same rate as your energy, 1 every 5 minutes. The core difference between the two is that to do anything with stamina, you only need to spend 1 point, where as jobs will keep taking an ever increasing amount of skill points. If you are only attacking people you will beat in fights, a single point of stamina will average you around 2.5 XP where as a single point of energy will average you about 1.7 XP. Of course, since the stamina cost 2 skill points, the energy boost was still more efficient. The difference is, you can generate special loot items much faster with fighting than doing jobs.

If you are excited about being a hitman for other mob families and you don't care that they almost never pay enough to be worth it, you will need more stamina in order to attack someone the 2-15 times in a row that will be necessary to knock them out solo.

The basic recommendation is keep your stamina just high enough that you fully leverage the regeneration timer unless you don't want to fight others at all. For example, if you play off and on throughout the day, 12-24 stamina means you can check on the game every hour or two while you are awake and not lose out on fight opportunities. If you only check the game twice a day and still want to fight a lot, 144 Stamina may be worth it to you. There is no real benefit to increasing it anymore than that though and most players will never really miss out if they just leave it at the initial 3.

Generating mad skillz… points

We have talked about the fact you get 5 skill points every time you gain a level, but there are two other ways to generate skill points as well. Every time you complete a new mastery level of one of the jobs, you are awarded a new skill point. You can also go to the Godfather) to purchase 4 skill points for reward points. This is probably one of the best uses of reward points.

When looking to maximize your gain of the skill points from job mastery, there are two things to consider: Different jobs complete at different rates and cost different amounts of energy. So "Ransom a Business Man's Kid" costs 54 energy to do, but will provide 10% job mastery per attempt. "Steal an Arms Shipment" costs 40 energy to perform, but it only advances 6% job mastery per attempt. All and all, this means it is 540 energy to unlock a skill point with the first job, and even though the second job takes 14 energy less per attempt, it is 680 total energy to master and get a new skill point. Look for detailed charts in Doin' the Job for a breakdown of exactly how much energy each job takes to master. Since you need to master all the jobs in a given category at a level to unlock the next mastery level, it won't matter too much what order you do them in. A good rule of thumb is just to work from the lowest level jobs up to the highest and do the jobs that take the most energy per attempt first.

The Energy speed leveling strategy

If you have ever min/max-ed a character in a different RPG game, this strategy will come as no big surprise to you. The general idea behind the phrase "min/max" is that there is a benefit to be gained by focusing solely on one or two given stats that comprise your character and ignoring all the others with the goal of the benefit from the maximized attributes outweighs the detriment of the minimized ones.

Spending the Skill Points

For Mafia Wars, this means spending every skill point in just Energy, maximizing the rate you get new skill points, and speed the recovery of your energy. Since you can get an Energy Pack every 24 hours from your mafia, regardless of your regeneration rate, you will be able to spend 125% of your energy each day, plus however much you naturally got back. Also, every time you level, your energy is reset to your max amount. The basic idea is to try to keep your energy pool so high that by the time you have spent all your energy, you level and it all comes back to spend again.

Character Type influence

There are a couple of other interesting facts to keep in mind when maximizing this strategy. If you are a Maniac character type, your Energy will come back at 1 every 3 minutes instead of 5. This means that outside of your full refills, you will have 480 energy coming back a day to spend instead of the 288 someone with a different character type will have. Also, you can use the Godfather to get a full refill which can be worth it if your leveling has stalled out.

Leveraging XP spill-over

To maximize the efficiency with which you are completing jobs it is worth noting it is almost always beneficial to complete the job mastery levels since this will get you more skill points. There was a brief period where "Exterminate a Rival Family" provided more than 2 XP per energy with Top Mafia bonuses and it was more worthwhile to just do that job over and over again, but that was rebalanced. Also, when you level, any extra XP you earn is rolled over into the next level. This means the ideal situation is to get 1 XP shy of leveling and then do a job that provides the most XP for you last so you get the most spill-over into the next level. For instance, at level 4, you could do "Mugging" until you are at 44/45 and then do "Auto Theft" which would push you 7 XP into level 5 with a full energy refill.

Top Mafia bonuses and Energy leveling

Your Top Mafia Mastermind and Wheelman also can greatly impact the speed at which you level based on energy. You get a bonus to the amount of XP you get per job based on the number of jobs your Top Mafia Mastermind has completed. Your Wheelman, the highest level Fearless member of your mafia, will give you a reduction on the amount of energy it takes to do the job. Similarly, if you are the Mastermind for one of your friends, you will sometimes get a 50% bonus to the XP you earn per job you do and if you are one of your friend's Wheelman, you will sometimes have a job you complete cost 0 energy. Here are some estimates on what bonus you will get depending on your friends, we will continue to refine them as more information comes in.

