Basics/Resource Management

Resource management guide for gems/gold/energy
Resource management by Tinywhale (CN server -Whale)

Resource management is very important in the game. You need to decide if you are going to commit yourself as a free to play, light spender or heavy spender. All resources (except privilege items) can be obtained in game (yes including skin tickets). The following are the resources you will get. I will list them and the ways you can get them and what you should use them for.

Gems: The most important resource in the game. You can use real money to purchase more gems but it isn’t really necessary. If you really decide to spend in the game, buy the monthly privilege item which gives you 50 gems a day as well as buy the 150 gems per day for a nominal fee. Doing so right at the first day when you play will save you a lot of money should you decide you need more gems later. The savings are about 5x comparatively than buying gems in a bundle (without bonus).

You get free gems from completing through solving normal quests/character binding quests/time rifts/time trials/logging in/events/arena. After completing dailies, you get some free gems as well.

You can use gems to buy gold/energy/summon character/summon equips/participate in Macho Lotto events. Personally recommend that you should ONLY use gems to summon (if FTP) and summon 10x in a row. Reason is that the minimum you get is a SR card which later on at promoted 5/6 stars, it’s perfectly usable. You can get a limited skin for your units as well as a rare runestone in the Macho Lotto. If lucky that runestone will cost you 1000-2000 gems if not it can potentially cost you 3980 gems. If you are a fan of limited skin or want the rare runestone in powering your characters, be sure to save gems for the lotto event.

For light spender, buy energy once a day and combined with the other privilege item that increase golem/dragon bonus by one and spend it there. Heavy spenders can buy energy and gold depending on your needs.

From level 1-60, can safely estimate you can get at least 20k free pure gems and about another 20k gems in the form gold tickets (each gold tickets is worth 88 gems). Hence if you use these gems/gold tickets wisely, you may never need to spend a dime in this game.

Gold: Gold is abundant but you need gold for many instances but the question is what to use it for priority.

Gold Priority

 * 1) Army upgrade: Use Gold to upgrade your army. Army is very important because its the first line of attack/defence for your forces. It will determine to a large extent the damage output as well as whether the force will survive in the end. Tip is to try to max up your fliers and spear army first, giving priority to attack stats first. The reason for pumping army first is because its a guaranteed upgrade to your combat abilities.
 * 2) Equipment: Build up a 6* SR set ASAP using your gold. You should have at beginning a tank/sword/mage/healer/flier/cavalry set. Doing so you can pass the set to other similar class character. Do not try to arm every character with customized equips.
 * 3) Character binding stats: After increasing their intimacy level and other conditions, character binding stats is available. This aspect is often neglected. Increasing character or their army % here increases the white base stats which can further be modified by item modifier. Hence character binding stats is very important. Save gold for the main team to get to level 10 for hero stats and army bonus. Additional gold can go into increasing Attack %. Every 1% counts. Gold can be gotten in many ways and a gold daily reap you 150-250k at level 60. Guild function and silver nuts exchange nets you 860k gold weekly. Gold is NEVER enough, if you have excess gold, it means you are missing out something. Not recommended to trade gems for gold (600 gems for 1.2M gold), even for light spenders. For heavy spenders please YOLO as you wish.
 * 4) Scrolling: Gold is required also for scrolling, aim for at least 10% increase in the stats desired. Cost to scroll SR type scrolls is 5000 gold. Try to scroll in multiples of 20. Personally I got more 15% stats increase from SR scrolls than SSR scrolls (which cost 25000 gold to scroll). Note: Recommend to only do scrolling when your other guaranteed increase combat abilities gold spending are done. Scrolling is like gambling and a lot of times you gained nothing after spending a lot of gold yet it is still crucial to scroll. Settle for 5-6% increase in stats if you are short of gold.

Energy / Stamina Priority
Energy is free which you get 1 energy per 5 minutes and also 4 burgers at different login time (might be 5 in global). Each burger is 50 energy. Hence you get 488 energy free everyday. Each purchase of energy is 120 which cost 40/60/100/150/200 gems. FTP should not buy energy while light spenders can buy 1 to at most 2 times per day. In terms of priority:
 * 1) Character fragments - you get 9 free chances to get fragments for all characters from R-SSR. Recommend to focus on your SSR team. Each chance takes 5 energy costing 45 energy daily.
 * 2) Dailies - there are the following daily quests which must be done; 1 dragon (30), 2 golems (20x2), 1 character binding items (20), 1 gold (20) and eventually 1 temple (20). Cost for dailies are shown in the brackets. Privilege item can increase dragon and golem by 1 more time. Other than gold and temple, the rest can be done in multiplayer mode which reduce the cost by 20% which means a 30 energy dragon daily is now 24 energy. Multiplayer are risky and if you fail, you lose 100% of the energy cost.
 * 3) Normal quest line  and Timerifts - You should aim to finish all the normal quest line and timerifts asap as they give lots of gems and gold tickets which you need to summon. After finishing the above 2 the rest should be used to clear whichever you can. Excess energy is to be used to sweep maps for character promotion items. Go for elite time rifts sweeps only which cost 15 energy each. Normal time rifts sweeps cost 10 energy but drop rates are bad.
 * 4) Time Trials - likely you will not worry about time trials before level 60. When you reach there, just remember to leave 250 energy for it weekly, energy is needed since you might retreat from difficult maps often to retry.(edited)

Post Guide Side Notes
PS: I save 2 burgers out of 4 daily and use them for events after I have reached lvl 60. You should use more energy on army training even without the bonus. Priority is FLYER ATTACK and ANGEL lvl 10. I cannot stress enough for these 2 stats. It is possible to achieve them as you can train 3 times a week for any particular army type.

PS S: Also I don’t really recommend to play for free. Best is to get the three basic monthly privilege, including the gems daily/increase golem,dragon/forgiving clock. Without the forgiving clock, it’s a very tough journey initially. You have to restart a whole stage when you make a mistake in the later part (though that makes you think extra carefully before making a move). Personally I think my journey will be much smoother if I got these privileges earlier. At late game the importance of the privilege will get lesser but nonetheless helps.

PS S S: Remember, buying 150 gems daily will save you 5x the cost of buying it later in a bundle!!!