{AUTHOR'S EDIT - 8/27/09 - Zynga made some major changes to the combat algorithm within the last day or two. The discussion below is therefore now obsolete and should only be followed for historic interest. For discussion of the new combat algorithm, see the comments toward the end of this post.
{AUTHOR's EDIT - 08/01/09 - please note that this article was written before several major new features of Mafia Wars were implemented. Item gifting and MW Cuba did not exist at the time I wrote this. The basic principles discussed below are still valid and I still follow them (the combat algorithm has not been changed to my knowledge, and my DEF stat is now way over 1000), but gifting and Cuban loot have changed my approach a bit.}
It was several weeks ago that I discovered the conversations between Satanika and The Wanderer in which they discussed and figured out the combat system for Mafia Wars, and the earlier threads on the FB discussion page in which some very clever testing was done, validating and invalidating assumptions about how the combat system works. I've been experimenting with their results since then, and have mostly confirmed them. I changed my character build strategy and got some dramatically positive results in a very short time. I've also built a spreadsheet in which I've been tracking combat results from all my fights and have been running numbers on them. I won't bore you with all the details, but I've noticed a few interesting implications that I thought I'd pass on.
First of all, I'm going to be intentionally vague about the combat algorithm here. I'm breaking Omerta even discussing this here, and I don't want Zynga to get all aggro about "reverse engineering" or anything like that and kneecap my MW persona. I don't know if the formulas I've picked up are really correct, thought they sure seem to give a close approximation of how the system really works. If somebody else wants to post the equations, they're welcome to, but it won't be me. Let it suffice to say that: A) mafia size and combat skill stats are both very important and appear to be force mulipliers, and B) equipment (weapons, armor, vehicles) stats seem to be additive. "Win/Loss" in a fight quite clearly seems to be calculated entirely separately from damage taken (you'll often seen combat results in which you win the fight but take more damage than you inflict...or the opposite. There's also the infamous "critical hit", which seems to be an independent random probability of 20% that the defender automatically wins when the attacker is at a much higher level or the defender is below 20 health and "ghosted" (it also looks to me like the probability drops the more evenly matched the combatants are, but I don't have enough data to confirm).
So what conclusions have I drawn?
Skill Points and Combat Stats:
By far and away the most effective thing a player can do to increase combat effectiveness is to add skill points to both their Attack (ATT) and Defense (DEF) character stats. Hands down. Want to be strong in fights? Pump your combat stats with as many skill points as you can spare. If your mafia has reached the maximum size (for fighting) of 501, then each additional point added to these stats has the same net effect as adding 12 AR-15s to your arsenal. In fact, combat stats are so powerful as a force multiplier, that a player with 501 mafia, 500 ATT, 500 DEF, 501 Baseball Bats, 501 Shamrock Medallions, and 501 Speed Boats could easily defeat a player with 501 mafia, 1 ATT, 1 DEF, 501 AR-15s, 501 Pints o'Green Beer, and 501 Armored Limousines. No kidding. Speed Boats.
In fact, that first player could probably defeat me in a fight...Baseball Bats, Speed Boats and all. Oh, the humiliation.
Fortunately for my ego, the chance of somebody getting enough skill points to boost their stats that high without piling on a lot of more fancy-looking loot is essentially nil. So, I won't have to stay up nights worrying about the Speed Boat Bandit.
Here's another interesting observation about combat stats: as far as fighting goes, it doesn't matter whether you put your skill points in ATT or DEF. My DEF stat is five times higher than my ATT stat. In fact, if I told you what my ATT stat was, you'd probably be surprised at how low it is. And I only rarely lose fights in which I am the aggressor.
Why'd I pump the DEF stat, then? Well, part of it was a holdover from the days before I became enlightened and opened my mind to the Combat Algorithm. I was getting beat up a lot. So, I naturally surmised that boosting my DEF stat might help me with that. In the meantime, I learned that it doesn't really matter which stat gets the points as far as fighting effectiveness is concerned. So why keep pumping the DEF?
Because from observation of results, I've noticed two things about having a high DEF: 1) I seem to get loot drops from fighting more often, and 2) DEF appears to count more than ATT in robbing (regardless of whether you're the robber or the robbee). This is still conjecture, but as a working hypothesis it's proven remarkably useful.
