Introduction

A Help Alliance is an alliance aimed at providing full Helps to their members as fast as possible to assist them in doing building upgrades and research projects very fast, often to be able to score enough point to win prizes in Challenges. Their member base is very flexible, besides a small core group that coordinates the alliance, people join when they need the helps and leave afterwards.

What Are (Alliance) Helps?

For certain timers alliance members can offer help that reduces an amount of time from the remaining timer. This is the case for Building timers, Research timers and Troop Healing timers, but not for example for Troop Training timers or Manufacturing timers. The amount of helps you can receive depends on the Headquarters level, it is 4 plus the level of your Headquarters meaning you can receive a total of 25 helps once you have upgraded your Headquarters to level 21. The amount of helps someone can give is unlimited. Do not be fooled by the fact that there is only a limited budget for the Alliance loyalty you get for Helps, afterwards you can still offer Help, you just do not get the Alliance loyalty anymore. A help reduces the maximum of 1 minute and 1% of the remaining time from a timer. This means initially it is just about minutes (but this is still very useful, as it means that within the short amount of time you might be playing the game you can complete much more small building upgrades and research projects as you would be able to do without the helps) but later on, once your research timer becomes hundreds of days, the Helps play a very crucial role.

Why Help Alliances

Once you have upgraded your Headquarters to Lvl 21 you can have up to 25 Helps taking time off your research and building timers. If you want to have a chance at winning prizes in the Extreme Challenges you only have a time frame of one hour, so it is important to get those Helps fast. Maybe there are some times your alliance has 25 or more members active, but likely not very often. At times when your alliance does not have enough active members and you still want to complete several building upgrades or research projects, a Help alliance can save you lots of speed ups.

How it works

There are some slight differences in the way Help Alliances can work.

A Help alliance can have Open Recruitment switched On, which allows anyone to join automatically. It can also run a bot to let people in once they apply, potentially blocking some people from a list, or it can have their members actively monitoring applications. The latter is kind of risky, as it is important people can join fast. Since you can join an alliance from any state, it does not matter there is no one from the help alliance in your state. You can just join an alliance by dropping from your current alliance and going to the Alliance tab and type the name or tag of the new Alliance you want to join in the search field. Most important thing to do is to make sure you have opened all gifts before leaving your alliance.

There are some different procedures wrt leaving and potentially rejoining alliances. A very popular method is around the halfway time of an Extreme Challenge to promote all members to rank 2 and after an Extreme Challenge is finished to kick all r2 from the alliance. This prevents people from, intentionally or unintentionally, staying in the alliance.

At busy times Help Alliance Management would like you to drop from the alliance as soon as possible after you have finished because it opens up the spot for someone else. At slow times, the Help Alliances providing manual helps likely appreciate you staying a bit longer to provide Helps for the other players.

At very busy times Help Alliances might kick people, normally starting with the lowest power players. Good to be aware about this, and normally it is announced in alliance chat beforehand, because it is annoying to get stuck without Helps when you are just in the middle of competing for an Extreme Challenge.

It is always good to be aware whether you are in a Help Alliance that has bots providing the Helps or that depends on actual players. If the latter is the case it is important you click Help as well.

The Help Alliance is operated by a host. The host is normally a rotating function within the alliance so that the Help Alliance is operating 24/7. Depending on how the Help Alliance is setup exactly the host takes care of activities such as accepting players, promoting them and kicking them.

Bots/Automated Programs

I mentioned a few times about bots and an Automated Help alliance. I am no expert in this area, but it is possible a Mobile Strike account is ran by a software program rather than an actual person. This program can do certain actions automatically, like clicking Helps, but I have also heard from players that use it for their main account, to open gifts for example.

What is in it for them?

Often Help Alliances allow people to join for free, sometimes they ask to be gifted, or ask players below a certain power limit to gift.

Even if they do not ask to be gifted as a requirement and it common to give the host a gift. Just ask what they prefer (e.g. speed ups, VIP points) and gift some. You can check for yourself how much you actually save in speed ups/gold by being able to join the Help Alliance and even if you give only a fraction of that to the host, they will be happy as well.

Sometimes a Help Alliance offers a VIP program that allows people that have gifted above a certain threshold to acquire rank 3 which prevents them from being kicked and having to rejoin.

There are plenty of people who purchase there packs while in a Help Alliance, so the organizers also benefit from these gifts and since there are normally quite a lot of active players, the Gift level of a Help Alliance also increases quite fast.

When there is a lot of activity the Help alliances can score well in research and building related Alliance Challenges and the Alliance part of the State vs State Challenges, which could result in some extra leaderboard prizes.

Drawbacks

This drawback is not directly related to Help alliances, just to fast helps. I have seen it happen in normal alliances as well. The game can screw up the time deduction if Helps come in very fast. I don’t know the exact details, but it have seen situation where up to 3 helps have not been deducted from the timer. This is difficult to spot unless you have calculated beforehand how much the remaining time after full helps should be, or if you are researching several projects subsequently with exactly the same time. The helps are maxed out, but your timer does not have as much time deducted as it should. I have reported this problem a long time ago in Game of War, but never heard back and noticed in Mobile Strike, which is running on the same game engine, the bug is still present. Unfortunately it is not rare to happen either, I am guessing that it happens in more than 50% of the cases in an automated Help alliance.

As long as this is not fixed, it is something we just need to accept, as fast helps and Help Alliances still offer a lot of benefit to players. Just keep it in mind. Once change I made after I realized this problem is that when I am finished with my Extreme Challenge, previously I used to start a big research project and get full helps in the Help Alliance before leaving, now I first leave and join my regular alliance before I start the big research project as I know I am much more likely to get full help time deducted in my own alliance, because the helps come in at a slower pace.

What Help Alliances are Available

At this moment I only know of two Help Alliances in Mobile Strike.

MAXH has a power limit of 50M. I have used them in the past, but not so happy recently. It has happened that I applied and it took very long to be let in, or I was not let in before the hour finished. They work with bots and I am afraid there bots might not handle the application of people very well.

DZ6 has a power limit of 100M. When I was using Help Alliances I did not meet their requirement yet, so I do not have any personal experience, but my alliance members are positive about them. Seems to be your best choice.

If you know of other Help alliances, let us know, we will include them in this guide.

Conclusion

Help Alliances offer a great way to still get full Helps even at times your alliance is not so active. There is a bug in the game causing not all time to be deducted, but from the positive side, a lot of time is still deducted from your times and a Help Alliance can really save a lot of speed ups or gold when winning Extreme Challenges.

Contributed by: GamesGuide on July 1, 2016