Yet Another War Era Beginner's Guide
War Era is a free browser game where you join a real world country, build a small economy, and eventually fight in wars alongside your nation. It sounds simple at first, but there are a lot of small systems working together.
Let's just straight to the topic.
The Four Bars You Need to Understand
At the top of your screen you'll see four bars. Everything you do in this game runs through them.
Health (usually shown in green with a heart icon): used when you attack or defend in a battle.
Hunger (red, fork and knife icon): used to eat food like bread, steak, or cooked fish. Eating food restores health.
Energy (blue, lightning icon): used to work for someone else's company as an employee.
Entrepreneurship (pink, lightbulb icon): used to work in your own company.
(status bars)
All four bars refill at the same rate: 10% of the total every hour, and they never overflow past 100%, so waiting longer than 10 hours between logins just wastes free regeneration.
That's why almost every experienced player tells beginners the same thing, check in roughly every 10 hours if you can. Two or three times a day is enough. You don't need to be online constantly, you just need to spend what you have before it caps out.
What to Do First: Missions
Missions are the only real way to gain XP and level up, so this should always be your top priority, above everything else in this guide.
You'll have four types of missions:
Starting missions: a one-time set for new players, worth a large chunk of XP, gold, and crates once you finish enough of them.
(starting mission)
Daily missions: reset every day, give smaller XP rewards individually but add up fast if you clear all of them.
(daily mission)
Weekly missions: reset once a week, worth much more XP per mission than dailies, so try not to leave any unfinished before the reset.
(weekly mission)
The latest v0.25.5 adds Monthly missions and Milestones as well, another way to gain more XP.
(monthly mission)
(milestones)
Daily reward: Each day you logged in after the daily reset you'll get to claim daily rewards, keep the streak, and you'll get rewarded with 7-days jackpot.
(daily reward)
If a mission looks too hard or too expensive to complete (for example, eating cooked fish when you don't have any, or landing a certain number of critical hits), you can reroll it for a new one.
(reroll a mission)
The first reroll is usually free, and each one after that costs more gold, so don't reroll carelessly.
Every level up gives you 4 skill points to spend, which is where the next section comes in.
(skill points)
Skill Points: Economy Comes First
This is probably the single most repeated piece of advice across the whole War Era community, and for good reason: new players should put almost all their early skill points into economic skills, not fight skills.
(fight skills)
The skills that matter early are:
Energy: increases how much you can work at someone else's job.
Production: increases how much you produce per unit of energy or entrepreneurship spent.
Entrepreneurship: increases how much you can work in your own company.
Companies Limit: lets you own more companies. Put a point here whenever you're about to build (or could afford to build) a new one.
(economic skills)
Skip Attack, Health, Armor, Crit, and every other combat skill completely until you're at least level 18 to 20. Skip Management too, since with no workers it does almost nothing for you.
A common and easy pattern to follow is to put points into Energy and Production roughly side by side, add a point to Companies Limit whenever a new factory is within reach, and only add a point or two into Entrepreneurship occasionally.
The exact "optimal" allocation shifts a little level by level, and there are community-built calculators (linked at the bottom of this guide) that will tell you exactly how many points to put where if you want to be precise. But the principle stays the same all the way to level 20: economy first, always.
You can fully respec your skills, but usually only twice for free over your whole account, and after that it costs gold based on how many points you've spent.
(reset skills)
There's also a weekly cooldown before you can reset again. So don't throw points around carelessly, follow a plan.
Building Your Companies
You start the game with one company already built, producing a random raw material in a random location. Your goal from here is to grow that into a small self sufficient production chain.
The core four materials almost every guide agrees on are limestone, concrete, iron, and steel.
Limestone and iron are raw materials you can produce directly.
Concrete is crafted from limestone, and steel is crafted from iron, and both concrete and steel are what you'll need constantly to build new companies and upgrade existing ones.
Getting your own limestone and iron production going early means you stop relying on the market to buy the materials you need to expand, which saves a surprising amount of gold over time.
(companies supply chain)
Each company has two things you can upgrade:
The Automated Engine (often shortened to AE): this passively generates production points every single day for free, without you having to click anything.
Each level roughly doubles what the previous one produced, and each level costs steel to unlock. This is usually your main source of income once your economy gets going.
(automated engine)
Storage: this holds the production points you've built up until you use them. For an active player who checks in regularly and has no workers, storage barely matters.
Most guides recommend leaving it at level 1, or upgrading it to level 2 at most as a small safety net in case you miss a day or two of logging in.
Don't waste materials pushing storage higher than that early on, it does very little for you compared to putting that cost into the automated engine instead.
(storage)
A build order that shows up again and again across different guides, in different languages, works like this:
Build company 1, upgrade its automated engine to level 3.
Build company 2, upgrade it to level 3.
Build company 3, upgrade it to level 3.
Bring companies 1 through 3 up to level 4.
Build company 4, upgrade it to level 4, then build 5 and 6 the same way.
Bring all 6 companies up to level 5, then continue growing from there.
