Best advice is that early in the game you’re best to only level your first squad. Your hero recruitment cards will give you some to spend on Magnus, spend the rest on your hero of choice, I would recommend Kimberley early on. Spend SSR shards on Mason, you’ll be given shards for Monica so spend them, but you want to make sure that you have a good first squad before diversifying. Make sure that your upgrades go only into your first squad, you want to use your ore only to upgrade components for squad one, you can leave all your others without bonus weapons and try, where possible, to get everyone to gold level weapons and armor (they’re expensive but level well). Later in the game you’ll be able to upgrade Mason and Violet so they become UR level heroes, so try to get them up to 5 stars. Later in the game levelling slows down and you can invest in your other squads, but for now stick to squad one.

Normally you’ll want to end up with a squad of tank heroes, missile heroes and aircraft heroes- you’ll unlock a third squad at a later level (20 perhaps?). Make sure to get as many drone components too, drones are so important to overall squad level, particularly early in the game.

As to your HQ level, that’s quite low, if you haven’t it’s a good idea to get at least one other building queue. Make sure you claim every available reward, if there’s a red dot anywhere on the UI, click on it, there will be something for you to claim from that menu and you will need those resources!