How Do you make nice cascades? 

By River

Step 1. Count your orbs.

I’m going to assume you’re going for max combos, but if you need TPAs or sparkles etc you may want to count differently. Here we have 4 red, 8 blue, 9 green, 3 light, 4 dark, and 2 heart. The important part of this is that we have 1 extra red, 2 extra blue, 1 extra dark, and 2 heart that won’t match. So these are the extra orbs that we’re allowed to ignore in our solve.

Step 2. Pick a starting region.

Not necessarily the exact orb you will start with, but try to identify some early combos that are easy to make.

The following images identify some nice combos we can try to create. The last one is the 3 yellows, which have to be matched together. Notice that most of these combos are towards the left of the board, so we will probably want to start towards the left.

Step 3. Identify what of these orbs you will want to cascade.

There’s 2 obvious combos that should be cascaded on this board: light and dark. The reason for this is that these orbs are very far apart vertically but not super far apart horizontally. So in order to move them fewer spaces, we definitely want to have them cascading over something.

Step 4. Identify a few options for starting orb & path within the region you want.

Cascade blues to 2nd row http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=GIxz0K1	Somehow cascade yellow over green http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=6KyvmC1	Place green over blue – http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=2PTE091
Match the green & blue and later set up somehow for yellow cascade http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=28wFSn1	Start with green & set up for light cascading towards the right eventually http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=OOfcgl1	Start out a way to cascade blue & green over red or something http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=0PAW8i1

Not all of these are going to be good starts; in particular the last one is probably pretty bad on this board (also is very far outside of our starting region). But on other boards looking for a pattern like that can be a good idea. (A more practical way of doing the last option would be to start from the bottom-most green like this: http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=WtwbIC1 since we aren’t allowed to trap any green on the corner, but this was hard to show in the diagram)

Step 5. Try a lot of things!

Let’s look first at starting path #4. Here’s a solution that seems good but doesn’t actually work: http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=9Wftij1 The logic in this one is to start with 3 vertical matches, green blue green, and then force the light to cascade over dark. Unfortunately, we are forced to ignore the dark all the way to the left, which requires dark in the 5th column, and as you can see…there’s just not enough room in the 5th column for all the orbs to drop.

I started with this one to set the tone for this section: most of the stuff you try will fail. Just accept that. When trying to do cascade boardsolves like this, you will try 25+ wrong things for every right thing.

Now I’m going to take you through the first starting option to come to a solve that 8c’s the board in 30 moves – not the best solution I found, but maybe a bit more straightforward.

First let’s look for a way to not be wasting any space. Right now there’s a dark orb, a light orb, and a green orb below the 2 blue in the 2nd row. We will eventually need to make the light orb part of a combo, so let’s just brute force do that now and see what happens – http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=noYbuB1 

So we spent 13 moves to make 3 combos. This might seem like we spent a lot of moves & didn’t do much, but let’s notice that the green match actually is 1 orb away from completion, and we have red near each other, and other blue orbs are pretty close, as is green in the bottom….the biggest problem is the dark.

How can we make dark match? There’s 2 options. The first is to make the last dark cascade over the blue also, with a green match somehow in the bottom row…but if we do this straight up, it will actually break our second-row blue cascade as you can see here: http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=yJLGXK1 The way to get around this is to make the green not match initially, but instead itself be cascading over something…what to have it cascade over? There’s 2 options, blue and red.

Let’s try blue since there is already a blue orb in the bottom row, but there isn’t any red. Which green orb should we have cascade & which one in the bottom row? Well, we can’t let the blue 3match touch the 2 from the cascade, so it has to be the one in the 5th column from the left. Which we can do like this: http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=hGLBPn1 Yay we have a solution! This is 45 moves, but it’s not really optimized at all. What I did to make this:

• Start with our path of making the blues cascade
• Then make the yellow cascade
• Finish the green match
• Place the dark over the blue because we know we want that there next
• Move 2 red to the right side while placing one green at the top of the column of 3 blues
• Finish the red match & the blue match at the same time at the end

I did most of these steps independently of each other, but we can actually do some of it at the same time and shorten by a bit. http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=zXFYP31 This one is 37 moves. This path might be a bit harder to follow because there are a lot of moves dedicated to setting up a match that will be completed later: I worked on the blue earlier on in the path. 

