Starting Tips, Tricks, Strategies, and Good Game Play Habits

The process of starting out as a new player in Farmville 2 means starting small and building your farm through a process of regular play. That process can be as slow or as fast as you want, largely based upon how often you play the game, and that subject makes up the first set of tips for game play.

Scheduled Play

The base game provides you with a set number of resources that you can use – Power, Feed, Fertilizer, and Water – all of which are refilled over time. What that means is that players who can play the game several times throughout the day will find their progress to be much faster and easier than players who play only one session each day.

Crop Method vs. Scheduled Play

The obvious factor that will dictate how often that the average player logs in and plays is Crops; when a crop takes 8 hours, most players consider that to be the natural time gap before they should log in, and it is not unusual for players who base their sessions on the crop that they are currently growing. That approach works, but it is not the most efficient approach...

The reason that it is not preferable has to do with the large amount of XP, Coin, and other resources that players can obtain by logging in three to four times a day rather than just when your crop is ready, as in addition to crop harvesting, planting, and the like, there is considerable advantage to using up the available Power to craft as well as harvesting the rapid-grow trees that you have on your farm, and feeding the odd animal that completes its cycle quicker than your crops.

Planning Ahead for Quest Resources

If you take nothing else from this section and the Hints and Tips than this single entry you will still be way ahead of the game - and to emphasize this point, the flag above thar reads !! VERY IMPORTANT !! is there to get your attention because the following is VERY IMPORTANT!

As you work through each of the Levels and each of the grouped Levels per guide section you will flag different Missions along the way. Each Mission has a proper name, which you can see in small print at the bottom of the basic description for the active Quest - for an example look at the image below:

In the image illustration above you will see that the Mission Name is “If Wishes Were Pigs” (see note”I” highlighted in the illustration above), while the Quest Name is “The Longest Summer” (see note”II” highlighted in the illustration above).

The protocols that are used to identify the Mission and Quest names is consistent from Mission to Mission, and this is important because each time you flag a new Mission that Mission consists of the stated number of Quests, and in order to save time and wasted effort, you should get into the habit of looking up the Mission Listing in the Mission Listings Section of this Guide so that you can see what resources will be needed to complete the entire Mission (all of its Quests in other words).

Knowing what resources you will be needing for the as-yet-unflagged portions of the Mission and its Quests will allow you to grow/harvest/request or otherwise obtain the specific resources in advance of their need, which as you can surely see, will be of immense help to you!

So to reiterate, this Hint and Tip is: When you flag a new Mission you should immediately consult the Mission and Quests List Section to note what materials, resources, and/or Items will be required for all of the Quests that are part of the Mission so that you can work ahead of your needs, thus saving time and extra effort.

Friends, Friends, Friends

This may be an obvious hint but networking with your friends to play the game together in a supportive manner is really very important to strategic game play! In fact it is so important that when the game was designed this time around a mechanism was put into it to offer gamers the ability to add other Farmville 2 players who they do not know – basically random players – to their neighbors list specifically without the need for those players to be part of your Facebook Friend List.

If you do not have a lot of friends from your Friend List playing Farmville 2, taking advantage of the neighbor connection system is a very good tactic. The reason for that has more to do with how much good that your neighbors will do for you and your farm, and how important the bonus is that you will gain by helping out on your neighbor's farms.

When your neighbors visit your farm they have a choice of helping you out in a variety of ways – from fertilizing/harvesting/watering your crops, to feeding animals, tending trees, or simply activating different objects on your farm for the coins that are generated by doing so.

The important thing for you to understand is that, with respect to the crops and trees, no matter what your neighbor did when they helped out by tending to them, once you have logged in you have full control over how that assistance is actually applied.

A good example of how to make better use of this can be seen in a typical crop assist. When you log in you have the option of activating the icon over their character and letting the assist that they gave you play out immediately, but doing so tends to be far less productive and effective than holding off on the use of those assists until you have set up the correct conditions. If your crops are ready to harvest, using the neighbor's assists to accomplish that makes no sense at all.

You are much better off harvesting the crops yourself, and then planting a new set of crops and then using their assist to water them, which will allow you to water more crops than the 30 Water limit of your recharged Water resources (ignoring whatever wells you have available).

In addition to using the assists to water new crops, you can use them to accelerate crop access by planting, watering, and then fertilizing the new crop, and then activating the assist which then causes the helper to instantly grow your crop, allowing for immediate harvesting!

