By the players, for the players, this is a guide to Chom Isis, and invaluable information for those new to the game. Check here before you post a question on the Forum, you may save yourself some time. If you feel there is anything missing, please post it on the Forum and I will endeavour to get it added.

The mission in Chom Isis is to be the last player with pawns. Pawns are normal inhabitants of the city of Acerine Prime, and the Players take the role of their rich overseers working behind the scenes.

Players bid to "own" pawns, and then affect their day to day lives by setting Jobs with Operatives. This all costs Resources which are earnt from owning pawns and keeping them happy. Jobs can have a positive or negative effect on pawns.

To finish the game, firstly a number of Votes must be accumulated for the Endgame, and then its a game of attrition until only one player remains.

Once you have logged in, this is the first screen you are presented with. It is split into 3 sections. the top part shows links to other screens on the game. The Middle part gives important infomation about the game and the bottom section give information on pawns you currently own.

Navigation Icons

This opens up the Mini Window, so you can monitor Chom without having a Browser open all the time.

Takes you to the Game Viewer.

Takes you to the Mail Page.

Takes you to the Set Jobs screen.

Goes to the Pawn Auction.

Goes to the Public Message Board.

Takes you to Skynet.

Opens the Journal

Goes to the Help Forum

Goes to Options.

General Information

Here you can see how many resources you currently have, your company affiliation, your home territory, and your Glyph. You can set your Glyph in the Options menu. On the right hand side there is a map which shows your home location, the location of all your pawns, and the state of each location. A red location is a 'bad' area, where jobs will be cheaper to do, and a green area is a 'good' area, where jobs are more expensive. Yellow locations are neutral. You get more resources every midnight, and the amount you get is based on how happy your pawns are.

Pawn Information

Here you get detailed information about all the pawns you currently own.Pawns are vital in Chom Isis, and its a good idea to keep an eye on how yours are doing. The information you are shown is;

• Name - the pawns name
• Wealth - how rich the pawn is
• Wealth Happiness - how happy the pawn is because of his money
• Love Happiness - how happy the pawn is with his love-life
• Hobbies Happiness - how happy the pawn is with his hobby
• Overall - overall how happy the pawn is with his life (an average of Wealth,Love and Hobby)
• Employer - the company that employs him (if any)
• Job Grade - his level in the company (if any)
• Spouse - the name of his girlfriend/wife (if he has one)
• Spouse Grade - how things are between him and his spouse
• Hobby - What your pawn gets upto in his spare time (if anything)
• Hobby Grade - how good he is at his hobby (if he has one)
• Home Territory - where your pawn lives.

Here is an example pawn layout;

Name

Wealth

Wealth

Love

Hobbies

Overall

Employer

Grade

Spouse

Grade

Hobby

Grade

Home

Mr. Interesting

Gate Prime

Hoppa Technician

Gareth

Talked on Gaia

Gambling

Expert

You need to keep an eye on your pawns happiness levels. If any of them hits suicidal then you have to act very quickly to stop them killing themselves. There are 10 levels of happiness, each symbolized by a smilie icon

The happier overall your pawns, the more resources you get from them. The overall happiness of pawns is also shown on the Game Viewer screen, as is information on the different levels a pawn can reach in Hobby, Love and Jobs. An unhappy pawn is susceptible to Jobs such as Disruption, and may kill themselves.

The happiness levels of pawns are updated at midnight every day, or when a job affected them occurs. If a pawn has a bad job and a bad Love-life their overall happiness will slowly go down (A pawn cannot be unhappy about Hobby happiness). If a pawn has a good job and a good love-life their overall happiness will increase. Overall happiness can also be affected by jobs such as Winfall, Disruption and Kill Spouse.

Pawn Suicide

If a pawn gets to a suicidal level in Wealth, Love or Hobby levels then they may kill themselves. Not only will you lose the pawn if they kill themselves, you will also lose half your current resources. Its a good tactic to force a pawn to suicide, as its cheaper than murder, and the player loses money as a result. A good way to stop suicide in the short term is to Winfall your pawns, but the best way to avoid it is get them jobs and girlfriends.

This is a small browser window that gives you information on the game. It has 3 pages that it cycles through that show;

• Last Message Posted on the General Message board
• Information on your pawns
• If new mail is recieved and current resources

It means you can keep an eye on the game without having a full browser window open, useful for work. You can also set how often it refreshes in the Options page.

