Thanks for this! I was looking for a non-beginner guide to my favorite time sink. I'm certainly not at the play level to be able to do Kerensky, but this is very useful and I'll get there eventually. Kudos to the quality of your channel and your presentation style!
Well done, great advice. The short road in never occurred to me and I've always found myself under the gun for time. I've always been gun-shy about the raven flashpoint on a Kerensky attempt because its always proved costly for me. Any chance you have a video on that flashpoint? I'll poke around on your lets plays for it. Thanks for a great vid mate.
Amazing work mate! Props for the refresher on uni level data structures and algorithms course with the di-graph + hamiltonian path primer as well, must have been fun figuring your right out on the fly
I already finished my Kerensky run few weeks ago, largely thanks to watching you. About 70% of info I got from your playthrough and rest was forums and experience from three failed starts. And I can give you mad props for your guide. I had a little bit different starting setup and I had stingy payout but lucked out titan mission with highlander HS in the first 150 days. That made it much more feasible (or it would be 4th restart)
That was the one thing I wanted to mitigate this time around, was having to get lucky with a Heavy or Assault mech. I'm sure you've read the same old Reddit thread I did, and the person saying they pray for those Titan missions. I had one of those on my 2nd Career run and thought I was going to get Kerensky then, but I didn't have the travel planning and faction parts down, so it still wasn't enough. So this time, I wanted to find a path forward that didn't rely on the luck of a heavy/assault mech to get the player rolling. Congrats to you JGD! It's a helluva thing, ain't it? Good job!
@@ColorsFadeGaming Yes, it is hellowa feeling. Your guide is much more... guide-y I guess, as in universally applicable. My route was more based on trial and error in the beginning. Planning travel and checking store/hiring hall/contracts on every jumpship is 100% most important thing.
Great Guide ColorsFade. It inspired me to try my own hand at this achievement. Been following your Redux Let's Play too. 1:35 Unequipped Mechs is probably worth turning off since you'll be assembling many mechs over the course of the game and the equipment stripped off of them will add up fast. This will make your c-bill score grow faster than with it turned on. It will also allow you to use mechs you salvage right away, speeding up the early game. The bottom half of the difficulty settings can be juggled from system to system and even mission to mission to free up the extra points. Stingy Salvage and No Rare Salvage early on while your taking all cash, and even easy enemy difficulty if your are on your way to a 1 star system but don't have a heavy yet.
The thing with turning off Unequipped Mechs is, you gotta make up those points somehow. You need a multiplier of 1.00 or you have no hope of reaching Kerensky. The other point - about juggling those settings - is good. I avoid doing it because I'm mistake-prone, but that seems like a very valid approach to me.
@@ColorsFadeGaming You are absolutely correct, that 1.00 multiplier is mandatory. To keep 'Unequipped Mechs' you are somewhat forced to turn off rare loot and decrease one other thing (experience, payment or salvage). I started with salvage lower and rare loot off so I could keep pilot experience high. After the first star or two I dropped pilot experience down to slow so I could bump salvage up and periodically drop it to very slow if I want to turn on rare loot. Being able to juggling the bottom settings according to the opportunity of the moment helps. I was able to start buying out mech salvage completely a bit earlier and hit my first 10k very quickly once I got BM access. I believe you get more gear from completing SLDF mechs than you get from having rare loot on. Completing Bullsharks are especially good as it comes with 2xUAC5's and 4xER M Laser++ and many dual heatsinks. The Pilot Experience score is behind your benchmark, but still ahead of pace to max out before day 1200. Pilot Experience does not seem to effect the training rate of the training halls.
Kerensky Achieved! Maxed C-Bill score with 239 days remaining, Maxed Reputations with 172 days remaining, and Maxed visited systems and 770,015 total score with 147 days remaining.
@@Masochisto Nice, I've been looking for confirmation that equipped mechs can be viable. Not only is it great for SLDF mech equipment, it can also be pretty helpful to put a new mech to immediate use without having to wait for it to clog up the mech bay jobs. I didn't realize some of the difficulty settings could be toggled.
