Puzzles & Survival: Ace Commander Event Schedule & Guide

When & How Long is Ace Commander?

Ace Commander occurs every other week, beginning on Monday and lasting through Sunday for a total of 7 days and phases.

Each day of the event features a different theme that lasts nearly 24 hours, ending about 5 minutes before the daily reset. Make sure to plan accordingly to get any last minute points.

Rewards from Ace Commander

As you might expect from a week-long event, Ace Commander offers a ton of rewards. Ranging from diamonds to resources to special speedups, it has it all. But most importantly, Ace Commander offers you the chance to get hero frags for 4 unique heroes – Obsidian, Atropos, Nam Hayul, and Wali.

However, if you want these hero frags, you’ll have to earn a high enough rank. There is a individual rank for each day and a cumulative one that spans the entire week. Even if you don’t do well on a single day, that doesn’t mean you can’t get a good overall rank.

That being said, it’s best to plan ahead of time if you plan on trying hard when Ace Commander rolls around or waiting a couple weeks for it to appear again when you’ve stockpiled more resources.

Note: If you’re playing on a relatively new server, you’ll be limited to only Obsidian for a while, but the other 3 heroes will eventually be added as a reward option.

For players specializing in Riders, this is an especially important event as Obsidian (and eventually Wali) are some of the best rider heroes in Puzzles & Survival. Meanwhile, Atropos provides unique bonuses to defending your sanctuary, and Nam Hayul is just a fantastic hero for puzzle battles. Frankly, they’re all great choices.

Event Schedule for Ace Commander

1. Monday – Day 1 (Heroes Rising) – Get hero frags
2. Tuesday – Day 2 (Path to Prosperity) – Building/Research upgrades
3. Wednesday – Day 3 (Survival) – Spend AP/Stamina and gather resources
4. Thursday – Day 4 (Soldier Trainer) – Use training speedups
5. Friday – Day 5 (Advancement) – Get Bioenhancer materials and Gear Refiners
6. Saturday – Day 6 (Improve Might) – Get enhance/promote/modification materials
7. Sunday – Day 7 (Ultimate Trial) – Building/Research upgrades and train/upgrade troops

Ace Commander Day 1 – Heroes Rising (Monday)

Time to get some hero frags and start unlocking/enhancing heroes!

Points & Tiers

1. Get Heroes
   • Get 2* Hero Frag = 1,500 points
   • Get 3* Hero Frag = 6,000 points
   • Get 4* Hero Frag = 20,000 points
   • Get 5* Hero Frag = 60,000 points
   • Get 6* Hero Frag = 90,000 points
   • Exchange points for heroes = 0 points

• Reward Tiers & Notable Rewards
  • 100,000 points
  • 200,000 points
  • 400,000 points
  • 800,000 points
  • 2,000,000 points (400x Diamond, 1x 30% Research Speedup)
  • 4,000,000 points (900x Diamond, 1x 30% Build Speedup)

Tips & Tricks

We hope you’ve been saving up all those Recruit Coins and Hero Choice Cards, because this is the day to spend them and enhance your heroes.

If you’ve been stockpiling resources for a bit, you should be able to rank highly during this Ace Commander day, as it’s one of the easier days of the event. We’ve even managed to place as the number 1 player in our bracket after hoarding for a couple months.

Nearly every source of hero frags in the game will give you points towards the event, except for converting Ace Hero reward cards and exchanging points in the Tavern. We’ll list out the most reliable ways to get points for this day.

Main Methods:

• Use Recruit Coins in the Tavern
• Use Hero Choice Cards
• Open up Joy 777 Jackpot boxes and select hero frags
• Exchange Rare Earth for McCarty frags in the Rare Earth Shop

Semi-Reliable Methods:

• Convert Perfect Hero Frags
• Exchange water bottles for Levina frags in the Reservoir Shop
• Exchange for Varvara / Eve frags in the Ruins
• Exchange for Flint / Devana frags in the Arena Shop
• Get heroes from the Timed Tavern
• [One-time only] Clear Ultimate Challenge level 170 for 20x Ironclaw frags and level 200 for 50x Phoenix frags.

