Tips for Battling Rival Teams

Battling rival teams and winning three times within 10 minutes (to reach the next tier) gives you prizes. Winning also gives you "R" money to buy crates and improves your ranking for the weekly and monthly rewards.

The easiest way to win a single fight is with the power attack, but that uses up your three adrenaline points, forcing you to use adrenaline bottles to continue fighting. It is better to just use the regular attack which only uses one adrenaline point. To win without using the power attack, you need to estimate which of the three opponents is least powerful. This is relatively easy if you use the following tips for estimating a rival's defense power. The one thing that makes it difficult to accurately estimate your rival's defense powerful is that you cannot see the level of each survivor on your opponent's team.

Estimate Your Rival's Power
At the lower tiers, it is usual easy to determine which rivals you can defeat because the game pits you against at least one rival who is significantly weaker than your team. As you climb the tiers, the game pits you against rivals that are closer to your own team's power. At the highest tiers (starting around tier 8), even the weakest rival has the same or better power than you.

Here's what information you have to help estimate his team's power:
 * Your opponent's level: From this you can guesstimate whether he has trained the members in his team. If your opponent is low level, he probably hasn't farmed enough resources to train the survivors on his team to max level.
 * The evolution level of each survivor: The higher the evo level, the higher the defense power of that survivor
 * The rarity of the survivors: The five types are Common (white), Uncommon (green), Rare (blue), Epic (purple), and Legendary (orange). The more rare the survivor, the more powerful. Try to avoid attacking an opponent whose team contains more rare survivors than your team.
 * Survivor type: Melee survivors have higher defense, Specialization have medium defense, and Ranged have least defense. Be wary of an opponent who has lots of Melee survivors because they are harder to defeat.
 * The type of survivors. The newest survivors (after the update) specially the epic and legends, can take down the oldest legend and even mythic survivors. (cult leader, hermit and riot police).

A Quick Estimation
This is a simple math trick similar to card counting. Assign the following values to each survivor type in your team and the rival's team and only attack if your value is higher.

Common = 0, Uncommon = 1, Rare = 2, Epic = 3, Legendary = 4.

For example, your count would be 10 if you have one Legendary (worth 4), three Rare (worth 3x2) and one Common (worth 0) in your team. If your rival has four Epics (worth 4x3) and one Rare (worth 2), his count would be 14 meaning it is very likely he is more powerful. If the counts for all three of your opponents is too high, either choose the lowest count or use the reset trick mentioned in the Other Tips section.

Other Tips
These are various tricks I've learned that help when battling rivals
 * If all three of the rivals look too powerful, you can get a new set of random rivals by going to your Party view (close the Rivals view. then tap the Menu button and then the Party button) and either changing team members or just tap the Auto button. Then go back to the Rivals view. Even if the Auto button doesn't change any of the five team members, it still causes the game to choose three new random rivals.
 * Use survivors with skills that have a high percent chance to boost attack value because the more of these you have, the more likely one of the random bonuses will happen. Also realize that a survivor with a skill the boosts defense does not help you when attacking a rival.
 * You don't have to use your most powerful survivors when attacking rivals. In fact, you should consider using lower-powered survivors that all have high percentage (30% to 40%) of activating their attack bonus to your attack. This is because the game pits you against rivals with similar attack strength to your Party. Your level (be it level 20 or level 75) doesn't matter. The power of survivors in your Enlisted and Reserved group also don't matter.