For what it's worth, I have generous contract payment with normal salvage and I only need 6 more chassis with 650+ days to go. The extra money has allowed me to finish a great deal of mechs through purchasing and I haven't had to neglect my argo upgrades over-much. I favor it because your cash payout gets a percentage-based boost every time you finish "optional" objectives instead of running to an evac zone like a big grouch who hates fun. So basically every mission that has bonus objectives. The salvage agreement receives no such bonus; so it just makes the most sense to me to max out payment and thereby maximize the output of the bonuses
Chassis completion isn't the hard part though. The settings basically make no difference for that aspect. It's C-Bills that are the pinch. I always complete the missions - never evac - and there's always a bonus for optional objectives. Question is: Is the bump in bonus pay from Generous Contract significant enough (in terms of bonus objectives) over the course of an entire Career to merit taking it instead of Generous Salvage, which results in more mech parts and thus more mech sales. I don't know, but my guess is the answer is 'no'.
@@ColorsFadeGaming Yeah, can confirm at this point (just under 200 days left) that the cash for contracts, even with maxed-out bonus objectives, doesn't really put any kind of dent in the C-Bills goal. I got to maybe 20,000 points or so before I wised up and switched to maxing salvage; so I'm going to miss Kerensky for this run but I'll at least rank in Legendary so that's not too bad for my first career if I do say so myself. Also looking like I'm going to have to pick between star systems and reputation completion since I made some mistakes in my mission choices early on that led me to have to spend way too much time searching the western map for Steiner missions I was allowed to do. I saw someone post a guide on steam where they had pissed off Kurita instead of Liao and I was wondering if you had any insight into that strategy because while it's tempting to keep Capellan in good standing all the way through the endgame, but it seems like you really have to luck into getting enough missions against Draconis to get them all the way to -100 considering how few systems they're active in. Sorry for the novel but just one more thing I had thought of during my run was that in the final days once you've finished all the contracts you plan to do, if you're still short on C-Bills you can store all your active mechs and sell off all equipment weapons and ammo for a little bit of a boost. I know I I have a good 300,000 c-bills worth of basic heat sinks at this point, for example. I also figured out that you can scrap partial mech salvage from the storage menu even though you can't sell mech parts in the the store. Obviously you don't need this tactic when you've hit Kerensky with 100+ days left, but I thought it might be helpful for people who were cutting it close.
@@johnnyandtheinsatiablevoid I sell my stored gear at various points along the way. It's not just full mechs I sell, it's all the parts I never plan to use as well. You keep a few heat sinks and such in reserve, in case you need repairs, but otherwise I always sell it all. On the Kurita thing - my thought is, both Kurita and Steiner have so few systems where you can get missions that I don't see any point in trying to go -100 with them. Getting Kerensky is already hard enough. Capellan can be maintained at a high level for the whole game if you get the rolls your way (meaning, you land in systems where the mission distribution is such that you can raise Capellan, or improve it, without hurting anyone else). A lot of this comes down to luck, but lowering Kurita just makes it harder to have good luck. You know what they say about success: it's making your own luck.
@@ColorsFadeGaming Yeah that was my initial impression on the Kurita thing as well. Neglecting to realize how little territory Steiner has is why I squandered half my days and I wasn't about to repeat that mistake with Draconis. Worse, though, I didn't piss off Canopus enough while I was over there so I have to waste time revisiting their area if I want reputation completion.
@@johnnyandtheinsatiablevoid Magistracy of Canopus is always my first stop, because their systems are low skull and you can get their faction really close to -100, if not all the way. If you don't bury the needle, you can finish them in Marik space. The way I usually run the game is: 0.5 skull systems until I get a Heavy, then Magistracy of Canopus, then Marik (trying to keep Capellan high) then Kurita/Federated Suns, and then run the Capellan space for as many C-Bills as possible. That's the high-level version, anyway.
Absolutely splendid piece, good sir! I am happy to say I was groping my way towards some of the things you covered but I would say that on some things I was dead wrong! In particular, for my current run, I look at my basement level rep with the Pirates and the fact that I have been system hopping through Taurean space visiting every planet :O I had started to see that there was no way I could do the 170 system achievement this way, which is what lead me to searching about that ... which lead me here :D A couple of questions if I may. Do you make use of the Alliance system for rep at any point in your progress? And as far as I could make out from your video, you actually didn't do the 170 system thing?
170 Star Systems is necessary to get the Star Systems Visited portion of the achievement, and it's absolutely necessary. You can't achieve Kerensky without it. So yes, I did 170 Star Systems. But the thing is, with DLC installed, there are 230+ systems. So that gives you 50 systems you do not need to visit. Also, you mentioned "Alliance" rep, but I don't know what that is. Do you mean Arano Restoration Rep? If so, that can be a good place to spend the last couple of stops in a Career run, to bury Pirate faction.
