The Animals Are Finally Here

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Finally the "Exciting Animal Feature" (Zyngas words, not mine) has been implemented.  The animal category has been incorporated into the fighting and robbing equations.  In addition the our 501 best weapons, armor and vehicles, we will also take our best animals.  To keep current with the best animals bookmark the Wiki Animals Page.  You will also find a complete list of the animals available to us, their attack and defense scores and where to get them. Unless you have a lot of reward points to spare, it's never a good idea to buy equipment items from The Marketplace.  Your reward points are better spent to make your character stronger by using them for skill points and increasing your attack and defense scores.  From what is currently known about the combat equation, equipment is only 25% of your overall combat score.  Equipment and mafia members make up your overall attack and defensive scores (which is different than your combat score).  This score is obtained by taking the attack or defense rating of each piece of equipment in 4 categories and multiplying it by the number of mafia members you have (up to 501).  Most of you have 500 or more mafia members.  To maximize your equipment score, you now need to get 501 of the highest ranking attack and defense animals. 
Here is what I found when I logged into my Mafia Wars account:

1.  Overall Attack and Defense Score Increased:  My scores were around 76,000.

2.  A New Animal Section in My Inventory:  All animal type items were converted from what ever they were before to animals.  It's a shame that out of all the animals listed in my inventory only three of them are giftable (The Riding Elephant, The Forrest Scorpion, and The Chain Viper).  Zynga is not showing much love for the traders these days.

3.  Animals Can be Purchased In All Cities:  This gives us something to spend our unneeded Dollars, Pesos and Rubels on.  The stats aren't great but can raise your scores while you wait to get a total of 501 better ones.

New York Inventory

Cuba Inventory

Moscow Inventory

Bangkok Inventory





Faction Store Animals (not new but I might as well add them here)

4.  Fighting has the Animal Category Added: Now there are four squares instead of three.

Animals are also added when you check your equipment.  If you don't know how to do this, just click on (show all items used) located below your best item pictures.  You will now get a list of what equipment you and your opponent used.  Copy and paste your results so you can refer to it later.  To get a list of the defensive animals you use in fights, attack yourself with another account.  You can also ask a friend to attack you but they will have to remove and re-add you to their mafia. 

5.  Robbing has the Animal Category Added:  Like with fighting, click on (show items) to get the list of what animals were used in the robbery.

Now for the break down of what we need to do to have the highest overall attack and defensive scores.
1.  Review your equipment to determine what you already have.  For quite some time now, animals have been dropping in jobs, fights and robberies.  They have also been found in secret stashes.   
2.  Determine what you need:  The best animals are ones from The Faction Store but we all know how hard Baht is to come by so it's not realistic at this point to wait until you can afford all these items.  For now, focus on the animals that you can make or trade. 
1st Choice Attack:  Banded Krait (51/28)-Faction Store-B$540,000-Yakuza (Allied)
1st Choice Defense: Xiamen Tiger (26/52)-Faction Store-B$555,000-Triad (Allied)

2nd Choice Attack:  Chain Viper (46/33)-Episode 7-Silence A Shadow Kingdom Patrol
2nd Choice Defense:  Forrest Scorpion (25/37)-Episode 4-Yakuza*-Set up an Opium Shipment**
*If you're kicking yourself for choosing Triad, don't worry, Arch-Angel Nemesis can save your day.  Just go to his Website and bookmark his tool called Bangkok Unlock (Live).  For complete instructions on how to use this tool to unlock the Forrest Scorpion Job, read my article titled Bangkok Unlock: Triad or Yakuza? BOTH!!!.
**Requires 1 drug shipment per job.  From my farming experience, I estimate that it takes on average 3-5 drug shipments per Forrest Scorpion.

3rd Choice Attack: Killer Bee Swarm (29/20)-Cuba-C$50,000
3rd Choice Defense: Riding Elephant (18/30)-Bangkok, Episode 2, Set Up A Bogus Chess Tournament  or Musk Ox (23/28)-Moscow-R$24,000,000

4th Choice:  If you can't come up with a combination of the above choices, your only option at this point is to collect as many items that drop from jobs, fights, an robberies.  Ask your mafia family members to help you out with the giftable animals and buy as many Red Tailed Hawks (25/22) as you need with NY money.  Keep up the good work and soon you will moving up the animal food chain.