When you first start playing Ninjas Live, it takes a while to learn the ropes and to figure out what your strategy is.  Many players waste tons of money and skill points before they settle down on a strategy that works for them.  Through a lot of trial & error and resetting my ninja characters multiple times, I’ve learned to use certain strategies that help me burn past my rivals and suffer fewer losses along the way.

The strategy that I’m going to walk through is an opening strategy that covers what to do in the beginning between levels 1 to 35.  The idea is that you are building a strong foundation for your character early on in the game, so that it is smooth sailing when you get into the higher, more competitive levels.

Spend Most of your Skill Points on Defense

At the very start of the game, you want to burn through as many missions as you can so that you level up as quickly as possible.  Here’s the important thing – every time you level up and get skill points spend the majority of them on Defense.

If I’m not spending the skill points on Defense, then I’m spending it on Attack.  The ratio between Defense and Attack depends on how much you like to Attack other players.  If you’re a defensive player, meaning you don’t want to attack very often, then spend 100% of your points on Defense.  If you like to attack more often, then use 1 skill point on Attack for every 5 on Defense.

The idea is to build up an impenetrable defense, so that you’re not ever worried about losing to rival clans when they attack.  This alone minimizes your losses greatly because you are now the hunter rather than the hunted.

Another benefit of having a very strong defense early on is that you don’t need to worry about banking your money.  This saves you from wasting 10% of your money on the deposit fee.

Use Your Honor Points Early

If you play the other Storm8 games or if you’ve been good at collecting free Honor Point offers, you should have well over 200 points at the very start of the game.  Use these Honor Points early on in the game to give yourself a big advantage over your competition.

For this strategy, I recommend spending all of your Honor Points on the Ceremonial Chest at the very beginning.  Spend all 200+ points on the Ceremonial Chest and if you are lucky, you will end up with 4+ uncommon or even rare weapons that are significantly more powerful than any weapon, technique or spell that is available in the early stages of the game.

Combine these weapons with your stacked defense and your ninja should be nearly invincible (at least for the first 10 – 20 levels).  But we’re not done yet – let’s give your ninja more advantage!

Recruit 3 Members into Your Clan

The next step is to go to the Ninjas Live Academy clan code list and invite 3 other players to join your clan.  Don’t go nuts and invite more than 3.  The reason is that you want to keep your clan number at exactly 4 (3 other players, plus yourself), so that you’re the top dog in the lower clan bracket division.  Here, you are taking advantage of the game’s bracketing system which breaks up the competition based on clan size.  The first bracket groups all players with clan sizes between 1 to 4 members.  So increasing your clan size to 4 ensures that you have an advantage over all players with a smaller clan and you don’t need to worry about larger clans attacking you.  Plus, you keep your dojo costs low because you only need to equip 4 clan members.

If you want to learn more to about the game’s bracketing system, read our post on choosing the right clan size.

Focus Your Money on Income Clients

So now that you have built your foundations for a very strong character, you can relax and play the game.  Do missions regularly and attack other players to collect money and gain experience points.  When attacking, pick and choose opponents that have smaller clans and weaker weapons to minimize the chance of losing.

With all of the money that you collect, spend them all on maxing out your Income Clients.  Your goal is to always have 5 stars on the best Income client available to you on every open client slot.

This will take a little bit of time to get started, but once you get the ball rolling, it will be very easy to max out your income.  Once you’ve maxed out your income, continue to save your money so that you’re ready to max out again when you unlock new clients.

If you have extra money lying around you can spend it on improving your dojo weapon, but only do it to keep up with the competition and avoid incurring a big upkeep cost.

Start Lining Up your Clan Members

Just because you are keeping your clan size at 4, doesn’t mean you can’t start lining up your recruits.  Post your clan code on Ninjas Live Academy so that your getting a steady stream of requests to join your clan.  However, when you get a request, don’t accept it right away.  Just leave it there and let those requests accumulate.

The idea is that by the time you’re ready to make your break out move at around Level 35, you will be able to accept all of your requests at once and instantly max out your clan size.

So that’s my strategy for playing levels 1 through 35.  Once you reach level 35, everything changes because the game will no longer follow the bracketing system.  That means any player regardless of clan size will be able to attack another player of the same level.  And with your current clan size of 4, you will get crushed unless you max out your clan size (hence, the advice above).  With a maximized clan size, you will need to adjust your strategy.  Luckily there are a few different strategies that work well for level 35 and up, which I will cover in a future post.  But for now, focus on this opening strategy and your character will be in an excellent position to transition into a new strategy when the time comes.

Tags: Attack, bank, beginner, clan-size, clients, Defense, honor-points, Income, missions, money, novice, skill points