Inefficient Methods (poor value or requires certain events to line up with this day):

• Kill zombies on the world map for Chester / Otto frags
• Buy hero frags from the cash shop
• Open locked chests for a chance at Lee frags
• Claim hero frags from other ongoing events (ex. Distress Signals, Lucky Wheel, special Holiday events)

Invalid Methods (do not give any points):

• Convert Ace Hero cards
• Exchanging points for specific hero frags at the Tavern.

Difficulty & New Players

It doesn’t take much to achieve enough points to claim all the reward tiers, so it’s rather easy to just aim for that if you don’t feel like committing too many resources to the event that week. But if you’re planning on going for a high overall ranking for the entire event, it’s usually best to pad your score on this day.

But if you’re a newer player, you’ll probably struggle with this Ace Day. Don’t worry – just keep participating in events and joining high level rallies to steadily accumulate Recruit Coins and Hero Choice Cards.

You’ll most likely want to use them early on to at least begin unlocking new heroes, and that’s completely reasonable. Just try to at least wait until there’s an active event that rewards you for obtaining hero frags before using your resources.

Ace Commander Day 2 – Path to Prosperity (Tuesday)

This is the day to finish your building upgrades and research projects.

Points & Tiers

1. Build
   • +1 Building Might = 7 points
2. Research
   • +1 Research Might = 7 points

• Reward Tiers & Notable Rewards
  • 100,000 points
  • 200,000 points
  • 400,000 points
  • 800,000 points
  • 2,000,000 points (400x Diamond, 1x AP Refill)
  • 4,000,000 points (900x Diamond, 2x 50 Stamina Refill)

Tips & Tricks

This is a very item-intensive day of the Ace Commander event. You’ll need to ensure you’ve stockpiled plenty of resources and speedups if you want to actually compete on the rankings.

Since this Ace Commander day only cares about completing research/building upgrades, you’ll want to minimize the amount of speedups/resources you use and prioritize upgrades that give a drastic boost to Might.

While your upgrades to your main buildings often increase Might by a sizeable amount, they also tend to be rather costly in resources. It’s usually more resource-efficient to focus on researches that boost your military strength.

There’s a couple ways to also cut back on the time it takes to build or research.

1. The simplest one is to switch to Economy talents, as they’ll give you passive bonuses.
2. If you have access to the Builder/Tech gear, swap to the correct set before starting your respective upgrade.
3. This Ace Commander day is the best time to activate a 30% Build/Research Speedup item from your Bag (under the Speedup tab).
4. If you have access to the Fast Build skill (under the Economy talent tree), activate it before you start going crazy with upgrades.

While the 30% Speedup lasts for an hour, the skill only lasts for 5 minutes, so you’ll want to get your upgrades done quickly. Don’t hesitate to use the Auto Speedup function and spend the 3-4 diamonds to finish the small amounts of remaining time on your projects. We also suggest giving your alliance members a heads-up that you’ll be doing back-to-back upgrades, so they can help you with the timers.

One last tip for this day – if you plan on getting a high overall rank when the event rolls around, try to start an upgrade that’ll require a long time weeks in advance. If you plan it out correctly, it’ll be nearly done when this Ace Day rolls around – saving you a couple days worth of speedups. Just make sure to account for the time shaved off with helps from your alliance members, otherwise it might finish before this Ace Commander day rolls around.

Difficulty & New Players

You’re probably not going to get all the reward tiers without actually trying on this day, but that’s to be expected. Most players ignore this particular day unless they’re aiming for an overall high rank in Ace Commander.

If you are aiming high, you’ll need to be prepared to go through 10-15 large upgrades to get a respectable rank. The higher level your Sanctuary is, the “easier” this is to do in terms of upgrades needed, but be prepared to spend millions in resources.

Additionally, note that the final day of Ace Commander also features increasing your might via building and research. Typically, most players do not have enough resources to rank highly on both days, so we suggest primarily doing your building/research upgrades on this day.