@@ColorsFadeGaming Ahh, I see - my mistake; I think I misinterpreted what you were showing us when you were talking about getting score points from system visits. What I meant when I spoke of Alliance rep was making use of the system made available in the DLC to Ally with a given Faction when you are at 100 rep with them. Mostly it seems to be a more negative thing in that it restricts your mission choices, so I was just seeing if someone like yourself had a view on whether Allying was useful or not.
@@dallassukerkin6878 I see what you're saying now. Allying with a faction is actually harmful if you're trying for Kerensky, so I definitely don't recommend it.
Still more questions (thanks for responding!!): a) did you ever even do a drive-thru of the Aurigan area (Green area on the map at 13:38)? What about the central gray area of Spencer/Ur Crunine/Bellerophon? b) did you ever route plan to deliberately go thru red/yellow systems OR did your route planning to hit blue planets just naturally take you thru the 170+ needed systems?
a-1) I did drive through the Aurigan Reach this time, about midway through the game. In the past, I had saved that for last, but those are not great systems for anything other than tanking pirate or Taurian faction. So this time I felt free to pass through some of those systems if I needed to, and it worked out. So, by the time I got down to the last 100 days, I already had 75 Arano faction and could do any of those systems I wanted for the final cash to push me to a perfect score. a-2) I did pass through those systems, but did not stop to do missions. If you download the Excel/Calc sheet from the link in the description you can see the annotations; you can trace my entire route using the ordered numbers. b) Yes, I plotted routes deliberately to go through red systems. I felt like those were good systems to capture for the Star System Completion score, because I knew I wasn't going to land on them.
@@ColorsFadeGaming Wowzers...I had no idea you had hit 50-ish systems by the time you hit Tarragona. It's weird that you were passing thru places like Turin and Calseraigne during your 1/2 skull Marauder hunt. Did you do this intentionally or only because you had early lengthy repairs/heals you needed to cover?
@@BellMichael-sh4xi Oftentimes it simply had to do with best path, and me not having the mechs/levels to do those systems. The game scatters high level systems among low level systems, and when you're chasing Kerensky you don't want to repeat systems. So, you just have to fly through those high level systems and ignore them.
@@ColorsFadeGaming It's still not clear to me how you "chose" where you wanted to go, i.e. your "best path." Was it skulls? Faction? Planet color? Heal/repair times? Avoiding repeats? General area of the map? Example: why did you choose to go to Claybrooke (which is red) from your starter planet instead of a closer blue 1/2 skull like Arn or Lyreton?
@@BellMichael-sh4xi Each situation is unique. If you look on the "System Stops" tab of that spreadsheet, you notice I stopped at Viribium after Claybrooke, and marked it in red, and only completed 2 missions. It's because I took a lot of mech damage and pilot hits, and needed time to repair coming out of it. I made an error there, thinking I could take a 1-skull system. I avoided going directly to Arn because Salardion is in-between, and it's a pirate system I wanted to save for later, until I had the faction to land there and buy from the pirate store. When choosing destinations I'm taking into consideration ALL data points, not just one. I'm thinking about blue systems, I'm thinking about travel time to make sure all mechs get repaired and my pilots are healthy, I'm thinking about faction I want to boost, I'm thinking about pirate systems, etc. I'm considering a lot of things. The key thing to understand is, other than the half-skull systems, I'm rarely targeting a specific system and going there. What I'm doing is charting a course using a directed graph, that takes me through a bunch of systems with as little duplication as possible. Then, I'm pausing over every system I pass through, checking the store (to see if there's a mech part or weapons I want to buy) and the missions (and the faction of those missions) and making a determination. I'm also looking at pirate systems (which I want to avoid until I have pirate faction). There's a LOT to consider, which is why there's no "best path" through the game, and why it's so critical to plot routes that allow you to pass through systems and change course. You have to Evaluate-As-You-Go.
Nice guide, using it for my own run. You might want to add a legend for your color codes with the map, so people actually know what each color means, I know you explained it in the video but sometimes I forget and go "What does this color mean again?"
Once I had a Heavy mech and could start reliably clearing planets of missions (and had a bit of a nest egg; 6+ million or so) I started taking all Salvage all the time. On a couple rare occasions (maybe 3-5 total mission) I had to go all Faction, to keep Pirate/Capellan from dropping too low.
