This goes for both when you attack somebody regardless if it be a Player or NPC (Non-Playable Character and NPC's are Blackhand Gangs) or if you're being attacked. You can see what units the "enemy" lost.
Roll your mouse over the i to see what units you lost, what units they lost. There is no pre-requirements to be able to read the reports.
To know if your wall has been breached
If it has not, you will see something like this. See Patch Notes: 1.05.2012
What Cityscapes are & what they do
They're mini cities you can take over to get more resources and cash boost. Best to have all cityscapes the same level. There is currently no cap to the % boost in resources.
They come in many different shapes & sizes due to level. Each one gives a 5% increase based on level. Lv1=5%, Lv10=50%. So make sure to mouse over it to see what level it is. This one is a image of what a cityscape looks like unclaimed by a player. So in order for you to claim it, you will have to make sure to have slots.
I strongly advise not taking ones from players or people in your same family. Ones controlled by a player will have the family crest on them. It may trigger a war and you may become a target and it will break your protection status if you attack ones under player control only.
Hide or Defend: What should I choose?
Click on your mansion, you will see you have a warehouse. Warehouse is active all the time. Upgrading it will protect more resources and more cash. Should another player attack you and break your walls, that player will only be able to take any cash or resources your warehouse is not able to hold to protect. Upgrading your warehouse as a new player will help protect those low resources and cash. Later in the game the warehouse becomes more like a safety net and more agressive means are needed to protect your estate such as Defensive Units. You can read about defensive units here.
When you click on your mansion, you will see this option and be sure to click on Protect Tab.
If you have any units. Regardless if it be Defensive or Offensive units, they are added in to the total. As you can see, if you select Defend. You will lose any units at your estate that are guarding it. If you select Hidden, You will not lose any units while a player is attacking you. Keep in mind a player can still break your wall and take any resources your Warehouse is not protecting. You can read more about Wall Breaking & Defensive Units and their effects here in my Advance Tips
My suggestion is don't break your protection. Let timer wear off (The timer is one real life week from the day you started playing). Select Hidden for now till you've Built Defensive Units. When you have your Warehouse to Lv9 or Lv10 and your resources start to go past what your warehouse can protect then you want at least 1k of each Defensive Unit as a solid base defense and click on Defend. At least this way if any player silly enough to attack, you will earn respect for defeating their forces.
The order your units die in defending your estate. First to die is your Defensive Units. Then Your Offensive Units step in to Defend your estate and then your last line of defense is your wall and if they wipe out all your units and break your wall, then make sure to go in to Hidden, Rebuild your units and Defend again (eventually). Always add on to your Defensive. Best way to do this is to dump all your resources in to defensive before you log out for the rest of the day/night., generally before you go to sleep.
What should I build?
That's a matter of opinion and depends how you wanna play. So i'll do a break down of each building that is important to building a offensive fast.
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| Hideout |
These are important to their respective level. The effect the building time of units based on what level the hideout is that allows you to train that unit. A clear example of this is when you first join the game, Kabam sends out a e-mail saying you should build more hideouts to train units faster. While the hideout does not state the % at how much it decreases training time, it is noticeable. To prove this to your self. Build up one hideout to be able to train hitmen. select train unit "1" and make note of the time. Then do a few more hideouts up to the same level to train hitmen and select "1" again and you will notice the time is lowered. With the way game mechanics are its hard to say how much it lowers the total time. (remember you're building in bulk, not just one unit). So the effect is believed by most veteran players that each hideout lowers the bulk time required. If you're looking to train a large offensive, make sure to build 14-18 hideouts and keep them all equally leveled. Not doing so makes it nearly pointless in making so many.
So it will be a good chance to send in your main bulk of units hidden away at your estate to send a large offensive to finish off his or her remaining units and if you're lucky, get to take all their resources away. (if you been building unis for a while that is). To learn more about how to read reports and when to send a counter attack, check out Tom's Desk
Keep in mind that when you plan to go with building a large offensive and storing units in a cityscape to protect them for easy respect boost and should your units die, you get more base respect for killing off their units. That you always should keep a army hidden away at your estate. Enough to still be able to farm Gangs or Cityscapes for resources and enough to be able to reclaim the Cityscape that was lost.
