Warpath: 10 noob mistakes to avoid

If you just started out playing, here’s a list of the biggest mistakes to avoid.

Warpath is a real-time strategy game with the ability to upgrade units and grow your power over time. If you rush and make bad decisions, they will have consequences on your long-term prosperity.

The list below is a compilation of typical mistakes that beginners (myself included!) tend to do most often.

1. Rushing instead of planning

Warpath is not a sprint game, it’s more like a marathon. Players trying to get quick wins will be stronger short-term but will fall behind mid- to late-game (I’m not talking about whales investing $10k+ here).

• Make yourself familiar with how the game mechanic works, what type of units it has and how is the best to manage resources – both gathering and technology ones.
• Learn which events are upcoming and what objectives they have. It will allow you to save the necessary resources and utilize them later on with an extra benefit. Some events are time-limited – don’t miss those!
• Upgrading the correct buildings first and knowing how much they will cost in future gives you a huge advantage early game.

2. Spending resources outside of events

Warpath has several events unlocking gradually with your city age. Starting from a 5-days Call to Rally, moving into Jurisdiction, Arms Race and eventually unlocking Grand Showdown events.

All resources you have (speedups, coupons, unit assembling etc.) should be spent ONLY during the relevant event is ongoing. Most of them have similar objectives (i.e. Jurisdiction event has a task to spend Production and Research speedups – same as certain days of the Grand Showdown) so make sure you wait till the right objective kicks in.

3. Wasting or purchasing gold

Unless you’re whaling, never spend gold on speedups, resources or drawing units. Your #1 priority should be getting VIP Lvl. 4 (to get 1 universal coupon from the daily VIP chest), you can buy 5000 VIP points for the same amount of gold. After that, aim to invest into VIP 8 (for silver parts daily chest, interim resource collection speed bonuses and +1 airlift).

Same applies for purchasing – for the equivalent price of the gold packages on the foreign exchange tab you can get more value while buying gift packages.

I will not advocate spending here, it’s entirely your decision. But if you decided to invest any amount of real money, you can find some recommendations here.

4. Joining an inactive alliance

Being part of any alliance is a key part of the whole game – it is not possible to survive on your own. During the tutorial mission, one of the tasks is to join any alliance and most people jump into random one for the sake of completing it.

It might be ok to finish the task and move further with the tutorial but it’s a very bad idea to stay there for a long time.

Not only you will miss alliance gifts (there are 2 types of those – for destroying bunkers and purchasing items from the in-game shop) but you will also fail to complete objectives of the Urban Combat Plan event while playing in a dead alliance.

There are some PvP events and need to control important territory objectives with your alliance, so make sure you join an active one – ideally with its own discord server to communicate and find support.

5. Prioritizing Military technology over Industry one

Another common mistake by those who just started playing. While it seems like a military tree gives way more battle power and access to advanced units (which is true), investing everything in the tree at the beginning is the worst idea ever. The reason is exponentially growing building’s upgrade cost (both for resources produced and collected on the field).

Investing in the Industry tree allows you to farm and produce those resources faster, building a good foundation for steady growth. While you might get a short-term advantage with Military at the beginning, it will be neglected once you reach Command Center Lvl. 20 and onwards. Without resources, you will get stuck there for a long time.

Make sure you invest in the Industry tree as much as possible and research only those Military technologies that are required to complete tutorial missions.

6. Skipping infantry

While it’s tempting to use powerful tanks or high-damaging artillery, don’t scratch out infantry from your army roster at the beginning. There are several reasons for that:

• Infantry is great damage sponges, even at low levels and without any investments into training and parts. Due to bunker ability, you can tank a lot of damage with a single unit while the rest of your troops kill the enemy ones;
• Two of your starting officers (Percy and White Wolf) have skills that are heavily oriented for infantry;
• Infantry’s self-healing allows your army to stay effective without a need to get back to your base for repairs. If you tank with infantry, these troops will start recovering health shortly after combat ends.

