West Game Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Make Your Own History in the Wild West

Once upon a time in the west, there was a new West Game player who wasn’t sure what to do, what with all of the game’s popups and railroading. However, he read some guides, talked to people, and made friends. Eventually, he became the leader of his own alliance. Even tried to take over the state. Did he succeed? Not sure.

West Game is a city builder slash tactics game that’s very, very similar to another game we’ve written on before, Evony: The King’s Return. This time though, we’re not fighting in a fantastic world of magic and dragons, but in the untamed frontier of the wild west.

Available on both iOS and Android, West Game demands much from players. You’ll need to learn to dance the deadly and delicate choreography of balancing economy, military, and diplomacy. You’ll have to make powerful friends while avoiding the ire of dangerous foes. But fear not – we’ve put together this West Game beginner’s guide to help new players find their footing in the sand, and maybe survive long enough to become a force to be reckoned with.

Maximize Your Bubble

New player make for easy pickings, due to not having established alliances and having virtually no armies to protect them. To alleviate that problem, each new player is given a 3 day protective shield, during which time they cannot attack or scout nor be attacked or scouted by other players. This also means that you’ll have just 3 days to build a solid foundation.

This shield also expires when your Town Hall hits level 6. With that in mind, you’ll need to be prepared when your shield goes up, but you also don’t want to be too hasty in upgrading your Town Hall, since that can leave you vulnerable.

If you need more time to prepare, plan to spend some time away from the game, or are just paranoid, you can buy more shields for gold. Be warned though – this is expensive.

This Town Ain’t Big Enough…

…so we’re expanding it. Your town is made of several other buildings aside from the resource generation buildings listed above. Knowing what each of these buildings can do for you will help you choose what to build, and how many of them you should build.

Town Hall

The Town Hall serves as your seat of authority. Gameplay-wise, the Town Hall doesn’t actually produce anything, but serves as a gate for unlocking the higher upgrade levels of other buildings. In addition, upgrading your Town Hall also allows you to deploy more armies on the field.

Warehouse

The Warehouse is where your resources are stockpiled. More importantly, the Warehouse protects resources from being plundered by other players when they attack your town, ensuring that you’ll at least have something left to rebuild. Note that the Warehouse does not protect silver until level 21!

Blacksmith

The Blacksmith is where you go to forge equipment for your sheriff, which in turn provides neat little bonuses such as reduced training, research, and construction time. It’s your call whether you want to spend your crafting materials as early as possible, or wait to unlock better tiers and technology.

A bubble will appear over the Blacksmith if it’s idle.

Academy

The Academy is a very important building where you can research various technologies to make your life easier in West Game.

Research trees are divided into economics, combat, traps, sheriff, and forging categories. Each of these different trees offers passive improvement or even unlocks new stuff for you and your town. Make sure that you’re always researching something!

Like the Blacksmith, a bubble above the Academy indicates that it’s idle and should be put to work.

Embassy

The Embassy is an important building if you’re in an alliance. It provides passive bonuses to transporting resources, increases your reinforcement capacity, and increases your reinforcement march size, reducing how many times you need to send units over.

Market

While the Embassy provides passive bonuses to transporting goods, the Market is where you actually do it. This structure allows you to both send and receive resources from your alliance members, and upgrading the market also reduces the tax rate and increases the number of transport routes you can maintain at once.

Sentry Station

The Sentry Station houses your scouts and outriders, and upgrading it gives you better scouting capabilities. This handy building can let you see, at a glance, if there are any imminent attacks on your settlement, as well as if anyone is sending you anything.

Higher levels of Sentry Stations reveal more intel – what area is going to be hit, how long before the attackers arrive, the name of your attacker, their army composition and size, and if they have a hero. In addition to all these, level 21 Sentry Stations vastly improve the efficiency of your traps, giving a large 25% attack bonus!

Defence Factory

The Defence Factory is where you construct traps to deter attackers. Each kind of trap is good against a certain unit, and this works great in tandem with the Sentry Station – if you know what your enemy’s army is composed of, you can rush an effective defense.

