As in recent months, we have been in need of rare armadas for at least one Battle Pass event, and sometimes two. They have become integral to completing the BP and getting all our rewards. So how do we maximize the ones we are getting from month to month, and where do we get them?
First, to maximize their potential, there is absolutely no reason to be using your rare directives outside of these events. Any other time or event should have other ways to complete it, so be careful. During the battle pass, there are two different events that can be confusing. One for damage, which works with uncommons. And one for killing, which does not. Let's compare these two.
So, looking at these two screen grabs. The first event is destroying and starting rare or epic armadas. Starting one rare will get you 20,000 points and one epic will get you 35,000. The goal would be for everyone in your alliance to start three rare armadas, then join ten armadas to fill up that last 15,000 points. This should be easily doable if everyone starts three, because that means that twelve other players will each get an armada spot. Twelve is more than the ten needed for this.
If you were just trying to kill armadas to complete this, you would need 50 Rare or 30 Epic Armadas.
The second is just about damage. Here you can hit uncommon armadas all day and it doesn't matter. Do not waste rare directives on these. If you follow the Crucible of War guide, plus the 400 uncommon directives you get weekly with alliance credits, you should have 1000 uncommon directives a month, more than enough to win these.
The SLBs for the officer every month is where people tend to run into trouble. If you don't have enough materials to spend AND it is personally worth it to you to win an officer and not have enough armada directives to finish battle pass, that is your choice. But if you choose to spend them here, you can't expect your alliance to be able to support you for the 35+ armadas you would need to complete it without spending. Also, remember at the end of Heroic BP Overflow that you will still be getting couple more shards of the epic and rare officer of that Battle Pass.
Every day you can pull your uncommon armada chests, from your uncommon credits from defeating armadas. From these, you will get approximately 200 a month, so 1 rare armada. As it's based on RNG (random chance), it's possible to get more or less, but the math on the RNG works out to 200 a month on average.
This requires quite some explanation, follow the guide here: Crucible of War
This is by far the best way to get the directives you need for the events.
With Cosmic Cleanup, where runs Saturday nights during Battle Passes, you can claim one chest which has a chance of getting 20, 40, 50, 60 or 80 Directives. Unfortunately, there is also the chance of getting none. This is not a terribly good way at sourcing directives, as it's got so much random chance built in.
Even with the cheapest paid option, you will get 200 directives from it. During this arc, it was given out on days 6 and 12.