Thursday in Alliance Duel is themed as "Hero Initiative". It awards you 2 victory points, like most of the weekday events in Alliance victory. Just like the previous 3 days, Hero Initiative days have two Hero Initiative phases for Full Preparedness. This day is a bit special, as while for Hero Initiative phases of Full preparedness spending XP is a source for points, they don't award any points for Alliance Duel. On the other hand, Alliance Duel points are awarded for using hero fragments, skill books, promoting or enhancing equipment. Using summoning tickets to recruit heroes give points for both. 

If you don't want to spend real money (or google play points) to buy points, this day should focus on using your hero fragments, skill books, improving equipment. It looks straightforward, at least at the first glance. But as some fragments are for specific heroes, different heroes might advance at different rate. Some of them might overtake others in terms of power. If you tend to buy Battle Passes for heroes or exclusing equipment you might want to look for the new one.

So after starring up your heroes you might want to remove all the equipment from heroees, and give the best equipment to the strongest heroes and rebuild your troops. It is similar to what is recommended for Hero Battleground, as you can use your best equipment for all 3 here Battleground Troops if you are willing to rearrange the equipment when needed. 

But unlike other days of the week, you don't have a mostly free "big point" item, like Orange Intercity Trades or Bonus missions, no ability to score lots of points quickly with much preparation from radar, etc. so this day is the day where your saved resources are more important for all the points you want to score today. It is a day when reaching even 9 boxes is achievable., so it can be one of our stronger days, but it can be a strong day for eeryone else.

While the game only mentions Hero Fregments, using Unique Equipment Fragments to upgrade unique equipment of your S1 (or S2) heroes. Later we might have additional kinds of content that might also give us some rewards and we should conssider that.

Possible preparations and timing

Preparation is very important for this day. after this day, it is possible for an alliance to have 7 points and secure victory in the weekly alliance duel competitoon. As you usually don't need materials intented for Hero Initiative for other days, it should be reasonable to spend a week worth of materials in a single day in most cases, and go to Hero Battleground with all 3 teams to gather more rewards and spend some of the rewards for more points.

Most of the points for the day can be gathered in a few moments, so even if you have very limited time for gameplay, it is easy to gather all your points by quickly upgrading your heroes. If you focus on summing in the earlier Hero Initiative Phase of daily Full Preparedness and spend your XP in the 2nd phase it is easy to have 12 Full Prepareddness Medal from focusing on Alliance Duel. It should help you to gather many rewards from both events. 

Hall of Honor

As some of your fragments are for specific heroes, once the said heroes reach 5 stars you can no longer spend those points from hero page directly. The 3 faction buildings, Toxic Fog Garden, Dawn Tower and Steel Factory once you leveled them to level 20 have a Hall of Honor interface where you can spend these fragments. If you don't have Hall of Honor for your faction yet, but you have plenty of hero fragments scored, that can be a significant amount of points to reach in short time.

Flexible fragments are usually better spent on heroes who aren't in Hall of Honor yet. 

Fuel economy, Deal Store and Strategy

You spend fuel for the daily events (Danger Lurks, Furylord) and on looting, you don't need any for Alliance Duel today, but you might want to start saving up cans of fuel for Enemy Buster and Capital Clash. Hero Battleground doesn't use fuel. As you don't need resources directly for Hero Initiative but you might need Food and Wood for training troops Friday. You don't need Zents or Electricity, so if you want to use some food for plundering, it should be straightforwards. But as you might be hit by many enemies on Enemy Buster and Capital Clash, you might want to limit how much lootable resources you keep, so you might want to slow down some of the looting.

Fuel isn't a big concern, so you can save some cans of fuel for other days. Appointments don't help much with Hero Initiative day, but the Deal Store might have several options from Power Cores, Enchancement allows, fragments, skill books to recruiting tickets. You should focus on what you need as all of them are valid options for Alliance Duel points. When you plan to use any flexible fragments and want to improve heroes you want to use in the near future.

If we face a stronger enemy in State Ruler (and capital clash) it makes sense to focus on short term power and advance your current strongest heroes. If we only face weaker enemies (or even don't have State Ruler enemies at all), you might want to focus more on long term growth. While our own server (273) is a new server, there are some older servers with more heroes released. Including the S2 hero Bella. When you acquire a new hero, you will have her at level 1, so the heroine in question will be among your weaker heroes initiailly, but once you start to level them, you could see that newer heroes can usually get stronger.

Usuing some of your XP in the 2nd Hero Initiative phase of daily Full Preparedness event would allow you to level up your newer heroes. A new hero can be already stronger, than an older orange quality (S tier) hero, mostly because I had the option to use the books and the flexible fragments on the new hero, assuming that newer heroes will be stronger on the long run, and as this week I won't need these supplies on other heroes more urgemently.  But we have to balance the need for multiple strong heroes on the long run and the need to level and improve our main troop quickly.

When material costs and time required to improve your HQ or reaching the maximum level of your HQ stops you from leveling your old heroes more, you can easily and safely use your XP on newer heroes (it is a second reason for using XP on Nix on 114), which allows the newer heroes to catch up in terms of XP. As the cost of "staring up" increases with each star, and you will need more and more hero fragments for the same goal, sometimes the cheaper, lower levels might advance in power faster, and it can be beneficial if these heroes are mostly used for Hero Battleground. 

We will have a more in depth guide about advancing your heroes, improving your troops, but even the above basic guidelines might help you to use your resources more efficiently at hero initiative day of Alliance Duel.

Packs and pay to win options

New heroes are usually released with their own battlepass, buying them would allow you to level the hero in question to 3 stars relatively quickly. This can help you to fulfill the need for more strong heroes. Buying those packs are important. Hero Code is a monthly pack that also helps you to improve your heroes, so it can be also a recommended pack. There are other smaller or bigger packs allowing you to improve some of your heroes, and you might want to consider buying them. Heroes usually also have some packs where you can get more fragments for them, and this can help you to star up some of your heroes and score more points. 

Additional considerations

• You should prepare for the coming days Alliance Duel phases. 
• The event is straightforward and predictable, so as an R4, I would like to see you score at leact 1.500.000 points in this event in NDSY, in smaller sister alliances around 1 million alliance duel points should be acceptable..