Tips by Pinecone

The following are some tips I found by a user named Pinecone online. I hope this helps:

TL/DR
- Use silver refresh and never buy gold goblet.
- Level up your heroes’ skills when you’re stuck. Don’t farm equipments or spend too much gold leveling up your minions. The core of your army is your heroes.
- If you have enough crystal, do two energy recharge and buy gold chest + key for quick money or equipment.

Heroes
Heroes form the core of your army. Your priority early game is to get 4-star heroes as early as possible. DO NOT BUY GOBLET. For every goblet (80 crystals) you get 16 silver refresh. While silver refresh may not “always” yield a 3- or 4- star, after 16 tries you definitely will get two, three 3 stars and if you are lucky a couple of four stars (Note:This is crossed out because I believe update 1.7 has changed this. More testing needed.). “Always” is in quotation marks because, opposite to what it is stated in the tavern page, goblet is NOT 100% guaranteed to yield a 3 or 4 star. There are a lot of sad stories on the forum.
Until you get Nicolai, the bowman on a horse, your priority for crystal use can only be for heroes refresh. Personally I prefer saving up a bunch of crystal (300 - 400) and do silver refreshes. With no proof or whatsoever, it feels like the more crystal you consecutively gamble at once, the more frequent it will be toward the later tries. I started with about 10, 13 refresh per 3-/4- star, but toward the end I see one every 4, 5 refreshes.

Normal stages vs Elite Stages
Skills will be essential to your army’s attack power and survivability. At max level, Nicolai’s active skill does 1900 damage to every enemy hero on screen. With a high level skill Nicolai, you can pretty much beat normal 100 without much of a resistance.
What does that have to do with Normal vs Elite stage? Farm scrolls and level up your 4-star’s active skill as much as you can. You will play 15 games instead of 20 out of 120 energy, you will not have as many equipment (see next section), you will get less experience and level up slower, but you will have some really scary attack power early on. At level 4, your 3 star cavalry deals 300 area damage which ignores armor. At level 10 3-star archer does 2500ish damage in 5 strikes.
With the gold cut in normal stage (stage with drop only gives half the gold) but not in Elite stage, you can get a lot more gold and use that money on leveling your minion’s level or skill levels.
Equipment
This doesn’t do not much damage to your enemy. My hero has 2191 attack, but even with critical hit he does 900-ish normal damage to enemy heroes. ARMOR REDUCTION WEAKENS NORMAL ATTACK, HENCE YOU SHOULD FOCUS ON SURVIVABILITY so your heroes can unleash their powerful skills. Logically, do worry too much about weapons but do pay a bit attention to armor, shoes, and ring. Head is the best kind of drop because it raises your HP by quite a bit.
Squad size and Level
They are hard to say. You do need minions to counter minions, and without a decent level they die off rather quickly. So I’d say early on make sure you have 12 minions for each of your 4 stars, and probably for two of your 3 star archers (they are really good even in later games) as well. Just make sure you can keep pace with the rate enemy minions dying. Remember, the core of your army is your heroes and their skills, though no man should or can be an island.

Prestige Level
This determines how many heroes you can bring to battle and enemy’s level in encounter battles. You want some prestige level to allow multiple heroes, but always focus on leveling up hero’s skills. You are leveling up everyone slowly anyways.
Too high of a prestige level without strong skills will only be detrimental in encounter battles. I am currently level 59, bring one less heroes to the encounter battle than those lv 65 players, but I can roll over them with ease most of the time.
The stated AP in the formation page should be taken with a grain of salt. Other than a few achievements and reward, they are not accurate assessment of your army. My 33125 AP army easily defeat Elite 93 of AP 37756. AP’s inaccurate and with some luck and good enough hero skill, you can press very far.