Gathering in Last War is an essential aspect of the game. While it is slower than other forms of acquiring resources, it is reliable and gives your idle squads something productive to do. Building, research, creating and promoting troops all rely heavily on resources.
Most importantly, on the first day of Alliance Duel — VS — a significant number of points can be scored by gathering. The best I've managed with resource points at the very beginning of the Alliance Duel is 750,000 points, simply by recalling my gathering troops once the competition began. These points are won immediately at the instant of recalling gathering troops or at the precise moment the gathering completes.
Let's look at the important aspects of Gathering. First and foremost is how to find the resources you want. There is an automatic and a manual method.
With the automatic method you first have to be outside your base on the world map. There, toward the bottom left corner is a magnifying glass icon. Tap on it.
The following window then appears at the bottom of your screen:
Select what category you want.
Select which resource you want.
Select the size of the desired resource.
Finally, do the search.
After tapping Search we see a resource tile and tap it to see the following:
No one is gathering here so it is free to take.
Tap the pick icon to proceed.
Finally we have arrived at the most important screen concerning gathering. There are three things to focus on.
Select which squad to gather with. While you can recall your gatherers at any time, you should not commit a squad that you will soon need for other activities. Of special note is that different squads might or might not take a different amount of time to gather, affected primarily by research.
Shows the Gathering time.
This is easy to overlook, the time the gather will complete. For me, this is reporting at my local military time, or 6:11 PM "civilian" time. This finish time includes travel time to the resource tile and is extremely important.
For the Alliance Duel (VS) event, prep for Day 1 includes having all your squads out gathering for as long as possible before the event begins. For me with eastern time, reset is at 10:00 PM, and Day 1 points start accumulating at 10:05 PM, so I aim for my gatherers to complete their tiles no sooner than 10:06 PM for a slight safety margin. In military time as the game reports to me in item #3 above, that would be 22:06. This expected time to finish is an invaluable tool specifically for the first day of the Alliance Duel. This is the only day of the week where gathering scores points in Alliance Duel.
The other way of locating resources is the manual method. Here, you search the map visually while scrolling around. It is highly recommended to zoom out until you see the resource tiles reduce to little white icons, and continue zooming out until the little numbers below them disappear and then zoom back in just enough so they reappear. This way you can see the most at one time while still being able to see all the important information. Ultimately you will see something like the following:
#10 food tile, shaped like a piece of bread.
#10 coin or gold tile, shaped like a coin.
#8 iron tile, meant to appear as an I-beam.
When you tap on one of these white icons it automatically zooms in and everything in the above sections applies.