Equipment
Here's where I've seen some very interesting and non-intuitive results. I've already alluded to this above with the Speed Boat example. How can a player fighting with Speed Boats (ATT 0, DEF 0) actually have any hope of winning? After running the numbers, I see that where mafia size and combat stats account for 86% or so of combat effectiveness, all of our precious loot weighs in at the paltry 14% remainder. This is a rather fascinating bit of misdirection on Zynga's part, since every shiny new Godfather Crate Item gets players scrambling to spend their precious GF points and own the new "shiny" (Ninjacycle, anyone?). And yet, per GF point, I would actually get (on average) nearly 100 times the combat boost from spending the same number of GF points it costs to get the special loot item on getting skill points from the Godfather and putting them in my combat stats instead.
Another oddity about the additive nature of equipment in combat: although the game system uses item ATT strength to select items for the attacker in a fight, and item DEF strength for the defender, when actual combat strength in the fight is calculated, it uses both. As a result, the game software is not necessarily always picking the strongest items for you to use in the fight. As an example, when attacking the game will choose all your Napalms (25 ATT / 9 DEF) for you to take into the fight before any Bonus Weapons (20 ATT / 20 DEF). Yet, the combat algrorithm sums the ATT and DEF values of all items as part of calculating your combat effectiveness. So, the Bonus Weapon (total strength of 40) is 6 points stronger in a fight than the Napalm (total strength of 34), regardless of whether you're using it to attack or defend.
That can be a sobering thought for those who loaded up on Napalms back when they were supposed to be the "strongest" available attack weapons. If my inventory has 501 Napalms and 501 Bonus Weapons, I'll never be able to take any of those Bonus Weapons into a fight as an attacker, leaving me 3006 combat points weaker than if I had no Napalms at all.
Fortunately, I'll still be using all those Bonus Weapons when I get attacked, so there is a bright side.
Also remember, because it's additive and not multiplied, equipment only counts for about 14% of your total combat power. The small edge you might have lost by bringing all those Napalms into the fight instead of Bonus Weapons is more than offset by putting a few more skill points in your ATT or DEF stats.
In fact, if we take the highest-value normally-purchaseable equipment items in each category (Bonus Weapon, Body Armor, and Town Car), you would only need to add 77 additional points to your ATT and/or DEF to get the same benefit as maxing out every single equipment item in all three categories to the highest-valued Godfather Loot "shiny"s (say, 501 Gold Crowbars, 501 Whatever-the-50-point-samurai-armor-is, and 501 Ninjacycles).
Imagine how many Godfather points you'd have to spend in order to do that with Godfather Loot. The mind boggles. 77 skill points costs only 280 GF points...cheap in comparison. This is why experienced players recommend that you don't waste your GF points on buying special loot. The people you run up against in fights may have Ninjacycles, but that's not going to do them much good when you turn them into roadkill with your crushing ATT stat.
The best approach with equipment is to stock up on items that are easily available and have above-average total strength values (using the highest-value purchaseable items as the baseline for "average"). So, any weapon with a total ATT+DEF over 40 is good (there are several 50-point GF Loot items out there, but Poison Gas Grenades, at 48, were easier to come by...AR-15s, in comparison have a total strength of 42). Any armor with a total over 11 (this is not hard...the Pint o'Green Beer is currently the best normally-obtainable armor item with a total strength of 44, though the Half-Dollar Body Armor (43) ain't bad either). Any vehicle with a total over 22 (current reigning champion is the Armored Limousine, a job loot drop item, weighing in at a massive and unchallenged 52 total combat strength...the highest of any item I've run across).
Skip the weaker items (for instance, I own no Chrome Skylines at all), and stock up on the stronger ones (I've got 180 Pints o' Green Beer...party!). Building your equipment list with items high in total strength (ATT plus DEF) gives the same effect as piling more skill points into your stats, just not as much. Also, don't be fooled into thinking that some weapon with a super-high ATT value is great unless it's got enough DEF value to make its total strength high enough to be worth it. Like I said, Napalms are actually a liability if you're building for fight strength. The Gold Desert Eagle, with the same ATT (25), but higher DEF (15) is better, but it's still exactly equal to your boring-old Bonus Weapon (20/20) in a fight.
Knowing that now, I wish I'd saved the purchase levels for all those Gold Desert Eagles I bought to buy more Green Beer when it came along. I'll probably be thinking the same thing about the Green Beer when they debut a new Special Loot armor with a total strength of 50 (doh!) weeks or months from now.
