Housekeeping

And so it begins

Famiglia, there’s a lot going on. I hope this organization format helps. Make sure you check out info on Season 1 stuff as well as regular gameplay stuff like VS.

Season 1

We’ve learned a lot in the last day. Here’s there skinny on what we think you need to know to get started in Season 1. For now, we are only focusing on your individual gameplay and not large-scale alliance and server-wide gameplay.

Ok. There’s a virus. You need immunity. You get it from upgrading the Virus Research Institute. You need Immune Protein to upgrade the Virus Research Institute. The main way you get that is from farms. Check out the Essential Resources tab for more on that.

Zombies are way tougher in Season 1. They are infected. So as their levels get higher, you need more resistance. You get higher resistance by building and upgrading the new Virus Research Academy.

The Virus Research Institute and the Protein Farms are in the lowest right section of your HQ, an area that was previously unoccupied.

Essential Resources

There are two new currencies: Immmue Protein and Mutant Crystals. You can get them from typical free in-game mechanics like defeating monsters. You can also get through so seasonal tasks and accomplishments. And, of course, you can buy them.

  • Immune Protein:

The passive way to get Immune Protein (pickle juice) is from Protein Farms. These are like other resource producing buildings in your HQ. You can upgrade them using Mutant Crystals, the other new currency in Season 1.

You start with one farm, but you can get 4 for free and a fifth if you purchase the weekly pass from the in-game store. There is a strategy to this part of the process. Follow these instructions.

  • Build your first farm and upgrade to level 5
  • Build your second farm and upgrade to level 10, unlocking farm 3.
  • Build your third farm and upgrade to level 10, unlocking farm 4.
  • Build your fourth farm and upgrade how you like.

Upgrading your weekly pass farm does not help you unlock your free farms!

Mutant Crystals:

Mutant Crystals primarily come from event accomplishments and from your first time defeating infected monseters (first blood kills). The first blood doom walker each day (first DW you kill, regardless of level) also gives you crystals. And, as you may have guessed, you can buy them from the store.

Crystals are essential for upgrading your Protein Farms.

Killing Infected Zombies

Zombies now have new information explaining the minimum recommended resistance for attacking and rallying. You get higher resistances by upgrading the Virus Research Institute.

When you attack zombies without meeting the minimum resistances, a few things happen:

  • You deal less damage, especially if you are significantly under the minimum.
  • More troops die than usual
  • Some injured troops become infected and continue to do less damage

You can get around the resistance requirements to some extent with rallies. As long as the person who rallies meets the requirements for resistance (and power as usual), the rally should have a good chance. In this way, higher resistance squads can help carry lower resistance squads.

Doom Elites are a lot harder this Season. There is a work-around to help low-power/low-res folks. Coordinate with someone with 1250+ resistance to rally with you. You will have to launch it to get credits, and because of your low resistance, you will lose lots of troops the higher the Doom Elite level. However, if you choose a squad and remove all but 1 hero, you will make sure you take only a fraction of the normal troops into battle. That’s fine because the other person you’re working with should have the power to kill the Doom Elite for you.

If you don’t know, you remove heroes from your squad the same way you add and change them around. Go to the “Garage” just outside your wall.

Your Infected HQ

When you attack zombies that are too much for you, some of your squad comes back infected. This is reflected in a purple icon on your HQ (world map view). A new icon on the left of your screen also tells you your infection level. You can share your HQ coordinates in the chat to have your alliance fam help you clear the infection. You help clear the infection from someone’s HQ by scouting it. `

Alternatively, before you get all cleaned up and disinfected by our loving fam, you should take a squad with infected troops out into the wild and attack a HQ that doesn’t belong to any alliance. I know. That’s mean. It’s a war game, though. You can either feel good about yourself or you can complete tasks for rewards like mutant crystals and immunity protein shakes. You can’t do both.

VS and Other Stuff

Don’t forget about VS. Big ticket items today:

  • Radar Tasks
  • Drone Data and Parts Spend
  • Stamina Spend
  • Gathering resources from iron mines, gold mines, and wheat fields
    • You don’t get VS points until you leave the mines/fields
    • Set an alarm to remind you to bring your squads home before reset at 10 p.m.
    • ABG: Always Be Gathering
  • Hero XP Spend
    • Normally I say wait until Thursday to use hero XP in VS. You get almost 3x the VS points on Thursday as You do on Monday. However, I think a win today would be awesome. So spend them if you want!