If you're aiming to eventually fight in wars, a common benchmark is having around six companies with their automated engine at level 6 before you switch any points into combat.
If you want to stay a pure economy player long term, you keep expanding toward 10 or 12 companies and pushing all of them toward level 6 or 7 over time.
There's no need to decide this on day one, just follow the build order above and make the call once you're closer to level 20.
Money Rules for New Players
Keep this simple: rotate your gold on building companies, don't spend it on gear or upgrades you don't need yet.
Don't gamble on cases. Every bit of gold you save should go toward building new companies or buying the concrete and steel needed to upgrade them.
Patience here pays off enormously later.
Understanding Production Bonuses
Once you're producing regularly, a few extra multipliers start to matter a lot:
Deposit Resource Bonus: certain regions randomly get a temporary bonus ranging from 20% to 40% for producing a raw material, lasting anywhere from one to five days.
You can check the map for regions with an active deposit if you want a short term boost.
(deposit map)
Strategic Resource Bonus / country specialization: each country gets a bonus, sometimes fairly large, to producing one specific material, based on which regions it controls and how its government has set its policies.
This bonus can be checked on the map as well, and it stacks on top of everything else.
(strategic resources map)
(specialization map)
Fidelity bonus: if you hire (or become) a worker, staying with the same company for consecutive days slowly raises production by 1% per day, up to a maximum of 10%.
This only matters once you start dealing with workers, which for most new players is still a while away.
(fidelity bonus)
Party ethics: some governments choose policy paths that boost either farming type resources (plants, fish, livestock, grain) or industrial resources (ammo, lead, oil, steel, concrete, iron, limestone).
This is set at the country level, not something you personally control, but it's worth knowing why one material might suddenly be much more profitable than another in your country.
(party ethics)
None of these change your wage or your costs, they just mean more output for the exact same amount of energy or entrepreneurship spent, so it's always worth placing your companies somewhere with a decent bonus rather than wherever you happen to start.
Should You Hire Workers?
For a genuinely new player, the honest answer is no, not yet.
(create new job offer)
The math right now is tight enough that hiring workers often produces only a tiny fraction of a cent in profit per production point, and that thin margin disappears completely the moment a region's resource bonus drops, the local market price dips, or you're forced to relocate your company (which costs concrete and isn't cheap).
Right now, wages are close to matching the market value of the goods being produced, so unless you have a specific and well calculated advantage, workers are more of a long term positioning move than a real source of profit.
Get your own factories running well with the free automated engine first, and only think about hiring once you understand exactly how the wage versus output math works in your favor.
Crates (cases)
You'll get free crates from the daily rewards, from completing missions, and occasionally as a random drop after battles.
As a beginner, sell your crates instead of opening them. Opening crates is essentially gambling, and the average value you get back rarely beats just selling them directly.
(open case and sell case)
The only exception is when a mission specifically requires you to open one, in which case there's no way around it.
Gear and Equipment
Weapons and armor come in a rarity ladder: basic/gray, reinforced/green, advanced/blue, elite/purple, legendary/yellow (gold), and mythic/red, each one stronger and far more expensive than the last.
As a new player, stick to gray gear only. It's cheap, it's plentiful, and you genuinely do not need anything better while you're still building your economy.
(equip gray gear)
Don't spend more than a couple gold on any single piece.
If you do end up with items from crates, gray, green, and blue gear can usually be scrapped for crafting materials or sold, while anything purple or better is generally worth selling for a real profit instead of using it, at least until you're much further along.
(gear tier and what to do)
One important thing to know: the in-game market where you can buy and sell equipment and items doesn't open up until you reach level 7. Until then, whatever gear you find from crates or starting equipment is what you're working with.
Fighting and Battles
You don't need to avoid combat completely as a beginner, fighting a little is actually useful because it satisfies mission requirements and helps drain your health and hunger bars so they don't sit wastefully full.
Here's how it actually works.
Finding the right side to fight for: open the Battles page and look for fights your country or Military Unit has issued an order for, these are usually marked with your country's flag or a colored order indicator.
Following orders gives you extra damage bonuses, so it's always worth prioritizing those fights over random ones.
You're never really fighting "against" the other side directly, you're adding your damage to whichever side you're supporting, so pay close attention to which button (usually labeled Attack or Defend) actually corresponds to your country's side, since it isn't always the one you'd guess at first glance.
(finding your side)
How a battle is structured: a battle is made up of rounds, and the first side to win two rounds wins the whole battle.
Each round is won by whichever side reaches 300 "ground points" first.
(ground points)
Ground points get handed out every two minutes based on which side dealt more damage during that window, so a single fight can shift back and forth several times before it's decided.
(battle score)
What your combat stats actually do:
Attack determines your base damage per hit.
Precision is your chance to actually land a hit, missed hits deal half damage and can't crit.
Crit chance is your chance to land a critical hit, and crit damage is how much extra damage a critical hit deals on top of a normal one.
Crit damage is boosted damage that above normal damage on hit.