Ace Commander Day 3 – Survival (Wednesday)

Despite this day being named “Survival” it’s really just about spending your AP/Stamina and gathering resources.

Points & Tiers

1. Consume Stamina
   • 1 Stamina = 2,000 points
2. Consume AP
   • 1 AP = 500 points
3. Gather Resources
   • 20 Food = 4 points
   • 20 Wood = 4 points
   • 4 Steel = 4 points
   • 1 Gas = 4 points
   • 2 Rare Earth = 1 point

• Reward Tiers & Notable Rewards
  • 50,000 points
  • 100,000 points
  • 200,000 points
  • 400,000 points
  • 1,000,000 points (400x Diamond, Training Speedups)
  • 2,000,000 points (900x Diamond, Training Speedups)

Tips & Tricks

This is by far the easiest day of Ace Commander. Even if you’re not actively participating overall that week, you can get a high daily ranking with minimal effort.

Simply spend your Stamina and AP before they get full, make sure you’re always in the Pit, and constantly send your marches out to gather in the downtime. That being said, there are a couple tricks to further pad your points and rank.

Stamina & AP:

You’ll want to go into this day with as much Stamina as possible, so try to stockpile your Stamina the day before. You can set (and join) fake 1-hour, level 50 rallies to temporarily “pool” some Stamina if you’re at max capacity, allowing you to keep regenerating more.

You can also hold off on claiming your first 3 daily quest boxes until this Ace Commander day is about to begin to get a bit more Stamina and AP. The same principles apply to AP, just minus the pooling method.

Assuming you’ve done all of the above, you should be teeming with Stamina at the start of the day and should be able to run a bunch of rallies (or individual zombies in the worst case scenario). This is the ideal time to launch a “hunt party” – where you and multiple alliance members activate the Hunt Mastery skill (from the Balance talent tree) to reduce your Stamina costs for 10 minutes.

Everyone participating should immediately start launching the highest level rallies that your group can reasonably clear and joining one another. If you have access to all 5 march slots (and enough members), you should be able to join a total of around 10 rallies before the skill wears off.

Unsurprisingly, this is much more effective if you schedule it in advance. Talk to your active alliance members and figure out who’ll be around and on standby during the daily reset (or a later time if you can’t get enough people at reset).

The Pit & Gathering Rare Earth:

As for the Pit and gathering Rare Earth, ideally you would be near full capacity at your spot in the Pit when the day resets and then immediately leave with your earnings before you get robbed.

Afterwards, you should go to the highest Pit level that you can reasonably stay in and try to find/rob spots that are near completion (have a high percentage). As soon as the game lets you recall your troops from the Pit (which should be after 2 hours), do so. This will prevent other players from stealing your earnings and lets you rob another spot.

Gathering Resources:

Notably, resources only count as gathered when your march returns to your Sanctuary. If you can line up the timing for your troops to return home from gathering just as soon as this Ace Commander day begins, you can get a bit of a lead.

This is especially effective if you’ve left one march to gather in your alliance’s communal resource building for hours on end during the previous day. If you think the building might run out of resources before this Ace Commander day begins, it’s worth asking an officer to demolish it and rebuild it early on in the previous day.

As for the rest of the actual event day, keep this tip in mind – gathering bonuses are applied when you send out your march. So make sure to switch to your Economy talents before sending your troops to gather.

If you’re actively checking the game throughout the day, it might be worth activating a 50% Gathering Speedup item from your bag (under the Speedup tab). Ideally, you’ll have access to at least level 6 resource nodes, so you won’t have to check the game every 20 minutes or so.

Lastly, try to figure out what time each hour the resource nodes respawn. It varies for each different server and changes whenever there’s a major update for the game. But if you can figure it out, you can be on standby to send marches to the level 7 resource nodes when they spawn.

This is especially good if you have access to the Swift Gatherer skill (under the Economy talent tree) – just make sure your marches have actually arrived before activating it.

Difficulty & New Players

As we mentioned above, this is not a difficult Ace Commander day. Most players, even relatively new ones, should be able to get all of the reward tiers if you actively play throughout the day. However, getting a high daily rank does require you to take advantage of all the tricks we listed above.