Jobs Completed			XP Bonus
0	-	19	1%
20	-	99	2%
100	-	499	3%
500	-	999	4%
1000	-	2999	5%
3000	-	4999	6%
5000	-	6999	7%
7000	-	9999	8%
10000	-	11199	9%
11200	-		10%

Fearless Level			Energy Discount
1	-	18	1%
19	-	28	2%
29	-	38	3%
39	-	48	4%
49	-	58	5%
59	-	78	6%
79	-	98	7%
99	-	148	8%
149	-		9%

Bonus items to Energy and Energy regeneration

Several of the collections available from the various job tiers will yield additional energy to spend. Likewise, whenever you master all three levels of job mastery for a given job tier, you will receive a special bonus item. Several of these items will help speed up your leveling even further. For collections, we have the following:

Job Tier	Collection	Bonus
Street Thug	Diamond Flush	+1 Energy
Enforcer	Cigars	+2 Energy
Capo	Paintings	+6 Energy
Consigliere	Great Race Horses	+7 Energy

Since the Capo tier doesn't fully unlock until level 34 and the Consigliere tier doesn't until level 55, early on you are better off asking your higher level friends to see if they have an extra set of the collections floating around. It takes more total jobs to finish these later tiers than the early ones, so it is quite likely there are full sets available for someone to send you. Doin' the Job has more exact details.

To use the new wishlist feature you either need to have unlocked the job tier for the items you want or you need to have received at least one of the items. Once the collection shows up in your Inventory tab, you can then click on the button with the green plus sign to add that item to your wishlist. Click on "Share Wishlist with your Friends" and everyone in your mafia will get a notice of which items you need. Once you receive an item you need, be sure to come back to the Inventory tab to remove that item from your wishlist. Your friends will see how many you currently have, but they won't know if one of your other friends sent you what you need.

For the bonus items from completing job tiers, there are three that will help speed up your leveling the most. For this reason, as soon as you have these job tiers unlocked, it is worthwhile to try to master them as quickly as possible.

Job Tier	Fully Unlocked	Item	Bonus
Consigliere	55	Helicopter	a 30 second reduction on your energy regen timer
Underboss	95	Private Island	5% bonus on job experience
Boss		Golden Throne	2x energy regenerated per regen period

Part 3

Bulletproof

(Earned by surviving at least one hour on the hitlist)

This achievement is virtually impossible (facebook) in its current form if the hitlist isn’t lagged and there are only 5 people hitlisted or a similar amount. On a normally functioning hitlist you will get attacked rapidly and if you win most of these fights and manage to heal within hospital cooldown, eventually a big hitter (read: credit card player) will dump their 500 stamina on you 10 clicks a second. You might get lucky and not draw attention from a big hitter to your way in the whole hour, scoring you bulletproof, given that you have enough health to heal between hospital cooldowns from the small attacks. I would say have at least 1000 defense skill, 501 mafia with best gear and 250 health before trying on a rapid hitlist.

The easy way to get bulletproof is to get hitlisted on a server where the hitlist is flooded with people so you have a very good chance to linger on the hitlist without getting attacked at all.

That’s with a “T”, Nest Egg, What’s After Trillion?

(Earned by depositing 1 trillion/10trillion/999trillion in the bank in a one lump sum)

These achievements are the hardest ones in the game. Remember that the bank fee reduces 10% from the (reduce 10% means you will end up with AmountDeposited x 0.9) amount deposited so you will need at least $NY1,111,111,111,111 and so on and deposit it all at once.

That’s with a “T” can be acquired on an Energy Account dumping energy on the ‘Make Arrangements for a Visiting Don’ job in the Boss tier over and over again. It will take about 600 000 energy spent on the job.

All these achievements are most easily acquired on a low max energy maniac account with rackets instead of properties. As you may or may not know, properties are no good for making money, the ROI (Return on Investment) is terrible, in some cases it can take a year to get your initially invested money back. Read more about rackets in the rackets guide.

With rackets and doing jobs, accumulate a sum of money on hand, which would make this equation true: (MoneyOnHand*0.0018)/(MaxEnergy*0.2) > 1,642,857

The enforcer tier boss fight awards 0.18% of your current money on hand and costs 20% of your maximum energy. The 1,642,857 is money earned per energy point doing the highest paying job in the game (Make Arrangements for a Visiting Don). Let’s say you have 500 MaxEnergy. You would need only 91 billion on hand, before the boss fight would start paying better. With 500 max energy, a maniac character type, and the golden throne (NY Boss tier reward, don’t try for these achievements before mastering at least NY) you can do the boss fight 27 times a day, assuming you level up once a day. If you start with 91 billion it takes:

91,000,000,000 * 1.0018^n = 1,111,111,111,111

1.0018^n = 12.21

n * lg 1.0018 = lg 12.12

n = lg12.12/lg1.0018

n = 1391

1391 boss fights, 27 per day = 52 days before you have the first trillion. However, because of the exponential increase, the 10 trillion would only take:

1,111,111,111,111* 1.0018^n = 11,111,111,111,111

1.0018^n = 10

n * lg 1.0018 = lg 10

n = lg10/lg1.0018

n = 1280

With the 1.1 trillion on your hand you would only need 1280 boss fights to get to the 10 trillion, 47 days. And to get 999 trillion from this point would take 93 days. However, all these numbers completely ignore production from rackets, which obviously have a huge effect, so in reality it doesn’t take as much time. However, the key elements here were a maniac character, New York completely mastered and only 500 max energy. The more max energy you have the longer it takes because the boss fight energy cost is based on your maximum energy

Ironically, a mogul character (designed to make the most money in the game) would take a lot more time to get these achievements.

