Mafia Live : Hints and Tips

[TheIrishMafia]

I've seen plenty of postings for Family Codes (the crack cocaine of Mafia Live), but precious little info on how to actually PLAY the game, so I decided to start sharing some of the Tips&Tricks I've picked up in the last few weeks.

Starting with:

How Family Size affects Fights (Mafia Live)
Family Size by itself has no effect on your Fights, but the larger your Family, the more items you can bring to the fight, which has a major impact.
Each Family member you can bring to the fight will include a weapon, a defense, and a vehicle from your inventory (adding the att/def values for those items). Note that Family members do NOT bring anything other than what you give them.
For example, if you have 100 Family members, but you only own 1 pistol, 1 AK-47, one helmet, and one Town Car, you are only bringing 4 items to the fight. If you own 100 AK-47 rifles, they will all add to your attack.
So, you should try to own as many weapons & defenses as you have family members (and no more).


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Why You Need AK-47s and Helmets (Mafia Live)
If you are involved in a Fight, every Family member you have will bring along a weapon and defense item out of your inventory.
Since the AK-47 and the Helmet do not require any upkeep cost, you can stock as many as you can afford without them sucking away your income.
So, at a minimum, you should try to own as many AK-47s and Helmets as you have Family members.

Why you shouldn't be running a Debt
I was curious to find out what would happen if you ran your Family with a large negative income - and I can now pass along my 'learning experience'.
For those starting out: You can generate a constant stream of income by buying Real Estate. You also lose money as an upkeep cost for many of your items.
Since there are reasons to NOT have a net income (refer to posts on Stealing Income), I was curious what would happen if you didn't generate ANY revenue from Real Estate, and just operated at loss.
At FIRST, this seemed to have no negative effect: money wasn't being taken from the bank account, inventory didn't change, etc. However, this behavior will eventually piss off the Godfather enough that he will take away ALL items that have an upkeep cost, as well as cleaning out your entire Bank Account (net loss for me was around 5 million).
So, the lesson learned is: Make sure to balance your income and expenses so you're not operating at a loss.

Stealing Income (and why a big Income can be painful)
As most of you know, when you pick a Fight with another Family, if you win the Fight you will walk away with some of that Family's cash-on-hand (money that is not stored in the Bank). This is actually a GREAT way to make money, IF you choose your Fights wisely. Instead of picking random fights from the Fight tab, you should be looking at the details for a family (by clicking the green Family box, or the link for the Family name) and picking fights with Families that:
1) You know you can beat (see posts on Picking Fights)
2) Have a lot of income generating Real Estate
Picking a fight with a Family that owns 10 Jewelery Stores, but hasn't equipped a lot of weapons, can nab you tens of thousands in cash.
The key here, though, is that if you find a real cash cow, you can CONTINUE to steal money from them by navigating back to your My Hood tab and scrolling down to the Recent Fights. If you click on the Family name link from your most recent fight, it will open the screen for that Family --- which includes the button for "Fight this Family". You can continue picking fights as long as you both have the Health to fight.
The additional lesson here is: Don't let money accumulate from income! It just makes you a target, if you aren't protecting it well enough. Until you can field a pretty big army, your income should be just enough to fund the stuff you own.

Picking Fights with other Families
If you don't know how attack/defense is calculated, see other posts on how Family size affects fights, and how to equip the proper weapons/defense.
Once you have a decent Family size, properly equipped, it's time to start picking fights you know you will win. The easiest/fastest method (of course) is to just pick on folks who only have one or two Family members (since they won't be able to mount any real defense). You'll still get experience for the Win, but odds are you won't be making any money. And you'll find you waste a lot of time picking on people who have no health anyway, since everyone else has already picked on them.
The more profitable method is to actually take a look at the Family details before picking a fight (by clicking on the green square, or the Family name), and comparing their inventory to yours. You'll be surprised by how many Families have a large number of Family members, but haven't bothered to buy any weapons for all of them to use.

 

[Marcus72]

oh no the secrets is out.