Armor reduces how much health you lose per hit you take.
Dodge gives you a chance to take zero damage and avoid wearing down your equipment on a hit entirely.
Health is what lets you keep attacking, since every unequipped hit costs a chunk of your health bar, and more max health simply means more hits before you run out.
Loot chance gives you a small percentage chance per hit to instantly earn a crate, and an even smaller chance at a rarer elite crate.
Hunger limits how much food you can eat to refill health mid battle.
As a beginner without good gear, don't try to top the damage charts, that's not realistic yet and it isn't the point. Instead, hit cheaply and often.
(top damage chart)
Since loot chance triggers on every single hit regardless of how much damage that hit does, spreading a lot of cheap hits across a battle is actually a solid way to farm crates early on, even with weak gray gear.
(loot chance)
There's also a Pill item that gives a large temporary attack boost, but it comes with a noticeable attack penalty afterward, so save it for when you're seriously committing to a fight rather than using it casually.
(pill)
A quick money saving tip for later on: armor and dodge don't scale in a straight line, they follow a formula where the effective percentage you get flattens out the higher your total points get.
(armor and dodge effectiveness)
In practice this means that once you're gearing up seriously, there are ranges where spending more on better armor or dodge gear gives you so little extra benefit it's rarely worth the cost, because the effective percentage gained per point shrinks so much that a cheaper combination gets you almost the same effective percentage.
This isn't something to worry about as a total beginner, but it's worth knowing exists so you don't overspend on gear later without checking first.
Community Basics: Referral, Discord, and Your Military Unit
A few small housekeeping things that matter more than they seem:
Set your referrer before level 10. Go to your profile, find the Referrals tab, and enter the username of whoever invited you .
Once you pass level 10 you can no longer set one, so do this early. It costs you nothing and gives a small reward to both of you.
(referral)
Join your country's Discord server. Nearly every active country community runs one, and it's genuinely the fastest way to get help, find a well paying job, get war orders explained to you, and avoid mistakes.
Don't be shy about asking questions there, every experienced player was once completely lost too.
(join country discord)
Join a Military Unit (MU) once you're ready to fight semi seriously. Being in an active MU with a strong headquarters and regular orders gives you extra damage bonuses in battle, on top of whatever your country provides.
Early on, joining any reasonably active MU from your country is fine, you can always move to a stronger one later.
(military unit)
Eating Food
When you start, you'll get some free food in your inventory as part of your starter kit, usually bread, steak, and cooked fish.
Sell most of it. Steak and cooked fish, sell all of it, don't eat any of it.
Bread, sell about 80% and keep the rest, since some daily missions will ask you to eat food, and that's really the only time you should be eating any early on.
(food items)
Outside of a mission that specifically requires it, there's no good reason to eat food as a total beginner, your health regenerates on its own anyway, so turn that starter food into gold instead of burning it.
Common Mistakes New Players Make
Spending skill points on combat before level 18 to 20, when economy skills would have compounded far more value.
Opening crates instead of selling them, especially early when the odds simply aren't in your favor.
Buying expensive gear when gray items do the exact same job for a fraction of the cost.
Hiring workers before understanding whether the wage actually turns a profit.
Letting your bars sit full for hours, which wastes free regeneration that could have gone toward leveling or production.
Leaving daily or weekly (or possibly monthly) missions unfinished, since missions are your main source of XP.
Forgetting to set a referrer before level 10.
Trying to run before you can walk, rushing into serious war mode without an economic foundation to support it.
Useful Community Tools
A handful of player made tools come up constantly across guides and are genuinely worth bookmarking:
War Era Coach - can help to show you the rope upon reaching level 15.
warera.wiki – the general community wiki covering mechanics, military ranks, and XP requirements.
toolbox.warera.wiki – production bonus lookups by region, plus various player and transaction tools.
warerastats.io/tools – market data, wages, loot statistics, and a production calculator.
arcana.warera.wiki – helps you see which products and jobs are actually profitable right now.
https://intel.warera.wiki/builder - a combat build planner that shows expected damage output based on your gear and skills.
Community made economic and battle skill calculators (search your country's Discord for the current links, since these tools change and get replaced fairly often).
When to Actually Switch to War Mode
A benchmark that shows up repeatedly across guides: aim for level 20 before fully committing to war mode, with level 18 as an absolute minimum.
By that point you should ideally have somewhere around six companies with their automated engine at level 6. Once you hit that point, you have a real choice to make: keep your points in economy and stay a builder, split your time between both, or respec fully into combat skills and head to the battlefield.
(6 companies with AE6)
None of these paths are mandatory, but going in with a solid economic foundation first will make whichever path you choose afterward far smoother, since you won't be constantly short on gold, materials, or gear.
That's it, another War Era beginner's guide,
TL;DR
Finish your missions,
keep your economy skills climbing,
get your core companies running, save your gold,
and ask your country's community when you're unsure about something.
Do that consistently and the rest of the game opens up naturally.
Good luck out there.
cheers!
~ /user/69bd432766cd740733175da7