This page gives you a general overview of the game. At the top there is a list of every player and their glyph, and next to that you will find your relative position in the game. It also shows you the people directly above and below you. You can only find out more information on your overall game position by swapping information with other players.

The next section on the page gives a list of all pawns currently in the game, their overall happiness, and a Tick or Cross, indicating whether they are currently available or not. A Tick indicates that the pawn is currently for sale in the pawn, a Cross shows that it is already bought.

The bottom section of the pages give information on what Job levels are available in the various companies, and also the Love and Hobby levels available.

If you need to get a message out to everyone, this is the place to do it. Any game-wide announcements will be made here as well, such as random events, suicides and player information will be posted here. To post here simply goto the Mail screen and type out a message as normal, but choose the recipient as "Public Board".

Some of the most damaging scams have been pulled off through the message board, including such things as the publication of a players entire list of pawns, messages of such severe mis-information as to confuse even the writer of the game and numerous claims to be "Gareth". Its fair to say that anything posted here, especially anonymously can be taken with a pinch of salt.

When a Job is carried out by an operative, there is a chance that the press will hear of it. When they do, a story will be posted on Skynet. The story may give away some information about the pawn, the owner, or even the person who set the job. Even if no information is given away, it may give you warning that someone is trying to do jobs against your pawns. It does not matter whether a job succeeds or fails, it may get reported on Skynet. Only "interesting" jobs are reported on Skynet, basic Help jobs are not newspaper worthy.

The more you spend on a murder, the more chance there is of it being reported.

If you have any questions that are not answered here, or anywhere else on Chom Isis, post them on the help forum. There are several players who have played Chom a fair bit in one incarnation or the other, and should be able to answer your question quickly. Rob also checks the forum and if other players can't answer it he can (probably). he'd prefer you didn't email him, as allegedly he has better things to do than speak to the likes of you. Also, if you are having a problem, the chances are other are as well, so a question answered on the forum may solve other peoples questions as well.

This is a small page that reminds you of your Player Name (the one that appears within Chom Isis), your real name (in case you forgot, and you dropped your name tag), your login name and password (in case you forgot them since logging in to view this page). More importantly, here you can set your player Glyph and the refresh rate for the mini-window.

To change your glyph, first you need to get your image hosted. . Please make sure your Glyph is no more than 50 x 50 pixels, or Rob will beat you. Once you have your Glyph hosted somewhere simply press "NEW" enter the URL of it (for example "http://www.icar.co.uk/pics/playerglyphs/standard.jpg") into the text box and press "Submit". There is some free hosting available at Brinkster, and if you click here with the username of "chomglyphs" and a password of "chomisis" you should be able to upload your Glyph.

The refresh rate for the mini-window is in place for those people at work who are monitored on how many pages they view...the default is to refresh every minute, but you may want to increase this.

You need to buy pawns from the Auction . Pawns will be added every now and again to the auction, so if you want a pawn, check it regularly.

To bid on a pawn, goto the auction, and place your bid against a pawn (only do one pawn at a time) and click the submit button. If no-one beats your offer in the next 12 hours, the pawn is yours...if someone else bids, the 12 hours begins again. You can only bid on a pawn if you have the money at the time. If you lose the money before the auction ends then you lose the money and the pawn stays.

When you buy a pawn, remember theres more to the cost than just the auction price. Left to its own devices, a pawn will get more and more unhappy until it commits suicide. They need a series of Jobs (see below) done on them before they are stable. These jobs can cost in the region of 400, so don't get roped into paying over the odds for a pawn. Once you have a pawn it will be listed on your login page.

Selling Pawns

You can also put one of your pawns up for auction. This works in the same way, only once the auction is over you will recieve the money from the auction. The pawn will retain any status increases you have paid for it. You may want to do this if you have a lot of pawns but are short on money.

You will spend a fair bit of time here. Nearly all your private communication is done via here, including any information operatives have for you. The area is split up into 3 areas. In the top section you can compose and send messages and money. The middle section shows messages you have recieved, while the bottom section shows messages you have sent.