They should add to cops to it, somebody need to put some of the thieves in jail, especially the ones who steal my money while I'm asleep.

 

[Vance1981]

Use the bank

The fee to the banker is cheap compared to the thief.

 

[MiniMacBook]

Awesome guide. I wish the designers had put somehting up like this earlier.
Not sure why. Maybe they wanted us to guess. Thanks for the post.

 

[Cole Train]

Thanks for the info

Thanks for the info. I found out about some of the things you wrote about the hard way.

 

[echaudry]

General Tips to get people started:

* Pretty sure Capitalist is the fastest way to get crazy rich. But the problem is that everyone seems to want to fight a Capitalist (because they all know we have money).
* Put your money in the bank as often as possible. That stops people from fighting you and stealing whatever you haven’t banked.

Jobs
Doing jobs is the easiest way to make money. There’s a huge list of jobs you can do to make money. These are the ones I recommend:

* Buy a Metal bat.
* Trash A Car. Keep doing that until you have enough money to buy a Revolver.
* Rough Up Rivals. Keep doing that until you have enough money to buy another Revolver.
* Rig Horse Race. Keep doing that until you have enough money to buy a Town Car.
* Vandalize Mansion. Keep doing that until you have enough money to buy a Hummer H2 & 3 M-16 Rifles.
* Run Gaming Circuit. Keep doing that until you have enough money to buy another Hummer H2. Don’t sell your M-16… you’ll need the 3 later.
* Casino Heist. Keep doing that until you have enough money to buy another Hummer H2 (making 3 total).
* Take Cop For Ransom. This is the best value job, in terms of money and experience, for the energy you’ll use for each job.

Real Estate
When you first start off, the money you get from jobs is best used to buy better equipment (so you can do bigger jobs). But after about level 6 (when the next equipment you need is too expensive to be purchased quickly), you’ll do better investing in real estate. That allows you to earn income all the time, without doing jobs or fighting other players. My recommendations are:

* If you don’t have enough money to Construct Buildings, then buy one piece of Land. But don’t stock up on Land. They’re not efficient, so just buy 1 piece of land and then save up so you can build something on it. Then repeat.
* For the Empty Yard, the Shack is the better value. The Hot Dog Stand costs 3 times as much, but only returns slightly over 2 times the income. So 3 Shacks cost as much as 1 Hot Dog Stand, but provides 28% more income.
* For the Commercial Lot, the Gas Station is the better value.
* For the Downtown Block, the Commercial Building is the better value.
* For the Marina Square, the Fantasy Resort is the better value.
* Initially the Shack is actually the most efficient (revenue vs its cost). But the cost goes up the more you buy. I won’t go into the mathematics of it, but this is is the roughly how I do it: buy up to 10 Gas Stations, buy 15 Jewelry Stores, buy 5 more Gas Stations, then start on the Downtown Block building types. After 15 of each building type, it’s more cost effective to buy the next level stuff.

Fights
Fighting other players are a big gamble. Often you’ll get $0, but sometimes you can really hit pay dirt!

* The best time to fight other people is early in the morning. While they’ve been sleeping, their character should have built up a big chunk of unbanked money.
* You’ll have the best chance of getting a good pay out if you fight Capitalists. Especially in the morning.
* But sometimes, especially as the day progresses and everyone’s picking on Capitalists, try to fight some Executioners or Psychopaths. They may have unbanked money because they think everyone else will be busy attacking Capitalists.
* If you find someone that paid out a big sum of money, go back to the Home screen (so you can see all the people you’ve fought). Then click on that person’s name, and you can attack him again! Keep fighting the same person as long as the payout is good

Cookie Cutter Play
This is pretty much what I do every time I log in.