Friday Night Lights

Famiglia,

It’s the first round of the biggest night in Last War:Survival each week for our new LFG alliance. I want to thank everyone for all the hard work, dedication and patience. I don’t know that PAL ever had close to 90% of our members at 1 million VS points. You all did that today. And many of you got out in the mud and earned you 10,000 honor points. Don’t forget to spend them only on Legendary Gear Blueprints in the honor shop!

Unfortunately, I won’t be around to celebrate and play with you all tonight. I’ve spent so much of the past week with my face buried in my phone gaming and coordinating or on my laptop writing this blog that my wife is about to murder me.

So tonight I’m putting the game down for a while and taking her out for a much deserved night on the town.

I want to take this opportunity to tell you that I’m never going to be mad at you for prioritizing real life needs over this game. This should be an escape from, not the creator of, stress in your life. Tonight, I’ll lead by example.

I leave you in very capable hands. Your R4s have been and continue to work tirelessly to make sure you all can continue to enjoy the game at a high level. Tonight they will lead your through Desert Storm and prepare you for Enemy Buster. Do me a favor and take care of the following big ticket items:

Ok, that’s all. I’ve got to get ready for date night. Have fun tonight, fam.

Warm anti-hero regards,

Capital War/Capitol Conquest a.k.a “Fun in the Mud”

Famiglia,

This is the first post today. It’s all about Capital War.

Last War: Survival is clearly designed as a war game. You may have noticed that the center of the map is gray/brown with a big capital building in the middle. Each Friday from 10:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m., the alliances in the server can battle for control of the capital. The winning alliance gets to be the President and control lots of stuff for the server.

Because this game also has server vs server mechanics, the top alliances in our server (421) have an agreement whereby they peacefully rotate control of the capital and share the rewards and responsibilites that go along with it.

For the rest of us, though, this is still an opportunity to earn Honor Points, which are arguably the most important currency in the game for reaching the highest power levels for your heroes.

Earning Honor Points in Capital War:

  • During the Capitol Conquest, only commanders battling in Contaminated Lands (the “mud”) will earn captial war event points.

  • In the Capitol Conquest, you score capital war event points by inflicting serious injuries and casualities on enemy (other 421 alliance) Units. The higher the troop level, the more event points you earn.

  • You’ll also earn event points when your own units die. Higher level fallen units give more points.

  • Once you reach a certain event point threshold, you’ll receive corresponding Honor Rewards, including honor points.

Captial War Mechanics

The actual fighting you need to do takes place ONLY IN THE CONTAMINATED ZONE. That’s the brown/gray mud in the center of the map.

There are two main ways to participate.

  • You find a resource tile in the in mud that has a red pick axe icon, signifying that another alliance member is in that tile. Then you attack that tile. If you lose, it means all your troops are injured or dead. That sucks, but you still are earning the chance to get honor points. And while losing troops sucks, you get VS points on Day 5 for training troops, so there’s a silver lining there, too.

  • You can also occupy an empty tile and either wait to be attacked or share your tile’s coordintes to World Chat so people know you want them to attack you.

The agreed upon norm in our server says any occupied tile in the mud during Capital War is fair game for attack. Don’t complain if you were just harmlessly gathering gold. ore, or food and you get murdered. It’s not safe out there. This is your fault.

That being said, some people ignore this norm and think you should only get attacked if you advertise your tile in WC. This is stupid for many many reasons, but I can’t control other folks. Most alliance leaders share my view. But you may get angry DMs from people if you attack their tile without finding it in world chat.

So best practice is to either find a tile in World Chat and attack it, or post a squad to your own tile and advertise it yourself.

Why all the fuss?

As I’ve said before: honor points are the most important late-game currency as of the time of writing this blog. And they are hard to get. You cannot upgrade your heroes’ gear beyond level 40 without them.

This is where patience comes into play. The honor point store has a LOT of tempting items for sale. Before I knew any better, I used to buy UR shards and UR decoration chests. But I wish had instead been hoarding all the Legenday Gear Blueprints I could from the beginning. My best advice is to only spend honor points on gear blueprints. You’ll be glad you did that later in the game.

Advanced Capital War Strategy

If you have a very powerful squad (~17M plus), you can basically squat on a tile, broadcast it to World Chat and just sit there while you murder all the troops that attack you.

Otherwise, Capital War takes a bit of time to get to 100,000 event points, which is when you max out the 10,000 honor points available in this event.