Oh well. Live and learn.{
{AUTHOR's EDIT - 08/01/09 - please note that this article was written before several major new features of Mafia Wars were implemented. Item gifting and MW Cuba did not exist at the time I wrote this. The basic principles discussed below are still valid and I still follow them (the combat algorithm has not been changed to my knowledge, and my DEF stat is now way over 1000), but gifting and Cuban loot have changed my approach a bit.}
It was several weeks ago that I discovered the conversations between Satanika and The Wanderer in which they discussed and figured out the combat system for Mafia Wars, and the earlier threads on the FB discussion page in which some very clever testing was done, validating and invalidating assumptions about how the combat system works. I've been experimenting with their results since then, and have mostly confirmed them. I changed my character build strategy and got some dramatically positive results in a very short time. I've also built a spreadsheet in which I've been tracking combat results from all my fights and have been running numbers on them. I won't bore you with all the details, but I've noticed a few interesting implications that I thought I'd pass on.
First of all, I'm going to be intentionally vague about the combat algorithm here. I'm breaking Omerta even discussing this here, and I don't want Zynga to get all aggro about "reverse engineering" or anything like that and kneecap my MW persona. I don't know if the formulas I've picked up are really correct, thought they sure seem to give a close approximation of how the system really works. If somebody else wants to post the equations, they're welcome to, but it won't be me. Let it suffice to say that: A) mafia size and combat skill stats are both very important and appear to be force mulipliers, and B) equipment (weapons, armor, vehicles) stats seem to be additive. "Win/Loss" in a fight quite clearly seems to be calculated entirely separately from damage taken (you'll often seen combat results in which you win the fight but take more damage than you inflict...or the opposite. There's also the infamous "critical hit", which seems to be an independent random probability of 20% that the defender automatically wins when the attacker is at a much higher level or the defender is below 20 health and "ghosted" (it also looks to me like the probability drops the more evenly matched the combatants are, but I don't have enough data to confirm).
So what conclusions have I drawn?
Skill Points and Combat Stats:
By far and away the most effective thing a player can do to increase combat effectiveness is to add skill points to both their Attack (ATT) and Defense (DEF) character stats. Hands down. Want to be strong in fights? Pump your combat stats with as many skill points as you can spare. If your mafia has reached the maximum size (for fighting) of 501, then each additional point added to these stats has the same net effect as adding 12 AR-15s to your arsenal. In fact, combat stats are so powerful as a force multiplier, that a player with 501 mafia, 500 ATT, 500 DEF, 501 Baseball Bats, 501 Shamrock Medallions, and 501 Speed Boats could easily defeat a player with 501 mafia, 1 ATT, 1 DEF, 501 AR-15s, 501 Pints o'Green Beer, and 501 Armored Limousines. No kidding. Speed Boats.
In fact, that first player could probably defeat me in a fight...Baseball Bats, Speed Boats and all. Oh, the humiliation.
Fortunately for my ego, the chance of somebody getting enough skill points to boost their stats that high without piling on a lot of more fancy-looking loot is essentially nil. So, I won't have to stay up nights worrying about the Speed Boat Bandit.
Here's another interesting observation about combat stats: as far as fighting goes, it doesn't matter whether you put your skill points in ATT or DEF. My DEF stat is five times higher than my ATT stat. In fact, if I told you what my ATT stat was, you'd probably be surprised at how low it is. And I only rarely lose fights in which I am the aggressor.
Why'd I pump the DEF stat, then? Well, part of it was a holdover from the days before I became enlightened and opened my mind to the Combat Algorithm. I was getting beat up a lot. So, I naturally surmised that boosting my DEF stat might help me with that. In the meantime, I learned that it doesn't really matter which stat gets the points as far as fighting effectiveness is concerned. So why keep pumping the DEF?
Because from observation of results, I've noticed two things about having a high DEF: 1) I seem to get loot drops from fighting more often, and 2) DEF appears to count more than ATT in robbing (regardless of whether you're the robber or the robbee). This is still conjecture, but as a working hypothesis it's proven remarkably useful.
