Mafia Wars: Moscow Tips - You'll Get By With a Little Help From Your Friends

When Zynga told us that we'd need to rely on our friends more than ever to progress through the Mafia Wars: Moscow, we thought they just wanted us to spam add more friends and help the game stay at the top of Facebook gaming charts. Turns out we'll actually need all the help we can get.

Take a look (if you're level 70 and above, that is) at Chapter 1's missions. The first two (Smuggle Consumer Electronics for the Vory, Arrange A Drug Shipment for the Mafiya) take anywhere from 30-50 energy points per job, depending on the composition of your Mafia. That's no surprise -- missions from Cuba and later missions from New York also take 30-50 points.

Unfortunately, the last mission, Fight Off An Ultra-National Gang, takes a whopping 100+ energy points per job (and we got only 3% job mastery each time). That means it'll cost roughly 3000 energy points in total to master the job. On top of that, if you've been distributing your skill points pretty evenly between your health, attack, defense, energy and stamina, that means you'll likely only be able to do this job twice each time you have full energy.

This is where Zynga's plan falls in place -- when you hit the 'Get Help' button below the job, you'll send out a notification to your friends asking for help (it'll also post on your profile page). If they respond, they'll help you gain some serious mastery on the job -- one of our friends came to our rescue and our Job Mastery shot up at least 20%. The more friends respond, the quicker you'll be able to master the job and open up Chapter 2.

Given that this is only the first episode of Moscow, we wouldn't be surprised if both energy requirements and our dependency on friends' goodwill got higher as the story progresses.

Have you played the Moscow expansion of Mafia Wars yet? What do you think of these changes to Mafia Wars? Do you prefer to have help from your friends or to go it alone?

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