The AC24 Challenge - My Road to Rally Lead in 3 Months

With FIFA World Cup 2026 starting and GoTWiC coming out of AC Season 23, I thought it's time to spice things up a bit and create a personal challenge. Because competing in all these events has to lead up to something greater, am I right?

First of all, congrats to WxC for winning the Super League :)

But coming back to my challenge, it's rather simple. I'll be preparing a mini-series to follow my progress over the next 3 months.

Why 3 months, you might ask? Because that's roughly when the next AC season should start, and my goal is to work on my account enough to become eligible for a Rally Lead role in N0X.

I know what you're thinking. Even a fresh account can become a whale overnight if the owner has deep enough pockets. But that's not me. Instead, I'll be focusing on something much cheaper: figuring out how much value I can squeeze out of an account that has spent far too long on autopilot.

Granted, my account hasn't seen any major improvements in quite some time despite me actively playing it. That's exactly why I'm confident there are still several lumps of coal hiding in there that can be turned into diamonds with enough pressure and a bit of planning.

My challenge will rely mostly on minimal spending aimed at the highest impact upgrades. Things like the Honor Token for the extra Rebel Leader drops needed for gear upgrades and Iron Bank for Health Badges. There will be other investments, such as the Ruins and Recruitment Passes, but those are long term plays and won't "move the needle" much during this 3 month challenge.

To keep things measurable, I'll also have a secondary goal: Strongholds.

And I'm starting this journey stuck behind Baelish at Cav Stronghold level 359.

So my second goal and measuring rule will be breaking into the 400 bracket and finally getting... a chance at getting... Royal Badges.

Now, my alliance will probably evaluate potential Rally Leads based on factors like lineup and synergy, CR, rally size, dragons, dragon skills, and whether the account has a proper war ready setup with Fervor, a level 60 Lord Prison, executed HoFs, and AC research.

That gives me a pretty solid roadmap for what needs work, so let's split everything into a few categories that I'll also use as benchmarks throughout the challenge. After every major improvement, I'll be testing my progress in Strongholds to see if the upgrades are actually moving the needle.

So I'm thinking of tackling this in... let's say "key areas".

The 1st and probably most important base is the lineup, including synergy.

I'm running a Spear Weakness Synergy, but it's the most basic version possible with the original commanders. I'm still running Uma and Arslan, for crying out loud... Hello? 2023 wants its synergy back!

Since we're talking commanders, we might as well include weapons and advisers in this category too.

My weapon situation isn't terrible. I have full red weapons and a decent 50 Base Attack. For some of my weapons 10 BA is the max they can roll, lol.

My advisers, however, could probably use a little more love.

The next major category is already visible in the previous screenshots. So the 2nd area is... drum roll... Dragons.

These definitely need attention. They're not even max level yet, which seems like a good place to start.

And don't get me started on the skills. I don't even have all the skill slots unlocked. On top of that, I only have three decent red skills, and those aren't even level 9. If, and that's a very big if, we get the dragon skill discount event this month, there could be some serious upgrades to be made here.

My target is to get Shadowmoon to level 80, unlock the final two skill slots, and get 3 more red skills. Maybe Tear, Damage, and Assist? Maybe Legion Building since I'm trying to become a Rally Lead? That's something I'll need to investigate further, provided we get the discount event. Fingers crossed. Otherwise this skills upgrade will be delayed until Christmas.

I should also be able to make progress on my support dragons. With AoW around the corner, Sparky (aka the Lightning dragon) should be easy enough to improve a bit. Goldie (aka the Glory dragon) is a bit more complicated because all my Glory Coins are currently funding the AoH castle skin.

Alright, dragons covered. What's next? Let's call the 3rd area "Lord", which basically means gear and badges.

The situation here is a little sad, and even more sad since I don't see any significant improvements possible in 3 months.

Once my gear reached gold quality, I mostly stopped paying attention to it. Combined with my long standing habit of ignoring level 6 Rebel Leaders... my gear has fallen behind and currently sits below 50% "max-red".

That said, I don't need to become the best Rally Lead in N0X. Realistically, I'd be perfectly happy becoming a "filler" Rally Lead, and for that, fully "max-red" gear probably isn't thaaat important, right?

Surprisingly, the badges situation is very similar. Between Ancient Dust being hard to get and getting actual badges... I'm also sitting below 50% "max-red" here.

Mind you, I'm running the "cheap" Troop Attack, Troop Health, Troop Defense, and War Badge setup. Nothing fancy, like Royal Badges.

Anyway, moving to the 4th area. A place where I might find some easy upgrades is the Tavern.

I've been using the Friendship Calculator and currently sit at roughly 10k/5k bonuses, which is rather decent, but I'm fairly sure there's still room for improvement to be made here.

And since we're talking Army Size, let's look at what I actually have to work with.

I'm sitting on roughly 980k personal army size and a staggering... not!... 3 million rally size?!?😅

If I'm serious about this Rally Lead thing, rally size is probably one of the areas that needs the most attention.

Next up, 5th area: research.

Honestly, I'm hopeless here.

I focused heavily on the SoW tree and nearly finished it, which means my AC research is basically standing there naked and wondering what happened. We'll see how much of that can be fixed over the next three months. But I'm not expecting miracles, tho.😒

As a bonus objective, I should finally finish upgrading my buildings to Glory Level 10 for the extra stuffs, including the Fervor buildings that I've mostly ignored so far.

That being said, I'm not going to inspect every tiny source of stats or obsessively min-max every aspect of my account. I'll still get improvements where I can, whether that's Greensight, skins, reforging collection weapons, or maybe even locking a 4* F2P Arslan weapon in the new vault system. But I'm not expecting miracles to come from these... supporting actions.

The 5 categories above are the real focus of my challenge.

Since this is the first entry in the series, there's no groundbreaking achievement to share yet. This chapter is simply about establishing the baseline and setting expectations.

The challenge itself is the story: Can a long time Racer turn a somewhat neglected veteran account into a legitimate Rally Lead candidate in roughly 100 days without breaking the bank?

I'm counting on the answer being yes.

My account has years of resources buried inside it. The question is whether three months of targeted focus, optimization, and a pinch of spending can finally bring them to the surface.

And even if I don't make it as a Rally Lead because N0X is a top tier alliance and there are probably stronger candidates available, I'll still consider this challenge a success if I can push through Stronghold 400 along the way.

After all, Royal Badges don't care about my alliance role😜