Farm Helpers

In addition to the Neighbor Assists that you can get from your neighbors visiting your farm, you also have the Farm Helpers – the neighbors who respond favorably to your requests that they volunteer as Farm Helpers – which can give you a full queue of Helpers each day. The Farm Helpers appear sitting on the hay bales at the bottom right side of the screen – and as you level up your farm you gain access to more Helper availability each day.

You can utilize the Helpers in the same fashion that you use your Neighbor Assists but with the bonus that where your Neighbor Assists are locked in to whatever grid square or resource that they chose to use their five daily helper Actions on, the four actions that a Farm Helper offers you can be used on whatever crop grid and action you want them to.

Remember to make the most of the free moves/assists that both the Neighbor Assists and Farm Helpers provide you each day.

Speed Feeding

A new element to the game, once you have completed the required steps of mastering an animal and completing the related missions in the game, is the Speed Feeding system, which allows you to use the special feed which you receive each time you obtain an Animal Mastery Ribbon.

You will not actually see the Animal Mastery options until your character reaches Level 9, which is the starting level for the new system. Animal Mastery is very similar to Crop Mastery in that the levels are obtained for each feeding (for Crops it is for each harvest), though there is a significant difference in the target totals per level, which can be much larger numbers for Animals than you typically see from Crops.

The important point is that with each of the Animal Mastery Ribbons you unlock you will receive a handful of Speed Feeding bags, which you can save up and use strategically to help in completing challenges that require X number of feedings for the specified animal type.

The special Speed Feeding bags allow you to feed any animal whenever you want to – they do not have to have the hunger indicator over their head. In addition to that, you get double-Mastery Points for using Speed Feeding, which means you will potentially be unlocking Mastery Ribbons faster.

The final point that should be made here is that the more Mastery Ribbons you have for each type of animal, the more potential resources they will generate upon being harvested both for regular feeding (which can only happen when the animal has the hunger indicator over its head) and Speed Feeding (which can only happen when the animal is NOT hungry).

Creating Neighbor Teams

While it may not be obvious at first the very wide variations in WRU's for the different trees in the game when it is combined with the desirability to maintain a targeted number of specific trees in your farm can create a situation in which the availability of resources - and specifically Water Resource Units - can become a serious challenge for the average player.

Short of adding an extra session or two per day in order to address the tree issue by leveraging the time-based refilling of WRU's there is an alternative strategy that the player can employ that is far more effective and far less intrusive than other methods simply because it makes use of activities already in place, and that is the assignment of specific units to each of your friends/neighbors.

Specifically this requires you to have a good communication base with your neighbors; each of whom has five helper Actions that they can use each day on your farm. All that is required is to ask them to always use those five actions on the same set of resource Items each day.

In other words Neighbor A always waters your five Pine Trees, Neighbor B always waters your five Walnut Trees, and so on. They can in turn assign you a specific set of targets for you to use your helper Actions on in order to benefit as well, but the end result of this is that Trees no longer factor as a resource issue!

Give that some thought, and be sure that you work with neighbors and friends who play the game on a daily basis and who are committed fans, and you should find that this tactic makes your farming life a lot easier.

Level Leveraging

The final (and very important) hint pertains to Leveling. Whenever you level your farm that process has the immediate effect of maturing any crops to fully grown state, resetting the hunger status for all of your animals, and causing all of the trees on your farm to a fully-grown state, which means you can instantly harvest them. In addition to that the game will also offer the player bonus resources like Power, Water, or Fertilizer as part of the leveling rewards.

Strategically you should always try to complete each level with as many crops planted and in grow state as you can, and with all of your trees watered and in grow state. All of your animals should be fed (and thus not in a hungry state). By taking care to arrange all of these conditions you can use the leveling to provide an extra full harvest across the board, which offers you extra XP, resources, and income for just a small measure of planning.

Good Play Habits

While this is easy to overlook, veteran players always make sure to visit each of their neighbor's farms and use the daily five assists that are available to them, for the simple reason that doing so is the best way to encourage your neighbors to do the same for you!

It is a sad fact that a lot of players will not make the effort to visit your farm and use their five assists each day unless you are doing the same. Those assists can be incredibly valuable, but only if they are applied to the right targets on your farm – which means crop squares, trees, or animals. Because of that you should always lead by example, and be sure to use your five daily assists on their farm on objects that will benefit them.

What that means is using them on crop squares, trees, or animals, with that order of priority, and trying to refrain from only targeting objects like wells and water troughs – which you may want to do on the off chance that the action will gain you additional Water resource units. The reason for that is simple, really... Your neighbors will notice when all of your Actions are self-serving, and they will notice when your actions genuinely benefit them.