Closer to mid- or late-game, infantry becomes less effective due to appearance of artillery units on the battlefield able to wipe out an entire squad with just their volley fire. But in the beginning, it is a perfect unit to rush campaign and defeat enemy bunkers.

7. Assembling wrong units

Warpath has over 150 different units to play with and even more coming soon. The way unit upgrade works is quite tricky, that’s why I’d recommend reading a dedicated guide on this topic here.

Recommendation for new joiners – don’t assemble any units at the beginning, unless there’s “safe assemble” green icon in the bottom left corner of your screen.

Try different units, upgrade any that you like, combine them in different formations and find a play-style that fits your taste and/or alliance needs. You can reset any unit for just 20 gold and get all invested resources back.

Once you get more experienced and understand how the game works, you will be able to make clear decisions in which way to build your account.

8. Killing Raven units instead of bunkers

Beside special Raven buildings, villages and mines, you can find 2 types on enemy units on the map:

1. Individual group of Raven units (Lvl. 1 to 25 in the starting city)
2. Raven bunkers (Lvl. 1 to 3 in the starting city)

The difference is in rewards for taking those down. Individual units will give you one type of resource they are guarding (from wood planks to asphalt). You need to kill those ONLY when the next level is unlocked (they grow as your city ages) and pick up that first kill reward. Another reason to kill individual units is to complete Urban Combat Plan objectives (last day one has 200 units to kill).

Rest of time your main goal is defeating bunkers (you can easily solo Lvl. 1 at the beginning and Lvl. 2 and 3 with your alliance mates) to farm building materials speedups and ammunition. Both are quite important resources – you can spend the first one during Jurisdiction/similar events to earn points for rushing resources production and later ones for upgrading your troops (each 10^th level of upgrade requires a certain amount of ammunition.

9. Ignoring scouting and campaign missions

Let’s start with scouting. It gives the following advantages:

• Detects farming tiles and random abandoned buildings with rewards (resources and gold). On top of that, you can find radar bases to unlock fog in a 9-square area around it.
• Finds your enemies. Knowing where they are located could avoid surprise hits.
• Locates villages and other key city objects. You will need to capture those together with your alliance for future growth.

Keeping your scout planes idle will slow down your growth since abandoned buildings provide a huge amount of wood planks and bricks that are essential for upgrading low-level base buildings. And random gold chests will allow you to boost VIP level quickly.

Same applies to the campaign. The trick here is with its passive income – it depends on how far you’ve progressed – allowing to get crucial experience, ammunition and parts chests to build up your army.

If you don’t push campaign as far as possible (certain stages are limited with your Commander’s level) your passive income will remain low and you won’t get enough materials to grow your power later on.

10. Under-/over-farming

While Warpath is all about fighting and PvP, don’t go into one direction only. Here’s why:

On one hand, underfarming means you’re all focused on fights and rarely do campaign missions, scouting, collecting resources on the map and keeping your collection trucks idle. Apart from capturing key map objectives (like villages and transport nodes), PvP doesn’t give any rewards if you hit someone’s base. Yes, it’s sweet to have that kill counter growing in your Commander’s profile, but if you avoid rest of activities quite soon you’ll be the one attacked.

On other hand, overfarming means you only farm and avoid engaging in battles. Since Warpath is not a farming game but a PvP one, skipping key battles with your alliance will slow the entire group down and yourself included. Reasons are:

• All key objectives on the map have got sweet first capture rewards – gold, speedups and so on;
• You get a 25% boost while farming on your alliance territory;
• You earn special alliance points not only when donating to alliance technologies but also when building villages and capturing objectives.

While you’re busy farming and only farming, the strong alliance might consider you being too passive and kick you out eventually – remember teamwork is important here. So best is to keep the balance – fighting and growing – without going into extreme in one direction only.

What were your noob mistakes? Let me know in the comments!