Equipment
Here's where I've seen some very interesting and non-intuitive results. I've already alluded to this above with the Speed Boat example. How can a player fighting with Speed Boats (ATT 0, DEF 0) actually have any hope of winning? After running the numbers, I see that where mafia size and combat stats account for 86% or so of combat effectiveness, all of our precious loot weighs in at the paltry 14% remainder. This is a rather fascinating bit of misdirection on Zynga's part, since every shiny new Godfather Crate Item gets players scrambling to spend their precious GF points and own the new "shiny" (Ninjacycle, anyone?). And yet, per GF point, I would actually get (on average) nearly 100 times the combat boost from spending the same number of GF points it costs to get the special loot item on getting skill points from the Godfather and putting them in my combat stats instead.
Another oddity about the additive nature of equipment in combat: although the game system uses item ATT strength to select items for the attacker in a fight, and item DEF strength for the defender, when actual combat strength in the fight is calculated, it uses both. As a result, the game software is not necessarily always picking the strongest items for you to use in the fight. As an example, when attacking the game will choose all your Napalms (25 ATT / 9 DEF) for you to take into the fight before any Bonus Weapons (20 ATT / 20 DEF). Yet, the combat algrorithm sums the ATT and DEF values of all items as part of calculating your combat effectiveness. So, the Bonus Weapon (total strength of 40) is 6 points stronger in a fight than the Napalm (total strength of 34), regardless of whether you're using it to attack or defend.
That can be a sobering thought for those who loaded up on Napalms back when they were supposed to be the "strongest" available attack weapons. If my inventory has 501 Napalms and 501 Bonus Weapons, I'll never be able to take any of those Bonus Weapons into a fight as an attacker, leaving me 3006 combat points weaker than if I had no Napalms at all.
Fortunately, I'll still be using all those Bonus Weapons when I get attacked, so there is a bright side.
Also remember, because it's additive and not multiplied, equipment only counts for about 14% of your total combat power. The small edge you might have lost by bringing all those Napalms into the fight instead of Bonus Weapons is more than offset by putting a few more skill points in your ATT or DEF stats.
In fact, if we take the highest-value normally-purchaseable equipment items in each category (Bonus Weapon, Body Armor, and Town Car), you would only need to add 77 additional points to your ATT and/or DEF to get the same benefit as maxing out every single equipment item in all three categories to the highest-valued Godfather Loot "shiny"s (say, 501 Gold Crowbars, 501 Whatever-the-50-point-samurai-armor-is, and 501 Ninjacycles).
Imagine how many Godfather points you'd have to spend in order to do that with Godfather Loot. The mind boggles. 77 skill points costs only 280 GF points...cheap in comparison. This is why experienced players recommend that you don't waste your GF points on buying special loot. The people you run up against in fights may have Ninjacycles, but that's not going to do them much good when you turn them into roadkill with your crushing ATT stat.
The best approach with equipment is to stock up on items that are easily available and have above-average total strength values (using the highest-value purchaseable items as the baseline for "average"). So, any weapon with a total ATT+DEF over 40 is good (there are several 50-point GF Loot items out there, but Poison Gas Grenades, at 48, were easier to come by...AR-15s, in comparison have a total strength of 42). Any armor with a total over 11 (this is not hard...the Pint o'Green Beer is currently the best normally-obtainable armor item with a total strength of 44, though the Half-Dollar Body Armor (43) ain't bad either). Any vehicle with a total over 22 (current reigning champion is the Armored Limousine, a job loot drop item, weighing in at a massive and unchallenged 52 total combat strength...the highest of any item I've run across).
Skip the weaker items (for instance, I own no Chrome Skylines at all), and stock up on the stronger ones (I've got 180 Pints o' Green Beer...party!). Building your equipment list with items high in total strength (ATT plus DEF) gives the same effect as piling more skill points into your stats, just not as much. Also, don't be fooled into thinking that some weapon with a super-high ATT value is great unless it's got enough DEF value to make its total strength high enough to be worth it. Like I said, Napalms are actually a liability if you're building for fight strength. The Gold Desert Eagle, with the same ATT (25), but higher DEF (15) is better, but it's still exactly equal to your boring-old Bonus Weapon (20/20) in a fight.
Knowing that now, I wish I'd saved the purchase levels for all those Gold Desert Eagles I bought to buy more Green Beer when it came along. I'll probably be thinking the same thing about the Green Beer when they debut a new Special Loot armor with a total strength of 50 (doh!) weeks or months from now.
Oh well. Live and learn.
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