Attack: The more attack points you have, the easier it is for you to win fights against others. Your attack points are combined with your attack gear (remember post #2) in an unknown calculus to come up with your base attack. Bottom line, more is better. If you click the stockpile button, you will see your base attack listed there. Your base attack is what the game uses when you attack another player. If your base attack is higher than their base defense, you will win the fight. If your base attack is lower than their base defense, you will lose. This is where force comes in. You can attack at higher force levels to overcome the difference between your base attack and their base defense and still win. To use force, you need lazyweb at a minimum and a properly constructed link, or you need a script. Use a script, its way easier. The downside to using force, is you take a much greater amount of damage the more force you use. You must heal much more often when using force, or you will die while attacking.
Defense: The more defense points you have, the easier it is for you to defend against others attacks. This is basically the inverse of what I wrote about attack. Your defense points are combined with your defense gear (remember post #2) in an unknown calculus to come up with your base defense. Bottom line, more is better. If you click the stockpile button, you will see your base defense listed there. Your base defense is what the game uses when you defend against another attacking player. If your base defense is higher than their base attack, you will win the fight. If your base defense is lower than their base attack, you will lose. They can use force to overcome the difference between your base defense and their base attack. They must heal much more often or they will die while attacking.
Energy: The more energy you have, the more jobs you can do. This is straightforward. At the lower levels, energy is primarily for doing jobs. You also need to have energy to rig someone. Never have less than 100 energy, having 1k would be better. If you need to rig, and you have zip for energy, you are done playing till you get some energy. At the higher levels, energy is your primary source of income, far exceeding anything you can make from property. Don’t worry about this till you are maybe level 12-15k.
Health: The more health you have, the better you can withstand lots of damage. The other side of the coin, is the more health you have, the more damage you do when attacking and punching. You also take more damage with more health. It’s a nutty equation. Healing also gets more expensive the more health you have. This is not a big deal until you get up around 1 million health or more. Then you start getting into real money, and you need to have enough energy to deal with it, or have the understanding that it will take time to build enough cash to play.
Stamina: The more stamina, the longer you can fight. You also need stamina to list, rig, and send messages. Never have zero stamina, if you are out, you are done playing. Stamina is probably the most important of all the skills, so it costs double per point. If you put 100 into the box to add to your stamina, you will get 50 points. Capiche?
I’m going to quote myself here from a post I made about 6 months ago. Get stronger for whatever level you are at. Doesn't matter what level you are, it applies to every level. Be stronger than the other guy at the same level. Have more skill points than he does. Have better gear than he does. Have a bigger bounty than he does. Just because you are a high level doesn't mean you are strong. Many make this mistake and get their asses handed to them and wonder why. There are many, many playing spaces in this game. Own whatever playing space you are in.
The trap in this game is leveling. It is silly easy to level. To really be strong, you don't want to. You want to be whatever level you want to be, and stay there. Forever is ideal. Then you gain skill points, gear, and cash to build your bounty and be the strongest whatever level you picked there is. You can level to 10k in like 2 weeks and can still be beaten by a strong 3k. The higher level you are, the harder this is to accomplish.
The above paragraph is the key to the game, and probably the most important thing I will write in this whole series. Burn that into your brain. Learn it, love it, live it. So where do you put your skill points? Well, that depends. What kind of account do you want? Are you leveling? Single player? Want to stay low level, mid level, high level? Want to win all your attacks? Defend against anything? I will say this much, no matter what kind of account you build, someone will always be able to beat you. There are no perfect accounts. I will also say that a balanced account is a loser. You almost have to build in one direction or another.
If you want to win all your attacks (or most of them) and have a chance to AK (attack kill) people, you want lots of attack obviously, but you also want a lot of health. You need the attack to be able to get thru their defense, and you need the health to do a lot of damage. The trade off is going to be not having a lot of points for defense or energy. This is known as “the attack cow”
If you want to be able to fend off almost all of your attackers, you want lots of defense. This is the opposite of the attack cow, and is known as “the defense cow”. This is good to build to level with an attack cow. Polar opposites.
If you just want to list the holy bejesus out of everything, you want to spend a lot of points on energy. Build yourself up a fat bounty cost by buying lots of property and doing lots of jobs. You can bankrupt players with what is known as “the cash cow”. Now you don’t have to go whole hog in any of these directions, there are many shades of cows, but you probably want to skew in one of those directions. If you want to level quickly, you want to spend on stamina and energy first, and bring in the other stuff later. If you plan on leveling slowly, then you can build the way you want right from the start. The best way to level is to have two accounts that mirror each other.