# 1. Introduction This is a guide that I thought I would post to discuss some advanced "techniques" that allow you to take shortcuts through the game. It doesn't involve any glitches, bugs or other shady exploits, but rather a deep understanding of the game and crafty usage of game mechanics to achieve legitimate progress. I will be discussing topics such as "Rival Switching" and efficient mastery point (re-)allocation. In order to understand the topics discussed here you need at least a basic understanding of game mechanics such as how masters, rivals and the combat system work. If you are completely new to the game I recommend reading [Shyshaeia's beginner guide](https://www.kongregate.com/forums/951337-sword-fight/topics/1631885-sword-fight-beginners-guide) first. # 2. Rival Switching (RS) **2.1. Basics** "Rival Switching" involves pausing the game and changing your hired rivals at specific points during a fight, in order to take advantage of more rival abilities than your rival slots would normally allow. Whether that means changing between a red and a yellow rival to take advantage of both an improved attack stat and an improved hit stat, or switching in exp/gold boosting rivals at the end of the fight to get more disciple levels, this is a very useful skill that will speed up your progress massively. **2.2. Requirements** In theory, all you need to rival switch is at least 1 rival slot (school level 5+) and enough platinum to hire 2 or more rivals. However, early game platinum generation is quite slow and might be better invested in building upgrades. Furthermore, the fewer unspent fighting/mastery skill points and completed special trainings you have, the less significant the benefits of each rival will be. I would personally recommend that you don't waste any platinum of rival switching before you have both of your rival slots, a level 5 library and at least 20 unspent mastery points per master or 100 unspent fighting points on your disciple. Furthermore, you should probably have at least 4-5 unique mastery skill points on each of the rivals you want to switch. Finally, RS becomes far easier and cheaper if you have the "Worthy Administration" award and at least 7~8 special trainings completed on each of the rivals you want to switch. By that point, you should definitely consider doing it if you haven't already as it can very easily help you complete more Co-Founders and collect more fame significantly faster. **2.3. Gold/Exp boosting rivals at the end of a fight** The original, simplest and least active type of rival switching involves pausing the fight as soon as the enemy's HP falls to 0. Then, you switch your rivals to a couple of Exp boosting rivals (Greg, Wallace, Kyle) or Gold boosting rival (James, Xander, Ward) and unpause. The actual recording of your fight takes place a couple of seconds after the conclusion of said fight, which gives you enough time to change from the rivals you used to win the fight, to those that will result in a more profitable record in your statistics. The majority of your exp/gold gains are based on your statistics pages which list your top8 most rewarding fights. Usage of this type of rival switching can get you thousands of times more exp/gold than you would normally get. **2.4. Offline gains boosting rivals before a secret training charge** So you’ve used a couple of combat rivals to beat some difficult opponents, and then you’ve either switched in a couple of good exp-boosting rivals such as Greg and Wallace to maximise the exp gains recorded in your statistics or a couple of good gold-boosting rivals like James and Ward to get a good gold record. However, there is actually a bit more you can do. Sigmund and Erik have good 4th skills which boost offline gold/exp gains respectively. If you switch to one of them (depending on what resource you want to maximize) and allocate all of their skill points to their 4th skill before losing a couple of fights (or using a secret training charge) you can probably get an extra 10~20 levels more than you could without them. **2.5. Combat boosting rivals during a fight** Another type of rival switching involves pausing the fight and switching rivals between hits. The most prominent example would be using two red rivals (Greg, Drevon, Erik, Xander) which boost your attack stat in order to have an increased likelihood of initiating a Combo Strike. Once the chain begins, you can then pause and switch to a couple of yellow rivals (James, Ward, Sigmund, Edward) in order to improve your hit% and increase the likelihood of landing a hit during the remainder of the combo. Because you switched out your red rivals, your attack% will now drop significantly but it's not important while the combo is ongoing, because your disciple is guaranteed to keep attacking for as many times as are listed on your statistics page. A notable exception is that the barrage stance **CAN** and probably **WILL** interrupt a combo strike if the enemy's attack is much higher than your disciple's. This renders this type of rival switching fairly ineffective against red rivals. Another word of caution: If you feel that you aren't going to win the fight before the combo is over, make sure you pause the fight and switch to your red rivals again so that you can initiate another combo. If