This building is also where you assign heroes to town defense duties. If your heroes aren’t doing anything, you can put them here to assist with keeping your town safe.

Barracks

The Barracks is where you whip your men into fighting shape. Unlike other games in the same vein, you can actually build multiple Barracks. The question is should you?

Each individual Barracks only increases the amount of units you can train at once. You cannot train a new set of units in each Barracks that you own. I tried that and discovered it the hard way. Also, there’s really no point in building multiple Barracks unless you really want that troop defense bonus that comes into play at level 21. However, that brings us to…

Cabins (Again)

Yup, Cabins again, so important that they were mentioned twice. The reason? Have a look at the image above – at level 21, cabins give attack bonuses to your troops. As mentioned earlier, their primary purpose is to produce Silver for your war machine, but Cabins also give a decent training speed boost to your units.

Hospital

When your troops inevitable get wounded, they’ll need a Hospital to recover and get back on their feet. Healing isn’t automatic, so make sure you tap the Hospital’s heal button to start working on your wounded. Better hospitals not only increase the amount of wounded they can treat at once, but also give your units a life bonus at higher levels.

Monument

For some reason, dead isn’t dead in the wild west, and the Monument is proof positive of this. The Monument allows you to revive some of your fallen units, allowing you to bounce back after a failed attack or a pitched defense.

Church

The Church is where you presumably give captured enemy heroes their last rights before executing them. Executing enemy heroes gives your town a huge 24 hour bonus that provides a two-part bonus: one that scales off your town’s base values, and another that scales off the executed hero’s stats.

Build Your Economy

Like many similar games, West Game requires you to establish a resource base before you can stake your claim anywhere. There are many ways to earn resources, and you will need a lot of them, so here are some of the easiest ways to gather materials for your journey.

Passive Income Buildings

The easiest way to generate resources is to devote buildings to producing them. West Game has 5 main resources – 4 of which are grain, logs, rubble, and iron. Farms can produce grain, Logging Camps can make logs, Quarries generate rubble, and Mines make iron. And don’t worry – resources are deposited directly into your stockpile.

By upgrading these buildings, you not only increase each building’s production, but you also raise the cap of how much of those materials you can store. Most basic buildings can be upgraded for free a couple of times – so do this immediately with your resource generation buildings!

To build a resource building, tap one of the plots of land below the railway tracks that split your town in two. Everything south is for the exclusive use of resource buildings, so build away.

Silver Mining

The fifth resource that you’ll need is silver. Gathering silver requires building and upgrading Cabins instead of the 4 resource buildings. Unlike those 4, cabins need to be built in the town proper – that is to say, above the railroad tracks. On the other hand, cabins also provide valuable passive bonuses, such as decreased unit training time and giving your sheriff some exp when built.

Occupy Resource Nodes

Resource nodes on the world map are a great way to augment your income.

By sending men to resource nodes, they can gather materials that they’ll bring back to your town when they’re finished. As a rule of thumb, higher tier units can carry more resources, so they’ll be able to gather and deplete a node much faster.

These nodes are considered neutral territory, so while no one can truly lay claim to them, you might be attacked by other players while your men are gathering. Rules and etiquette will differ from server to server, so if in doubt, ask senior players what your server’s policies are.

“Gambling” at The Casino

Unlike what it may sound like, the casino doesn’t involve any betting on your part. Instead, you get to play three card monte – you’ll be shown 3 cards, and after they’re shuffled around a bit, you need to pick the card with the highest value, with 2 as the lowest, and the joker as the highest. Win, and you’ll get stuff like speed-ups, Gold, or resources.

Each round will consume chips, which you get for free every day depending on the level of your town center.

Socializing at the Saloon

Every wanderer’s first stop is the saloon, if we’re going by Spaghetti Westerns. And since they’re already in town, you might be able to entice them with a job…

The saloonserves as a recruitment hub for new heroes. It’s here that you spend your common and advanced keys to unlock hero chests to get hero shards. You also get 1 free roll per day on the advanced chest (24 hour cooldown) and 5 free ones on the common chest (5 minute cooldown). Apart from hero shards, these chests also drop hero-related items, such as insights.

