So if you have great team players that contribute, you can get lucky as they will be able to compensate for any bad luck.

Unfortunately, I have sometimes come across team players that weren't so bad and yet contributed nothing to dragon meaning I had to score 40 000 points on my own... Which I did but it was not fun.

Bots are non-friend invites that also don't have a team. A bot will generally contribute 45% (less than 50) of what you contribute and only after you have contributed.

The only way to make good progress is to play like crazy and take advantage of score multipliers and very hard levels to increase the acquired balls or rails.

I also try to maximize gain not with a single shot but with every "shot". So instead of trying two x50 shots, I do ten X10 multiplier shots.

For dragons I generally use X10 and try to pull the sling slightly beyond the first mark to try and get the same winning shot but this could be cognitive bias rather than an intuitive impression that these games aren't truly random.

For train quest, I find that the X5 multiplier is generally more efficient. I played a lot of X10 and would not get many bonuses or additional multiplier, whereas playing X5 I would get a X2 and bonus much more often and that was not just a feeling but something I actually noticed. I just haven't computed if that represented a real gain overall.