For new players, your gathering efficiency will increase drastically as you continue to level up and unlock new researches. Once you reach VIP level 10 and can switch talents freely in Puzzles & Survival, this Ace Commander day will become infinitely easier for you.

Make sure to also prioritize unlocking the research under the Development tree for faster stamina regeneration. It’ll also help to unlock and enhance the hero McCarty, so you can get more mileage out of your stamina.

Lastly, pick a troop type to focus your upgrades on and build a strong formation around it. You’ll be able to get much further in the Pit, give you more options to steal from, and decrease the chances of you being robbed.

Ace Commander Day 4 – Soldier Trainer (Thursday)

This is a great time to build up your army or upgrade those lower tier troops.

Points & Tiers

1. Training Speedup
   • Each 1-min of Training Speedup = 80 points

• Reward Tiers & Notable Rewards
  • 20,000 points
  • 40,000 points
  • 80,000 points
  • 160,000 points
  • 400,000 points (400x Diamond, 6x Enhance Choice Box)
  • 800,000 points (900x Diamond, 6x Promote Choice Box)

Tips & Tricks

This Ace Commander day is a bit odd. Normally, having bonuses to your troop training speed would be seen as a good thing, but it arguably works against your favor when it comes to earning points on this day.

That being said, if you also want to grow your army, it becomes a non-issue. Just make sure that no matter what you do, you activate the Cost Reduction skill (under the Balance talent tree) to reduce the resources needed to train troops. It lasts for an hour, so you won’t be in a rush.

Depending on which you have more of (speedups or resources), you may also want to use a 30% Training Speedup item from your bag (under the Speedup tab). But once again, that’s only if you’re primarily interested in growing your army.

If you’re planning on training or upgrading a bunch of troops, try to set the slider so that the time it takes is as close to an increment of 5-minutes as possible (e.g. 8 hours, 25 minutes, 2 seconds) and hit the little lock button to keep it set to that number. Then after you start the training/upgrading, hit Auto Speedup. If done correctly, your waiting time between batches of soldiers should be next to nothing.

Luckily, you earn points from using both training speedups and generic speedups, so you don’t need to worry about that.

Difficulty & New Players

In terms of getting all the reward tiers, it’s rather easy and doable once you’ve been playing the game for a bit. Getting a high daily ranking is a completely opposite story though…

Since it’s so easy to get points on this Ace Commander day, you have a much higher wall to climb to get a high rank. It doesn’t help that top level players with access to T11 or T12 troops are easily burning through days worth of speedups whenever they train a single batch of troops, making it difficult to catch up to them.

While it’s not impossible to compete against, you’ll be hard pressed if you haven’t been stockpiling speedups for a while.

New players are better off saving their training speedups until they have access to at least T8 soldiers before attempting to compete in this day’s event.

Ace Commander Day 5 – Advancement (Friday)

This is probably our least favorite Ace Commander day due to how restrictive it is.

Points & Tiers

1. Bioenhancer
   • Get Organ Stimulant = 100 points
   • Get Basic Bioenhancer Shard = 400 points
   • Get Int. Bioenhancer Shard = 2,000 points
   • Get Adv. Bioenhancer Shard = 8,000 points
   • Get Super Bioenhancer Shard = 20,000 points
   • Get Apex Bioenhancer Shard = 40,000 points
   • Get Basic Bioenhancer = 40,000 points
   • Get Int. Bioenhancer = 200,000 points
   • Get Adv. Bioenhancer = 800,000 points
   • Get Super Bioenhancer = 2,000,000 points
   • Get Apex Bioenhancer = 4,000,000 points
2. Get Gear Refiner
   • Get Gear Refiner = 3,000 points

• Reward Tiers & Notable Rewards
  • 20,000 points
  • 40,000 points
  • 80,000 points
  • 160,000 points
  • 400,000 points (400x Diamond, 2x Modification Choice Box)
  • 800,000 points (900x Diamond, 10x Enhance Choice Box, 2x Adv. Recruit Coin)

Tips & Tricks

As you can probably tell just by glancing at the requirements for this day, it’s largely about obtaining Bioenhancers. If you haven’t cleared all 24 levels in the Campaign at least once to unlock the Prison, you won’t have any real way to access Bioenhancer material.

