By popular demand, I will group here all the posts I made previously about how to improve your Mafia Wars performance (Mafia Wars is the #1 Crime game on Facebook).

• Mafia Wars: Get a large mafia in no time
• Mafia Wars: Maximum loot
• Mafia Wars: How many points?
• Mafia Wars: Combat strategy
• Mafia Wars: Best weapons

All these are grouped under the “Mafia Wars” tag.

• Build a powerful mafia (if some of the family members are sleeping on the job, do not hesitate: cull them out of your mafia team)
• Arm your mafia: In each category, you should have at least one of the best weapons for eachof the mafia members. For example, in New York, you will go and buy (when you can) hundreds of Bonus weapons. They don’t come cheap, but it’s the best money can buy. Also, purchase hundreds of Body Armors and 500 Town Cars (It will also earn you an Achievement)
• Don’t buy Boosts if you don’t havea precise and urgent use for them. You would waste them in meaningless fights.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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

I’ll also show you more about it later.

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.

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…