* Bank any money I am carrying.
* Go to My Consigliere, and accept any family invites.
* Check my family strength, then Fight anyone who is below my family strength.
* Keep fighting until my Stamina is 0 and my Health is less than 20. If I still have stamina but low on health, I’ll get Dal Dottore to heal me.
* From my Fight tip above, if anyone has a good payout, I keep fighting him to get even more money.
* After I’m done fighting, I buy any equipment that I might need for the next bigger job.
* Bank all the money I’m carrying if my health is 20 or more. If it’s less than 20, I can hang onto the money I’m carrying because no one can attack me while I’m low on health.
* Now I do jobs. Just keep doing the more cost effective job until I run out of energy.
* Then I bank all the money I’m carrying.

Gaining A New Level
When you level, the only thing worth improving is Energy. Because that lets you do more Jobs, which allows you to invest in Real Estate, which allows you pile on the money

Build A Big Family
As you progress, it is important that you build a big family. Having a bigger family stops people with smaller families from attacking you (and taking all your unbanked money). Make sure you tell everyone you know to join your family!

 

[jman800]

Awsome advice! I hope they add a "Buy 25, 50, 100" of the items. that would be SO much easier!

 

[Solver]

Keep Raiding the NYC Fed. You'll make well over a hundred thousand dollars per job and somehow never get caught.

 

[xUKHCx]

This thread is not for codes, please use the following thread for codes

Mafia Live Family Codes

Any posts with codes in this thread will be deleted.

 

[ysdpoker]

How do you remove a family member from the family?

I am new to this Mafia game (lvl 7) and blindly added everyone to my family.
Now, I have few "Big Dogs" (lvl 60+) bastards just punking me around. This really pisses me off cause they are only able to do this cause they are in my family members. How do I remove these backstabbing punks?
Funny thing is that they seems to keep attacking me for the heck of it or for the win record even when they dont get any money off me.

If anyone knows how to remove these bastards from my family, please help.

Thank you.

FROM: Sorry Little Thug Trying to Make a Easy Living

As you can see, I wont even post my family code anymore cause of this bad experience. GOOOOOOODDDDDDDDD I hate those bastards. I want them exiled from the Family. HELP PLEASE!!!!!

 

[TheIrishMafia]

The best job for Experience is still the Bank Job, with a return of 1.33 exp for each Energy spent, but only an average of $766/pt. At higher levels, the only choice is between the Ransom Cop (1.28:1 $5,714) and Raid NYC Fed (1.16:1 $5,833). The gains of the top four jobs are still offset by the upkeep costs of the gear required to run them.

I was going to post a more detailed breakdown, but then discovered that a few folks have posted spreadsheets online, so I'm just going to post a link to the full spreadsheet.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pAJZJ-Cme8eLoLrklvUGacQ
The quick and dirty information for beginning players is that you should focus on Shacks and Hot Dog Stands in equal measure, until you can start buying Gas Stations and Jewelry Stores --- they all provide roughly the same return on investment. You should never be holding empty property, and there's little reason to be saving up money on the high cost properties (they have lower ROI than the cheaper properties), until later in the game, when you're rolling in cash.

Following up on my earlier post, confirmed the rules on how having a negative cashflow will now affect you:
1) If you do not have cash to pay for upkeep, it will come directly out of your bank.
2) If your bank account reaches 0, weapons/armor/vehicles (starting from the most expensive) will be confiscated by the Godfather WITHOUT reimbursement until your cashflow is positive.

A lot of people were caught by surprise on this change last week, so you want to make sure you're not running at a negative income, before your bank account gets depleted.

The Godfather recently posted the updated formula for how Fights are calculated in Mafia LIVE. For those of you who haven't seen the post, here's how fights scores are calculated:
1) The amount of attack strength in your equipment (only YOUR equipment matters, ie if John is in your family and he has XYZ weapon, those weapons do not matter). You may only use one weapon, one armor, and one vehicle PER family member.

2) Your attack/defense score is then multiplied by some number and then added to your equipment score (a lot of tuning went into finding the balance here) NOTE: attack score matters when you are Attacking, defense score matters when you are defending an attack. Only YOUR attack/defense matter, your family members' stats have no influence. Your family size does have an effect of how much your attack/defense scores are magnified, but the effect is limited in scope. (took a while to derive that balance)

3) There is a little luck factor involved as well.