Composing Messages

Here you can send messages to other players, and to the public message board. Type your message in the large area, then on the left you can choose a recipient and whether you want to have the message sent anonymously or not. its easier to spread dis-information my sending messages anonymously, but the recipient may be less inclined to believe anything you say. also they will be unable to reply if they don't know who sent it. You can choose to post a message to the public message board rather than send it to a specific player, and this tends to be where anonymous messaging is more useful (want to see a powerful player lose a few pawns? Try giving everyone a list of their pawns...).

Sending Resources

One of the best things a team of players can do is gang up together to set expensive jobs. More than once a powerful player has lost their position as a group of weaker player gang up to murder his pawns. Similar to sending a message, you can send an amount of your money to another player. You cannot do this anonymously, and once you have done it, there is no way of getting the money back. Make sure you trust the other player before you do this.

Inbox

when you have a new message, the Mail icon on the front page will light up .You will recieve messages from other players, or from operatives who are doing jobs for you. Once you have read a message you can leave it, delete it or save it to the journal. Its worth keeping your Inbox tidy, so if you want to keep a message, save it to your journal by pressing . If you recieve any resources from another player, you will recive a short message telling you how much they have given you. There is a "Delete All" button at the top of your Inbox, which will clear all messages from it, which is useful if you have moved all your vital messages off to the journal.

Outbox

When you send a message, a copy is saved here. As with the Inbox, you can delete these or save them to the journal. If you hit the "Delete All" button at the top of your inbox every message there will be deleted, saving you a bit of time.

The Journal is an extension of the Mail system, and allows you to store, edit and sort messages. In the Mail area, you can copy messages you have sent and recieved to the journal. In addition, any messages operatives send you are automatically stored here. If you have some important information, you can create a journal entry to store it in. You can delete any journal entry by pressing the next to it. Normally you can only see the title of a journal entry...to view all of it press

Creating an Entry

Press the New Entry button . This will take you to the New Note Screen. Type in a title an and your entry, then when you are happy press the button next to the text input.

Editing an Entry

To edit a Journal entry, press the button next to it. You will be taken to a screen where you can edit the title and body of the entry. This is useful when you have copied a mail message here, as the Title line will default to the first line of the message, which may not be overly useful. Once you are happy with the message, press .

Jobs are one of the most vital parts of Chom. These are the only way you can affect pawns. Doing a Job costs resources, and requires the use of operatives. Nearly all jobs are set the same way, but do different things.

Setting a Job

To set a job, first goto the Jobs area . You will be presented with a list of operatives. These are the people who will do your bidding (for cash). Each has a brief description and a speciality listed, as well as a mug-shot. pick the one you feel will do your job best, based on their description and speciality.

You are now presented with a list of jobs you can do...some are good jobs you can do to your own pawns, others are detrimental, and its recommended you do these to other peoples pawns. Later on there is a brief description of what each job will do.

Once you have decided which job you want to do, you get to pick the target of your affections. You are presented with a list of pawns, and yours will be highlighted in white. Click the button next to the pawn you want to do the job on.

Next up you set how much you want to pay for the job. The cost of a job depends on many factors, such as;

• The job level of the pawn (the higher up in a corporation, the more expensive the job)
• The location of the pawn (a 'good' area is more expensive to operate in than a 'bad' one)
• The operative (some operatives are cheaper for certain jobs (their speciality)

Once you are have allocated resources to the job, you get a chance to affect the chances of the job by supplying information on the pawn. Each bit of information you know about the pawn can change the chance of the job working by 5%, but if your information is worng the chance of the job going off goes down by 5%. The information you can supply is

• Owner
• Company employing
• Hobby
• Type of relationship
• Location

Finally, you get to choose when when the job will happen. Each operative can only do one job at a time, and each job can take upto 10 hours to complete. If the operative is available immediately you will see the time listed and a Commit button, otherwise you will have 2 text boxes (time and date) where you can enter a different time to do the job. This is useful if you want to co-ordinate a series of jobs on a pawn (such as Get Job, then Help Job). Once you have chosen a date, press Quote to see if the operative is available. If you just want to set the job off, Press the "Find next Slot" button...Chom Isis will then automatically select the next available time for the operative to work for you. Confirm this to finish setting the job. Your operative will send you a message confirming all the details of the job.

