Family Properties Pseudo Walk Through

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I was off line when the new Family Property was introduced into the game. I asked my family to take screen shots and help me understand it. The problem is nobody really understands it and Zynga hasn't given us any additional information. I'll do my best to outline what is available from the in game instructions and player experiences so far.

In a nutshell, the goal is to upgrade your property using consumable items to gain a "Family Property Bonus". The bonus is a sliding scale increase to your equipment score based on the level and strength of your property. Players can rob your property to bring down your bonus score and you can repair it to increase the score.

The first Family Property is the Artillery Station. It starts out at Level 1 and can be upgraded to Level 10. If it's been robbed, there will be smoke coming out of it. I assume the

A Properties Tab has been added to the Family Module. This is where you need to go for all tasks related to the Artillery Station.

The help mark has all the info Zyga is willing to provide. I'll break it down as best I can. 

Build Property – Upgrade and repair your property with consumable parts. Parts are available from robbing properties (max.30/day), requests & gifts (max. 20/day).

Once you get any property in Mafia Wars, you have to upgrade it. Family Properties are no exception. The upgrade part is the Artillery Shell.

You can get Artillery Shells from the free gift system or by robbing them. They are on the Free Gift Page and you are allowed to accept 20 per day.

Accept Artillery Shells in your ZMC. To make things more difficult, Zynga imposed a limit of 20 per day.

It's nice that there is a tracker when opening Artillery Shells. You are told how many more you can accept before you hit your limit.  When you open the 20th one, it tells you that you can't open anymore for the day and lets you know how many hours it will be until you can accept more.

Once you hit your limit of 20 for the day, Artillery Shells are converted into Blue Mystery Bags.

The second way to get Artillery Shells is to rob them from other families. Individual robs through the robbing boards won't work. You need to rob families. There are two ways to get to a rob page. The first is to use the "Rob" buttons located on "Your Recommended Targets" list or your "Recent Attackers" list. These can both be found in the Properties Tab.

You can also go to the Family Page of any family by using their red tag link. Links can be found on player profiles, the fight list or the Spockholm Family Ranks spreadsheet. When you get there, click on their "Properties Tab".

There are more properties to come but for now you only get one choice. Click on the Artillery Station image to initiate the robbery. This method involves more clicks than using the families from your lists but you will find most of those are already at 0 health and you can't rob them.

Robs start out costing 10 stamina per click. You can only rob a family if their health is above 0 and you can keep robbing until you knock it down to 0. When you click on the Rob button you will see the results over the Artillery Station image and the stamina requirement for the next rob will increase. The 6 hour timer will be initiated after the first robbery.

If your robbery is successful, the amount of damage you did will appear and if you lost, it will say Failed.

If you steal an Artillery Shell, you will see it slide across the bottom of the rob results page. I noticed that you can get them even if the robbery failed. I'm not sure if that's a bug or intended. What's the point of protecting them if people can still get them when they lose?

We are limited to 30 Artillery Shells per day via this method but most won't get but a few. The reason is stamina costs per robbery increase exponentially.  During the 6 hour window, each robbery will cost more than the one before it. There is no limit to how high you can get this. I went nuts with a stamina account and got my Rob button up to 16,481!

What makes this especially annoying is most families are at 0 health. It takes quite a few tries to find live ones and the clicking about drove me crazy. I'm sure if this is deemed a useful feature, Team Spockholm will create a script to do the searching and clicking for us.

The good news is the experience you gain per robbery is proportional to the amount of stamina. If you win the robbery, the experience/stamina ratios seem to vary between 2:1 and 3:1. We weren't able to determine what variables are used in determining how much experience you get. If you lose, the ratio seemed to be consistently at 1:1.

Robbery Success

3:1

 Robbery Fail

1:1

Now that we know what we need to upgrade our Family Property and how to get it, it's time to review how to defend your property. The in game instructions are below.

Defend Property – Health/Defense is determined by items allocated to property by individual players (higher defense stats = higher defense). Allocated items will be consumed. Each player can contribute 5 items per property. Items of all classes may be contributed, excluding limited or restricted items; try combinations to earn a bonus.

On the Family Property Page, you will see empty boxes like the image below. The object is to add item from your own inventory to increase the defense of your property. Your loot items will act like consumables. Once you add them, you won't get them back. All family members can contribute 5 items and only 5 items at a time.

