Allies: The Most Important Means of Winning MAA
You need allies first and foremost (50 is your maximum). Without a lot of allies, you will not succeed in the game. This should be your first priority in improving your game.
If you don’t know a bunch of Avengers players on Facebook, you could conceivably bug all of your Facebook friends into playing the game. This is generally not a good idea. Most veterans of Facebook ignore game requests as a rule, and if you keep bombarding your buddies with game requests, you’ll not only gain few allies, you risk losing a lot of friends.
In my first couple days of gameplay, I quickly discovered that S.H.I.E.L.D. points (or lack thereof) would be the bane of my Agent’s existence. You see, every time one of your heroes gains a level, you have to send them off to training by paying a certain amount of S.H.I.E.L.D. points. Problem is, there is no way of earning S.H.I.E.L.D. points by playing the game normally ([t]he only other recourse you have is to check Tony Stark’s welfare bonus tower each day for a chance at maybe getting 3 points). You have to spam your Facebook friends begging them to send you some. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want to do is write messages to people I haven’t talked to in ages asking that they please sent me some S.H.I.E.L.D. points. Granted, this might not be a problem for some players out there with a close knit group of Marvel fan Facebook friends, but it’s nevertheless a social burden that does nothing to enhance the gameplay experience. – Andy Yen
Your best bet is to find people who already play and ask them to be your allies. If you don’t want to invite a horde of gamers onto your personal Facebook account, open a second account and use it only for gaming.
Allies give you Shield Points, silver, unstable ISOs, and lots of consumable goodies you will want when you “visit” them once a day. They fly your planes for you on the flight deck, saving you from having to pay gold for pilots. They are your first priority as a new player.
When you get more than 50, you will be unable to access the lowest-level allies on your Ally Bar (you’ll see it, Cartoon Tony’s face is always the first one in line). You can have as many as you want, but you can only get goodies from the highest-ranked 50 allies in your list. You can, of course, send gifts to all of your allies. If there is an upper limit on how many allies you can have, I’m unaware of it.
Ally Etiquette: A common mistake for new players is to bombard their allies with 50 gifts a day. Don’t. The maximum gifts a person can have is 350. If you and 49 other allies send 50 gifts a day to a person, that’s 2,500 gifts they receive. 2,150 of those will disappear, possibly including items that the person might actually want. I would suggest sending no more than ten a day: either energy or shield points. During Special Operations missions, where most people are scrambling for UISOs in order to actually play the ops, send a maximum of ten UISOs. If it’s a holiday season, like Christmas or Valentine’s Day, where you’re able to send unusual items, send a few of those, but don’t deluge your allies in Christmas cookies or valentines from Ms. Marvel. A few of these go a long way. And as a rule of thumb, don’t send items that you get in ally visits (with the exception of energy and SP).
Unless all of your allies are very, very low level, or you get a request, never send the blue Strong ISO-8 chip. (It’s actually a red chip, but the game designers made a mistake way back in the day and never bothered fixing it.) Few people need it, and people tend to react negatively when they get one (or 50!).