What creatures to evolve?

[Nuicakes]

I tend to neglect my fantasy forest game (don't play events, etc) but I'm wondering how everyone decides what creatures to level up? I usually go by it's element, then rarity, but I'm wondering if I should consider other things. I've had incredible luck here and bred a crystal unicorn when I was in the level 20's.

[Sakrysta]

It kind of depends on your goals. Since you don't play events, there isn't a lot of motivation for leveling up beyond how many coins the animals earn. If you do battles, it would also depend on which elements you want to use as your fighters.

Here's what I think about when evolving animals - though I DO tend to play the events, so some of my reasoning is governed by event play strategy.

First, I do my best to keep my basic single-element animals at level 15. By that I mean, sometimes I end up selling one to make space for something else until I can expand again. But the single-element basics are often very helpful in battles. They earn almost nothing in coins, but they also don't generally cost a lot of food or time to level up.

Next, I want to level up my special single-element animals. This is a fairly new consideration, because until recently, all the special elements were paired with a secondary basic. Anytime you have a single-element animal to battle with, it clarifies what it will be strong against. These often take a lot of food, an average amount of time to evolve, and earn substantial coins at their highest level.

Next I try to level up as many of my special element hybrids as I can. When I'm battling, I tend to work my way through the list of strong elements against an opponent, so I like to have as many elements as possible to have an epic representative in the roster. Unfortunately, a lot of the hybrids require large amounts of food for very little coin return, but if you're at a high enough game level, that's less of a consideration.

Having played for several years now, I have reached the point where I try to avoid evolving to epic any animal that has two basic elements. The more epics you have, the more scrolling you have to do in your fighters list when you play a tournament, and you can find any of those elements as a secondary with one of the special elements. So I don't evolve any of these animals past level 10 anymore, and occasionally I will go through a phase where, when I breed a duplicate, I will sell off the higher level animal from my forest and replace it with the new baby, just to have animals to feed and evolve for events, as well as to weed out some of my old epics that I don't want at level 15 anymore. I also now tend to save my feeding and evolving and do them during events where it helps me earn points.

Some people choose not to level up certain animals because they like their looks at a particular level. On my baby account, I've held back on evolving several of the prize animals from the Battlegrounds, as well as my Treent of Life, because you only get one of them, and I have epics of them on my two other accounts. The baby Ancient Sloth, Thorilla, and Hydro Yak are all super cute, and I get a kick out of the battle animation for the baby Treent of Life. I also like the battle animation for the baby Crystal Unicorn, so for now my second one on my baby account is also staying a baby.

Hope that helps a little!

[Phoenix406]

I really couldn't have stated it any better than @Sakrysta just did. I think she covered everything. One thing I will say is that if you have any crystal animals, level them up as high as you can if you want to use them in battling. They can still be good fighters when they are littler, but it is so much easier to find an animal at the top of the list than to scroll through dozens upon dozens of other animals to get to a level 6 Crystal Unicorn or something.