Everything that's been mentioned so far about building units, how to build them faster and how effective they are when you are able to build them fast allows you to earn respect faster and opens chances for a thing called Baiting.
All Baiting is some players will think they have wiped out your main army. Therefore think if you devoted that much time to units, they will think your estate has no defensive units. If you been following my advise so far, they will be wrongfully mistaken. So they will likely go out of their way to hunt any remaining cityscapes of yours they can find and then attack your estate directly. Should they be foolish enough, your defensive units will finish off their offensive army. However the person attacking you might have a dffensive army also. It depends how old the server is or how new the server is.
Most players on newer servers devote most of their resources to Offensive because they want to take over higher level cityscapes faster for the resource gain and most don't follow my blog. So they're taking a really long time to build defensive and most likely to have a good size offensive.
If they even bothered with switching between the two unit builds of offensive and defensive of like Defensive Train>Offensive Train> Defensive Train> and so on, then you will have a small challenge ahead of you but not very hard to deal with.
If all they been doing is Offensive Train> Offensive Train> Offensive Train> Offensive Train> Defensive Train then your bulk of your army hidden away at your estate will have a easy time to eat through that person defensive units and because it will and could run in to them, you've now crushed their main offensive + their defensive.
Granted while you have not taken their resources and it gives them a chance to rebuild. They will likely aim to rebuild Offensive Units because of the units they lost in attacking you. So they have to dump more resources (they likely don't have or how to build and farm quickly of) in to regrouping. So to kick them while they're down, take out their cityscapes. So now they have no units to reclaim Cityscapes, No Offensive Units to attack you back with and they already dumped their resources in to training more units. So all they can do is wait. When they build units, they will retake lower level cityscapes (at this time you want at least 100 units in each of your cityscapes so they can't take your cityscapes to replace the lost of theirs) then you go back and hunt down that person newly low level cityscapes and knock those out too till your Offensive Units have rebuild from losing some Offensive units from attacking their Estate (if you find their Estate) and then when the time is right, go in, break their walls. Take all their resources (make sure to have multiple trucks or be ready to do multiple attacks).
I would suggest doing this daily. Use up all 30 attacks (if you can) on staying on top of that player and remain actively attacking till they quit or beg for a peace treaty and promise they will never attack you again. For it they should, by that time you will have (maybe) 10k Offensive Units and well over 10k+ Defensive Units.
What if i wanna be a Defensive Player?
This requires more resource building in Cem,Steel,Food. Six of each and more apt's but at least 8 hideouts. This puts you in a place to crew to be able to wipe out most estate defensive units. (you earn respect points for doing so) and while you won't be able to break walls for a very long time (because your cash flow won't be high enough) you will want to stick with baiting players in to attacking your estate where you have well over 1k+ each defensive unit and always keep adding. The bulk of your Units will be thugs, arsos, brus,demos, some hitmen, tommy gunners & enforcers (like maybe 300 of the units that take longer to build, each) and your role in a crew to to mainly build Arsos & Demos to be ready to wipe out any Estate Defensive Units so the Crew can go in to crush that player estate while you stock pile arsos in most cityscapes to make them think they have beaten your army and want them to think your estate is a easy target. So stick around in Lv2 armor, own up to Lv6 Cityscapes. Only Lv6 because by that point all your resources will be 100k+ an hr with research and lv9 Resource buildings. So you're not having to relay on breaking estate walls to build massive weaker/cheaper units and able to build large defensive amount of units at a time. So your focus would be as followed:
What if i want to be balanced player?
Then i'd go with still at least 13-15hideouts. 5 cem,steel,food buildings and at least 4 apt's. This is just a matter of opinion of course but you will have to find your own balance as you read through the blog that covers different parts about the game. I as of yet have not found a good balance worth making note of. This can change in the future as Kabam further updates the game.
What if i change my mind later on?
You will want to inform your crew leader of this and you may no longer become useful to the crew. You can get wrecking balls from lucky chance, win free diamonds or buy them with cash in order to get wrecking ball cards to rip down buildings you don't want. Even if the building is Lv9, you don't lose the respect or exp you've gained from that building. You can pretty much ask anybody on any server about diamonds. Just to get free ones you have to do a lot of surveys.
I want to know more!
About research? I will cover that in my next blog post. Right now i feel i have covered all the game basics. How you play is up to you entirely.