Finishing Faster

The mud makes everything take fover. Your squads move at a fraction of the time. Resource tile speed boosts don’t matter.

What’s more you can’t even [tile surf]. And even if you win and take over another tile, you can’t attack a second resource tile from the one you’re currently on. You have to go back to your HQ and start the journey over.

Workarounds:

Sometimes there aren’t any squads to attack at nearby tiles. Because travelin in the mud takes FOREVER, you should try to tile sure and slignshot around the mud using the reosource tiles surrounding the capital (but not in the contaminated ground). Get as close to the resource tile you want to attack and then target that one in the mud.

If you have a powerful squad and you want others to attack you, you are best served occupying a resource tile in the mud near a different alliance. You may think that it’s best to choose a tile that is close to our hive so your squad gets there faster. But LFG famiglia can’t attack your tile for honor points. So you’ve essentially made it far less appealing for the people you need to attack you to do so. By occupying a tile next to other alliances you give them more incentive to attack you. Don’t do this with a weak squad, though. Once you are defeated you are redirected strictly through the mud back to your HQ. It takes forever and you don’t want to have to do that repeatedly.

Finishing More Efficiently

While it’s true that you get event points when you lose troops, the better way to get them is by killing other people’s troops. If you have a super powerful squad, you don’t have to worry too much about this.

If your squads aren’t particularly powerful, though, you need to scout the resource tiles before you attack. If you are selective in your attacks and concentrate on squads of comparable/lower power, you have a better chance of earning your event points from troop kills rather than troop deaths.

Micro-healing

You’re probably going to lose a lot of troops on your way to 10,000 honor points (and the other rewards). If you heal them all in one go it may take you a day or more. That’s not what you want.

The good news is that Friday is a popular day for playing this game. Our alliance (LFG and U5A) has good boosts for using the help button. Every time you ask for help with healing and an alliance member pushes the help button it takes ~10 minutes off the heal time. Depending on your Alliance Center level and survivors stationed there, you can get a lot of time taken off the healing.

It’s best to try to heal in 30-75 minute batches (depending on your buffs) and ask for help each time. You can get 24 hours of dealing done in about half an hour depending on how long you stay online and how many people are active when you are.

You can also use healing speedups in a pinch, but micro-healing is best as Day 6 is the day for getting VS points for using healing speed ups.

Have fun in the mud!

The Road Ahead

Famiglia,

Congratulations and thank you for a successful merger. We’ve got PAO vets, LFG newcomers, and U5A transplants all under one roof. Some people are here for the long haul, others may find this isn’t for them. That’s ok. I’ll keep saying it: This is a game. Don’t do things that aren’t enjoyable.

Today I’m going to be releasing some more content on the strategy guide. I know today is Day 4 of VS, which is Hero upgrade day and is everyone’s favorite. The VS mechanics for Day 4 are very simple, though. So I’m going to focus on Day 6: Enemy Buster intead. I’ll explain more in the Strategy Guide throughout the day. But I want everyone to be thinking about this stuff starting now.

Shielding Up

This week we haven’t been laser-focused on winning VS, but we need to be laser-focused on preparing and learning to win VS.

Day 6 (Enemy Buster- Friday - Saturday evening) is worth 4 points in the weekly VS battle. The fastest way to earn points on Day 6 is by killing troops for the other alliance. The fastest way to help the other alliance win is to lose your troops to them. There are two main ways to prevent this:

  • Buy a 24 hour shield
    • You can get these in the alliance store.
    • They cost a lot of alliance points.
    • Prioritize buying these shields above everything else you buy in the alliance store
    • Don’t deploy your 24-hour shield until 2-3 minutes have passed after reset.
      • There is a 5-minute cool down on enemey buster when you cannot attack or be attacked and earn/lose points.
      • You can’t use the free teleported either.
      • If you use your 24-hour shiled during the 5 minute cool down window, it wil stay up through the entire Enemy Buster event (unless you scout or attack a base while it’s active)
  • Remove your squads from your HQ wall
    • We’ve been putting our squads on the wall of our HQs a lot recently for Zombie Siege. Make sure you remove them ahead of tomorrow night.
    • This shouldn’t be a big deal because your shield makes this a non-issue.
    • But just in case… don’t give away kills to the enemy. Take your guys (and gals) off the walls.
    • If you don’t know how to do this, ask in the chat.