Other general Job Stuff

When a job goes off, you will recieve a message from the operative telling you if it worked or not. Sometimes, the results of the job may be picked up by the Press, and a news story will appear on Skynet. This may give away valuable information about either the pawn, or the person who set the job.

Another side effect of jobs is how they affect the area they are carreid out in. If a map area has a lot of 'nice' jobs set in it (such as Winfalls, Helps job and Help Spouse) then it will become a 'nice' area. This makes it more expensive for operatives to do jobs in these areas, and so defends the pawns. Conversely, if a lot of 'bad' jobs occur somewhere (Murder, Disruption, Sackings) then the area will become 'bad', and it will be cheaper for operatives to work in that area. The exception to this is if the pawn is in your own home territory, in which case the quality of the area is not a factor. Good areas and Bad Areas are shown on the main map by changing colour to green or red respectively. It is a good idea to move pawns to your home territory, and then do good jobs to them...it will make jobs cheaper for you and more expensive for anyone attacking them.

Its well worth reading the Tactics section of this Help guide beofre you set about doing jobs. It has some handy pointers from the original players who got brutally murdered playing this game...while you obviously can't trust them, you may be able to learn from their mistakes.

• Average Cost: 90
• Bad Job

  Spying on a pawn will yield information about it, such as who employees him, his hobby, his spouse, and his owner. Normally if offers 3 choices of owner, one of which will be correct. While this job does not affect the target pawn, the information it gives you can reduce the cost of future jobs against the pawn. Its a good idea to Spy on a pawn before you attempt to Murder it, to reduce the costs

• Average Cost: 700
• Bad Job

  Pretty self-explanitory, this will kill the target pawn. This is the most expensive job in the game, for obvious reasons. Its worth doing a Spy job on the target prior to doing this, to reduce the costs.

• Average Cost: 180
• Bad Job

  Theres nothing like a beating to get a pawn depressed. This job reduces the pawns happiness, and if it goes too low then the pawn will kill themselves. A good job to play against already uphappy pawns, as its a fair bit cheaper than Murder, and has the added benefit that a player who loses a pawn to suicide suffers a loss of resources. This is less useful against happy pawns.

• Average Cost: 140
• Good Job

  Relationship happiness is one of the 3 levels of a pawn. When you first buy a pawn he will have no girlfriend. This job sets him up with one, courtesy of your operative. Without a relationship your pawn will eventually kill themselves. This job should be one of the first you set on your pawns once you have bought them.

• Average Cost: 60
• Good Job

  Once your pawn has a girlfriend, set this job up to improve the relationship. A pawns relationship has 8 levels, and you need to reach level 2 to stop a pawn slowly becoming more depressed about his love-life.

  • Talked on Gaia
  • First Date
  • Second Date
  • Casual Partners
  • Serious Relationship
  • Enagaged
  • Married
  • Madly In Love

  Each successful "Help Spouse" job will move you one further up this ladder. The higher up, the happier the pawn will become over time, and happy pawns mean more money for their players.

• Average Cost: 60
• Bad Job

  The LAN party of Chom Isis, this job will damage the level of a relationship, knocking it down one level on the Relationship ladder. This is good against low-level relationships, as the pawn may fall off the bottom of the ladder and lose thier spouse entirely. Its also a lot cheaper than murdering her.

• Average Cost: 400
• Bad Job

  A severe way of destroying a pawns love-life. Again pretty self-explanitory. Not only does the pawn lose his spouse, but also his overall Happiness levels will drop. This may be enough to cause the pawn to kill itself.

• Average Cost: 140
• Good Job

  Hobby is the second pawn level, and the only one that cannot go into negative (unlike job and relationship). This job sets the pawn up with one of the following hobbies at base level.

  • Technomage
  • Planet Ball
  • Gaia Construction
  • Gaia Games
  • Gambling
  • Wanking

• Average Cost: 60
• Good Job

  Once a pawn has a hobby, you can increase the level of it by doin this job. The higher up the Hobby ladder a pawn is, the happier he will be, and the happier he is, the more money you will get for him.

  • Novice
  • Beginner
  • Initiate
  • Intermediate
  • Expert
  • Professional

• Average Cost: 60
• Bad Job

  This will knock the target pawn down a level on the Hobby ladder, and if they are already at the bottom then they will lose their hobby. This is only worth doing if the pawn only has a low-level hobby. A pawn cannot get "unhappy" about a hobby, they can only be content. It is probably worth targetting either Spouses or Jobs rather than Hobby, as they can adversely affect a pawn.

