I finally took the plunge and tried Drug Wars. I'm now addicted, lol. (I know where all my free time will be going for the foreseeable future.)

Beginners Game Guide

In this post, I will introduce the game to anyone not yet familiar with it, and try to explain the basics for those who are just starting and/or trying to figure out how to play the game. It is a good post for newbies, as well as beginners and novices who still haven't figured out all the aspects of the game yet.

Overview

At it's core, Drug Wars is a resource management game. There are three main resources in the game (drugs, alcohol, and weapons). By producing more of them - you move up in the game. You can also try to steal resources from other players in the game, and you have to protect your own resources from getting stolen.

One of the really cool parts of the game is you can earn STEEM from playing. The better you do in the game, the more STEEM you can potentially earn. You do not need to pay any STEEM in order to play, although you can advance faster if you do (more on this later).

Creating an Account

Steem Blockchain Account

I assume that most readers already have a Steem blockchain account, but in case you don't, you can get a free account here. The free account usually takes around a week (or more) to approve, so if you want to start instantly - you can pay around $2-3 USD to create one using SteemNinja. There are also several other third party options available to create Steem blockchain accounts - and any of them will work with Drug Wars.

Drug Wars Account

Once you have a Steem account, go to DrugWars.io to join the game. Click the green "Start" button, which will take you to a SteemConnect page to login.

You login to SteemConnect using your Steem blockchain account. You will need to use your active key or master password in order to give the game permission to use your account for gameplay. When you link your account using SteemConnect, the game will not have access to any of your funds.

Interface

The DrugWars.io game is constantly evolving, so it is likely that the UI will change over time. I will describe the interface as it currently is today. While it may not look exactly as I describe here by the time you are reading this guide, hopefully it will be close enough that you should be able to discover the main components based on what I describe here.

Prize Pool

At the top, you should see the daily prize pool. This shows how much is currently in the pool to be distributed to the players at the end of the day, as well as your current share of the pool. Your share won't be very much right now, but we will work on this later in the guide.

Resource Balances

On the right side, you should see your resource balances. This is where you see how much drugs, weapons, and alcohol you currently have.

Account Profile

On the left, you will see a link to your account profile with your current level, and rank compared to other players.

Missions

In the middle are your "Missions". These are suggestions for things you can do to start advancing in the game. If you want, you can explore these now and come back when you are done. Otherwise, you can continue reading the guide to get a better understanding of what each of them are first, and then complete them after reading the guide.

Gameplay

Buildings

The Buildings interface is the main place where you advance your resource production. There are four types of buildings: Office, Drugs, Weapons, and Alcohol. When you pay to upgrade a building, you will increase your stats for whatever service the building provides.

Office Buildings

One of your most important buildings is your Headquarters. By upgrading this building, you will make all your other building upgrades go faster. Also, you cannot upgrade any of your other buildings beyond the level of your Headquarters. (For example, if your HQ is level 3, then all of your other buildings can only be upgraded to level 3.) Personally I recommend getting this upgraded to higher levels fairly quickly.

Upgrading your Training Facility will allow you to purchase units (fighters) and help you crank out new units faster. Units are used to battle other players (more on this later). You will need to upgrade this to level 1 to start producing units. Personally I haven't found upgrading the training facility past level 1 to be super useful early on in the game. If you find yourself impatiently waiting for your units to complete, then it is probably time to consider upgrading this more.

Upgrading your Operation Center will increase the percentage of income that you earn. Early on in the game, this percentage will not really give you much benefit, although it may be something good to consider later in the game once you start earning more.

Upgrading the Pantheon supposedly does nothing. It is up to you if you want to spend any resources on this.

Drug Buildings

Pretty much all of the buildings in the Drugs section will increase your drugs production. By spending resources to upgrade these buildings, you will produce more drugs each day.

Once the building is at level 1, you will see the current production as well as how much it will increase by upgrading it to the next level.

At the bottom of the Drugs section is a Drug Storage building. This building is really important, because it increases the amount of drugs that are safe from being stolen by other players. We will go into this more in later sections, but the important thing to know for now is that it is good to increase this building's level as much as you can to keep more of your Drugs safe.

Weapons and Alcohol Buildings

The buildings in the Weapons and Alcohol sections are pretty much the same as the ones in the Drugs section. Increasing the level of these buildings will increase your Weapon and Alcohol production respectively.

There is also a Weapon Storage and Alcohol Silo building at the bottom of these sections. Similarly to the Drug Storage building, it is a really good idea to upgrade these as much as you can to keep more of your resources safe.

Bootcamp

The Bootcamp section is where you train units. Units are used to fight other players in battles. (We will go more into battles in the next section.) In order to train units, you will first need to upgrade your Training Facility to level 1 if you have not done so already. (See "Building" section.)

Each of the units has: a name, a resource cost, a description, and five characteristics {damage, defense, speed, class, carrying capacity}. The first four characteristics are what determine how good or bad the unit will do in battle. The last characteristic determines how many resources the unit will take home if it survives and you win the battle.

The exact mechanics of how battles are fought are outside the scope of this post, but in general:

Units which do more damage will be better at killing more of the opposing player's units.
Units which have higher defense will not die as quickly when fighting the opposing player's units.
Melee units need to attack other units by getting right up to them, while Range units can attack from a distance. This gives Range units an advantage over Melee units.