Shield discipline on Friday night will be the main focus of my administration. Please do everything you can to protect your base, and by extension la famiglia.

Hero Advancement

If you haven’t used all of your Hero XP and recruitment tickets yet, try to save some for the Hero Advancement period of Arms Race (2:00 - 6:00 EDT). Double dipping is frowned upon in the salsa bowl, but we love it in Alliance Duel.

Zombie Invasion (a.k.a. “The Most Wonderful Time of the Last War Year”)

The Zombie Invasion event is live. It’s the best rotating event in the game. I’ll post some tips on it later, but there’s already a YouTube video I made on “tile surfing” that you should check out.

House keeping

Please (PLEASE) do these things today (might as well do them now):

Have fun out there,








Nothing about this doesn’t suck

All,

I love this game. I play it all the time. Over the past four days I’ve spent more hours than I can count trying to keep our alliance from falling apart. Nevertheless, some things are hard to do. I cannot make everyone happy. I’ve got the DMs to prove it.

The merge with U5A was a coordinated effort in discussion with multiple folks from PAO as well as other server presidents. We were at risk of losing everything we’d worked for and the merger was the best move ahead. I believed it then. I still believe it.

When we agreed to have U5A join us, there were 17 or so empty slots. U5A needed to bring over 30 or so people. At that time, PAO members were still leaving, and we have 5-10 accounts spread all across the map who hadn’t moved to the alliance in weeks. It appeared that there would be few, if any, instances of people who would need to transition to U5A, which was to become our growth and learning focused alliance.

I won’t take credit for this, but over the past four days multiple folks who appeared to be inactive began showing up in ways they hadn’t in months. It has been amazing.

It also makes the merger more difficult.

But it doesn’t make it wrong.

We want to build an alliance that is a family but is also competetive. What separates us from other alliances, I believe, is that we are more interested in earning wins through supporting and helping one another rather than spending. You’re not going to be kicked out because you can’t or don’t want to spend money.

I’m sure much of this reads as hypocritical, especially if you end up getting asked to move to U5A. But let me be clear, there is no path of “excommunication” here. If we ask you to go to U5A, you will still be a part of this family. You just wont be in the in-game LFG alliance.

You will still, however, have full access to our discord chats, this blog, more resources that are coming in the future, the support of this community, the friendship and camaraderie we have, and you will also have as much intervention as we can possibly provide if you get invaded by a strong alliance.

You will also likely have opportunities to serve in a leadership capacity in U5A. It would be amazing if that alliance became as strong as this one. This game is actually really well designed to leverage the power of alliances.

Please know that this absolutely sucks all the way around. I chose not to leave for multiple other alliances when asked this past weekend because I just didn’t want to leave so many of you behind.

My DMs are open. Please contact me if you want to complain or volunteer. There’s no reason for anyone to leave yet. But if we have to ask people to move to U5A, I will start with those who do volunteer.

While I would love for everyone who leaves to move to U5A, I understand that you may be pissed at me and not want anything to do with us. I don’t blame you. You have our blessing, whether you care or not, to try and join any other alliance that suits you.

With apologies and stress,

An Open Letter to the Family

Mia Famiglia,

I address you this way on purpose. La Famiglia means family. I spend probably 3-4 hours a day playing this game with you all. I’ve come to know a lot about you and have been blown away at how cool this group of humans is. If I’m going to spend this much time with you all, I want to know that we are in a respectful and fun environment.

At the same time, this is a game about war. There are zombies to be killed, doom walkers to be toppled, trucks to be plundered, and cities to be sacked Conquest is literally the prime game mechanic. We need to be committed to the cause and to each other. We need that ride or die mentality. When Makosa rallies a level 140 Doomie, I want you to think, “Lets freaking go!” When it’s Friday night and Desert storm kicks off, I want you to think, “Lets FREAKING go!” And when server reset flips and it’s time for Enemy Buster and that level 30 Disco Kitty lands in our base, I want you to be chill because you are in the safety of your shield. But in your heart, through your bones, deep down to your soul I want you to feel like shouting “LET’S FREAKING GOOOOOOOOO!”

It’s in this spirit that I’m announcing that we are retiring PAO Mavericks. This is a new alliance now. We are a family ready to get after it. We may not outspend anyone, but we will grind these upgrades and get each other’s backs every day. Why? Because we are family.

We are lfG: La FamiGlia

Warm anti-hero regards,

LFG