When you click the "Add" button, you will get a menu of your loot items. Don't be fooled into giving away items which are active in your inventory. Zynga lists them from best to worst and you will need to scroll to find the ones you no longer use. The scrolling buttons are located at the bottom of the popup. Something should be done about this as scrolling to your inactive items can take some time and clicks. Another flaw is the loot items are only listed by combined score so it's difficult to tell if they are active without having to look the item up in your inventory. Either Team Spockholm will add a search bar via their toolbar or Zynga might have the light bulb go off and do it themselves.

To ensure you don't lose active items, use the Show Worst Items Spocklet and make sure you only give away items with scores less than your worst.

For a more detailed list of your inactive items, use the Spockholm Item Analyzer. The best category to look up is the "Not Using (By Combined): Top-5". The higher the combined loot item scores, the better.

This will also be a more useful options for collectors to ensure they don't use items that they have only one of.

Keep scrolling until you find the item you want to contribute. In the example below, I used a Smoker. I have 771 so I know I'm safe. Once the item shows on top of the page, click the "Select" button.

You will get a confirmation popup to prevent mistakes. Even with this, there will be players who aren't sure what they are doing and will throw active loot items out of their inventory.

Once the item is added, it will appear in one of your slots and the Health Bonus the item supplies will be shown under it.

The purpose of adding items is to increase the health of your families property. I took screen shots before and after and our health went up by 8 points. All families start out with a health score of 500. As members add items it increases. Your equipment score bonus will also increase with each item. That bonus will be discussed later in this post.

If you fill up all 5 of your slots, you can change them as many times as you want.

When you change your items, you have to do the scroll fest again. The items will be compared and you will be able to see if it will offer a better bonus. I guess you can do this all day long because the "Change" buttons don't vanish. Earlier today I made a joke in the PAC room that we bugged Zynga for so long to give us an option to dump our useless loot. They finally gave it to us but this isn't really what we had in mind. It beats Trader Goh but all this scrolling and clicking has to go.

Dawn from the {ASS} Family had a pretty good contribution. You get combination bonuses if you select items from different categories. You can see her contribution is +1,336 while the items I used above only had a +760 bonus. I bet Zynga was happy to get another Butler back!

Once you get enough Artillery Shells you will want to upgrade your property. It sounds easy enough but there is on clause that makes it difficult. In order to upgrade, your property has to be at full health (repaired). More consumables will be needed to repair the property than to upgrade it so it will probably take some time.
Upgrade/Repair Property – Upgrade or repair property by individual contributions of property parts and part requests. Properties can be upgraded up to Level 10; damaged properties can't be upgraded until repaired. Parts will be consumed.

To repair your property, click on the button with the red hospital icon located next to the health bar. Family Property health is not like your character health. It doesn't regenerate with time. The only way to increase it is to redeem consumable items. It gets reduced when players from other families rob your property.

You will be told how many consumable items are needed for a full repair and only have the option to use all of the ones you own. Currently my family needs to come up with 501 Artillery Shells just to get our health at 100%. This doesn't include the 1,000 we need to upgrade to level 2. The trick is to have enough consumables to repair and upgrade at the same time. It's best to let it sit at 0 Health until your family can mass add them. If you repair without upgrading, you will have to repair again and will be wasting consumables. Most families will catch on to this and robbing will be even more of a useless option to acquire consumables. The way I see it, we all get 20 a day so save them for a coordinated upgrade. The upgrade button will not appear until you have 1,000 parts to get to Level 2. We won't know if this number increases with level until someone posts a screen shot of an upgraded property.

The most common question I've seen about the Family Property is "What's the point of it all"?. I asked that question in the beginning as well. The Family Property Bonuses is the answer. So what is the Family Property Bonus? You may not realize it but you already have it. The Level 1 Artillery Station offers a +1,000 bonus to your equipment score. It's not a static number and will change with the strength of the items you are using.
Family Property Bonuses – Bonuses are calculated based on shared property level and damage status.

If you are in a family, you will no longer have a set attack or defense equipment score. They will constantly change depending on where the bonus is. I've seen many players complain today about losing equipment points, but this may be why. I believe that the higher the level of your property, the higher the baseline number will be. It's 1,000 for Level 1 so maybe it will be 2,000 for Level 2.

There are still many more questions to be answered. Eike from Team Spockholm is in John Nash mode and we should have some equations, strategies and fun facts posted after more testing is done. Many thanks to Team Spockholm, Mike Nestor , Leonard Wong and the {ASS} Family for helping me make some sense of this. I'm sure there are things I didn't mention. Please comment if you would like to add anything to this post.

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Article written by Jennifer Patterson, Creator of the MW Loot Lady Blog, The Mafia Wars Loot Lady Facebook Fan Page and Co-Host of The Informant Podcast. All material is protected by copyright law