Note that this means it's NOT simply a matter of adding up all the weapons your Famliy brings to the fight --- your Attack and Defense scores DO make a difference, as well as a modifying factor based on your Family size. And a little 'luck' thrown in to the mix.

 

[Huggybear07]

I've seen plenty of postings for Family Codes (the crack cocaine of Mafia Live), but precious little info on how to actually PLAY the game, so I decided to start sharing some of the Tips&Tricks I've picked up in the last few weeks.

Starting with:

How Family Size affects Fights (Mafia Live)
Family Size by itself has no effect on your Fights, but the larger your Family, the more items you can bring to the fight, which has a major impact.
Each Family member you can bring to the fight will include a weapon, a defense, and a vehicle from your inventory (adding the att/def values for those items). Note that Family members do NOT bring anything other than what you give them.
For example, if you have 100 Family members, but you only own 1 pistol, 1 AK-47, one helmet, and one Town Car, you are only bringing 4 items to the fight. If you own 100 AK-47 rifles, they will all add to your attack.
So, you should try to own as many weapons & defenses as you have family members (and no more).

So if a player has 20 Family members + 20 aks, 20 M-16s, 20 Grenade Launchers... Does this Player bring all those weapons to a fight or just one weapon per family member?

 

[speedracer3000]

Fights

* If you find someone that paid out a big sum of money, go back to the Home screen (so you can see all the people you’ve fought). Then click on that person’s name, and you can attack him again! Keep fighting the same person as long as the payout is good

this worked for me for a while until they scrolled off the home screen.
I made sure I attack the guys often enough so they stayed on each day but some stupid bastard attacked me repeatedly (for $100 chump change as a matter of fact) and filled up the entire home screen. Now I can't get my cash cows back.

 

[TwinCities Dan]

So if a player has 20 Family members + 20 aks, 20 M-16s, 20 Grenade Launchers... Does this Player bring all those weapons to a fight or just one weapon per family member?

They can only use one weapon per member, but at least they grab the strongest weapon available.

 

[Bobioden]

I am really enjoying this game. But, I have a couple questions.

I now understand buying helmets and AK-47's for each family member is important. Should I also be buying Vehicles, say like the town car? If I have 200 members, do I need 50 town cars to get them all to the fight?

Also, is there a way to multiple buy items? I just bought 200 helmets, and 75 AK-47's, all one at a time. Did I miss something, or is there no way to buy, say 50 items or so at once?

 

[ilfn143]

I am really enjoying this game. But, I have a couple questions.

I now understand buying helmets and AK-47's for each family member is important. Should I also be buying Vehicles, say like the town car? If I have 200 members, do I need 50 town cars to get them all to the fight?

Also, is there a way to multiple buy items? I just bought 200 helmets, and 75 AK-47's, all one at a time. Did I miss something, or is there no way to buy, say 50 items or so at once?

click on them really fast you can get 10 at a time.

 

[truz]

click on them really fast you can get 10 at a time.

Not just 10 at a time. I needed 50 ak47's so I kept clicking counted 50 fast clicks and I had 50 ak47's after I was done. You can click as many times as you want and whenever you stop, however many times you clicked is how much you will have.

One thing I don't get is how people are the same level as me (40 currently) and own 20 Gas Stations, 20 Jewelry Stores and 2 Commercial Buildings.

This person I seen also only lost 130 fights out of about 1600 fights. and completed 666 Jobs that I remember.

I own everything I need to complete every jobs there is for level 40. So, my upkeep is $136,250. Cashflow is 187,950.

6 Shacks
3 Hot Dog Stands
1 Commercial Lot
9 Jewelry Stores
6 Gas Stations
1 Commercial Building

It seems I'm losing fights while I'm offline (think it might be due to my family as the people I lose to have 1000 family members and about 400 ak47's and many other things)

When I pick someone with under 60 family members at my level or 1 higher I always win.

Guess I need a bigger family

 

[mafiagod1967]

because..

