TLDR - How to Play Dungeon Crusher (beginner guide)

This is the TLDR version of how to play Dungeon Crusher. I will ignore most of the back & forth and other available options and just layout a straightforward path. SPECIFIC HEROES and HERO ABILITIES are important for mid/late game play not so much DPS.

Get Ena to Legendary 4 --- This will let you start to rarity Nush or 4M siege hero

Get Nushkilan and take him to Galaxy X (or switch to 4M siege point hero Ophaniel or Truzk and take them to Galaxy X)

To get Nushkilan: altar sicri, katelah, or kaletah then Dark Ritual, repeat until you get Nush(you will randomly get 1 of these 4 and can only have 2 of them at a time). Work on levling nush to Gal X. Unless you get 4M siege hero (Ophaniel or Truzk), then just lvl 4M siege hero to Gal X instead of Nush.

Use the 3 hero rarity trick on daily boss on just the heroes above. "3 hero rarity trick": This means only have 3 actively hired heroes when fighting daily boss, so you only have 3 heroes pop-up for options to add rarity to. ALWAYS FOCUS ON 1 HERO AT A TIME!!! For example: to level Ena, just hire Ena & soul totem. For Nush, just hire Ena, soul totem, & Nush. For 4M siege hero, just hire Ena, Nush & 4M siege hero. Once a hero gets to Galaxy X it won't appear for rarity so you can do Ena, Nush, 4M siege hero (Gal X) & New hero.

4M Siege hero: "Scratch" - attack big bosses in siege hour for points using an all AOE/buffer team...make sure you have at least 2 AOE in last 4 of 10 slots. Once you have Dendi / Draador you can add them into your siege team in order to quickly kill bosses with 13M or less health using the 70% reducing abilities these 2 heroes have and farm bugles for top boss scratches.

Thus ends the TLDR section, more helpful information below.

Dark Ritual when you start to slow down, this could be at lvl 80, 100, 130... etc, Don't ask, just Dark Ritual. You will DR thousands of times.

Gilds: Not all that great, you need higher number of gilds to unlock higher lvl Bosses in Siege. However, if you get too many gilds, the bosses will be too hard for you. The sweet spot for early players is 2000 - 2499 gilds, this tier gives you only 5 bosses showing up all under 13M health so can use draador/Dendi abilities. Next sweet spot is 6000 - 9499 which has only 4 bosses, but 1 is above 13M. You need at least 150 gild for top bosses to appear. If you need to burn gild, ask someone for suggestions, but its basically assign your gild to a hero and altar the hero to wipe out those gild.

Ena - Gal X will roughly get you to lvl 1500, Nush will get you to around 2200, a 4M Siege Gal X hero will get you to 2500ish. Then you get kert through clan rewards or emerald shard pack purchases to get to lvl 4k.

CLANS - Join a good clan that will give you weekly siege and event clan rewards. A max clan reward can WEEKLY result in 3k emeralds, 1k magic bottles, holograms, mythical orbs, space trooper shards, kert shards, star hero shards, soul eater shards (all of these are necessary for further progression). You can also look for a "Farm" clan - a top player creates a clan just so they can get all the rewards and will allow new players to benefit.

Emeralds & Bottles - Always keep enough for daily quests on hand (125 emeralds, 120 magic bottles). Mostly save emeralds until you get up to level 1500, this is when the emerald pack gets better heroes and you should spend em all. You can buy the emerald heroes (sun tzi, feralfang, etc) but they are buffers or used in the mines. For bottles, it is sustainable to use 10 bottle refresh on daily quests, and also purchase a 2nd daily boss fight for 50 bottles. The best scenario is getting a 5/5 time travel reward (100 bottles for 50 bottles spent or free with ads on mobile), and getting the 2 x daily boss kill which results in a 55 bottle reward for only 50 bottles spent.

Equipment - as you hit higher levels, you will easily start to acumulate lvl 1-5 gear. Don't waste money buying dubloons and spending them on equipment. If you want to, buy a VOID, sell it on the auction house for twice as many dubloons as purchasing dubloons straight. This does require lvl 1500 though and you will probably already have the equipment you want. Don't bother adding equipment to all your heroes, FOCUS FOCUS FOCUS on the important heroes. Once you get to mythical gear, it gets much harder to make as you need mythical orbs (good clan helps, but this is where things really slow down for F2P).

Acronyms and random tips:

DH: Demon horn - acquired through money purchases, clan leader rewards, or trading with others.

DD: Dragon draft - the bane of our existence, but awesome rewards, ask someone for an instructional youtube video.

No you can't send magic bottles, you have to buy crates of magic bottles with money or get them as clan leader rewards.

F2P tip - If you are doing decent with Sieges, you can leave your clan for rune week, make a clan and get the clan leader rewards. at 105M personal siege points you will get 5 demon horns and 25 or so medium rune chests. Figure out for yourself if it is worth it versus what you can get in your clan.

P2P tip - buy a siege pack, getting a siege gun is very helpful for scratching bosses early on. Then buy Angel heroes. Also wait for monthly offers that pop-up which are usually severely discounted. Never buy VIP unless you just want to waste money.

Kongregate players - Wait for an offerwall 2x or 3x and do a big offer to get 3k or 4k kreds. Kreds can be used to buy heroes, but not voids. Be on the lookout for the 3 day in-game offers which can be bought for kreds!

Mid/Late Game:

Now you have Kert and you are level 4k! Welcome to Dungeon Crusher you new player.... At this point there should be 3 sets of heroes you are working on (space, star, & soul) each has 3 variations (space trooper, space warrior, space scout, etc). These heroes provide excellent science, influence and weekly rating boosts that will significantly help your weekly event score. However, These are just the beginning, as after Soul there are several more heroes to get and they require Holograms, hyperspheres and Soul hero shards. You will craft the next tier hero Necrophagist, then use Necrophagist to craft Seaweed, then Seaweed to craft Blue Void. Think you're done now after collecting thousands of holograms from weekly events/sieges and grinding up those heroes? Nope. You actually also need to be hunting down Special Hero summons through siege, which will require you to have collected 65k+ gilds so that they might appear. Lord Draador is the first special hero that comes usually once per hour. If you MVP Lord Draador you get a drop to summon Karamel, which when MVP'd drops a blueprint for summoning Tin Man, which drops raven's tusk for summoning Kozeenth, which drops Peachseed for summoning Peachneedle!!!

To get strong enough, you need to get a 4M siege hero like ophaniel, or a 230M siege hero like Foyme. To give you an example of a good setup (not the best, but achievable). For Siege: Foyme Gal X, Didgur Gal X, Lgneath Gal X, Sun Tzi, William Vane, Augustinus, Na'Ziba, Bard, Aurora, Elga. Equip Foyme with the best runes of hunter, Didgur with Defender Rune, Lgneath with Sneak rune. The goal is to have Didgur receive the hits, buffing Foyme. Sun Tzi & William vane dieing to be revived by Lgneath. This will continuously buff Foyme higher and higher each round. Of course you then need to adjust runes for silences, debuffs, type of enemy boss (Maybe add 30% hatred to Boss), etc. You will need to build your team around the runes you get. Other popular early main heroes are: 230M siege heroes: UG-X, Morris (for Rune week), Foyme; 4M Siege heroes Ophaniel & Truzk.