In Mafia Wars, fight is a critical par of the game, but it is too often neglected by players. Personally, I love to use it for several good reasons:
Stamina points are quickly renewed,
Fights are producing a lot of experience points,
In fights, you get quick money (specially in cities where jobs are not very efficient like Cuba or Moscow),
In fights, you get loots on your victims (I collected many an object that I did not know yet how to acquire in a more normal way, through MW job)
So, be an active mafioso and fight! A hundred fights a day is a good rhythm (but you could go faster if you really want it).
The fight below is a good example of several tactical tricks I use and appreciate in Mafia Wars fights:
Choose your adversaries: Your mafia must be at least twice as big as theirs, to be sure to always kick them down (Mafia Wars only offer adversaries around your own level, in this case a level 194 while I’m 184): Here, Tiny Larson is part of 94-man gang and my mafia is 354 strong)
Don’t kick twice a guy who did not drop some significant money, but remember that there is a hard-coded limit at $65,000$ per combat (obviously, in this example, I did well; And I immediately repeated my attack in order to grab as much money as possible from his bleeding beaten body)
A mafia family member doubled my experience points (+4 Experience)
A mafia family member collected a dropped item (loot) for me (Al Capone found a M16A1…)
All in all, a pretty nice and productive fight.
Then, as soon as I’m out of breath (Health fallen under 20 points), I rush to New York to stop by the hospital and bring me back into shape. New York has the strong advantage of allowing you to earn a lot of money (you only let the Properties produce their revenues) that cannot be invested in nothing else than good medicine. So, these fights become a good mean to convert real-estate income in New York into another currency and plenty of other objects (loot).
When you progress in Mafia Wars on Facebook, you collect points that you should choose how to assign between:
Attack
Defense
Health
Energy
Stamina
Here are my recommendations about the optimum number of points in each.
Attack: You should stay with around 1/2 of your level, with a minimum around 50-55. If you are a Level 50, try to have a 45-50 Attack. If you are a Level 125, you should aim for a 60-70 Attack.
Defense: Same as for Attack.
Health: You don’t want to be too low, but as soon as your Properties in New York start producing money steadily, you will be better spending this money is curing yourself than spending points on Health.
Energy: This is what you always want to maximize. You’ll never have enough.
Stamina: They are needed for fighting and we’ll see that fighting is key but slow. Don’t get much more than 100 if you don’t want to spend all your days fighting.
If you play at Mafia Wars on Facebook, you certainly noticed that some objects are very difficult to get and are absolutely necessary to finish a full campaign. For example, I would list:
Concealable camera
Computer setup
Untraceable Cell Phone
Blackmail photos
Illegal Transaction Records
Politico Corrupto
Dossier on Dmitri
You will need several hundreds of each of these objects (for example, 300 Politico Corruptos).
It is important to know where to get them. They are “loots” randomly ocllected from some “jobs”. And I advise you to write down where you should go to catch them. As a matter of fact, you could try and ask you mafia family to help, but everybody needs them and they don’t share those valluables a lot.
Concealable camera : Rob an Electronics Store in New York / Enforcer and Smuggle Consumer Electronics for the Vory in Moscow / Baklany
Computer setup : Rob an Electronics Store in New York / Enforcer
Untraceable Cell Phone : Rob an Electronics Store in New York / Enforcer and Arrange A Drug Shipment for the Mafiya in Moscow / Baklany
Blackmail photos : Obtain Compromising Photos in New York / Hitman
Illegal Transaction Records : Steal Bank Records in New York / Capo
Politico Corrupto : is a by-product of Businesses, Bribery Ring in Cuba
Dossier on Dmitri : Buy Mafiya Intel On Dmitri in Moscow / Baklany
If you are on Facebook, you certainly know Mafia Wars, this online game, slightly addictive, grouping several million FB users, where you try to progress in a mafia world while doing lowly jobs in New York, Cuba, Moscow (and soon Bangkok or the American West).
One of the difficult aspects is to build yourself a large mafia. You should recruit 501 friends to be stronger in fights. But not many people can really find 500 friends ready to spend a lot of time on a (slightly silly) online game. So, you should use on of the hidden tricks. Build your mafia in a matter of days:
First, sign-in as a Mafia Wars fan. You will receive all announcement messages about this game.
Find one of the messages and rush to the comments telling the world that you want to extend your family. Don’t overdo it, just say “Add me”, possibly adding your current level (”level 184″). You should immediately start receiving invitations from other players asking to be friend and then mafia members.
You can also merely notice people like you in the comments and ask them to become friends and part of your mafia family.
Add me, please!
In any case, I recommend to clean up the list of your friends after some time (they will stay in your mafia family anyway). It is not useful to have hundreds of unknown people being your friends on Facebook. But it’s your life…
Fabian Tischer is obviously gifted to create small videos from visual effects supposed to be simple (but actually quite tough to master) in order to offer us some cool movies:
It’s worth noticing it if you are using Opera. I had a difficult-to-solve issue recently.