Bioenhancers:

Though even if you have, it’s still rather annoying, as the best way to get points for this event is to do Bioenhancer Research at Nova’s building. However, it’s not recommended to spend any of Bioenhance Schemes on the research until you have 270 of them and can ensure you get a guaranteed Apex-tier Bioenhancer.

As such, the only other way to get Bioenhancer material is to do a run in the Prison. But since you can only do one run every 3 days, you’re still limited on how many points you can get for the day’s event.

You could in theory spend the points you get from Prison on some of the Bioenhancer shards or Organ Stimulant, but it’s a bit of a waste as you’re best off just buying more Bioenhance Schemes usually.

Gear Refiners:

As for Gear Refiners, there’s really no great way to get them on demand. They’re usually a reward from various other events. If you have them waiting to be claimed as a reward and know this Ace Commander day is coming up soon, hold off on claiming them until this day rolls around (assuming they don’t expire).

You can get about 20 from the Golden Pickaxe reward table in the Pit, but it’s not really going to make much of a dent point-wise.

You could in theory buy them from the Diamond Shop, but that’s usually a complete waste of diamonds, especially without a diamond-spending event being active at the same time. Though since this day does overlap with Break Loose, there is a chance for a diamond-spending Break Loose.

Difficulty & New Players

As we mentioned already, Bioenhancers aren’t really accessible until you beat the entire campaign at least once and unlock the Prison, so it’s a very unfriendly event day for new players.

Even after you clear the campaign once, you’ll still have to build up your heroes until you can reliably clear the highest level (10) of it to make meaningful progress on this Ace Commander day. If you can do that, you can usually at least get enough points to claim all the reward tiers.

But as for ranking, the only real way to get an even remotely meaningful one is to do 270 Bioenhancer Researches in one sitting, so you’ll be saving up Bioenhancer Schemes for a while. That being said, once you do reach that amount, you’re bound to get a high ranking for this day.

Ace Commander Day 6 – Improve Might (Saturday)

Time to open up all those enhance and promoter chests.

Points & Tiers

1. Get Enhance Material
   • 1* Material = 50 points
   • 2* Material = 250 points
   • 3* Material = 1000 points
   • 4* Material = 2500 points
   • 5* Material = 10,000 points
2. Get Promote Materials
   • Get promoter = 500 points
   • Get promoter II = 2,500 points
   • Get promoter III = 20,000 points
3. Get Modification Materials
   • Gear Modifier = 3,000 points
   • Chip Modifier = 3,000 points
   • Module Modifier = 3,000 points
   • Cube Modifier = 3,000 points
   • Nanoweapon Modifier = 3,000 points
   • Gear Lock = 30,000 points

• Reward Tiers & Notable Rewards
  • 17,500 points
  • 35,000 points
  • 70,000 points
  • 140,000 points
  • 350,000 points (400x Diamond, 1x 30% Research Speedup)
  • 700,000 points (900x Diamond, 1x 30% Building Speedup)

Tips & Tricks

This Ace Commander day is all about obtaining the materials to strengthen your gear. Obtaining enhance/promoter/modification materials will all get you points.

The main way you’ll be getting points is by opening up those Enhance Choice and Promoter Choice boxes that you’ve been receiving as periodic awards from other events. You should have been stockpiling them and waiting for this day to crack them open.

Modification Choice boxes tend to be rarer and require you to go out of your way to obtain in currency based events, but they’re also a good source of points for this day.

This is also the best time to clear Ultimate Challenge levels, as none of the rewards (minus level 170 and 200) will go to waste! That being said, we recommend on saving those levels for when you’re aiming for a high overall rank for Ace Commander.

This is also a great chance to claim most of the the rewards from the monthly Supply Kit and the Pit’s Gold Pickaxe table. They won’t make a huge dent, but it helps.

