Guide to Zynga's Empires and Allies for Facebook: tips, tricks, cheats and hints

Empires and Allies is a brand new game by Zynga's new Los Angeles studios that combines the fun of city-building and farming games such as FrontierVille and CityVille with strategy war games such as Risk, Civilization and Evony to create a whole new gaming experience. In this game you are a commander of your own country, and your island starts off as empty, but you can fill it with people, houses, production facilities and various military establishments. Your goal is to build your country and your military back up, beat various campaigns, build up both your honor and your infamy levels (or one, or both), and become a powerful warlord. Here are some Empires and Allies tips that will help you do so...

When you first start the game off, you'll follow the various quests to help you begin the game, including building your first troops (cadet soldiers, cannon shooters and vintage tanks). Avoid the temptation to place your troops in the center square of the city, because this makes them completely useless for defending against enemy (friend) invasions and attacks on your city. Place your troops near any building that you build, and preferably, place your buildings around clusters of troops so that the troops will protect your buildings during a raid. Place the most troops around your most valuable buildings, such as government buildings and production facilities.

When you fight, pick what troops you send into battle based on what troops your enemy is sending into battle (this is pretty easy to do, since your troop selection screen will show which troops are effective against which enemy troops).

When it's your turn to fire, don't just point and shoot at a ship unless the words "Great Target!" flash up when you point at an enemy troop, because when "Great Target" pops up, you have almost a 100 percent shot at scoring a direct hit with your arttack. If you see "Fair target!", then you have about a 50/50 shot of getting a direct hit on the enemy. If you see "Poor target", then you your chances of scoring a direct hit are slim to none.

When it's your turn to fire, before you shoot, make sure to change which troop is firing by clicking on any of your troops. The troop that you click will become the firing troop, and the troop that is firing will be glowing blue. Change the firing troop to make sure that the troop with the advantage is always the one firing against the intended target. Doing this can turn a "fair" or a "poor" target into a "great" target and vice versa. You'll be able to win battles very easily without using power ups with this technique.

An easy way to make a lot of money and gain a lot of experience points in this game is to replay battles that you have already won. My favorite one to replay is the Cape Pleasant III battle. Once you've beaten the battle, it's easy to play again because you can now use Captain Krunsch's ship, The Butcher, to destroy all of his ironclad gunboats, and use one of your vintage carriers to smash his version of The Butcher. Every time you win the battle a second time, you'll earn 900 coins, and with the large number of attackers he has, you have a high number of targets, meaning a high chance of a critical kill, which earns you back both energy, experience, coins, and various necessary materials such as aluminum and uranium.

When you get a critical kill (or at any time when you earn high amount of bonuses, such as coins or experience), make sure you actually click the little coin/experience/material/energy symbols lying around. You'll still earn all of what you would normally earn if you don't, but each one you click sends your bonus meter up more, and making sure that you click each earned material after a critical kill can send your bonus meter sky high.

When you invade a friend, don't just attack an area that has very few defending troops. You can earn even more bonus points when you attack a heavily-defended area, because you have more targets, and thus will earn more money and more critical kills from the battle alone. Just make sure that you have the necessary effective troops in order to win the battle.

To change your red hearts meter to a black hearts meter (or vice versa), your honor (red heart) level needs to be higher than your black heart (infamy level) (or vice versa). To gain honor levels, you need to help out your neighbors. To gain infamy levels, you need to invade and attack your neighbors.

That's all for now. More Empires and Allies tips? Post them in the comment box!