the combo ends while you are still using your yellow rivals, your low atk% stat will almost certainly guarantee that the enemy will attack and destroy you :D I've personally won fights where I had to switch between my red and yellow rivals several times during those fights. (This becomes easier when the rivals you are switching don't cost any platinum.) **2.6. Combat boosting rivals to defeat other rivals** If you are trying to complete a rival's special training, you only need to have that rival hired to **START** the special training. i.e. If you want to complete Marshall's 570 training, all you need to do is hire Marshall and click on his "lvl 570" button to "summon" him. After that, you can replace him with another rival in order to gain a better set of atk/hit stats and defeat Marshall. Marshall doesn't need to be hired when defeated for his training to count as completed. (Of course if you lose the fight you will have to switch him in to start another attempt.) I've personally applied this successfully on multiple occasions, by starting blue rival trainings and subsequently switching to red rivals to start a combo, followed by yellow rivals to land hits. This can be pretty intensive and if you fail you have to repeat the whole process but believe it or not, this can often be the simplest way to beat a high level blue rival as it’s not always possible to outlevel them and brute force them. **2.7. Budget switching - Skill point switching** If you don't have the platinum to switch rivals, you can still make use of a free, weaker version of it: Pause the fight and re-allocate the mastery points of your current rivals. i.e. You can use Erik's 3rd skill to gain more attack during a fight and then use Erik's 1st/2nd skills at the end to gain more exp (and +1 training win). Not as powerful and versatile as full switching but it's always free :D **2.8. Undo trick to save platinum** Sometimes, you really need to use rival switching to defeat a rival but it's gonna cost you a lot of platinum and might fail. Remember to save before the fight and load your file if you lose in order to regain the platinum and try again. # 3. Efficient Mastery Point Allocation **3.1. Requirements** Smart initial allocation of your master points only requires that you have a master slot. However, if you wanna utilise a couple of tricks to speed up certain parts of the game you will need a couple of resets from the "Mastery Skill Reset" lineage. (Religion Rank 3) **3.2. Leave some points unspent** Starting as soon as you have a rival slot available, you want to begin making use of your rivals' 4th skills. It's a good idea to have at least 10 unspent points per master if possible to get some extra multis. (Remember that the higher the cost of a mastery skill the less efficient it is to buy it instead of keeping unspent points) **3.3. Get rid of skills you aren't using** Once your scrolls are maxed you should stop wasting any points in innovation and/or wisdom as they aren't doing anything. Same goes for prestige once you have maxed all the school buildings and have enough platinum for all your rival switching needs. If your build is not damage-reliant and you don't have a Co-Founder/Advisor with the "Favored Sword" skill you probably don't need any gold boosting mastery skills either. The only skills that are always worth having on all masters even at the endgame are Mentor, Discipline, Dedication, Form, Prowess, Meditation and Leadership. **3.4. You don't have to max expensive skills** Don't try to get one skill to level 10 and all the other skills to level 2. That's a waste of points. Try to get as many cheap levels in as many different skills as possible and then keep the rest of your points if the remaining skills cost too many points. i.e. If Mentor levels 1-5 cost you 5 points for an x16 exp multi and levels 6-10 cost you 21 points for a further x2 exp multi, you can see that diminishing returns make this not worth it. **3.5. Double reset before disciple promotions** This is the coolest trick that you can pull off with your free resets. Right before you promote a new master, ensure that you first reset your old master and max his Prowess so that you can buy more fighting skills on your soon-to-be new master. That way he will gain scroll exp faster and help make more skills cheaper for your future disciples. Afterwards, you should reset the old master again and spend all the points on Leadership. That way the new master will have a bunch of extra free mastery points. If you only have one reset left, go for the Leadership option as that typically helps more. Also if you have extra points on the first reset, in addition to maxing Prowess you might wanna get a few extra levels into Innovation so that you can potentially spend those extra fighting points on higher levels that wouldn't have been available. **3.6. Accelerated scroll research** In order to research scrolls at the maximum speed you want to get your Research job as high as possible, use Ward and Jean's 4th skills as high as possible and also use your masters efficiently. What you want to be doing is maximising your unspent mastery skill points. Reset all of your masters and only spend a few points to get the cheaper Wisdom levels. You don't have to max Wisdom if it's too expensive and you