Nor here.

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Doesn’t look too bad from the front, does it!

The stretch Ute.

No need for a door anymore.

Always turns to the right a bit, though.

Nice and cool on a hot day.

The dash was a little bit warped, though. It could have come out better.

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Location Location Location

The old real estate sentiment rings true in Mob Wars. Investment in property is what gives you constant income. At the start don’t buy anything except property, except the bare essentials for doing ‘jobs’. Even when you’re high up the ranks — property is essential as it pays for all the ‘upkeep’ on all those warfare items that you will possess. First you buy vacant land:

The ‘undeveloped property’ is used to build properties on. You can still receive income from vacant land, (don’t know how that’s possible, but you can). You have to buy vacant land before you can build on it, (of course).

Once you have a certain amount of vacant land you can then buy properties:

Once you have the correct amount of vacant land you can convert this to developed property, as long as you have the moola.

You can buy vacant land and properties in groups of 1, 5 and 10. Every time you buy you increase the cost of the property or vacant land the next time you buy. So, the trick here is to buy properties and vacant land in groups of 5, 10. Once you have converted all vacant land to a property the cost drops again. So you can buy that ‘one off’ item just to boost your short term income.

What I found useful is to buy one off of the next stage of property which will land me with a greater income, yet won’t bump up the price too much when I come back a couple of days later and buy ten off.

Ding Dong (aka Warfare)

Don’t. Just don’t. At the start — resist the temptation to throttle your opponents and just hide away stockpiling your investments. Be invisible. Turn the other cheek. If anyone attacks you just take it and don’t fight back. That costs money. Besides.… in the early stages you really don’t get much from fighting. Note, though, that every level you go up, you have to beef up your ‘defense attribute’ as much as you can.

Once you’ve built up your investments… then you can start off with the punchups.

However, if you really must attack someone, then concentrate on people who have stats similar to below. That is: They concentrate more on doing jobs than fighting. (Note: This is why YOU should increase your defense attributes on every level you can, and as much as you can.) Someone who has a really low ‘fights won’ ratio. Who has not many weapons, and has a lot of investment properties. Also, someone who doesn’t have a large mob, or rather a smaller mob than you.

I still think, though, this is a ‘later on in the game’ strategy that you can use, and not an initial strategy.

Iron Tank (aka The Bank)

You face a 10% bankers commission when depositing money in the bank. I did this regularly in the early stages and faced the 10% loss rather than risk having it taken away from me, because of the more punch drunk Mob War competitors. Also, I’d much rather that money not going to them, and rather go to the bank.

Later on… once you’ve built up your army. You can leave money in the open a bit more and just shrug off the losses.

Don’t leave money lying around too much. Money sitting in the bank or in your pocket isn’t making any more money. Save up for a specific purpose, (like buying ten hotels), but don’t sock it away. A good mobster won’t have any money lying around at all. The more you invest the bigger the return.

However, there was one time when I had just withdrawn enough to pay for 10 restaurants, and had clicked on ‘buy’ when it said I didn’t have enough. I checked, and found that I had lost $16000! I checked again and it had gone down by another $8000. Aaaaargh! Someone was attacking me and stripping me! I lost around $45k that day, and lost out on $168k of potential revenue.

So you can still lose out even when being cautious.

Da Job List

There’s not much risk of meeting up with the ducks and geese, (police), so doing jobs is a low risk activity. Each time you progress a level more jobs will be available to you. Each job reduces your overall Energy. So you can only do so much with a certain time frame. Do as many jobs as you can in the first days. Time it so just as you have enough energy you’re clicking on ‘do job’. This way you can progress through the levels quickly, (and so getting more Energy on the way).

Levels

You only have a certain amount of energy to do jobs. Every level you attain gives you three points to do as you will. I concentrated on putting all my points on defense and energy. This way I could beef up my defense against attacks, (pacifist policy), and allow me to do more jobs. Which, in the early days, gives a bigger return than the available property you have.

