There have been numerous “Pay2Win” games that allow people to not spend money at all and still enjoy the game, but if you really want to advance and literally level up, you’re going to need to spend many hundreds, thousands of dollars to succeed.
It’s one thing if you are a parent and you can control what you pay and decide for your children if they play a game such as “Roblox” but if you are an adult, especially one with a lot of money or a credit card, it can be dangerous. So, it will take discipline and patience, especially if you are competitive.
Sure, there are games that make big money on cosmetics (Fortnite) to parents who will spend a lot of money on cards for games like Roblox. But “The Grand Mafia” is another beast. Not only is it a game based on competition, but it’s also a team-base mobile game that encourages communication, active participation (you will want to play daily otherwise you can get kicked out by your faction leaders), time and money.
“The Grand Mafia” is a mobile game from Yotta Games (creator of “Mafia City” and “Chief Almighty: First Thunder BC”) that receives a ton of downloads and people are hooked on the game. While it is mobile, there are people who prefer to play it on their computer via software like BlueStacks.
While there are plenty of YouTube videos of people who will not pay a single dime on “The Grand Mafia”, play the game and after achieving a level 25 mansion, you’ll notice that the game will suddenly shift.
So, I had a chance to discuss with many people on what brought them to The Grand Mafia. Some wanted a game to enjoy and watch their faction grow, to others who saw special offers such as “Injustice 2 Mobile”, where people can partake in “The Grand Mafia” and literally open up gems to purchase characters for that game or play the game as part of various services and pretty much make passive income on it.
Those who had super high influence levels tend to work profitable jobs or have significant others who make good money, those who will occasionally budget and those who simply will not spend a dime. They will work hard, remain patient to slowly grow.
But whatever reason of why you play “The Grand Mafia”, the game is no doubt addictive but it can be very costly for those who are “Pay2Win”. Dare I say, once you start leveling up pass the level 25 mansion, that’s where the game starts to change.
While the free portion is still fun to play, once you get your level 25 mansion, the game starts to change. When you start to play, there is a story mode and you try to beat tasks and missions but once you do all of the stories, you are left with…”is there more?”.
Well, I haven’t seen any progress of the story since I achieved my level 25 mansion. What I played the game for in the beginning, suddenly shifted to a team based competition in which your faction in whatever city you may live in, take part in daily/weekly competitions. All this leads up to the Battle of City Hall and the main game event, the Governors War (which I will get into later in this post).
Each city is different. The higher the number, the newer the number your city is. So, if you are living in cities 1-200, you have been playing the game for many years or spent money to transport to another city.
Your character/mansion is part of a well-oiled machine. You either create a faction of your own and hope people join or you join a larger faction.
You are going to want to join a smaller faction first and grow your mansion to level 17-25. But then after you accomplish that, you will want to grow even more by joining a larger faction. Larger factions offer support, where people can earn “speed-ups” for investments and training and the bigger the faction, the more support you get.
But each cities have their own set of rules decided upon the top 10 factions. Some cities are peaceful, some are all about battling with a heavy emphasis on KE (Kill Events).
The stronger your faction is the better things will be and you get to partake in the Battle of City Hall in which the winning faction of the week can assign buffs to strengthen one’s progress in the game or weaken an enemies progress.
But the main part is about constructing buildings around your mansion. The most people will invest is on Hospitals because 12-13 hospitals will help heal your “associates” (aka soldiers) because after a KE, you can find most of your soldiers either massacred or wounded but can still be healed. It all comes down to having a lot of hospitals.
But how to get more hospitals? You must invest gold. How to get gold? You either pay for it or you play the game by beating casinos or kingpins and slowly (and I emphasize “slowly” if you don’t want to pay) heal.
And for these associates (which are named differently for various countries), they belong to a certain specialty such as the thug (with knives), the hitmen (with guns) or the motorcyclists. For some reason, the game incorporates cars, which you would think would be powerful but has been severely nerfed to the point that they are worthless and if you use them for any raids, expect to be chewed out by your faction members.
You start out with the basic fighters (as you can see above), you slowly level them up until you get T2’s, then T3’s but then you will have to decide how much time you want to invest (especially money) if you want T4’s.
T4’s are currently the top soldiers in this game but to get them is a pain. I’ll get more into that when I discuss the investment portion of the game.
And then there are the “Enforcers”, the bosses of associates depending on their specialty. Aside from your main UB (Underboss) who makes things happen, you will need many enforcers to take part in attacks and for defensive measures.
Each enforcer starts out as gray, then you have to level up to green, blue, purple and reach gold (grand).
There are free enforcers which you can open up during the campaign story mode and they require stamina to level up. You get “free stamina” each day but it begs to ask if you are willing to wait months just to level up one enforcer or buy stamina packs at $4.99 or $19.99 per day and level them up quickly until you get them to Grand Level.
And also, there are paid enforcers in which you can purchase $4.99, $19.99, $49.99 and then $99.99 which have better Attack, HP, Defensive or Crew Attacks. The paid enforcers do make a big difference but if you want to make them to grand, expect to spend around $600-$800 for a paid enforcer. But just be selective and look for paid enforcers that focus on attacks rather than investments.
But this is just part of the spending in “The Grand Mafia”, because as you level up, you start to realize the most important thing aside from gold is liquor, handcuffs, shackles, diamonds” and crypto coins.
Acquiring these are not easy. Diamonds can fortunately be mined but what you are able to mine is not enough if you want to grow bigger. Everything requires taking part in events or simply shelling out money to earn these highly sought items.
