Introduction

West Game is a war game, but it is much more than just building some troops and selecting an opponent to fight with. Making your troops strong is a very important part and a lot of time in the game will be spent on this, for example via research projects, forging the right equipment for your sheriff, and (re)setting your sheriff's skill points. Players work with each other in alliances, offering help, exchanging resources, tips, and fighting together. This game is at its core quite similar to games like Game of War and Mobile Strike.

Tutorial

A new game starts with a tutorial. For first game players it is good to walk through this slowly as the game can get complicated because of its many different features. The tutorial does a good job of explaining the absolute basics.

Alliance

An important step is to find a suitable Alliance. Via the Alliance menu you can apply to join an alliance or join one of the alliances that are currently open. The open alliances might not be the best and it might be good to shop around a bit. You can just look on the State Map and fight players you might like to join, but it might be better to look at the leaderboard (via the More - Rank menu) to get an idea what the large alliances are. Most alliances have stated their rules and entry requirements on their alliance wall, which you can access by selecting a base and clicking on the blue shield at the right top, and then on the Alliance button. Find one that you feel comfortable with. If you are in the game for the long run it is important you find some likeminded people in your alliance. Give an alliance a serious chance, but if you don't like it, do switch to another one.

If you have a hard time getting accepted to an alliance, you can find the open alliance (i.e. alliances that do not require accepting) by clicking on the More button under the alliance list, and selecting 'No Verifying'. If you select an alliance from this shortlist and click Request to Join, you will automatically be accepted.

Teleports

When you start the game you get two advanced teleports. You can use one to relocate your town to the region of your alliance. It is normally appreciated or even required if you want to stay in an alliance.

In addition you also get one Supreme Teleport that allows you to teleport to another State, but can only be used before your Town Center reaches lvl 5. This is useful if for some reason you absolutely do not like the State you start in, or for example if you have friends playing in another state.

You also get a random teleport. Using a random teleport relocates you to a random location within your current state. This can be useful if you are regularly attacked and don't know yet where you want to permanently relocate to.

Academy

One of the buildings in your town is your academy. Basically you should try to make sure you always have some research project active and you should make your research speed as fast as possible. Unless you are planning to go to war right away, it might be good to focus on the first research tree first, Economics. Here are a number of projects that allow you to increase the production of resources and speed up gathering resources via increasing your gathering rate, troop load and deployment speed of your troops. Researching these will help you not getting into resource problems early on in the game.

Barrack

The Barracks are the buildings you can use for training troops. It is best to always train some troops here. If you are not planning to go to war soon just training tier 1 troops (Pistoleer, Skirmisher, Horseman, Mortar) is fine. They are trained fast, cost little resources and are good for gathering resources. They are also fast and cheap to heal.

Upgrading Buildings

The game suggests some order of building and upgrading buildings (tips in the lower middle of the screen), you don't need to pay attention to that. For some of the buildings (the resource production buildings at the other side of the rails and the barracks, hospitals and cabins) you can build multiple. There will be another article on considerations on how many to build of which. Unless you are an experienced player and follow a specific strategy of your own, for beginning players it is best not to focus on getting your town center to an as high as possible level as soon as possible, but focus on upgrading the other buildings, including the ones you have many off, and research projects as well. It is also recommended to always have an active building upgrade, unless you have everything upgraded to a certain level and consciously don't want to increase the town center further yet.

Traps

In the Defence Factory you can build Traps, which will give defense against attacks. On the long run it might not be worthwhile to put a lot of effort on wall traps, because if you have comparatively very large amounts of troops the traps will add little value. However in early stages it might make quite a difference. The idea is if you have 20000 traps and 10000 troops when your base is attacked one third of the incoming troops will fight with your troops, two third with your traps (based on the ratio of traps and troops you have). Even if you only build tier 1 traps, your troops have a much better chance of surviving. Traps are costly to build when it comes to resources and time, and if you are hit by a much stronger player or even rallied, traps are easily completely destroyed, so don't feel like you have to place the wall full with the highest available tier traps.

Helping Alliance Members with Research and Construction

Often during the game at the right bottom (to the right of the quest tip) of your town view you will see a Help icon. Selecting this allows you to click Help All which reduces time of active research projects and constructions of your alliance members. The amount of Helps you can receive depends on your town center level. Giving and receiving fast Helps will be an important part in growing fast as a player and as an alliance, especially early on when timers are not that long yet. By providing helps you can get a maximum of 2500 loyalty points every 12 hours. These loyalty points can be used to purchase items in the alliance Loyalty Store.

Using Gold and Speed Ups

During the game there are various ways to get gold and speed ups. Once your times start to be more than just a few minutes you might get tempted to use these to speed up research, construction and troop training. Our general advice is don't just use these, only use them if you can get something back by winning prizes in the active Events. Saving up some gold and speed ups is important so that it will be easier to win the prizes of those Events.

