First up is mobs that you have added. I think everyone understands that the more mob members that you have, the stronger your mobster is ya? If not, here it is, you want to max out the number of other mobs in your mob. 1000 mobs is greater than 100 mobs, ya? Mob wars is like bowling, not like golf. You want more, not less. Ok, good. Again max you mob out! Go to http://www.vfbmw.com/ and find the family database, view the whole thing. Those are all of your friends. Start adding them to your mob.

Next up, hired guns. What are hired guns? Those are mobsters that you buy using Favor Points (those things that you get every time you level up). Favor points are the most valuable things in the game. You want them, and you want to spend them wisely. Buying hired guns with FP’s will get you the best bang for your buck over anything else you can spend them on. Now don’t go buying 10 hired guns at a time. Save them up and buy 100 at a time. Look at how many points you have to spend to buy each bunch of mobsters. 100 at a time is clearly the best buy. Yes it takes time to save up, yes it’s worth it.

Ok, so now you have this huge army, you need to get them armed. Here’s how the game arms them. Let’s say for arguments sake, that you have 1,000 members in your mob. The game is going to arm them two very separate ways. Arming for attack, and arming for defense. The game will (sometimes) use different items for both.

Here’s how it works. Lets say you are attacking a mob. The game will arm each of your 1,000 mobsters with 3 items each. One weapon, one armor, and one vehicle. Let’s look at weapons first. The game will automatically assign the highest point value attack weapons that you have. Once it has run out of those, it goes to the next highest point value weapons that you have. It continues this until it has armed all 1,000 of your mobs with a weapon. Now you can have 42,000 crowbars, but if you have 1,000 weapons that are better than a crowbar, it won’t use any of them. Make sense? You better have 1,000 weapons better than a crowbar, or you will get your ass kicked.

Next up is armor, same thing. It will assign the best 1,000 pieces of armor and ignore anything below that. Same goes for vehicles. The 1,000 best attack vehicles get used, the rest get ignored.

Now before you start throwing stuff out, pay attention. Don’t throw anything out that you can’t buy from the stockpile. Ever. Bob is a stupid programmer and likes to make mistakes. That 10/8 gun that is worthless today, he could change into a 150/180 weapon of doom tomorrow. It’s happened before. If it’s not costing ay upkeep, let it be. Also we need to talk about defensive arming before you start chucking stuff too.

What is defensive arming? That is what the game uses when you are attacked by another mob. Again, the game will arm your 1,000 mobsters with the 1,000 highest value defense pieces it can, one weapon, one armor, one vehicle per mob. Like the attack arming, it will ignore anything not in that top 1,000 in each category. So those CheyTac .408’s that you bought might be used for attack arming, but might not be used for defense arming. If you are buying door ram’s I can almost guarantee they will not be used for defense, or if they are, you are screwed.

So think of your arming as two separate things. One set for attack, one set for defense. You can always see what you are using for attack by attacking a mob, then clicking the little triangle that says details next to it. This will show you all the items you used to attack that mob. You will have to have a friend attack you, and send you a screenshot of what you are using for defense items. You cannot see this yourself unless you are using one of the scripts out there.

I recommend only getting rid of stuff that can be bought from the stockpile that requires upkeep AND that you aren’t actively using. You will never get away from upkeep, but you want to minimize it.

You want as many high value items as you can get. The more you have, the stronger you will be. The best items that you can get at the low levels are all found in the game, not bought. A good one that you can get fairly early on is found in the second job in Rio. Those studded gloves are the 4th best armor in the game. Load up on those and you become much harder to beat, and your attack will go up a ton. The others are found by doing city boss battles.