Back in the U.S.S.R.

(Earned by vaulting the Soviet Memorabilia collection)

The pieces of this collection drop from episode 5 jobs in Moscow. Very high drop chance and I had the whole collection before mastering the episode even once. This achievement is tuned for around 400+ level players as getting episode 5 unlocked before that is quite unlikely.

Pank n' Spank

(Earned by defeating Dmitri Leonov)

Dmitri Leonov is the boss of episode 1 in Moscow, you will unlock him after you have finished the 3 chapters and the finale. The boss fight isn’t like the one in New York, it’s simple a normal job with only a “Get Help” button instead of “Do Job”. Click “Get Help” and as soon as one of your mafia members click the published message, you will get this achievement.

Part 2

Big business, Banana Republic, Tycoon

(Earned by fully upgrading a single business in Cuba/owning all businesses in Cuba/upgrading all businesses in Cuba)

Upgrading Tobacco Plantation is the most easiest one to upgrade, costing C$12,500 to take over + C$ 125,600 to fully upgrade = C$138,100 total. Owning all businesses in Cuba costs C$637,500. Fully upgrading every business costs about 6 million pesos.

If you are a fighter character then you should start doing your fights in Cuba as soon as you hit level 35 to steal Cuban money from players and get your businesses going early and you will have easier time in Cuba when you start doing jobs there.

Energy character’s fast progress means they won’t benefit from businesses as they take over 20 days to even return the initial investment and energy characters can blow through cuba easily much faster than that. For energy characters, after fully mastering cuba, you can sell all your inventory except what is required for the job ‘Arrange A New York Drug Shipment’ in the El Cacique tier and farm the money required. This job will give you the best money for energy invested after taking the minimal equipment requirement bribery increase in the calculations.

Like a Hurricane

(Earned by winning 1000 fights in Cuba)

As soon as cuba opens to you, start doing every fight in Cuba. It doesn’t matter if the defender is in New York or Moscow, the fights you initiate in cCuba will always count towards this achievement. This is a grinding achievement which will take some time.

Working Man

(Earned by completing 20 jobs)

Trivial achievement, only way not to get this is not to play the game at all.

Knife Thrower

(Earned by looting 10 butterfly knives)

These will drop as you master associate tier, the unmodified drop chance is 25-30%.

Uncle Sam

(Earned by owning 50 federal agents)

Since the job where federal agents “drop” from consumes a blackmail photo each time you do the job and the drop chance is very low, it’s not recommended to try and farm 50 federal agents from the job.

They start dropping from fights after reaching level 105, and fights don’t consume the much needed blackmail photos.

The most easiest way is probably get them all gifted and then gift them back to the player, but requires a degree of trust if this person values the federal agents. You can also put it on your wishlist and publish it or trade for them, this is a second rate item and is not worth much.

Set Them Up for Later

(Earned by losing 10 fights in a row)

Have 10 stamina, go to leaderboards, attack the best player on the leaderboard 10 times. These players get attacked thousands of times per day and your 10 attacks will probably go unnoticed. Alternatively you can just find a stronger player on the fight list.

First Blood, Veteran

(Earned by declaring and winning a war/participating in 500 wars )

These are facebook only achievements. The bigger your mafia is the better the chances are that when you announce a war, your mafia members will instantly go kill the guy you declared war with. Participating in 500 wars requires a big mafia and hunting newsfeeds for wars to be participated in, this is a grinding achievement and can really be softened by having your mafia size in the thousands.

It’s Good to be the King

(Earned by being promoted to at least 10 friend’s top mafia)

Boosting your jobs completed, level and mafia size is the most quickest way to this achievement. Depending on your class, fearless have it easiest on this achievement because -11% wheelmen (you will give a -11% wheelman bonus when you are a level 299+ fearless) are somewhat rare. Fights won and successful heists (when they are enabled) require somewhat a hardcore amount of completions to give the maximum bonus to your mafia so going that route is not as efficient. Always raise your mafia size, the more mafia you have, the better the odds are for getting promoted to top mafia.

Island Bound, Rossiya Matushka

(Earned by travelling to Cuba/Moscow)

Cuba/Moscow unlocks at levels 35/70 respectively, simply travel to the country when you reach the required level.