Fight Outlaws

You can pick fights with the giant entities on the world map – and they’re really more like pinatas, waiting to be beaten up so they can drop some sweet, sweet loot. These outlaws are one of the best ways to amass experience points for your sheriffs.

Note that fighting outlaws first requires you to research the appropriate Wild Hunt Mastery level at the academy. To fight level 1 outlaws and wild animals, you’ll need Wild Hunt Mastery I, and so on.

Fighting outlaws or hunting wild animals doesn’t require an entire army. Instead, you’ll be asked to send some of your heroes to perform the task for you. Each time they’re sent out, they spend some stamina to damage the target, all while netting prizes. While whittling a target away to get tons of drops is a viable strategy, make sure to secure the kill to get a gift box, which you and your allies can partake of.

Sometimes you’ll require an army to attack a neutral stack, at which point the game will prompt you to select what units and heroes to bring. You’ll also need to spend ammunition to attack these mobs, which can be seen in your Sheriff menu. These are generic battles, with some of your units possibly dying or getting wounded. However, they also give resources and time boosts, so they’re well worth doing.

Duel Yard

The duel yard lets you play a shooting minigame to get more rewards. The minigame isn’t particularly difficult – you just need to tap on the fire button whenever the circular gauge turn red (roughly the last quarter of the circle). And don’t worry about them firing at you as you’re effectively immortal. It’s just for show.

Museum Rewards

The museum commemorates milestones completed by your state, or server. These are timed events that require every player in the server to complete a specific task, such as hunting Butcher Brothers or upgrading the Town Hall to a certain level. The museum gives large sums of gold, so be sure to pop in when you see a bubble above the museum!

Civilians

From time to time, civilians will show up beside the railroad, begging for help. By tapping them, you gain buffs that increase your resource production (among other things), and you get to watch your men fight Daly’s gang. The shootout that ensures doesn’t actually impact your strength or resources, so be sure to help civilians whenever you can.

If civilians are present, an animated pile of coins will appear in the lower left of the screen, beside the world map button.

Train Deliveries

The train that occasionally pulls into your town also gives you small amounts of resources or boosts whenever you tap it. An animated chest will appear near the world map button if the train is in town and has something for you.

Quests

West Game has multiple quests that can be categorized by type.

Growth Quests can be completed daily, and give a small amount of resources on completion. These are mundane tasks that you’ll be doing anyway, such as training units of a specific type or donating to your alliance, so they’re really more of a minor bonus.

Each completed growth quest also gives some activity points, which fill a meter above the growth quest screen. As you accrue activity points, you’ll unlock chests that you can tap on to gain even more rewards, with the final tier giving out insight and keys for common heroes.

Town Quests serve as developmental milestones for your town. From building your first cabin to raising your first army, quests are there to ease you into the game’s flow and give you rewards for completing them. Your advisor can also get pretty pushy with these, so I’d recommend finishing them as fast as possible so you can actually play the game.

Daily, alliance, and VIP quests simply require a time investment to be completed. The downside is that there’s a limited number of these per day, so make sure you complete all of them before they time out.

If you’d like to prioritize certain rewards, you can tap on the poster (not the button) to see what items you get. You can refresh these to get a new set of quests for 1000 gold, which isn’t really worth it – there are far more important things for you to spend your gold on.

7 Day Boot Camp

While we’re on the topic of quests, new players get an introductory week of quests via the 7 day boot camp event. This event gives out a lot of prizes, and isn’t particularly hard to complete. You only get the opportunity to clear this once, so be sure to nab everything you can.

Gold Bounties

Gold bounties are long-term quests that offer a sum of gold for completing certain goals. To check the current gold bounties, tap the wanted poster on the lower left of the screen, near the world map button.

You’ll not only get stars for completing each star in each task, but you’ll also get a large lump sum of gold for achieving enough goals. To put that in perspective, nabbing 10 stars gets you a 500 gold bonus, while 30 stars gives an extra 3,000. Aim high!

