General's Trial Guide — the Alliance Challenge and which Sky Predator Station to pick
Two different Sky Predators
The game uses the name Sky Predator for two events that have nothing to do with each other. This page is about the one your alliance shoots down — a 30-minute boss fight inside the General's Trial. If you are looking for the week-long warzone event where your side builds an airship and flies it at another warzone, that is Sky Battlefront and it has its own guide.
The General's Trial is a recurring event with two halves that most alliances treat as one. The Solo Challenge is you against the Elite Instructors. The Alliance Challenge is the whole alliance against the Sky Predator, and it is the half that needs organising, because an officer has to choose a difficulty before anyone can swing at it — and that choice is close to irreversible.
Only one difficulty can be selected for the Alliance Challenge in each event. Pick too high and the alliance misses the damage bars entirely. Pick too low and you leave rewards behind. The rest of this page is about making that one choice correctly.
How the Alliance Challenge unlocks
This is where most of the confusion sits, so it is worth being exact: there is no alliance power requirement. Nothing anywhere asks for a combined power total. The gate is a headcount of members who have personally cleared a given Solo difficulty.
The in-game line reads like this:
After at least 29/10 allies complete all challenges of Advanced Difficulty 1 or above, R4 and above can unlock it
That is ten members needed, twenty-nine already there. Each station has its own pair of numbers.
Twenty members who can each clear Advanced Difficulty 6 on their own unlocks every station in the event. That is roughly 55M squad power each. There is no step above it — stations VIII, IX and X ask for nothing more than stations VII and before them. If twenty of your members are at that mark, the unlock is no longer your constraint and the damage bars are.
| Station | Members needed | Each must have cleared | Recommended power each |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | 5 | Advanced 1 | 35.0M |
| II | 10 | Advanced 1 | 35.0M |
| III | 15 | Advanced 2 | 37.5M |
| IV | 20 | Advanced 3 | 40.0M |
| V | 20 | Advanced 4 | 45.0M |
| VI | 20 | Advanced 4 | 45.0M |
| VII | 20 | Advanced 5 | 50.0M |
| VIII | 20 | Advanced 5 | 50.0M |
| IX | 20 | Advanced 6 | 55.0M |
| X | 20 | Advanced 6 | 55.0M |
"Or above" is doing real work in that sentence — a member who cleared Advanced 7 counts toward every row on this table. The practical reading is that the headcount matters more than the ceiling: one member at Advanced 9 unlocks nothing on their own, and twenty at Advanced 6 unlock everything.
The Solo Challenge, and why it is the real prerequisite
The Solo Challenge runs eighteen difficulties — nine Normal, then nine Advanced. You must clear every challenge at one difficulty to open the next, and the next one opens in the following event, not immediately. That is the part worth planning around: an alliance cannot decide on the day to raise its station, because the members who need to climb could not have done it in time.
You do not have to meet the recommended power to try. Below it the game tells you your formation is underpowered and points you at rallying allies instead, which works — the recommendation is a guide to whether you can solo it, not a lock.
Your base must be level 8 or higher to take part at all.
The two progress bars
Damage you deal in the Alliance Challenge counts twice: once on your own Individual bar, and again toward the alliance total. There is no choosing between them and no splitting your effort.
Each bar has six nodes, and each node pays out when the damage behind it is reached. The numbers below are the full set for every station.
| Station | Alliance bar (six nodes) | Individual bar (six nodes) |
|---|---|---|
| I | 1 / 2 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 8 G | 20 / 40 / 80 / 100 / 120 / 160 M |
| II | 2 / 4 / 8 / 10 / 12 / 16 G | 40 / 80 / 160 / 200 / 240 / 320 M |
| III | 3.75 / 7.5 / 15 / 18.75 / 22.5 / 30 G | 75 / 150 / 300 / 375 / 450 / 600 M |
| IV | 5 / 10 / 20 / 25 / 30 / 40 G | 100 / 200 / 400 / 500 / 600 / 800 M |
| V | 12.5 / 25 / 50 / 62.5 / 75 / 100 G | 105 / 210 / 420 / 525 / 630 / 840 M |
| VI | 25 / 50 / 100 / 125 / 150 / 200 G | 110 / 220 / 440 / 550 / 660 / 880 M |
| VII | 50 / 100 / 200 / 250 / 300 / 400 G | 115 / 230 / 460 / 575 / 690 / 920 M |
| VIII | 100 / 200 / 400 / 500 / 600 / 800 G | 120 / 240 / 480 / 600 / 720 / 960 M |
| IX | 100 / 200 / 400 / 500 / 600 / 800 G | 115 / 230 / 460 / 575 / 690 / 920 M |
| X | 100 / 200 / 400 / 500 / 600 / 800 G | 120 / 240 / 480 / 600 / 720 / 960 M |
G is a billion and M a million, as the game writes them. Station II is the one pictured on most servers' first run: its alliance bar opens at 2.00G and finishes at 16.00G.