Big Spender, Treasure Hunter

(Earned by spending GF points/finding a Rare Item in a mystery crate)

Simply use your GF points to get Big Spender, extra skill points are generally the best investment for these.

You have 10% chance to find a rare in a crate that costs 20 GF points (or 55 GF points for three crates). If you are willing to go for this achievement by buying GF points or simply wasting the free GF points awarded in the game, here are some numbers:

Crates bought	Chance to find rare item
3	27.1%
6	46.9%
9	61.2%
12	71.8%
15	79.4%

So if you buy 9 crates you are more likely to find a rare than not, but it is not guaranteed and even buying 15 crates you have 1 out of 5 situations where you don’t find a Rare Item. So this is a huge GF point drain achievement, definitely not worth it for 1 skill point.

The Best Offense

(Earned by defeating 6 attackers in a row)

What makes this achievement a little tricky, is that fights won riding the hitlist do not count and most people don’t attack you 6 times after seeing a loss from the fight list. Simply ask a weaker player in your mafia to do you a favor, remove you from his/her mafia and attack you 6 times losing. You can then add each other back. Remember to give a gift!

Part 1

Napoleon Complex

(Earned by defeating someone with a bigger mafia)

This achievement is most trivial for new characters. The 10 first fights on a character are fake fights where the outcome is randomly decided. So to get this attack first player on the fightlist with a higher mafia size than you and repeat until you win. Alternatively you could pick someone from the leaderboards and do the same. For old characters, 501 vs 501 should work just fine.

Unstoppable, Brawler

(Earned by winning 15/100 fights in a row)

Since the removal of critical hits, these achievements are trivial. You need ONLY one player that you can beat, go to his/her profile and copy the attack link on your address bar and refresh for 15/100 times or until you run out of stamina, in which case, bookmark the link for later when you have stamina. 100 times attacking isn’t considered abuse even by Zynga standards and you can even do this while the other player is Iced so they never knew they were attacked.

Armed and Dangerous, Personal Fleet, Slum Lord, Cashing Out, The first is the Hardest, Personal Bailout

(Earned by owning 10 Tommy Guns/500 Town Cars/30 Apartment Complexes/selling 50 Mega Casinos/banking 1 million at once/banking 1 billion at once)

All these achievements can be completed when you have $NY1,111,111,111 or more money on your character. This amount of money is trivial and is earned when you are mastering consigliere or underboss at latest. To get these achievements, bank more than $NY1,111,111,111 in one go, the bank fee will reduce this to $NY1,000,000,000. Buy 50 Prime Downtown Lots and 30 Commercial Blocks. Buy 30 Apartment Complexes. Buy 10 mega casinos for 380 million, sell 10 mega casinos for 380 million. Rinse and repeat until you have no Prime Downtown Lots left. Buy 500 Town Cars and sell 460 of them, 40 is the maximum you need to do jobs, you might wanna keep more for fights if Town Car is the highest attack and/or defense vehicle for you. Armed and Dangerous will be automatically gained just by going for job requirements.

Giver, Spreading it around, That’s Amore, My Little Friend

(Earned by giving a Diamond Ring to any player below level 8/an M16A1 to a friend/10/501 gifts to your mafia)

These are trivial for anyone that has ever traded, I have over 30000 gifts sent. If you don’t trade much, you can get this when you reach more than 501 useless brass knuckles, butterfly knives, firebombs, and so on and you can go to the gifting page and gift these to random members of your mafia for 20 per time. To find an under level 8 player, add friend requests to those people under 8 in the fight list or simply find an inactive player already in your mafia. Diamond ring is found by default when you get well into Hitman tier jobs. M16A1 starts dropping from fights after reaching level 60, this level unlocks the job in Cuba that drops M16A1’s. Alternatively you could put it in your wishlist, publish it and when someone gifts it to you, you gift it back.

Wing Man, Mercenary

(Earned by helping out 10/200 friends who call for backup)

Zynga is constantly changing around the job help limits, which at the moment seem to be lifted from Cuba and New York, and only apply in Moscow. Simply put, the larger mafia you have the faster you will get this, so better go raise that mafia size of yours.

One Down, What else you got?, Next!

(Earned by mastering at least one job tier in New York/All job tiers in New York/All job tiers in Cuba)

If you are a low energy account, these will take a long time, make sure you login every day to use your energy pack and energy regenerated.

Collector, Curator, Master Collector

(Earned by vaulting at least one/nine New York collections/all Cuba and New York collections)

By mastering jobs you will by default find all the collections in their tier by the time you have it mastered 3 times, except for soldier and enforcer. You can add the missing pieces from soldier and enforcer to your wishlist and get lucky. Most reliable way is just trading the missing pieces from people.

All my characters had lotto collection vaulted when Master Collector was added in the game so I am not sure if it was included in the “all New York collections” requirement.

