Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Allies: Making friends

There are two reasons to make allies. First, they send you gifts. When you're starting the game, it's pretty good to have people send you that Desert AK-47 or the Secret Society Ring; they are better than the weapons that you can buy, and will help you in battles or wars. Second, in PvP War (also called Invade), you get to equip as many allies as you have, so it makes a weak guy stronger, through strength in numbers.

The Allies page is reached from a link in the menu at the bottom of the main page. It has two tabs: HIRE ALLIES and YOUR ALLIES. They are somewhat self-explanatory, but the YOUR ALLIES page has a box to enter army codes for new allies.

You can make allies in several ways. In no particular order:

  • Buy 'em. You can do this by hiring them from the allies page, or by clicking "add ally" while viewing their profile page. They cost game dollars, which are commonly referred to as $. This is not the same thing as real world dollars. If you're ever confused about whether you're using real dollars or game dollars, just try to notice if you are asked for the password for your appleID. That's a hint that you're using real money. 
  • Watch the world chat. Many players post their army codes here. I find that it's easier to write down 30-40 codes than it is to try to remember one long enough to enter it, but you might like to do just that. 
  • Post in world chat. You don't have to say, "Add me," or "Daily gifter." Just post your army code in world chat. Be mindful that world chat requires chat tokens. If you don't have any, you won't be able to chat there. I have bought several promo packs that included 50 world chat tokens, but I have never seen my chat token balance, and am not sure how to find out. NOTE: there is an achievement for posting to world chat five times: you get one Favor Point. Some players do that all at once. I think it's better to space them out, because your code is more likely to be viewed by different players. 
  • Find them online. There are several websites you can use to find army codes. This works if you use a desktop or laptop for your browser, because you can view the codes as you enter them on the allies page. 
    • Underworldempireforums.com - this is the first place you'd go for UWE info [link] (This is the place where I've had the most success by posting my own code, too.)
    • FTSmilitia.blogspot.com - lots of good information here [link
    • Clancodes - a site for codes for many games [link]
  • Accept ally requests from people who want to be your ally.
But there's a salient difference, when you are viewing someone's profile page, between the two most common ways to add an ally. If you click the "Add Ally" button, the game will send them an ally request from you, but it will cost you game cash. When you start the game, this is small, as little as $100 at the beginning. As you level up, this cost becomes prohibitive. At level 60, this costs about $80,000.

But you have an alternative. In their profile, in the top right corner of the screen, players have a "profile message." It starts out saying "add me to your army." But players can change this to whatever profound statement they'd like to make. It's a common practice to put YOUR army code in your profile. So, if you see one on someone else's profile, you can write it down or try to remember it, go to the allies page, and type it in. You'll have the ally immediately, and it won't cost you any dollars, regardless of what level you've reached in the game.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Did I just delete my game?

My wife got a new phone. I had been playing an alt on her old phone, and she gave it to me when she got the new one. But she uses her apple ID on her new phone, and I needed to create a new apple ID on the old phone.

Apple has made the process of transferring phones cumbersome, to say the least. The game publishers and Apple want you to buy new apps for your new ID. Fine, if I was going to be buying apps, sure. But I want to move a game that I've spent money building up, and I don't want to lose it.

In the past, I've used a 3rd party freeware program on my laptop to backup and restore game states from my iphone. For UWE, I have never tried that. So I found myself unable to buy in-app purchases like FP or promotions unless I used the same apple ID that the app belonged to.

I googled the problem, and read that if you save your phone to the cloud, delete the app, and restore from the cloud, you can have your game state and your new ID. Kids, I'm going to stress this, don't do this unless you have a really good backup of your phone. Back up to your computer, to the cloud, whatever you can to be sure you aren't risking something that you don't want to lose.

I did just what they said. The backup to iCloud took an hour. The restore was daunting. You have to reset your phone. I mean, everything was erased. I did that, and then started the restore from iCloud. It took very little time to restore the settings. But I do suspect that the apps are not saved - only the purchase info - because it looked like the apps were downloading from the app store.

I was prompted for the password for my wife's apple ID. I put it in. The restore / download started, and ran quickly, just a few minutes. Then I got a message that Underworld Empire couldn't be restored.

My stomach turned over, did a flip or three, and started griping like the kids do when they are tired.