Which is the best way to use allies?

[Repomeister]

Is it better to:
1. Spend all your money buying as many different allies as possible and keep them all leveled up at about the same time
2. Put your money into leveling up the lowest priced ones and keeping them at your level
3. Spend the money buying all the allies you can at a level 1 but then spend your money leveling up the most expensive one
4. Leveling them up as you can afford them to a certain level and then moving on to the next one (better cheapest to most expensive or most expensive first?)

Thanks!

[Geothermal1159]

Getting new allies > leveling up previous allies for the most part as the new ones have a significant jump in attack power.

However I can't say for certain if that is the best tactic for all of the game but, it is definatley an effective strategy for a lot of the game.

[Repomeister]

So it is better to have like 20 or 30 level 1 allies than to have 3 or 4 level 20 allies?

[Renfrew]

The former, look at the damage numbers and you'll understand why it is better to keep buying a new girl. Of course there is still incentive to level up an ally, always go for gold boost and DPS boost (the one that boosts DPS for all allies).

[Repomeister]

I have been buying as many as possible and getting them quickly to level 200 (I use autoclicker)
so I should keep on with this it sounds like.

[The Lunar Douche]

Buy new allies ASAP. Only level up old ones once you're fairly certain you can afford to get them to the next useful passive skill in one go. Useful passives are Gold+, and All Damage+. All other passives are practically worthless.

[lnomsim]

with an autoclicker, I noticed it's way quicker to only upgrade the main character to 450 and then reset, usually I collet 17 pets every 30mi that way.

Still with autoclicker, if I use allies, it can take up to 1h30 to reach stage 15 and still be 450.

After reaching stage 15, it takes as much time to reach stage 20 as it took to reach level 15.

Once you reach Azami, only buy new girls or upgrade the latest in order to beat bosses, no need to upgrade others, their bonuses aren't even worth a speck of dust.

If you play without an autoclicker, only upgrade your latest ally to beat the boss, then buy the next ally as soon as you can.

[Sam Lilly]

I'm late to this party but I find that generally once you CAN hire the next ally, you should because their damage typically will outclass even the most recent one given the price to damage ratio. I would say once you start hitting roadblocks of not being able to beat the boss, then go back and start leveling up the other allies from cheapest to most expensive and try to gauge if you can hit their level bonuses at 100, 200, 400, and 600. To be more tactical about it, try to focus on the bonuses that boost all damage, ally damage, DPS, click damage by percent of DPS which makes leveling the main hero worthless after 450, and gold boosts. All of these things will help you progress faster even if the damage on those allies is negligible at that point. Eventually you'll get more and more stuck due to scaling and basically at that point you can just shut the game off for a day or two and come back when you've accumulated enough gold to work with instead of idling and checking constantly. That's basically how I've been doing it. But for progressing pets, you basically go until you can get your main hero to level 450 and then reset right away because the spirits you get after that have diminishing returns.