don't have many points. You don't have to spend any points on your other skills because Ward's 4th skill will get you enough effective levels for quick exp. You just need a decent Wisdom and lots of points. The rivals will do the rest. **3.7. Accelerated school building** Same idea as above. You need Edward's 4th skill and a high Administration job for faster platinum generation. In terms of your masters, you want to reset them, only put a bunch of cheap levels on Prestige and leave as many as possible unspent. Don't waste your points on other skills. I don't recommend trying to get platinum, research scrolls and/or level disciples at the same time. It's better to focus on one task at a time and alternate between tasks instead of cutting your unspent points thin to do everything all at once. That would take longer. Also, if you don't have enough resets to switch from fighting to scrolling, then to platinum and then back to fighting with the same masters, try to switch to one task, then back to fighting and then create a new set of higher level masters with more free resets to use for the other task. Remember that your free resets are a limited resource that you have to plan for in the same way that you plan for your mastery points themselves. # 4. Other **4.1. Dedication and Discipline multiplication zone** A master's Discipline skill multiplies exp gains if the disciple has a lower level than that master, while the Dedication skill does the same if the disciple has a higher level than the master. The Discipline bonus from one master is added to the Discipline bonuses of the other masters. Same goes for Dedication, the bonus of one master is additive to the Dedication bonuses of the other masters. However, the sum of the Discipline bonuses from all masters is multiplied to the sum of the Dedication bonuses. That means that unless you have a Co-Founder ability that always keeps either Dedication or Discipline active, your Disciples will get the maximum possible exp while there is at least one master below and one master above them. **4.2. Advanced Disciple Training** Following from **4.1**, if you want to level a disciple as high as possible, it's a good idea to get their level between at least 2 masters, then defeat the highest level opponent you can (consider fighting rivals at their real levels - not only are they likely to be higher than their special trainings but you won't have any stat penalties so they could be easier than you think), then pause and rival switch to maximize exp bonuses from your rival slots, then switch Sigmund in and use his 4th skill to get a boost to your offline gains and then use a charge of secret training. That will usually allow your disciple to leap far above your higher master. Promote (Because at this point you will typically lose your Discipline bonus and you won't be able to climb much higher with this disciple) and repeat the process with your next disciple. This time your highest master will be higher than before and so you can use the same method to climb even higher. **4.3. Permanent TL Clearing** Pick a CF that you can easily defeat at max level with no stat penalties. Ideally it's also a CF that gives you good stat/exp bonuses that is quite useful on his own as a CF. I recommend Erik. (He gives extremely good attack bonuses at +3/level which is the most important stat in the game, therefore allowing you to deafeat enemies up to TL1600+ with the correct rival hires. He also has 2 good exp skills making him useful even when rival switching for exp. His 4th skill can be used to boost offline gold gains which can be useful if you have an advisor with Hired Sword. He also has Brutal Training and Max Aggression which are phenomenal CF skills. Essentially, he is a rare case where every single one of his Rival and CF skills are top tier. Finally he is a red rival which means he uses counter attacks more rarely than yellows and blues and therefore is more easily defeated by Combo/Crit builds.) Then use the technique discussed in **section 4.2**. to get masters at the highest level you possibly can. (Making correct use of Drevon's 3rd/4th skills, Edward's 3rd skill, CF Erik's 3rd skill for combat stats then Greg's 1st/4th skills, Wallace's 2nd/4th skills and CF Erik's 1st/2nd skills for exp multis, then, Sigmund's 4th skill with Secret Training for high offline gains allowed me to get a master at level ~1570 after slowly climbing up to ~TL1725.) Because Co-Founders can climb up to 100 levels above your highest master, Erik can theoretically get close to level 1670 given enough time, which will essentially allow me to set him up as a "checkpoint" to sort of save most of the training levels that I have fought to get to TL1725 and skip close to that point in the future. To accomplish this faster maximise Xander's 4th skill to increase rival exp gains. It will take a couple of days. Don't try to get to 1670, stop at like ~1625 and then repeat this entire method to get even higher, get more high level masters and continue leveling your CF even faster. This might slow your current school down a bit, but you will get a good performing school in your statistics which gives you a permanent Fame multi for your future schools in addition for a waypoint to skip up to TL ~1600+ to essentially speedfarm fame.