Getting the Crew Together, Crime C.E.O.

(Earned by promoting one person in each Top Mafia slot/having at least a 100 level person in each top mafia slot)

The first one requires no more than 6 mafia members, given there is at least one mogul, maniac and fearless in your mafia, as some positions are only allowed for certain class type. The more mafia you add, the more likely it is that you will have six over 100 level players in your mafia for the Crime C.E.O. Keep checking the players in your mafia if you are still missing this achievement.

Dependable, Dedicated

(Earned by doing a job 7/20 consecutive days in a row)

These achievements don’t have any tricks, you simply log in every day and play the game.

Hitman, Bounty Hunter

(Earned by collecting a bounty/50 bounties from the hitlist)

I wouldn’t try for these if I didn’t have sufficient attack skill and offensive mafia strength. Nevertheless, these are achievable for everyone, you don’t need to win in a fight to kill someone. Any attack you do will deal damage to the target, even if you lose. If you deliver the damage that kills the player (I.E. Killing Blow) on the hitlist, you will get the bounty and it will count towards these achievements.

Rollin' a Bankroll on Mafia Wars

Financial problems are fairly common in the low levels, though if handled early can stay completely solved for the remainder of your mob career. Whether you just don't have enough money to make the next purchase to unlock a job, can't afford to completely outfit your family, or you actually lose money every hour, here you will find general strategies to help guide you out of these problems.

One important consideration before we get into the exact details of how to roll a bankroll is whether or not you are truly completely broke. If you have no cash on hand, no money in the bank, and your income every hour is negative the good news is you can't drop below $0. There is no debt system in the game. If you go to the Properties tab in the game, you will see what you current income is, how much your current upkeep is, and the difference between the two that you make every hour. To get actual details on the upkeep, you need to go to the Inventory tab and scroll through the different lists in the Mafia store to see which items you own that are contributing upkeep costs.

Since the hitlist strategy to get your bankroll started is the most efficient, you will want to be able to keep some money aside for hospital bills so you can take a shot every 15 minutes without having to wait for your health to recover naturally. It is recommended that you sell off just enough of your high upkeep items, specifically Tommy Guns and Chain Guns, until you are at least making some money every hour again. Bank the proceeds from these sales so you don't lose the money while you experiment with rolling the bankroll up.

Workin' for a livin'

The most straight forward approach to making some money is just to do some jobs. At the low levels, specifically below level 24, you won't get as much from doing jobs as other players. Long term, passive income from properties will quickly exceed the money you can make running jobs.

As you are starting out, you will need the money from these first few jobs to be able to buy the equipment to try bigger and better jobs. This money will also provide the cash for your hospital bills. The best return from the first few jobs is "Collect on a Loan". It provides the most cash per energy from your initial choices and only requires you own a baseball bat which has no upkeep. See Doin' the Job to get further breakdowns of how much money the higher level jobs will pay as you continue to unlock them.

For making money from jobs, there are a few aspects of the current Top Mafia bonuses that should be discussed. You can assign the highest level Mogul in your family to the position of Bagman, and the higher their level, the higher percentage of bonus money you will make on the jobs. If you are someone else's Bagman (meaning you are a Mogul type yourself), there is a chance you will get the money from a job you perform doubled. Since the money you make from jobs will be quickly dwarfed by your passive income from properties if you follow the advice outlined here, these benefits will be barely noticeable.

Covetin' from your neighbor

If you don't have the money you need yourself, you can always look to make others share with you, whether or not they are willing. While your income is in the awkward stages of $250,000 an hour to $5,000,000 an hour, making money off other players will supplement your income better than any other source. Fightin' and Robbin' gets in the details of how to successfully win fights and succeed at robberies. Fights will generate money based on how much your victim has as cash on hand. Robberies generate money as a factor of the type of property your victim owns as well as the number of them he currently owns; however, you can't even attempt robberies until you are level 15 and it doesn't really become worthwhile until your victims have Office Buildings, 5-Star Hotels or Mega-Casinos.

In the level stretch before Office Buildings can be bought by you and your victims, fighting can help build your bankroll. You can get as much as $100,000 as the result of a fight. If you receive $0 from a target after fighting them, it means that all of their money is banked. You will want to go down the list of potential victims trying each one that you can beat once as usual, but any time you get at least $60,000 from your victim, you should continue to attack until they stop coughing up money. Make sure you bank your ill gotten gains as soon as you can as this behavior will most likely result in a hit being put on you. This is effectively meaningless though as long as your money is in the bank and you didn't bother going to the hospital after your rampage.

Once Office Buildings start to be available, robberies begin to provide more cash than fights. You can get from $200,000 a robbery on the low end to $855,000 on the high end from someone with 250 Mega-Casinos. Once again, you will make more money by hitting a juicy target multiple times, but this also will make it more likely that your victim will put a hit out on you. If your target does not have over 200 of the type of building you are targeting, I would recommend trying to hit a building just once or twice before choosing another target. This makes it much more likely your victim won't bother trying to get even with you.

