Tips
Some general tips on things that may not be immediately obvious.
Despite the description, Chuck's rage attack is not random. It will always launch 5 attacks from your birds in successive order starting from the first. This means that if you have 3 birds, it will launch attacks in the order 1, 2, 3, 1, 2. The order of your birds is fixed based on the order they are encountered in the game, so it will always be Red > Chuck > Matilda > Bomb > Blues. This means that Red and Chuck will always get 2 attacks. Blues will always get 1. Bomb will get 1 attack unless Blues are also in the party, and Matilda will get 2 attacks only if Red is not in the party. If one of your birds is knocked out, or you have only 2 for some other reason, the first bird will get 3 attacks and the second will get 2. This should also help you do the math to decide whether Red's or Chuck's rage will do more damage against a single target. (Edit: description was changed, so it no longer says random.)
- There's a big difference between Counter and the other abilities which cause damage to attacking enemies. Counter will only activate if the affected target is alive and not stunned at the end of the attack. This means if you can do enough damage to kill the target, or you can stun it, you don't need to worry about its Counter ability. This includes multiple attacks from Chuck's rage attack.
- Multiple damage-over-time effects can stack, but only if they're from different abilities. Thus, the Druid's, Rainbird's, and Rogues' abilities can all affect a single target, but attacking a target which already has the same effect on it will do nothing but do the initial damage and prolong the DoT for another turn.
- The same goes for damage-increasing buffs, including Tricksters' Cheer ability and any of the buffs from Bomb. This is less obvious because they use the same graphic, but the damage does stack.
If you hire a friend for a battle (either another human player or one of the pig hirelings, or even a Mighty Eagle's mercenary), you can replay the battle as many times as you like for more rewards, without having to wait between battles to hire another, or pay a second time for a mercenary. This is useful if you want another chance at the battle, to get more stars, more loot or experience, etc. As soon as you leave the battle, however, the usual 12-hour wait kicks in. Apparently the latest patch changed this. How annoying.
- For Chronicle Cave battles, if you don't know what you'll be facing, you can always start the battle with just 2 birds to get a feel for it, then leave and come back with the proper hireling. This will prevent you from wasting a hire on a bird that will be useless on that battle. This does not work for Daily Dungeons however (except the first time.) If you leave the battle for any reason, you'll have to wait a week to try again.
If there is a Big Boss enemy in the battle (or anyone else with the Charge Command attack, forget if there are others), pay attention to the order of attacks. When his ability activates, only pigs who have not already used their turn will attack. If he's the first to attack every round, he's more dangerous, as every pig essentially gets 2 attacks. But if he's the last, he's mostly harmless, as only the Big Boss himself will attack. They appear to have now fixed this one too. Are they using this thread as a bug-report list?
Feel free to add your own.