Surviving and thriving amidst the zombie apocalypse in strategy hit Dark War: Survival requires you to build a prosperous settlement with long-term planning, economic acumen and excellent communication. As you take in survivors, recruit heroes and produce resources, you’ll come across ever greater challenges – and equally exciting opportunities. Here are some tips to help you establish a firm foothold in this unrelenting world.

Survivors are the backbone of your production line, so it’s important to take care of their welfare with proper food supply and medical care, and then assign them to the most suitable roles. By listening to their stories (which pop up as exclamation marks above their heads), you also get rewarded with extra resources.

Once in a while, a survivor may earn a positive skill that can boost their productivity dramatically, so watch out for light bulbs. And every time your survivor population changes, or when survivors earn skills, be sure to visit the Resident Status screen to optimise production.

Your Watchtower is the base’s most important structure, since it not only helps protect the survivors, but also determines the maximum level of other structures. So always plan to save up and upgrade the Watchtower as soon as possible, especially since later levels require ample resources and take hours or even days to finish construction. For beginners, try to hit level 7 quickly, since that’s when the world map will open up with plenty of new features and opportunities.

Throughout the day, your Radar will continuously scan the world map to discover interesting opportunities. By sending heroes or troops to resolve those events, you’ll get to earn plenty of valuable loot, including precious hero fragments that can be assembled for the real deal.

As you complete more Radar events, the Radar will become more effective, providing more and better events with each scan. And by upgrading the Radar building, you can reduce the wait between scans as well.

One of the best ways to spend your hard-earned rubies is to unlock slots at the hero training center. Thanks to this feature, you don't have to level up all of your heroes. Instead, you only need to level up the five heroes assigned as instructors, and other heroes will automatically level up to match the level of the weakest instructor. By unlocking slots under each instructor, you can get more heroes to benefit from this handy system.

The zombie apocalypse turns out to be a good time to look for bargains. At the Black Market, you can find heavily discounted deals for resources, speed-up boosts, recruitment tickets and more. The deals will be refreshed daily, so try to check in regularly to see what’s up. You can also try to refresh manually by spending rubies should you find yourself in a rush. And with every refresh, there’s a higher chance to find deals for high-value items too.