Makin' the hit

Especially when you are first starting out, nothing comes close to performing hits for getting your initial bankroll started. As an experiment, we started up a new character and using this trick we were able to get our income up to $542,250 an hour without leveling. When you choose the Fight tab, you will see Hitlist as an option in the second row of options. The first detail you need to know is that every time you choose "Hitlist", even if you are currently on it, it refreshes the list of available hits.

When you attempt to perform a hit, it performs an attack on your victim, just like a Fight, but without the chance for a special loot drop. You still get the same money and XP. The important detail though is that you do damage to your opponent even if you lose the fight. All you need to do in order to collect the bounty is be the person who causes enough damage for your target to drop to 0 health. This means that regardless of your level, you can cash in on a hit placed on any target. Keep in mind though to be fully healed before you start, have enough stamina to try several times in a row, and have all your money in the bank so you don't lose money in failed attacks.

The highest amount a hit can be is currently $16,000,000. To get your bankroll started, keep refreshing the Hitlist tab until you find a target that has an $8,000,000 hit or larger placed on them. As soon as one comes up on the list, immediately attack them and keep clicking the Attack Again! button until you either succeed, run out of stamina, or someone else takes out your target. It can take a little patience to wait for a large enough hit to show up to be worth it, but it is worth the wait. If you don't succeed, just wait for your stamina to recover, heal up, bank your money and try again. On the flipside, since you will lose a lot and get injured frequently, it is completely worthless to do one of the $8,000 hits. Actually, the low value hits aren't worth it for anyone, but there are a lot of mediocre players out there. At the lowest levels, you will only be able to try a hit every 15 minutes, so we strongly recommend you never bother with any hit less than $8,000,000.

Balance the books

Once you get your immediate cash on hand fixed, you also need to make sure you keep your money situation solved. On the property tab you can see how much money you make an hour, how much your total expenses are an hour, and how much your cash on hand will net up each hour. It is strongly recommended no matter how badly you need an item, you don't let your expenses exceed 10% of your income. This guarantees that your properties will pay for themselves quickly enough to return most of that money to you in order to both get the items you need as well as more properties to raise your budget for expenses.

This is a good time to mention the Top Mafia bonuses to your income. It used to be you would get a 1% boost to your income for every member in your Top Mafia up to a maximum of 8%. This has changed when the Top Mafia was dropped to 6 members. Now, you get an 8% boost to your income if your Top Mafia is full with 6 members. You don't seem to get any bonus for less than that anymore. This means it should be an early priority to get at least 6 friends and at least one of each of the three character types as outlined in Getting Started.

Likewise, pay attention to your cash on hand. If you are getting beaten up frequently for your money, be sure you are banking it more regularly. Banked money can't be lost in fights, though is also can't be used for purchases. You will need to withdraw the money you need for property purchases and item purchases. If you do this while your health is less than 20, you can't be attacked for it before you make the purchase.

Finally, never heal your health unless you need to in order to leverage your stamina or you are about to do a boss fight. The lower your health, the less money you can lose to fights since other players can't attack you for money once your health drops below 20. On a similar note, when you do heal at the hospital, try to do it before you bank money. Hospital bills will pull from your bank account, but the money in your bank you paid a 10% laundering fee on, so effectively, that hospital bill is 10% more if you pay it from the bank rather than your cash on hand.

When to bank your cash flow… and when not

Next to your cash you have the option to go to the bank. To sum it up very simply, whenever you deposit money, 10% of the amount you deposit is deducted as a laundering fee. Withdrawing money has no penalties. You gain no interest on the money you have in the bank. Your money total shown in the stat bar is always just your cash on hand, so you must actually go to the bank to see how much money you have in the bank.

There used to be daily rewards, one of which was that the bank laundering fee was waived. The old way to get around laundering was to wait till these days and then deposit as much as you can. This feature has since been removed.

The Basics of Mafia Wars

Once you are finished with the little introduction sequence to the game, outlined thoroughly in Getting Started, it is not immediately apparent what you should do next. Overall, the game encompasses a number of different objectives and where to start is really up to you.

• Grow your Mafia family
• Keep leveling up your character
• Maximize your fighting strength
• Establish a large income
• Complete collections for special bonuses
• Earn impressive titles

Keepin' up with the Corleone's

Since Mafia Wars is a game on a social networking site, there is no surprise at all that it has a strong social networking component. Growing your mafia size has a surprising number of benefits:

• Ability to purchase more Mafia Mike's, the highest return on investment property
• Ability to purchase very strong special items
• Flushing out your Top Mafia for bonuses
• Your potential cash payout from jobs is increased.
• Certain mafia sizes are required to unlock Boss fights
• Higher attack and defense for both fighting others and defending yourself
• People to trade with to complete collections faster
• The chance to meet new people who share common interests!