Raise A Posse

Always treat war as an inevitability, not a possibility. Whether you want to go on the offensive or just want to be left alone, you’ll need units to keep you and your town safe.

Unit Types

There are four unit types in West Game – infantry, ranged, cavalry, and artillery. Each of these units is good and bad against other types.

Infantry are close-ranged fighters armed with revolvers. They’re strong against both cavalry and artillery, but bad against ranged units and traps.

Ranged units are armed with rifles, allowing them to fight from a greater distance. They’re good against infantry and artillery, but suffer against cavalry and traps.

Cavalry use horses and superior mobility to overcome their lack of range. These swift units are great against ranged units and artillery, but bad against infantry and traps.

Artillery use powerful mounted guns to crush foes from a distance. They’re effective at demolishing traps, but are bad against everything else.

Unit Stats

Unfortunately, West Game doesn’t have actual numbers in its unit stats page. Unit stats are instead represented by stars, which give a rough idea of how the unit performs in each category. But in general, lower tier units have less attack, defense, and life, but have higher speed compared to high tier units.

While West Game doesn’t have enough information to make detailed comparisons, it does helpfully list some other things on the unit stat board, such as overall bonuses, upkeep cost, troop load (how many resources each unit of this type can carry), and what resources they can harvest.

Unlocking higher tier units requires the appropriate program to be researched at the Academy. As you tech up, your enemies will too, so always be prepared to defend with the highest-tier units you can muster.

Invest In Your Sheriff And Heroes

Your formal title within West Game is the Boss.

The Sheriff

You can easily confuse this for the Sheriff, who is your main representative and serves as the governor of your town. There are three ways to invest in your Sheriff – giving them gear, learning skills, and using skins.

The Most Decked-Out Guns in the West

Sheriffs have 7 slots for equipment, the last 2 of which are unlocked as you upgrade your Blacksmith. These provide powerful bonuses to your Sheriff. Try to fill out each slot as soon as you can – any bonus is better than no bonus at all. And if you’re worried about equipment becoming obsolete, you can upgrade them to the next tier, at the cost of some silver and materials.

Equipment can further be upgraded by inlaying Gems into them. Gems provide more passive bonuses on top of what the base equipment already provides.

Earning Spurs

As the Sheriff gains levels, they also get skill points, which are used to buy powerful passive boosts in the Sheriff’s skill tree. Sheriffs possess two skill trees – one for town and army development, and another one for hunting wild animals and outlaws. It’s important to note that skill points are not exclusive; if you gain 1 skill point, you can allocate 1 point in both trees.

Skinning for Skins

Sheriffs also have different skins which offer different passive bonuses. The default skin “Joe” as well as the unlockable “Annica” one do not confer any passive bonuses. To unlock other skins, you’ll have to search around for pieces of those skins, then exchange for the skin once you have enough. If you don’t feel like putting in the legwork, you can also rent a skin for a limited time via skin packs that are occasionally put up for sale.

Your Heroes

Heroes are important figures in your town. They are prominent characters that can supervise your town and assist in a lot of things. If you missed the section above, you can get hero shards from the Saloon, or acquire them in other ways, such as clearing quests.

Leading The Charge

One of the most important things your heroes can do is to lead your armies whenever you attack Butcher Brothers or other players.

If you take a look at your hero’s stats, you’ll notice they also have a force and march size stat. These stats denote how much power they add to their army, and how big a bonus they give to the army’s max size.

Triggered Skills

Hero skills activate automatically depending on the situation. Some skills activate only in combat, and provide a bonus to the armies they lead. Other skills are completely passive and are in effect for as long as the hero who has them is alive.

You can make skills even stronger by increasing their level. This is done by using insights, which you can find in rewards for quests, killing neutral mobs, or more commonly, the Saloon.

Getting Stronger

By increasing the rank of your heroes, you not only unlock new skills, but you also give them improved stats, vastly improving their efficiency.

To increase the star rank of your heroes, you’ll need to gather enough medals of that hero, then use the hero interface to increase their rank. The higher the rank, the bigger the bonuses – but the more medals they’ll need. Once again, you’ll want to head to the Saloon to open your free chests, since they’re a constant (and free, and reliable) way to get medals for boosting your heroes.