Somehow these people are cheating! I have seen the same thing. People on levels lower than me with Billions of dollars worth of real estate and equipement. It makes no sense and I'm surprised nothing has been done about it!

 

[Bobioden]

Should I also be buying Vehicles, say like the town car? If I have 200 members, do I need 50 town cars to get them all to the fight?

Any thoughts on buying vehicles?

 

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

One thing I don't get is how people are the same level as me (40 currently) and own 20 Gas Stations, 20 Jewelry Stores and 2 Commercial Buildings.

It isn't hard to get that by level 40. Heck, I might have even had a Fantasy Resort around that time. It comes down to how much money you've got coming in. I went down the route of being a powerful fighter from the ground up and I can make oodles of money in the middle of the night or during the day (when pickings are slim in the evening).

You just have to balance your expenses properly, buy the right real estate, and get money from the right people (which requires the right amount of power). Or you can take a different route and focus totally on real estate and banking money so it doesn't get taken.

As for the win/loss right now I've got about 2500 wins and 45 losses. It just depends on how you progress your equipment.

Any thoughts on buying vehicles?

I love buying vehicles. They're a heavy investment up front but their upkeep is low. A good vehicle is much more important to have around than an Armored Suit because the Armored Suit doesn't take a very long time to become more expensive than the vehicle. Town Cars are a great bargain and you should own what you can. Scale up as your income increases and focus more on having the best total number and consider future purchases. I stated with Town Cars then went to BMWs. I bought Hummers to replace Town Cars, then spent two levels buying Armored Vehicles. Now I'm trying to buy those Bond cars and slowly phasing out my BMWs. Armored Suites are only a good investment when you've got great weapons and cars already.

 

[IphonePlayer]

More tips ...

Hi guys,

The tips on this thread were really helpful, especially from the original Poster ("TheIrishMafia"). Thanks for starting it.

I put together some of my own observations ... especially the idea to 'enjoy' levels 30-40 because things can get a bit different after that (fewer players to fight, and everyone is generally already drained of energy). I've posted my experiences here:

http://sites.google.com/site/mafialivetips/

Thanks - and keep this advice thread going!

 

[Bobioden]

I love buying vehicles. They're a heavy investment up front but their upkeep is low. A good vehicle is much more important to have around than an Armored Suit because the Armored Suit doesn't take a very long time to become more expensive than the vehicle. Town Cars are a great bargain and you should own what you can. Scale up as your income increases and focus more on having the best total number and consider future purchases. I stated with Town Cars then went to BMWs. I bought Hummers to replace Town Cars, then spent two levels buying Armored Vehicles. Now I'm trying to buy those Bond cars and slowly phasing out my BMWs. Armored Suites are only a good investment when you've got great weapons and cars already.

Thanks for the tips. I have a family of 235. Right now I have 235 M-16 Rifles, and 235 Armored Suits. I just add a new one of each when I get a new family member.

For the vehicles I am starting with the BMW M3, I have 67 now, (plus, 5-Hummers, 5-Armored Trucks, 5-Bond Maserati, and 1-Stretch Limo), and add 10-20 after completing each job.

Should you have one vehicle per family member also?

 

[TwinCities Dan]

I was told there is a cheat code 110126840 which unlocks the ability to purchase a brothel (LEVEL 50+)that generates 500k every 50 minutes....
I'm only at Level 31... so I haven't tried the code as of yet...looks like a regular family code to me....but several people in the yahoo-forum claim it works!! Can anybody confirm that this 110126840 works after LEVEL 50???????????

Hmmm, I'm on 51 and I entered the code (Which was accepted) but I don't see anything different. I'll give it some time, maybe it will kick in later?

 

[TheIrishMafia]

Buying Vehicles

Any thoughts on buying vehicles?

I'm a big believer in making sure you have at least one weapon, one armor, and one vehicle for every member of your family that is coming to the fight.

Note that with the new rule change for family members (you only bring 10X your level to the fight), you just need to make sure you have enough items to match 10X your level.