• Average Cost: 140
• Good Job

  When you first get a pawn, he will be un-employed. Set this job on him to get him a job. There are several companies within Chom Isis where your pawn may be employed. A job will bring in money for the pawn (not you). The more money a pawn gets, the happier his Wealth happiness will become...the happier the pawn, the more resouces you get. Without a job your pawn will get more miserable and eventually kill themselves.

  The job level of a pawn has another important effect...the higher up they are in a company the more expensive it is to set jobs against them...this makes it very important for you to get a job for your pawn quickly.

• Average Cost: 60
• Good Job

  This will move your pawn up in a company. There are several levels within a company

  • A job
  • Another Job
  • 3rd job
  • Partner
  The higher up, the more money a pawn brings in, and so the happier he gets. Also ,the higher up a company he gets, the more expensive it becomes to set jobs on him. This is the best defense you can arrange for a pawn. YOu need to do two of these to a pawn after you have given him a job to get him to a level where he will not eventually kill himself.

• Average Cost: 60
• Bad Job

  The opposite of Help Job, this will knock the pawn down a level in his company, and if he is at the bottom he will lose his job. This is only really worthwhile on a low-level pawn. A lower level pawn will be cheaper to do further jobs on.

• Average Cost: 260
• Bad Job

  This will get rid of a pawns job completely. This job is particularly useful if you want to Murder a very high-level pawn (for example a partner). Sacking the pawn will make further jobs done on him much cheaper. This job will not directly affect the overall happiness of a pawn, but he will start to get a negative Wealth happiness.

• Average Cost: 160
• Bad Job

  This allows you to move a pawn to another comapny of your choice. This is useful as you can then move all your pawns to a single comapny, and then they will benefit from any bonueses that company confers. It may also be useful if you believe that someone has information on your pawn, as if they guess the wrong company when setting a job the chances of the job working are reduced.

• Average Cost: 180
• Good Job

  This gives your pawn an instant boost to happiness, which may be useful if he has some low happiness scores. This has no long term effects, so if you have a miserable pawn with no job or girlfriend this will not stop overall happiness going down ,merely pospone suicide.

• Average Cost: 80
• Bad Job

  Un-usually, this is a bad job that you will probably want to do to your own pawns. This allows you to relocate the pawn to another area of the game map. Nearly always, this will be to move them to your home territory so you can then do future jobs on them for less money.

  The way you set this job is slightly different. Once you have selected the pawn (you can only select your own pawns) you are presented with two maps...one shows the current location of the pawn, and the other allows you to chose where you would like to move him(it also shows your home territory).

  Doing this job lowers your pawns overall happiness, so beware of doing it on already unhappy pawns.

• Average Cost: 200/500

  This is how you vot efor end game. It is different to all other jobs in that an operative is not needed. You can cast upto two votes, and on the screen it will show how many votes are required before the endgame kicks in.

  Once endgame has started any player without a pawn will have all their money removed, and no new pawns will be added to the game.

DISCLAIMER
We, the current players of Chom Isis, take no responsibility for these tactics not working. They are offered as a guide to get started in Chom, but don't blame us if we take advantage of the fact that we know what you're upto and vicously use this information...thats what the game's about, after all...

Game Start

Its pretty important to get yourself a pawn early on, without one you won't get any additional resources. Goto the Pawn Auction and place a bid or two. Remember not to bid for more than you can afford, as otherwise you may lose your resources. Also, remember that once you've got a pawns, you MUST set some jobs on them, or they will slowly get depressed and kill themselves.

Once you have a pawn or two, start setting jobs. To stop a pawn slowly getting depressed, the following jobs must be set on them

• Find Job
• Help Job x 2
• Find Spouse
• Help Spouse

You have about 10-15 days to get these jobs in place, but I recommend you do it as quickly as possible. Don't forget that everyone will be out to do these jobs at the start, and operative time may be in short supply. For this reason I would not suggest buying too many pawns at the start, otherwise you may not be able to stabilise them before they kill themselves.