Which station to pick
Read those two columns against each other and the answer falls out, because they do not scale together at all.
From station IV to station X, the top individual node rises from 800M to 960M — twenty per cent. Over the same range the top alliance node rises from 40G to 800G — twenty times. Choosing a higher station costs an individual member almost nothing and costs the alliance almost everything. The alliance bar is the only thing your choice is really setting.
That has a clean consequence for the officer making the pick. Your members will clear roughly the same personal nodes whatever you choose, so there is no reason to protect them by going low — and no reason to think a high station will be "worth it" for them personally either. Choose purely on what the alliance can total in thirty minutes.
Where the first wall is
On stations I to IV the top alliance node is exactly fifty times the top individual node. That is not a coincidence; it is the design. It means those four stations are participation targets: fifty members each finishing their own bar clears the alliance bar precisely.
From station V the relationship breaks:
No alliance has 833 members. From station V upward the top alliance node cannot be reached by everyone doing their bit — it can only be reached by members whose damage runs far past their own last node, which is to say by your heaviest hitters doing several times what the personal bar ever asks of them. That is the real meaning of the jump at station V, and it is why an alliance that comfortably maxed station IV can pick V and come away with less.
The number to check before you choose
Take the top alliance node, divide by the members you genuinely expect to show up and fight, and you get the average damage each of them has to do. Not your roster size — the number who will actually be awake and rallying for those thirty minutes.
| Station | 25 fighting | 30 | 40 | 50 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | 320M | 267M | 200M | 160M |
| II | 640M | 533M | 400M | 320M |
| III | 1.20G | 1.00G | 750M | 600M |
| IV | 1.60G | 1.33G | 1.00G | 800M |
| V | 4.00G | 3.33G | 2.50G | 2.00G |
| VI | 8.00G | 6.67G | 5.00G | 4.00G |
| VII | 16.0G | 13.3G | 10.0G | 8.00G |
| VIII — X | 32.0G | 26.7G | 20.0G | 16.0G |
Compare that figure against what your members actually scored last time — the Records and Ranking buttons on the event screen keep it. If the average you need is more than your middling members managed, you are picking a station where the top nodes will not pay.
The safe play is the highest station whose top alliance node you can still clear, because the lower nodes come with it and the personal bars are nearly identical either way.
Stations VIII, IX and X ask the same of the alliance
The three top stations share one alliance bar — 100G up to 800G — and the same Sky Predator. If your alliance can clear the 800G bar, the unlock headcount is the only thing separating them, and their individual bars and reward tiers differ in small ways that do not all point the same direction. We have not seen these run, so this page does not call a winner between them. If your alliance runs more than one, the comparison is worth noting down.
The fight itself
Thirty minutes on the clock, with a short preview before it starts. Only R4 and R5 can start it, and it cannot be started in the final two hours of the event — an alliance that leaves it late forfeits it, exactly like Marshal's Guard.
Damage comes from rallies. Commanders rally the Sky Predator or join someone else's rally, and every commander's damage is recorded separately as well as added to the alliance pile.
The Warlord Missile is the whole fight
This is the mechanic that separates alliances who score from alliances who merely attend.
The stun windows are long — the three of them run to several minutes of a thirty-minute fight, and the third is the longest. Practically, a large share of your alliance's total damage is decided by whether those three missiles land.
Nobody transfers energy. The Warlord cannot launch alone — the energy comes from allies sending it, and a Warlord staring at an unfilled bar is the commonest way a charge completes. The Warlord's base moves. If it relocates or is blasted away mid-launch, the launch fails outright. Whoever holds Warlord should be parked and left alone for the full thirty minutes.
Two more things to know about the end of the fight. The Sky Predator enters Rampage Mode on its own in the closing moments regardless of how well you have played, so expect the last stretch to be rough. And while it is up it fires on bases, costing durability and setting them burning — that is normal, not a sign anything has gone wrong.
If your alliance has a Muse, that role can summon a swarm of zombies against the Sky Predator. Expect to confirm the detail of it on your first run.
Rewards, and the trap at the end
Rewards arrive in two ways, and the second one catches people out every single event.
Trial Gifts come in six grades, N through MR, and the higher the difficulty you ran the better they are.
Unused Trial Keys are reclaimed when the event finishes. You are not holding them for next time — the rewards are reissued, but the keys themselves go. Worse: if you change alliance after the challenge, your keys stop working until you go back to the one you fought with. Anyone thinking of moving should open their chests first.
Exact reward contents vary by station and node. The Rewards Preview button on the event screen shows the set for the difficulty you are on, and that is the authority — we are not publishing a quantity we have only seen the icon for.
Officer checklist
All figures on this page are verified in-game. The station II ladders and unlock line were read directly off a live event screen and match the rest of the table exactly; the charge timings within the fight are the one thing we would like a first-hand reading on, so if yours differ we would like to hear about it.
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