Form An Alliance

Alliances are a great two-way street: you provide the alliance with help and resources, and in turn, you get a bunch of people who have your back in a fight. In the no-rules land of the wild west, you’ll need to seize every opportunity you can get, so join an alliance as soon as you can.

Alliance Missions

Alliance missions represent large goals that you and your alliance members can work together to complete. These are normally things that you would be doing in the course of the game, such as training units or constructing buildings. However, each time you or an alliance member fulfills that condition, you’ll contribute to your alliance’s goal – and once you complete certain thresholds, everyone who participated gets a reward. Not bad!

Alliance Territory

Once you have enough members and resources, your alliance leader or other higher ranking members can elect to start claiming territory for your alliance. This begins with an alliance fortress, which marks an area as belonging to you and your alliance.

As you progress, you’ll unlock an alliance warehouse, where everyone can deposit and take resources as needed, as well as special alliance resource nodes which are far more effective than the nodes that spawn in the wild.

Alliance Research

Once your alliance has settled down and created its fortress, members will gain access to the alliance research tree. These are long-term projects that need a lot of investment to complete for relatively minor boosts. The good thing here is that everyone in your alliance can contribute to their completion. Since these need so much time and effort to complete, try coordinating in your alliance chat to see what project everyone would like to focus on.

Alliance Help

Alliance members can request help on any project they’re currently undertaking, whether that’s training units, building new infrastructure, or just healing people. All members of the alliance can help with these projects, reducing their timers by a certain amount. It’s important to note that there’s a cap of how many times you can be helped in a single project. It costs you absolutely nothing to help others – just a tap of a button and presto.

Alliance Store

As you do stuff to help your alliance, you’ll gain loyalty points, which can be traded at the alliance store for some nifty things, like VIP points, 8 hour town shields, buffs, or even speed boosts. It’s important to note that these points aren’t tied to an alliance; even if you get kicked out for whatever reason, you’ll still have all the loyalty points from your previous efforts.

Aces Up The Sleeve

There’s a bunch of other tips we’ve compiled that don’t really fit anywhere else, so here they are.

Very Important Pardners

We’ve underlined the importance of saving your Gold for things that really matter. While it’s up to you to spend your Gold however you wish, the best Gold investment you can make as a new player is to upgrade your VIP level. To do that, tap the VIP button beside your portrait in the upper left, then tap the plus button by the bar.

By raising your VIP level, you’ll increase the production rate of your resources, as well as gain access to more quests and increase the threshold for getting free building upgrades. Note that you will need to activate your VIP perks via another item or a package for these to take effect.

The Good, The Bad, The Elite

If you don’t like the idea of spending your gold on VIP levels, you can also opt to use it to increase your elite levels and perks.

Not only do you get a free elite chest depending on your current elite level, you also gain access to elite trades, which let you turn in common resources for rare ones – and all at a discount, too! However, the selection of goods resets weekly and is restricted by your elite level. If you see something you like in the store’s rotation, it might be a good idea to spend some gold increasing your elite level.

Save Your Time Boosts

With how many time boosts you get in West Game, it’s very hard to resist the temptation of boosting every little thing you’re doing in town. I’m here to tell you right now – do this judiciously. Many higher-tier buildings, unit training, or upgrades can span multiple hours, and in the case of the Town Hall, days. By saving your time boosts, you can skirt or even entirely bypass these lengthy time gates.

The Map Has A Search Function

And it’s really handy. To access the map’s search function, tap the telescope in the upper right panel. This will let you pinpoint Butcher Brothers and wild animals of a specific level, as well as resource nodes.

Draw!

The sun’s high in the sky, the tumbleweeds are billowing, and a shadow casts long, ominous shadows on main street. It’s high noon, boss. Are you ready to embrace your destiny?

Well, we certainly hope you are. That concludes our West Game beginner’s guide, and we hope you learned something here that will help you survive once your shields go down, and maybe help you in your journey to state governor. If you have any comments or tricks of your own to share, let us know in the comment area below!