Fish backs this up, saying "My initial tactic in the first game was to buy all the pawns I could and ignore their happiness. It was cheaper to buy a pawn and let it die than kill it, In the mean time I make some money off it. It worked well until Rob added a pentalty for suicides, wiping out my stack of cash :( But it was nice to have 11 pawns.

Baron went the other way entirely..."My tactic was the opposite, I ensured I got at least on pawn by bidding all my resource on it. I then concentrated on getting that pawn sorted. You do tend to put all your eggs in one basket though...".

Dwain has some more in-depth view on the early game..."In the Early Game theres always a rush to buy pawns, it may be best to avoid this and instead buy a pawn three or four days into the game. This however leaves the question of what to do in the meanwhile. Early on in the game pawns maybe very sucetable to disruption remember that only one of the 3 faces need to get to suicidal for there to be a good chance of the pawn committing suicide. Don't forget to keep some resources to enable you to buy a pawn or two.

The question I find myself asking is how much should I pay for a pawn? The bidding on a pawn starts at 100 they never sell for this amount. During the test game the price of pawn varied from 120-600. During the early game there will be plenty of pawns to choose from. Oviously the cheaper the better when purchasing. As a guide I would say that 200-260 is a average price with anything above too expensive in the early game."

While the initial job rush is on, try and work out some alliances. There is nothing more powerful in this game than 2 or 3 people working together. The best way to do this is by sending messages and sharing information...this places a risk on you, and there's nothing to stop them double-crossing you, but without an alliance or two under your belt I don't rate your chances very highly once the game starts in earnest. An additional advantage of an allaince is that you get more perspectives on the leaderboard, so its easier to work out who's doing well.

Mid Game

Once your pawns are stabilised, you can start to improve your position. There are 2 ways you can go...buy more pawns and, using the money from the pawns you already have, build them upto a stable level, or you can improve the ones you already have, making them happier and thus earning you more money. I would recommend building up the Job level of your pawn, as this makes it more expensive for other players to set operatives against them. If you intend to do this, its often worth moving the pawn to your own home territory to make the jobs cheaper, and the volley of 'good' jobs you do should turn the area into a 'good' area, again making it more difficult for opposition players to set jobs there. If you want to buy more pawns, this is less vital, but possibly still worthwhile.

Sooner or later you can start to go on the offensive. This is where alliances really pay off. Between 2 or 3 players its easy and cheap to sort out a Spy job on a pawn, and then assult it with Jobs. You could target miserable pawns with Disruptions and try to make them kill themselves, or all chip in for an expensive murder. Even the most powerful player can quickly be conquered by the combined assult of a group of lesser players.

Again, Dwain has some suggestions regarding this...Never murder alone. Always try and find another backer for a murder after all 800 for one person is a lot of money but divide it by four and sudenly a alful lot of murders happen. This is another reason why you should be careful who you tell which pawns you own. After all if I get a message asking me to contribute to a murder why not send one back suggesting another target.

It may be that you get into a dominating position early on. If you do manage to sort out a lot of pawns and get them stable, try not to make it too obvious, as you quickly become a target for everyones aggression. Tactics include not letting your pawns go too happy (nothing screams "Kill Me!" like a green smilie on the Viewer Page) and keeping your money reserves relatively low (saved resources can boost your level on the leaderboard...the leader always attracts attention). Being in a powerful position in the middle of the game can be detrimental to you in the long run, and theres a lot to be said for "playing in the pack".

End Game

At some point there will be no more pawns available, at which point the end-game starts...this is where everyone tries to make sure one of their pawns is the last one standing. End Game is broguht about by players voting to end the game. Once this occurs if you don't have a pawn you will lose all your resources, and no new pawns are added. There is no second place in Chom Isis, so at some point alliances will fail and previously allies will have to battle it out, but the longer you can put this off the better.

Back to Fish on comedy ways to double-cross your one time partner..."A tactic that worked was convincing gareth that it was a good idea to publish his pawn list. All his pawns were subsequently killed and I won, buying his last pawn off him for "second place" ".

Dwain has a final bit of advice on how to deal with the end-game "The only player you can trust is one with no pawns and no money- whilst this may seem an ovious statement players in the past have refused to take advice from a player that is out of the running and suffered for it.

Other Nuggets of Information

Some words of wisdom from the mightly Byrnie with some useful tactical ploys...