Though you do not need the maximum 501 mafia size to be successful, it is highly recommended you try to keep your mafia size at least equal with your level. This will allow you to always get the most from your jobs, keep the boss fights unlocked, and have a solid chance at defending your properties from all the robberies going on out there. If you can't or are not interested in doing that, a mafia size of 16 will at least stop you from being unable to do the boss fights.

Doin' your first few levels

Leveling up your character gets you access to bigger and better items, loot, and collections as well as providing more skill points to make you more efficient and deadly. Leveling can be as complicated or as simple as your time and playing style allows. Every job you complete and fight you win provides XP. Every time you level up, your health, energy, and stamina are reset to their current maximums and 5 more skill points are awarded.

Since your energy and stamina completely refill when you level, it is ideal to have almost none left when you top off the XP bar. On the same note, any extra XP left over when you level gets applied towards the next level, so finishing with a big job for heavy XP will give you the most spill over. Fights yield from 1-3 XP randomly with a chance for it to be doubled based on the size of your mafia. This is all detailed in Fightin' and Robbin'. Most of your XP for any given level will come from doing jobs.

Each time you do a job, you will be awarded a payout in cash, XP as listed on the job, a bonus payout for the size of your mafia, a percentage of the job mastery, and a chance at a loot and collection item (depending on the job). The cash payout is fairly self explanatory. For a detailed treatise on the XP per job and the effects your Top Mafia has on these percentages, refer to Doin' the Job.

Job Mastery is important as for every level of Job Mastery, you are awarded an additional skill point. When all jobs within a given category, like Street Thug, are mastered at level 3, a special item with a bonus is awarded. You can not start leveling the next level of a job within a category until all jobs within that category have been mastered to the same level. So Job Mastery 2 for the Street Thug jobs won't be available until you have mastered all the jobs to Mastery level 1. Finally, for every fully mastered job tier, a title is awarded based on the category. This allows you to show other mafia families how far you have advanced. For the first tier, these are Street Thug, Skilled Street Thug, and Master Street Thug. Currently, Master Boss is the highest known title.

Special Loot items and the collections are discussed in more detail in Doin' the Job and you will also find a breakdown of what items need to be bought and found in order to do each job. If next to a job there is a red box frame around an item, it means you need to acquire that item in order to do the job. Early on, you just need to have it, but some later jobs will actually use up the item necessary to perform the job.

Early on, your best focus is to get the extra skill points from mastering jobs as quickly as possible and try to maximize the amount of spill over XP you have every time you are about to level. Collections and Loot can be focused on later. If your mafia is in solid combat shape, don't miss out on the opportunity to further speed your leveling by fighting with other families.

Pickin' a fight

At the very early levels, skill points won't have much to do with fighting at all and most everyone's skill points will have been spent in energy anyway. There are just a few key points to winning your fights in these low levels. First and foremost, make sure to the best of your financial ability that every member of your family has a weapon, armor, and vehicle. This means if your mafia size is 4, you ideally want 4 weapons with the highest attack value possible, 4 armors with the highest attack, and 4 vehicles with the highest attack. Whenever you are initiating combat, only the attack values matter. When you are assaulted by someone else, both attack and defense factor in.

The second key to winning your early combats is to just pick on the people with smaller families. If your mafia size is 7 and fully outfitted, you should win a fight against anyone with a family size of 6 or less. As you go up in levels this becomes less true and robbing takes on even different characteristics, but the details for these are in Fightin' and Robbin'. These basics tips are enough to get some money and XP out of your stamina.

More energy and Energy Paks

There are three ways to get more energy. It will regenerate at the rate of 1 every 5 minutes (3 minutes if you are a Maniac). It will completely refill whenever you gain a new level. This is one of the principal facts that makes speed leveling work, outlined in more detail in the Doin’ the Job section. You can also get a full refill from the Godfather. Finally there are Energy Paks and there can be a lot of confusion over how these work when you first start playing.

Energy Paks will completely refill your energy to your current maximum and give you an extra 25%. Your energy won’t refill again until your amount of current energy drops below your maximum. If you level before you use the extra 25% energy, you will lose the extra and be reset to your maximum amount. You want to save your Energy Pak until you have used all of your energy and you have the ability to consume most of the energy before leveling. On a similar note, you want to use the highest XP payout job if it is about to cause you to level as any excess XP beyond what is necessary to level will spill over in to starting the XP needed for the next level.

You can only use 1 Energy Pak every 24 hours. Before the Top Mafia was changed from 8 members to 6 members, sending out Energy Paks would only send them to people in your mafia who were also in your Top Mafia. Now they seem to go out to everyone in your Mafia. You won’t see them as being able to be used until the invisible timer of 24 hours since you used your last one completed.