When trying to optimize like this there’s basically one major goal: make every single orb movement actively contribute to the solution rather than just moving from one part of the puzzle to another. This process leads to a lot of seemingly confusing out-of-order moves, but it increases the efficiency a lot.

But remember when I said we had 2 different ways to make the dark match? The other option is to replace that bottom-row green with dark, and have dark cascading over yellow (which is in turn cascading over blue, which is in turn cascading over green wew).

At first it may seem pretty difficult to make this match work, because our initial path ends up like this:

With the green trapped under the two second-row orbs of the blue 3-match. But we don’t actually have to start with exactly this starting path! We could instead start like this: http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=VBAIGS1 and then we have the bottom row that we want, dark light dark underneath the green/blue cascade. 

This did take 10 moves to move only one orb of one match but let’s continue a bit farther: http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=6NVuY51 

Actually in this case we have set up the green match, the blue cascading over it, ⅔ of an eventual dark cascade, and ⅔ of a blue match with another green match cascading over it. Note that if you look at the drops in the dawnglare of our progress so far, the green that is matching is not actually the green match I’m talking about here; look at the highlighted orbs below.

So this is 3 completed matches (green on the left, blue cascading, and green cascading are done) and 3 more that are ⅔ done (dark cascading, light cascading, and blue to the right cascading). And this is only 16 moves. So not bad!

Now we have to finish the light & dark like we did before, match the green, make sure the cascading blue goes in the right place, and set up the red. We can do this in 16 more move, and reach this solution of 32 moves: http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=xOxFnX1 This is a lot nicer than 37!

If we play around with it more in different ways we can reduce further to 30: http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=fVOSFE1 

Like I said this isn’t the fastest solve I got with this board: Here is a 28-move solve: http://pad.dawnglare.com/?s=CcO2Z71 

Miscellaneous Tips

• Always look for ways to make orbs consecutive. Instead of worrying initially about getting orbs in their proper final position, sometimes you care more about making 2 orbs adjacent to each other so that you can pull them into their final position at the same time.
• If you have two sets of orbs that you want to cascade, but they aren’t in the same vertical order, look for a second-row cascade. The board above is a good example of that; it’s hard to position light always above dark or dark always above light in those two cascades, and so my 28-move solve cascades light to the second row. This way the cascades can be on top of each other but not have all the orbs in the same order.
• Try to leave as many orbs alone as possible. If there’s a cascade partially set up on the board already, try not to touch it too much. In most cases, the fastest solves on a board will be the ones that pass through the fewest orbs.

Best ways to practice

How do you apply this now? Here are a few things you can try:

• Go into Endless Corridors (normal ver) with a team with combo based lead. Clear the entire thing with at least 1 cascade per floor. Once this is easy, repeat except you have to do one interesting cascade per floor. Which is to say your cascade actually has to be incorporated into your overall solve, and you aren’t just wasting part of the board to accommodate space for the cascade. Keep on going until this is easy. Then try to do do 2 cascades per, etc
• Go into Endless Corridors (No Awakenings) without te badge with a combo lead & same thing as above.
• Go to Dawnglare and generate random boards, and try to get 6c in under 15 moves, or 7c under 25 moves, or 8c under 30 moves. These goals might be hard to hit at first, and you may find yourself spending 45min+ per board especially at the start. Keep a record of your best solves. After a few weeks of practicing, go back to your older solves & try to improve them!
• Hang out in boardhelp channel & try to improve on people’s solves
• Try playing a row or sparkle lead & cascading your activation every floor of Endless. Bonus: Do the same thing, but in A1.

All of these are things that I did to learn how to cascade. I still don’t consider myself that good at cascades (at least not in actual play as opposed to dawnglare), but I’ve definitely improved a huge amount over the months, mostly due to spending a lot of time practicing them in various ways. Also Mathena A1 with only 3TE and Diza debuff.