Strategies

These are some strategies that you should use to progress faster.
 * 1) Don't hire all possible outlaws, even if they only cost a small portion of your pioneers. Instead, you should only hire the pioneer outlaws for businesses that are not making significant income, because some unlocks increase the profit of a different business, (Areas 3 and 4 do this all the time) or even all businesses (usually on unlocks that are a multiple of 1000 or 1111). The first 7 Areas have a full list of unlocks shown on this wiki.
 * 2) You can get free patent cards by watching ads 3 times each time you open the game. So to get big profit bonuses quickly, you should watch the 3 ads, close and reopen the game, do it again and keep repeating.
 * 3) If you spend coins on 1hr, 6hrs, or 24hrs worth of income, make sure to have the x5 bonus from ads going, the piano going, and the x5 profit bonus from the loot bag active as well, to maximize the cash you get.
 * 4) Each day, the shop refreshes, offering new patent cards for gold coins. The 150 gold card is usually a "triple card", which increases the profit of 2 businesses, and halves the upgrade cost of a 3rd one. These cards are very important, so be sure to buy them if you don't already own them. Buying one you already own will just slightly increase the bonus, and shouldn't be done unless you have tons of gold, and/or one of the bonuses is for all businesses.
 * 5) Go west for maximum population on as many towns as possible. This will help you complete more deeds and get more cards when going west. The formula for maximum population is listed on the "Going West" page, but if you didn't reset without going west in the current town, the limit is usually approximately 8x the target population. Resetting before going west will make it faster to reach maximum population, but will also reduce it slightly, so if you're trying to get as many deeds as possible for the businesses, you'll want to avoid the reset option as much as possible. Exceptions: in Area 3, you should keep your pioneers below 1 ba for at least the first 55 towns, or else your progress will become unbearably slow. Area 9 needs to be played very differently from the previous Areas to prevent it from breaking, and getting as many pioneers as possible is the opposite of what you'll need to do. Other than those 2 exceptions, the more pioneers you have on any given town, the better off you'll be.
 * 6) You can fire your last hired outlaw only once per reset. Note that clicking on an outlaw that costs >1% of pioneers will remove the option to fire your last outlaw, even if you click "No". (That's a bug) You should hire all outlaws for "useless" businesses and not hire pioneer outlaws for the best business until you have everything built up. Once upgrading slows down, hire the more expensive outlaw for your best business, (the 3rd tier) buy max for that business, then fire it. That will speed up the game by quite a bit.
 * 7) Make smart choices with the pioneer upgrades. All profit upgrades are worth spending at least 20% of your pioneers on, depending on the multiplier. x5 all profit pioneer upgrades and larger (highest I've seen is x9.88) should be bought if they cost 50% of your pioneers or less. To determine whether or not to buy pioneer upgrades for a specific business, you need to know whether or not that's the best business at that stage in the game. If it is, and won't cost too many (>40%, can be less for small multipliers) of your pioneers, you should buy it. If not, it probably isn't worth it.
 * 8) Unless "+extra levels to this business" upgrades cost more than 1% of your pioneers, buy them! There is a misconception where those levels are "worth more" if you buy them later. You should buy these when you can unless your cash would be better invested elsewhere (for cash upgrades), or if it costs a significant amount of pioneers, as they may or may not be worth it depending on the unlocks that are coming up. (Even if they are worth it, it will take longer to reach the relevant unlock if it costs more than about 10% of your pioneers, so expensive extra level pioneer upgrades shouldn't be bought immediately, even if they end up being worth it.) Extra business levels from upgrades (doesn't matter if they are from cash or pioneers) do not increase the cash cost to buy more of that business.
 * 9) (Advanced) In events, use the investor upgrades list or Fame upgrades list so you can know which upgrades you'll need to buy first to get a desired upgrade to show up.
 * 10) In events, exceed the targets for the next milestone or attraction as much as possible every time, as this will help you reach higher cash amounts before you get stuck.
 * 11) (Advanced) There is an exploit that allows you to "redo" purchases of card packs in the shop until you get the card(s) you want. To do this, you'll need enough coins. What you do is go west to the next town, buy a card pack (Maverick pack is the most efficient for triple cards), if unsatisfied with the results, move your device's clock backwards, open the game, then change it back to normal and buy the card pack again. Repeat as many times as necessary until you get the card(s) you want. Once you do, go west to the next town to save those cards, then do this again if there are still specific cards you want (I think all cost reductions are the most important). Once you have most of the 50% cost reduction for all businesses cards, your progress should be significantly faster than before you started this method.
 * 12) (Advanced but SUPER IMPORTANT) Area 9 has an issue which can really ruin the game for you! The problem is that the towns have targets about 500x the starting pioneers, but there is a limit of 179.77 dt cash, and after I did some math, you'll need to keep your pioneers below 135^town number to reach the 60th town. To do this, follow my instructions here.
 * 13) (Advanced) There is a way to calculate the cash required to earn a certain amount of pioneers, since the formula is approximately (total income/1e+6)^0.4375, but income gained after reaching maximum population does not count, and resetting before going west affects this as well. Use Wolfram|Alpha to calculate this. For example, if the sum of your current pioneers, pioneers and settlers gained from resets in current town, unclaimed population, spent pioneers, and current settlers (the spent pioneer count in stats doesn't consider current town pioneers spent, only previous towns, so track it manually) is 30 t, that would require about 6.38 ah cash. If you want to get 100 t total pioneers in the current town, that would require about 100 ah cash, subtract 6.38 ah, and that would be 93.62 ah more cash you'll need to earn. This is quite complicated, but can be useful so you know how long you'll need to leave the game to earn the cash required to safely buy an expensive pioneer upgrade on the next reset or next town.

That's it. Feel free to add more strategies that you can find. There are 2 other glitches that help you to progress much faster than intended, but they should be reserved for "urgent situations", such as late Area 3 and early Area 8, because using them too many times will result in a lack of patent cards in higher Areas. That's why I won't list them here.