In the game, you must go to the investment center and invest in many categories, such Economy, Defenses, Crew, Kingpins, Casino, Advanced Defenses, Advanced Crews, City Hall, Governors War, Equipment, Formation, etc.
And then there are clothing sets, that will make your underboss even stronger or add more elevated stats for construction, investment, etc. And also, need to be leveled up from gray to green to blue to purple and to gold (grand) and also gems must be attached to them.
As you progress, and reach level 60, you can wear King or Godfather Set clothing. The latter is for the big spenders as you can only access it by spending dozens of $99 packs and have many diamonds.
Every little thing, requires a lot of resources. So, a large part of your gametime is farming for resources, may it be cash, arms, cargo, metal or diamonds.
Now, let’s get back to the super soldiers…T4 associates.
As you can see, it requires Investment Center Level 25, level 10 crew attack 1 and a lot of resources.
But this picture makes it sound easy than it really is.
If you decided to pursue T4 associates, you need to level up three centers to level 25. These take a lot of liquor, handcuffs or shackles in order to open up Investment Center Level 25. It’s one thing to get these to level 13 but then it becomes a grind because it requires so much of the three items and to get those, you will spend many months earning them or you will spend several thousand dollars on $99 packs which gives you a lot of certain crates to purchase each item. Each level requires almost 250-500 of those items and buying from the stores, you’ll get 20.
It amazes me to see those who are Free2Play that will grind it out for months or a year to do this, but you really have to be dedicated on wanting T4 and are willing to spend the money to get it.
And then after you level up the three buildings and Investment Center to Level 25, it then requires every single section in Economy and Crew to be to level 10. This is where the diamonds become important because once you reach level 8 and you find yourself needing to over 35-108 million diamonds for level 9 or 10, just for one section.
This is where being part of a huge faction comes into play because if you are going to be one of the top dogs, you will have those who committed themselves to be resource farmers and will contribute millions of diamonds to you. But even then, if you need 75 million or 100 million diamonds and you only have 38 million diamonds. you’ll need to decide, if you want to purchase the resource pack for $99 which gives you many millions of diamonds) but even then, once you invest, you want to start on the next investment, will need to raise more millions of diamonds and then invest in speed up packs, so you can become T4 much faster.
If I have one advice on this, if there are numerous people gunning for T4, wait until its your turn because your faction can only give so many diamonds per day. Have them focus on on T4 player and then once you open them up, then they can focus on the next person.
Unfortunately, the pain of getting diamonds doesn’t end with opening up T4’s. Because then you will need to train or upgrade your T3’s to T4’s. For one T4 soldier, it will take 500 diamonds. So, for less than 5000 T3 soldiers trained, you will need to cough up 3 million diamonds.
Again, you will need to decide if you are willing to go this path. It helps if you are in a larger group but you can see how much players are willing to pay to unlock T4’s and for clothing/gear, the Godfather’s Set.
If you notice an individuals influence level is over 125,000,000, more than likely they are gunning for T4’s. Those who are over 75,000,000 in influence level have invested hundreds or free2play for a year or two, those who reach 150,000,000-200,000,000 million influence have literally spent thousands of dollars on the game or have been free to play for many years. Anything over 250,000,0000 influence level means they spent more than a cheap rental car and those who have over 800,000,000 influence level have invested a lot of money equivalent to a brand new car.
While I won’t divulge how much I spent on this game (note: I’m sharing screen shots from a F2P account), being one of the higher influence level gamers on “The Grand Mafia” is expensive but it was necessary for my faction and my city to thrive and be competitive in the Godfather’s War against cities who have factions with numerous high influence levels. Unfortunately, if your faction does not have big spenders, it’s hard to be competitive.
Your faction will be targeted by the large factions and there are unfortunately, factions out there who take pride in bullying smaller factions for the sake of teaching them a lesson that they need to join a large faction or learn how to protect themselves.
If you do not want to spend money, just level up and join a big faction that has players with high influence levels, so you can grow. But you can’t do it right off the bat…In the beginning, may it be alone, you can still level your mansion quicly to level 10 and grow. But join a smaller faction with 25-30 players and do what’s necessary to level up. Once you reach level 23 or so, then ask to be invited to a very large faction.
But remember, to be part of a larger faction, YOU MUST BE ACTIVE. If you are going on vacation or need time off, let your leaders know. Because if people are spending money on this game, they treat it almost like a job. They will check in during the morning, during their lunch, when they get home, during the weekends, they are very active.
If you don’t think you can put that much time into a game, then leave the faction, transport to the desert and leave your mansion there as fodder for weaker players who want to grow and get kill points or to learn how to steal your underboss and attack.
Overall, I do enjoy “The Grand Mafia” and it’s probably the most expensive game I’ve played. Yotta Games also has “Mafia City” but I prefer “The Grand Mafia” more!
But for “The Grand Mafia”, you have control of what kind of player you want to be.
May it be a support player that farms to make your strongest players even stronger, while you slowly grow (may it be F2P or just casually investing a little). Or you are so competitive that you want to go from a small time player to one of the titans of your city (and you want to spend your hard earned money). Or perhaps a combination of both. Or just a casual gamer who wants to play solo with out a faction just to enjoy the game (or trying to unlock something on another mobile game, by playing “The Grand Mafia”).
May it be a soldier who likes to attack or a farmer of resources (ie. robberies), these are important to the game, so whichever you decide, you will have a place in the larger factions. Just stay active and you’re good!
But overall, “The Grand Mafia” can be one of the most expensive games to play or you can make it one of the cheapest, free games to play. It all comes down to you!
