Zynga's Empires and Allies Minerals Guide: Uranium, Iron, Copper, Aluminum and Gold cheats, hints, tips, tricks

Zynga's Empires and Allies is the fastest growing Facebook game since CityVille, having gained over 22 million users within two weeks of its release date. Empires and Allies takes the city-building aspect of CityVille and combines it with the light war games aspect of games such as Nintendo's Advance Wars series as well as famous strategy games such as Civilization and Risk. Your goal is to rebuild your island and retaliate against the Dark Alliance for destroying it, but the real fun comes in fighting against your friends, as well as bartering for such important minerals as Iron, Copper, Gold, Aluminum and Uranium. You can only mine one of them per account, but you can be a master at collecting all 5 rare minerals with these Empires and Allies mineral tricks.

There are multiple ways to get various minerals that you don't have in this game, and those ways are necessary because you can only transform ore into one kind of mineral with your account, and the chances that you will be one of the lucky ones who can turn ore into uranium are slim. Luckily, it's quite easy to get any kind of mineral that you don't have. You just need the right kind of strategies to do so.

One of the simplest ways to do it involves having a lot of neighbors in Empires and Allies, as well as a little bit of luck. Make a lot of friends and neighbors in this game, and invite your friends to be your neighbors. Just like your element of choice is randomized, theirs will be randomized too, and when they start mining for their element of choice, you can simply visit their island once a day to help them out, and instead of clicking anything else (houses to collect rent, trees to chop them down, etc), click on their mines to accelerate them. Each mine that you click to accelerate will earn you a bonus chunk of whatever mineral your friend is mining, so keep going back to them and helping them as often as possible if you want more of that mineral.

Additionally, you can go about it the "evil" (fun) way and invade your neighbor's island, focusing on their ore mines. If you do it this way, be smart about which attackers you send into battle, because you can earn even more bonus minerals simply by scoring critical hits and critical kills in battle against your neighbor. If your neighbor has a lot of ore mines though, this can be a great way to make a grab for massive amounts of ore at the same time, as well as to come back and continuously collect later if they don't fight back against you for awhile.

A third way to go about collecting other ores in Empires and Allies is to replay battles over and over where the enemy has 5 combatants in their platoon for the battle. Be sure to make wise choices for who you choose to combat your enemy so that your targets will all line up to say "Great Target!" for each of the enemy combatants. Fire on the "great targets" over and over and keep destroying your enemy and each time your score a critical hit or (especially) a critical kill, you'll often earn a large collection of a certain mineral at random. This is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to get uranium without buying it or mining it - in fact, it can be an even quicker technique than actually mining.

A fourth strategy is to actually go to your friends' marketplaces and buy the minerals from them. This can earn you minerals very quickly if you are willing to spend large amounts of money. Use the Empires and Allies coin cheats for this one if you want to simply be able to buy the massive amounts of minerals that you want to, instead of having to actually work for them.

The final technique, which is a little bit of a cheat, is to use the following links to request the minerals of choice from your friends.

Iron: http://apps.facebook.com/empiresandallies/request.php?action=default&itemName=iron&view=app&ref&requestType=level_up

Aluminum: http://apps.facebook.com/empiresandallies/request.php?action=default&itemName=aluminum&view=app&ref&requestType=level_up

Gold: http://apps.facebook.com/empiresandallies/request.php?action=default&itemName=gold&view=app&ref&requestType=level_up

Copper: http://apps.facebook.com/empiresandallies/request.php?action=default&itemName=copper&view=app&ref&requestType=level_up

Uranium: http://apps.facebook.com/empiresandallies/request.php?action=default&itemName=uranium&view=app&ref&requestType=level_up

The best way to go about doing this is to open up 10 brand new browser tabs, and spread out these links across each browser tab depending on how many of each mineral you want. Then, one by one, add each of your Empires and Allies friends to each request that you open up and request the mineral of your choice. Alternatively, you can simply go to "send gifts" and send your mineral of choice to each of your friends in Empires and Allies and hope that they send their mineral back to you (they usually will).

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