Beginner's Guide

Beginner's Guide

Just getting started in WaO and don't know where to start?  The tutorial gives you the basics, but not enough to really get off the ground.  Here are my beginner's tips:

1. Don't be afraid to use the "free" speed ups on your building upgrades. There is no limit to how many or how often you can use these.  I remember my first time playing, I was hesitant to hit the "free" icon hovering over my buildings because I wasn't sure if I was using up a resource I would need later.  Nope.  Use them as soon as you can and as often as they appear.

2. There is also a "free" option in the upgrade screen if the build time is less than your current "free" speed up time.  (5 minutes by default, but more if VIP is turned on.)  You can use this even when you have no builder available.  So you can have up to two buildings being actively upgraded, and continue to also upgrade all of your smaller buildings with the "free" button. This also works to start new buildings.  You'll get things started much faster if you use this feature to its fullest.

3. Daily Reward:  Look for this at your city hall.  There are a number of activities listed here, each worth some number of points. Accumulate points to receive reward chests.  You can get up to 6 chests each day.  Don't forget to check back before server reset to see if you have any rewards waiting here for you.  Every day you should try to do as many of these activities as you can.  Of course early in the game, some of them are not yet possible, like "Temple Donations," but some of them are very easy to do, like technology research and building upgrades, which become much harder to accomplish later in the game.

4. Send Flowers:  Yes, this is one of the activities in the Daily Reward, so you were already going to do it, but it bares mentioning separately.  It is super easy to do, and comes with its own reward in addition to daily reward points.  I also wrote an entire article just on this subject.

5. Join an alliance. This game is about community building.  Nearly everything fun about this game happens within an alliance.  Pick one that is active, fits your personality and has people you like.  You might have to switch alliances a couple of times to find the right one.

6. Use your elite teleport WISELY.  You get one for free at the beginning of the game.  You might think they're easy to get because of this, but they are not.  Unless you are planning on spending some money to play, it could be a week or more before you acquire enough gems for another one.  Don't use it until you are fairly sure you've found the right alliance, then talk to your alliance leaders about where you should place your castle within the alliance territory.  Don't be overly anxious to move.  Your castle is perfectly safe in a "newbie" shield until you hit level 9.

7. Use VIP: When you start the game, your VIP level is 1 and VIP is activated.  This gives you several benefits including the ability to search for monsters and resource tiles on the world map.  Use it to find your first few monsters quickly.  It also gives you a longer free speedup time.  That can come in very handy when VIP is a higher level, but eventually becomes fairly useless once buildings take days to upgrade.  I recommend that you focus your upgrading on one of each building type, (one farm, one sawmill, one stone mine, etc.) and leave the rest at the lower level.  Then each time your VIP level goes up, check those buildings and see if you can upgrade them for free.  As stated earlier, this can be done even if your builders are busy, so upgrade all of them at once without having to wait for the "golden hammer" to finish working.  You will not be notified when your VIP level goes up.  Take a look at the ribbon at the top of the screen and when it is red with gold letters, VIP is active.  You get 24 hours of VIP with each new level.

8. set up a second game right away.  I will write another article specifically about this, but even though you don't need it for the first couple of weeks, you will eventually be very glad you started a second (or even a third and fourth) castle immediately.  These extra accounts, whether they are "farms" or "body guards," will be very helpful to you in the long run and the sooner you start, the more helpful they can be.