Forces

Although the Force of a player has no direct meaning for your strength in combat, it is often used by players as a quick measurement of strength anyway. Typically alliances will set certain Force requirements for their players which increases over time. As such it is important you get your Forces up as well. There are five basic categories of Force: research, building, troop, traps and sheriff. It is an extra reason to always have active research projects, building upgrades and troop training. Your Sheriff force increases by leveling up your Sheriff, and one of the easy ways to receive the necessary experience points for that in the beginning is completing quests. We will write a separate article about beginners's force up tips.

Sheriff Skill Points

After each level up of your Sheriff you can assign skill points in two categories (development and outlaw). In the development skill point tree there are two tracks. The upper track is focused on combat, improving e.g. the strength of your troops and training speed, the lower track gives economic boosts, improving e.g. construction and research speed and increasing the resource generation. Unless you plan to go to war right away, it is best first to focus on the lower track. Spend your development skill points to max out Research and Construction I and II, only spend minimal points in the tree to unlock these. Experienced players typically reset the points (there are items for this available in the general store and alliance loyalty store (Sheriff Skill Reset for the Development tree and Outlaw Skill Reset for the Outlaw Tree)) to focus on combat before they go to battle. The Sheriff Outlaw skill points have less choices. As a beginner I suggest to focus more on getting as many hits as possible to maximize the goodies you get and the points you might score for Outlaw related Events, rather than doing as much damage as possible. This means maxing out the Stamina Cost Reduction, Stamina Recovery and Stamina Limit.

Outlaws

About three times a day Outlaws appear at random places on the map (and once killed new ones will appear as well). You recognize the Outlaws by the red health bar under them. To the left of the bar is a number that indicates the level. To be able to hit an Outlaw you need to have research the corresponding project in the Sheriff research tree. It is worthwhile to at least research the project to unlock hitting level 1 outlaws. Each time your stamina bar is close to max, consider sending your sheriff out to hit a nearby outlaw. If possible work together with alliance members so that you don't only get the goodies from the hits, but also get to kill the outlaw. If you have time and no other alliances are attacking the same Outlaw you can best do single hits so that for each subsequent hit you do more damage. If you don't have much time you can also do a Max Attack. If you kill an Outlaw, everyone in your alliance gets a gift.

Alliance Gifts

At the right bottom of the Alliance menu there is a gift chest icon. If this has a red number at the right top, there are gifts that you can collect, for example from outlaws that are killed by your alliance, if an alliance members purchases a pack, free daily chests and from events. Always open gift chests when there are any, and remember they expire within 24 hours.

Materials and Equipment

Materials are used for forging equipment for your sheriff. Equipment can give your sheriff all kind of different boosts and further on in the game you will likely have different sets of gear for different activities and your sheriff will wear gear based on what you are doing, e.g. research, construction, troop training, attacking. As a beginner it might be best to not manufacture anything at the start as it is easy to make mistakes and waste your valuable materials on useless gear. Also the best gear tends to only be available for the higher Sheriff Levels. When manufacturing equipment you should be aware of the 5 quality levels of materials and gear. If you have all materials of the same quality level, e.g. 4, the gear will also have quality level 4 and the corresponding boosts. If you use a mix of materials with different quality levels the outcome is not guaranteed and it might prove costly if you gamble wrong. Our advice is to wait and combine until you have all materials of the same quality level. It is a choice what level to go for. In the Blacksmith you can Combine materials to a higher quality level and Manufacture gear. You can get materials in different ways, for example when hitting an outlaw and from gitfs. There are also chests with materials that you can purchase in the store.

Events

You can win prizes by completing various stages of Events. You can find these events via the icon in your town view at the lower left side. There is almost always a Solo and Inferno Solo Event acitve. Each of those have 3 point targets with associated prizes and an explanation how to score points, typically one or more of the following: research force, building force, using stamina amd training troops. These Events are an easy way to get gold, speed ups and all kind of goodies. Make sure you pay attention to the active Events and consider using speed ups or gold to complete research projects, buildings and troop trainings, especially if you can win more than you spend.

Daily, Alliance, VIP Quests

Each 6 hours you get a number of Daily, Alliance (if you are part of an Alliance) and VIP Quests. The number depends on your VIP level. While online you should start and collect as many as possible.

Check List of What to Do When You Log In

Most of the things in this section we already mentioned, but it might be good to have a reminder of what you should look at as a minimum when you log into the game:

• Click on Help to Help all alliance members with research and construction
• Collect the gift from your old gang at the left corner of your town view if the timer has run out
• Collect and Start Daily, Alliance and VIP Quests
• Hit an outlaw if you have enough stamina
• Look at the Events, see whether you can win gold and speed ups by completing your current research, building and/or troop training
• Start a research if none is active
• Start a building upgrade if none is active
• Start a troop training if none is active
• Send out your troops to collect resources
• Open all gifts
• Read your mails and PMs

If you have more time consider:

• Opening any unopened chests in the Items – Chests section
• Chat with your alliance member, ask questions, share tips, coordinate attacks

Conclusion

The game is far from original, but my first impressions indicates it is done well, and the "Old West" setting is, as far as I know, at least an original angle to a familiar concept.