Da Mob

The bigger the mob you have the more fighting power, and the bigger jobs you can do. You increase your mob by inviting your facebook friends to join your mob. Note you have to have a facebook friend to do this. If you don’t have any, or your friends aren’t interested in Mob Wars, then go to the Mob Wars forums where there are plenty of people willing to join your mob, or you join theirs. Either way doesn’t matter, (just who gets the money). Once you have a mob of a certain size make sure that you fit out each mob member with a weapon — don’t let them fight bare fisted.

One word of caution: If you value your privacy, then facebook allows you to setup groups that allow or disallow access to view certain areas of you profile. I’d strongly suggest doing this — if not for your sake, but for your friend’s sake.

Then, when you get all the invites for friends, (the precursor to mob war invite), you can instantly put them into the limited access group. In the above example I created a Mob Wars group. I’ve heard of people, once they have become part of a mob this way — to remove the facebook friendship. But I suspect the Mob Wars application developers will cotton on to this soon enough, and will disable this capability.

Da Goods

You have a number of items that will fill your arsenal. This allows you to do jobs, attack and defend. Make sure you have a compliment of weapons for each member of your mob. When you do buy, though, buy the bare minimum to allow you to do the next job that returns more money. Don’t go hell for leather on buying that minigun too early. Savour the moment, invest. Then, like I did, buy ten of them in one hit and still have money to spare for a hotel or five. Not only that but the bigger items cost money to run. The minigun costs $1500/hour to run. So this is silly to buy in the early stages — when your take home pay is roughly $2000/hour.

Da Hospital

The hospital is a relatively safe place to be. That area of your health between 1 and 20 is where you want to be when you are making large purchases. Because.… when in hospital you can’t be attacked. You can buy those 20 odd HumVee and 20 Casinos without the fear of being robbed on the way from the bank.

Consequently, (having learned this once before), attack other players until you get below 20. Then hide in the hospital and go on a spending spree.

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This is a composite image of the side of my noggin, (and if you look carefully y
ou can see the one filling in my tooth).

I’m currently investigating merging the individual slices together to see if I can
build up a nice 3D image. Of course the resolution isn’t that crash hot being only an Xray scan, and they’ve reduced the size of the images on CD as well.

If anyone is interested, the image format from the CT machine is [[DICOM]], which is a medical imaging format. There are a number of applications that read/translate to all the standard image formats. There was one that came with the CD for Windows, but apart from that one I have no idea on the Windows platform.

If you’re running Debian, (lenny), you can just apt-get them. I found imagej to be the best GUI app, and medcon for command line bulk converting.

% apt-cache search dicom
aeskulap - medical image viewer and DICOM network client
ctn - Central Test Node, a DICOM implementation for medical imaging
ctn-dev - Development files for Central Test Node, a DICOM implementation
ctn-doc - Documentation for Central Test Node, a DICOM implementation
dcmtk - The OFFIS DICOM toolkit command line utilities
dcmtk-doc - The OFFIS DICOM toolkit documentation
dcmtk-www - The OFFIS DICOM toolkit worklist www server application
dicomnifti - converts DICOM files into the NIfTI format
libdcmtk1 - The OFFIS DICOM toolkit runtime libraries
libdcmtk1-dev - The OFFIS DICOM toolkit development libraries and headers
libmdc2 - Medical Image (DICOM, ECAT, ...) conversion tool
libmdc2-dev - Medical Image (DICOM, ECAT, ...) conversion tool
medcon - Medical Image (DICOM, ECAT, ...) conversion tool
xmedcon - Medical Image (DICOM, ECAT, ...) conversion tool
imagej - Image processing program inspired by NIH Image for the Macintosh

Converting the files to something more palatable, (and easily viewed), was as simple as running the following on all the DICOM files:

% medcon -24 -c png -n -v -contrast -f 

After this conversion you get images like this:

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