To give one example, I once tried to go into battle with another player who had one single Mercenary unit (120 attack, 75 defense, 15m speed, and Range attack). I sent ten Super Bouncer units, which each have 6 attack, 10 defense, 11 speed, and Melee attack. All of my units died, and the other player's Mercenary survived. I lost the battle, hehe.

Battles

Battles are an important element of the game. They provide an easy way to increase your resources (if you know what you are doing).

To go into battle with another player, click on the Battles section. (You will first need to have produced some units in the Bootcamp section.) Unless you already have another player in mind to attack, you will want to go to the "Find Targets" tab to browse players that you can attack.

Once you are here, you will be presented with a list of players. If you pick a player and attack them with a single cheap unit, once the attack is complete, you will get a lot of important information which can help determine if you want to make a larger attack.

In their balances section, you will see how much of each resource the player has in the top line. Each resource shows two values on the line: their current supply and their max supply.

Their current supply is what you care about for battles, because that is how much they will have if you battle them right now. In the above example, the player has 752.64 Drugs, 849.27 Weapons, and 1,620 Alcohol.

On the third line of the resource section, it shows how much of each of their resources is Safe.

Safe means any of their resources below that amount cannot be stolen in battle, so you do not want to battle them unless they have more than the safe amount. Again using the above example, up to 18,750 of each resource is safe. The amounts they have (752.64, 849.27, and 1,620) are way below 18,750, so there is nothing to steal from this player.

You want to look for players that have more resources than their safe numbers, since those are the ones you can steal from.

The other thing that you want to pay attention to is the user's Army section. This is where you will see what units they have.

By looking at the number of units that they have (and the stats of those units - such as damage/defense) you can get a rough idea of how hard it will be to win a battle against them. (Note: the stats of the units aren't shown on this page, so you will need to match up the images from this page with what you see for those units in the Bootcamp section.)

You will need to do a rough estimate calculation to see if the casualties you will likely receive will be worth it in terms of the amount of potential resources there are to steal.

If they have no units - then it should be an automatic win.

The other thing you might see is a Shield. A shield means that you cannot currently go into battle with them. Players get a shield when they first create their account (3 days at the time of writing this post). Once their shield expires, then you are able to attack them.

Once you have identified a player that you want to attack, click the "Attack" button below their name. This will bring you to a page where you can select your army composition. You can adjust the numbers of each of your units, and click "Add" to add them to your army. Try to add enough units where you feel confident you can "out gun" your opponent's units.

Once you are happy with your selected army, click the red "Attack" button.

After you click the attack button, it may take a few seconds to process. Once the hourglass stops spinning, the attack has been queued. You can see the status of the attack by clicking on the "History" tab.

The attack can take up to a few minutes to be confirmed on the blockchain. Once it is confirmed, you can wait until the timer is up to see the results of the attack.

After the timer expires, the battle will occur. Once the battle has completed, it will tell you if you won/lost, how many units were killed on each side, as well as how many drug, weapon, and alcohol resources you acquired from the attack (if you won).

Note: If you still have additional units that were not used as part of the battle, you can queue up more battles with other players. You will just need to wait until the battle you submitted is in confirmed status (which can take up to a few minutes).

The history tab is also where you will see any battles that other players waged against you.

If you are interested in learning more about the battle mechanics, you can check out this post:
Drug Wars on Steem - Intermediate Game Guide: Battles

Heists

Every day, half of the prize pool goes to the heist. You can participate in the heist by "investing" Drugs from the Heist menu. The more drugs you invest in the heist, the more of the heist pool you will receive. One thing to consider though (especially in the early stages of the game) is that if you invest your Drugs on the heist, then you will not have them to spend on upgrading buildings or purchasing new units.

Leaderboard

You can check out which players are currently ranked the highest in the leaderboard section. It is probably not a good idea to try and go into battle with any of these players anytime soon ;)

Discord

Near the bottom of the page is a link to the Drug Wars Discord channel. This is a great place to hang out and learn more about the game as well as interact with the other players. You may even be able to find yourself a Drug Gang to join ... ;)

Game Tips

Keep track of how much of your Drugs, Weapons, and Alcohol are "safe". Be aware of your safe numbers, as well as the amount of resources you have compared to them, since once your resources go above these numbers - you are a more appealing target. Remember, you can increase your "safe" amounts by buying storage/silo buildings from the Buildings section.
An important decision to make is whether or not you want to spend any STEEM on the game. While it is completely possible and totally fine to play the game without spending any STEEM, if you are planning to get into the game - I personally suggest planning to spend around $10-15 USD worth of STEEM in the early stages. This is mainly so that you can get your buildings to the point where you are producing enough resources each day to make playing fun. (Otherwise, it is a lot of waiting early on.)
The game is still new, so occasionally you may run into some glitches. I've found that most glitches can be resolved simply by refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, try logging out and back in. If you find a more serious issue / get stuck, you can report it in the helpdesk channel of the Drug Wars Discord channel.
Most importantly - remember it is just a game. Don't take it too seriously, and have fun :)

Additional Guide