Reserved just in case.

Reserved just in case.

thanks, well explained, helped me improve my game.

Just about 4.3 and Combo beats Reds easily... Barrage has an inherent 50% chance to ignore combo attacks, while blitz lowers counter chance by 50% (and i have never seen a combo chain interupted by counter so far). So if you plan on using anything crit, you should probably go with Edward CF right now. At least for fast runs towards TL1400+

> *Originally posted by **[boredom00](/forums/951337/topics/1698573?page=1#12779303)**:* > Just about 4.3 and Combo beats Reds easily... > Barrage has an inherent 50% chance to ignore combo attacks, while blitz lowers counter chance by 50% (and i have never seen a combo chain interupted by counter so far). > So if you plan on using anything crit, you should probably go with Edward CF right now. At least for fast runs towards TL1400+ I don't know, it's not necessarily the stances themselves. Try fighting a yellow rival a couple of times at 98/2 and then a red rival a couple of times 98/2. Barrage stance CAN interrupt combos but they won't if your attack is 98% because they need a higher attack to do that. Counters do NOT interrupt combos but it's still possible to counter after the last hit of a combo. So if your disciple is going to launch 15 combos in the entire fight and the enemy is defending for the majority of it, you will see more counters in-between said combos because I think yellow rivals have a higher counter chance than reds. Because of the nature of Combarrage, you HAVE to keep attacking for ages until you land 7+ hits and you must not get hit back in-between. I think overall yellow rivals are more sneaky in that regard. I could be wrong but empirically, my Greg/Edward are the same level and I always have a MUCH easier time beating Greg (provided that I have 98/2 against both. If you have enough attack to 98/2 Edward but not Greg then obviously you go for Edward)

Hm...Ok, now I see where you are coming from, but i really can't find anything good about a pure Combarrage at 98/2. Like you pointed out in 2.4 while playing actively switching from Red to Yellow works great, but I would definitely want Edward CF for favored sword and 400%+ crit which means 3 hit kills. Due to favored sword Edward CF will have a bit higher atk and alot more hit in barrage than Erik CF, but he is also the perfect CF for pure hit blitz/fencing (or blitz/dual while feasible). So switching to yellow has alot more potential. And for afk time I would assume blitz/fencing 4/98 to give you better results than combarrage 98/2.

Any advice on how to clear CF Grand Master Jean? I've hit a wall after level 780, can't seem to even get close to touching him with any combination of Master Rivals.

hello helpfull guide bumping it up

This should be pinned. It feels like the game was built with these advanced techniques in mind - with the pause button and zero(able) cost of rival switching. If executed correctly it can increase the speed of your progress tenfold.

Lol, I just came back to the game after being offline for like 260 days and I didn't remember anything. Thanks for bumping the guide guys, I was hoping it would be on the first page to help remind me how to do stuff :D