Lastly, we hope you’ve been saving up enough Ruins points and Rare Earth. At the Ruins shop, you’ll need about 10,000 points to clear out all of the daily chip items. As for the Rare Earth shop, you’ll need about 7,500,000 Rare Earth to claim all the daily module items. Note that buying the chips and modules themselves, do not grant points for this event.

Also related to the Ruins shop – make sure to save those one-time enhance/promoter rewards for when you’re really trying to push your overall rank for Ace Commander. They give you a huge boost of points.

Difficulty & New Players

This one isn’t too bad, but it does require you to save up chests for a while. If you clear out the Ruins store of its daily chip items and the Rare Earth store of its module items, you should be about 75% through with claiming all the reward tiers. Just crack open a couple more enhance and promoter chests, and you should reach 100%.

As for getting a high ranking though, we hope you have somewhere around 250+ chests waiting on standby. A lot of players will be hoarding their chests for this day, and some are really patient.

As for new players, this day will be rather challenging at first, but once you start getting the hang of the game and become strong enough to regularly clear events, it stops being as bad. Just make sure to participate in any other alliance events to steadily stockpile more enhance/promoter chests!

Ace Commander Day 7 – Ultimate Trial (Sunday)

Basically a repeat of Day 2 but with the added option of training troops and higher point requirements.

Points & Tiers

1. Build
   • +1 Building Might = 7 points
2. Research
   • +1 Research Might = 7 points
3. Train Units (Note: Upgrading units will give less points than training new troops)
   • Train T1 unit = 5 points
   • Train T2 unit = 10 points
   • Train T3 unit = 15 points
   • Train T4 unit = 22 points
   • Train T5 unit = 30 points
   • Train T6 unit = 40 points
   • Train T7 unit = 55 points
   • Train T8 unit = 70 points
   • Train T9 unit = 85 points
   • Train T10 unit = 110 points
   • Train T11 unit = 125 points
   • Train T12 unit = 150 points

• Reward Tiers & Notable Rewards
  • 200,000 points
  • 400,000 points
  • 800,000 points
  • 1,600,000 points
  • 4,000,000 points (Diamonds, 1x 50% Gathering Speedup)
  • 8,000,000 points (Diamonds, Enhance Choice Box, 1x 30% Training Speedup)

Tips & Tricks

The same principles from Day 2 apply to the building and research upgrades. However, this day also opens up training troops as a way to get points – and this time, you want to lower the training time as much as possible.

If you can upgrade McCarty, do so. He not only reduces the time it takes to train troops, he also reduces the resources needed. Ironclaw also reduces the training time, but he’s much harder to get frags for.

If you plan on training a bunch of troops, make sure to use the Cost Reduction skill and activate a 30% Training Speedup item – both will go a longer way in saving you resources.

Notably, upgrading lower tier troops will also get you points, but at a reduced rate. The amount of resources you spend is reduced for upgrading, so it all balances out in the end. This is a great time to make sure your army is at the highest tier it can be, though we recommend leaving a bunch of T1 taxis to serve as cheap canon fodder.

Difficulty & New Players

In comparison to Day 2, this day requires about double the amount of points to claim all the reward tiers. It’s offset a bit by how easy it is to train troops, but unless you’re training T10 or higher, it’s rather difficult to make a meaningful dent.

As we mentioned earlier, you typically have to choose between ranking high on Day 2 or 7. It’s hard to have enough resources to rank highly on both days.

Unsurprisingly, this day is not particularly friendly to new players. The tasks aren’t particularly difficult in any capacity, but they all require a lot of resources that you probably don’t have at the moment. Just keep hoarding as you play the game, and eventually you’ll reach the point where you can compete here.

Join the High Ground!

And that’s it for our guide to the Ace Commander event in Puzzles & Survival. We hope this has proven useful to you, whether you’re just checking for the schedule or looking for tips to get a high rank during Ace Commander!

If there’s any tip we left out or if you want us to clarify something, let us know in the comments below! And don’t forget to subscribe for more upcoming Puzzles & Survival guides!

Happy gaming!