"The cost of a job is related to many things, including area reputation, pawn happiness and so on, but the one that seems to affect it most is job status.
When you get your pawns you will want to give them jobs and boost them to at least minimum happiness level. You should also consider, however, that every time you improve a pawn the cost of then setting a job on that pawn increases.
This is the reason for the frenzy. You pick a date in a week or so when the operatives are all free, and set as many help jobs as you can. When exactly you set these jobs doesn't matter all that much, as long as they are before the first goes through.
I suggest setting a few a day, every day for a while. This also has the advantage of making some of your wealth "disappear" as it is taken in advance. This can ease any "Oh shit, I'm at the top of the leaderboard" problems.
On the day in question all the jobs go through and the pawn gets boosted up. Even if one or two of them fails the rest do not depend on them and so will still go through.
There is a disadvantage to this technique though. If someone gets wind of your plans and kills the pawn before the job goes through, you've wasted a big pile of cash. If the same happens by random chance (working your way down from the top of the pawn list has been a target choice stratgy in previous games)."

And one more for luck, again from Byrnie...
"Somebody buys a pawn in an auction. They paid a fair price for it, and they set some jobs on it to get it stable. It takes about 3 days minimum to break even on the cost of a pawn (less if you luckily pick them up for less than 200), so from day 4 onwards they're going to be making a profit. Imagine their horror and disgust when the pawn gets murdered at 11pm on the third day? They wouldn't be happy. But murdering even a pawn at minimum happiness sustaining levels is expensive.
So.
I see a pawn go at an auction. Maybe I know who was likely to get it, maybe I'm just feeling generally malicious (it happens ;) ), so I set a murder job on him. It doesn't cost me much, as he has no job, no partner, no hobby. And if he dies immediately the player who bought it will have lost the price they paid for him.
But that's not enough for me.
I set the murder before he has a job, however, I set it to happen on 11pm of the third day, giving the owner plenty of oppotunity to invest more money in his doomed pawn...

Keep an eye on your pawns, you may not be given warning that someone is attacking them. If they suddenly lose their job or their happiness drops be ready to respond. Also, if a Skynet item appears about someone spying on your pawns, make sure that they are well boosted. Failing that, you could always put them up for auction. You can't stop someone murdering your pawn, but you might get some money back for him.

Sharing information is a good way of making alliances, but sharing mis-information is a great way of forming rivalries. Its tricky to do, but if you can get two players killing each other, it costs you nothing and them everything.

Be careful what information you let slip outside the game...you can't be sure who will get to hear of it. Also, its worth hiding your identity from other players, as it can be used against you.Don't forget that even knowing who owns a pawn can add a 5% chance to anyone doing a job against him.

If you want more pawns, keep an eye on the auction...pawns can be added at any time, and will vanish 12 hours after the last bid. Also, make sure you don't spend the money in the meantime on a Job, if you win an Auction and don't have enough money, all your resources are taken and you don't get the pawn. Just because a pawn is there, you don't have to buy it. If you know the operatives are busy and backlogged with jobs and you don't have much money, you can't be sure that you will be able to set the minimum jobs on the pawn, and if it kills itself you lose a lot of money.

Make sure you set jobs in the right order. You will waste your money if you do a Help Spouse when the pawn has no Spouse, and similar with pawn Jobs. Its definitely worth doing a Spy job on a pawn before doing any offensive action against it...Spy is one of the cheapest jobs, but the information it gets you can save a fotune on a Murder job.

Use the journal to keep information and messages organised. Information is Power, but if you can't find the information its no use. Also remember that information can date...a Spy job set 2 weeks ago may not nessacerily be accurate now.

Alliances are good, vital even to win the game, but don't forget that everyone is out to win. If someone suggests that you giving them all you money is a good idea, think about it before you do it. There's nothing in the rules (rules?) that says you have to play fair. That said, if you double-cross too many people you're going to find it hard to make alliances.

If you know players outside the game, don't forget that real-life can affect their play. If you know someone is off on holiday for a fortnight to Mongolia, then its unlightly they can log on and see whats happening...a good time for a quick beating of their pawns. A bad time to try and fob a murder off on them. If people know you are going away, you might want to (as a suggestion) set a murder for a time when you are obviously not in the country...no-one will ever suspect you (after all, you were nowhere near a PC to set it...)