Bein' a better slum lord

Properties make up the financial life blood of your borgata's empire. In order to make the most of your skim, you want to make sure you are buying the properties that produce the best return on investment (ROI) first. Your properties income will be added to your cash on hand every hour (54 minutes if you are a Mogul) even if you aren't logged in to the game. Some of the equipment you buy for your mafia, such as Chain Guns, Body Armor, and Towncars will also have an expense that is deducted from your profit every time it pays out. If this number ever goes negative, you lose money every hour, hence why smart investing is so important. A good rule of thumb is to not let your expenses (listed on the Properties tab) ever exceed 10% of your income. If buying a new item would push you over that amount, wait till you make your next property purchase.

Before we get too much further in to actual facts and figures, all advice on purchasing properties should be predicated with the following: Always buy a Mafia Mike's whenever it is available before doing anything else. No other property comes close to its profit potential, even if you have hundreds of them already.

The basics to maximizing the property racket comes down to this, each time you buy a given property, the cost for the next one goes up by 10% from the initial base price. So if a restaurant costs $30,000 for the first one, the second will cost $33,000 and the 11th will cost $60,000. The amount that each property pays per instance stays fixed. This means that the more of a given property you have, the lower the rate of return to keep buying that property.

The second key point is that if you buy more than one of a property at a time, the unit cost stays the same. So if you were to buy 5 Rent Houses each one at a time, you would pay, $10k, $11k, $12k, $13k, and $14k for a total of $60k. If you used to dropdown to choose to buy 5 Rent Houses all at once, you would have just paid $50k. This makes the amount of time to break even significantly reduced if you buy in bulk. The game only supports buying as many as 10 at a time, so practically speaking, this means you should always save up enough money to buy 10 of what you want and then buy the full block to get the best return.

To save up the money to get started and for information about how to protect your bankroll, you should read Rollin' a Bankroll. For more details on making the most of your properties and protecting yourself from robberies, see Property Moguls. For now, here is the list of initial purchases that will net you the best return on investment in order. Just save the specified amount of money, and get the next item on the list. You will notice, due to ROI, the Marina doesn't even show up in your first $10 million in purchases.

Qty	Property	Cost for 10
10	Abandoned Lot	$50,000
10	Rent House	$100,000
10	Abandoned Lot	$50,000
10	Italian Restaurant	$300,000
10	Abandoned Lot	$50,000
10	Commercial Block	$500,000
10	Apartment Complex	$2,000,000
10	Commercial Block	$500,000
10	Valu-Mart	$4,000,000
10	Rent House	$200,000
10	Abandoned Lot	$50,000
10	Italian Restaurant	$300,000
10	Abandoned Lot	$50,000

An offer you can’t refuse – Using the Godfather

The Godfather is the game's way of letting you spend reward points. You start the game with 10 and will get 1 more for every other level you obtain plus another 5 as a bonus after you start playing. Outside of that, reward points are gained by paying for them or completing offers with various advertisers that have signed up with Zynga. There is a strong temptation to use these points right away, but as they are your rarest commodity in the game, let us talk about what they can actually gain you.

So far, every couple of weeks there has been a special item that is available to purchase for 25 reward points, but the offer only lasts for 36 hours. There is no limit on the number that can be bought during that time, as long as you have the reward points for them. These items usually have stats that match or exceed the best items that can be gained from job loot or the mafia store. They are expensive, but definitely good deals if you plan on doing a lot of fighting.

Along the same lines, there are also offers of 1 for 20 or 3 for 55 special loot items. Previously these were called Tools of the Trade, Yakuza Crates and Red Hammer Crates, but now they are Woodsman Crates. The boxes have a 10% chance at a rare item and a 30% chance for an uncommon. The uncommon items are about the equivalent of the special offers and the special loot rewards for mafia size. The rare items are slightly better than the best loot items in the game for a given stat. Unfortunately, with the low drop chance of the rare items and the fact that the common items don't match up to the best job loot, we don't really recommend picking these up.

The Godfather also has the option to completely refill your energy, stamina, or health. Health is a horrible deal as you can always pay the hospital to heal you every 45 seconds and this site has ample information to solving money problems. Stamina refills may seem useful to fulfill a vendetta on someone you are warring with, but once again, your stamina regenerates naturally and if you just hit the mattresses until you have it all back, you get the exact same effect. Energy refills may occasionally be worthwhile if you are trying to speed level, especially as your available energy pool exceeds 24 hours to naturally replenish. Of course, your daily Energy Paks also solve this issue.

Buying a name change is certainly worthwhile if you decide you don't like your initial choice. Unfortunately, there is no longer a way to change your initial choice of character type. Hopefully they will either fix that in the future, or balance the character types better. Buying extra skills points is certainly a viable option if you wish. Buying money is a complete waste as there are many easy ways within the game to solve your financial woes. Check out the Rollin' a Bankroll section if you are still struggling.