I'm still learning to battlefield, but I wanted to ask, if there's a quest at the top saying "The dwellers of io are looking for 100 Ore" how do you exchange the ore? Do you have to be on the portal to do so?

Is there a more indepth guide to the battlefield that I can read somewhere? The tactics FAQ only goes so far, and I'd really like to start getting Warehouse 6 and Stable 5 etc materials and blueprints.

Yes, you need to be on the Portal. The exchange gives you a random rare building material such as a Nightcat, Stable lvl 5, etc., so naturally it's not easy to get to. 

The Tactics FAQ is really the only comprehensive guide so far, but the best guide is just experience. First of all, you need to choose your squad pets based on what tactics they have available. This unicorn of yours would make a great squad pet, for example, but the pets you actually have in your squad don't have very many tactics at all. 

Yeah, they were the best I had when I made the first squad, which was about a year and a half ago. I'm frantically training some pets to level 50 for my second squad, which will be ten times better than my first attempt. I'm going to include my etelia, an Ice Breath/Ice Aura GP3 lykos with Deadly Frost (how you get that I have no idea) and a dragon with Fire Breath. And I have some good unicorns with Blinding attack via Magic Horn.

The only way in which high-level squads are better is that they give you duplicates of some maneuvers. I think my squad had an average level of 15 when I started out. As you learn more about how the Battlefield works you might end up switching some of your pets out anyway, so there's no need to spend time training them yet. 

Deadly Frost is a tactic gained by a GP2 or better lykos with Ice Aura after it has won 15 battles on the Battlefield. It's listed in the Tactics FAQ.

Ah, so the only difference between the lykos I'd bred myself and the lykos I'd bought was the tactic wins... That explains it then :)

Wow, one of my new squads is sooo much better than my old one! I actually won a battle!!! Wheeee!

Ok, another question: is it worth it to have fancy maneouvres like Hold the Line, Theory of Chaos and so forth? Or should I just go for more attacks? Because my primary squad is losing every battle, whereas my secondary squad is winning at about 60-40 ratio, and that has mostly attacks and Leadership.