While playing with the idea of starting to use IPv6 on my main PC, I tested the waters by validating this option in the network configuration of my Windows XP. Unfortunately, Opera is already fully ready for IPv6 but my router box is not. So, the first effect it had is that Opera decided to enforce the use of IPv6 for all web sites that mentioned IPv6 capacity in their DNS (not many of them, but Google and Free.fr my ISP are already in the list). The immediate effect was that Opera tried to connect to them in IPv6 but failed (because the rest of my home configuration is not 100% IPv6). For 99% of all web sites, there was no difference…
It took me several days (and some Googling – using Safari and Chrome) to understand that this is a known issue and to remove the (still) useless IPv6 Windows configuration.
So, the great FPS game will be back before the end of the year 2009. Either the launch campaign started early in Nepal or the bus drivers are using their vehicles as video game weapons (the latter would explain the extraordinarily high frequency of dramatic road accidents there).
Microsoft Project is expensive, very expensive. But once you started using it, you can’t stand not having a nice clean GANTT project chart. Why not get a free Microsoft Project? Even better than downloading MS-Project for free, I am proposing you to use an on-line GANTT chart/project builder that is completely free and works on-line: Gantter.
Gantter
I have been really impressed by the quality of such a software program. It may need to get some interface polish for Opera users (I had a couple of little display bugs), but the operation is fully adequate for many projects.
The arrival of Windows 7 also annonces the arrival of a new updated DirectX to serve the PC gamers’ community. We already knew that Vista did not have the favour of the gamers (who often stayed with Windows XP) and that had (among other things) some significant impact on DirectX 10 that required Vista. Will gamers now run to Windows 7? It’s possible, but if you want to see the real progress brought to video games (here, to the very popular Crysis FPS) by the various version of DirectX, check the video below:
See what happens to video game players, when a real World Rally Championship (WRC) pilot takes them to the real dirt. “Are you ready for the real thing?” Ken Block is not only a good driver, he’s trying his best to have them p…ing their pants.
With the repeated announcement of (minor) incidents with the security of the original PDF reader from Adobe, I wondered what could be a good replacement. Obviously, it seems important to stay around free or low prices (Adobe Acrobat: Windows/Mac/Linux, Basic: free, Pro: $299), but is it possible to beat the Adobe product to read PDF files?
PDF-XChange (Windows, Basic: free, Pro: $34): loads real fast (much faster than the Adobe viewer), has all the basic options (annotations, graphic annotations, etc.) and the Pro version allows to reorganize the pages of a document or to extract text from it.
Foxit (Windows/Linux, Basic: free, Pro Pack: $39.99): loads even faster, allows annotations (but only the Pro versio does it without watermark).
Sumatra PDF (Windows, free): is even simple; everything is done for sheer speed.
Apple PDF Preview (Mac, free): is very powerful (and it’s free, remember) and included in the MacOS offering; annotations, extraction, reorganization, all is available
If you want to grab the maximum CPU power for your PC video game (or any other PC application, by the way), there is a free utility that will ensure that the PC CPU does not spend to much time on anything else: Game Booster. It may be bad for a correctly balanced performance, but some games may appreciate the help.
OK, you’ve already seen all the icon collections on the Internet. Nothing can surprise you anymore. Stop! Icons Etc is really something else. You will find hundreds of high-resolution quality icons all of them being free and of the highest quality.
I just took one part of the simplest category: Rain drops.
Rain drops (on Icons Etc.)
I’m sure that you will find whatever you need for your web site, for your Windows desktop or any other icon-based application.
Windows 7 is not even here, but there are already people complaining about its download speed when using Torrent P2P software. It has the same limitation on half-open connections as Windows XP. So, there are people who already found the solution: Half-Open Limit Fix is a small, portable utility that is compatible with Win7 and will patch your tcpip.sys in just a few clicks.
A good bookmark: Using OpenLDAP on Debian Woody to serve Linux and Samba Users is a user manual for OpenLDAP; But it does a lot more than merely explaining the installation of this directory on Debian Linux. It can be considered as a proper training to OpenLDAP in more ways than one.
But if you consider that this is not the right thing, you could thing a more organized (but less readable) description of LDAP: “Basics of LDAP” which is also very much Linux-oriented, of course.
I am not sure that this is exact all over the Internet, but I just noticed that this is true for YLovePhoto, one of my web sites: There are more visitors using Firefox than Internet Explorer.
YLovePhoto.com
Then, I checked for Roumazeilles.net itself, and I noticed the same situation:
Roumazeilles.net
It appears that Firefox is moving very fast. Who would have thought -a few years ago- that Microsoft’s world domination would be toppled like that?
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