One of my starts was on Claybrooke. But i was still figuring everything and I am now kind of mad that I threw that game away. Follow-up question; how do you build your commander? I like to make sure someone on the team has sensor-lock right out the gate but would be very interested to hear if you have a preference
I show them at the end. Here are the timestamps: 31:01 Atlas II 31:18 Annihilator AC 10 + ECM 31:24 Annihilator 4x AC5 30:48 Marauder This was the lance I used for the bulk of the last half of the game.
BTW: 10.000 points cbill is just 100 million c-bills. So the game wants you to earn up to 800 million, and your recommendation is 100 million every 100 days. So rule of thumb is 1 mil per day. 10 days of travel between systems? You should earn about 10 mil in the system. 1 assault mech is about 1 mill to sell, so about 30 part salvage, if you take 5/xx salvage and headshot every assault you encounter, that is about 6 missions to earn. You will probable earn little bit less, but that is helped by recycling through buying parts. But if you hit 1 mill per day you know you are on the roll. Also to put it in the numbers: 100 million earned used to buy parts and sell again will make you another 30 million, that will give you 9 million, that will give you about 3 million and that will give you 1 million. So 100 mil earned will give you >> 143 million in points. >> ~ +43% for buying partial salvage.
Did not withdraw from a single mission, and only failed one mission (An Attack/Defend where the geography kept me from killing off the last structure, so reinforcements arrived and nuked my base; I left it unprotected because typically I can destroy the enemy base before reinforcements arrive) I did eject a couple pilots along the way, on Target Acquisition missions. I did that because on those missions it can be difficult (especially at 4.5 skull missions with Assault mechs) to get everyone back to the evac point, so your mechs that are further away can eject. You only need one mech to reach the evac spot to successfully complete the mission. But I tried not to do that very often because late in the game I had nice gear in the head slots (comms devices, rangefingers, defense, that sort of thing) and it can be difficult to replace that stuff. Still, if I thought I was going to lose a pilot, I ejected instead. The only pilots I lost were to unlucky headshots.
Just to be clear, regarding maintaining pirate and Capellan faction rep, you just want to keep it no lower than -19, so as to have access to their stores? Is it safe to keep it at -19 or do you try to increase it beyond that wherever possible?
Increase whenever possible and keep them as high as possible because in the last 600 days what you really want to be able to do is stop at the 4-5 skull systems and do ALL the contracts available. If you have anything lower than 40 faction you'll be locked out of those missions. It doesn't take very long to tank a faction. Two systems of negative contracts, really, and you'll be locked out of most contracts. It's a constant tug-of-war trying to keep everyone high, but that's the only way to march into a 4 skull system and ensure you can do all the contracts. Buying partial mech salvage is good and important and necessary. But so is simply getting a lot of salvage from contracts.
I have so far had several instances where there seemed to be no way to hit a system without a direct approach because travelling to any other system in its vicinity would not create a path through it. Usually it happens near the corners of the map or near a border, and I was just wondering what thoughts you had on dealing with this issue. Is it just that the number of times this happens is not enough to tank the viability of the overall effort?
I'm not 100% certain because that's one of the few data points I didn't collect, but if I had to guess I'd say it was somewhere around day 900-800. I got my first 10K toward the C-Bill point score at day 753 and to do that I know I had to sell a few mechs, many of which I'm sure I assembled from salvage buying.
What a great guide! I'm going to start first Career run. Been having a lot of fun with this game.
Enjoy! Game is great. I hope the guide helps you.
Thanks for this! I was looking for a non-beginner guide to my favorite time sink. I'm certainly not at the play level to be able to do Kerensky, but this is very useful and I'll get there eventually. Kudos to the quality of your channel and your presentation style!
Thank you! Glad you found this helpful!
Well done, great advice. The short road in never occurred to me and I've always found myself under the gun for time. I've always been gun-shy about the raven flashpoint on a Kerensky attempt because its always proved costly for me. Any chance you have a video on that flashpoint? I'll poke around on your lets plays for it. Thanks for a great vid mate.
Amazing work mate!
Props for the refresher on uni level data structures and algorithms course with the di-graph + hamiltonian path primer as well, must have been fun figuring your right out on the fly
Glad you enjoyed it!
I already finished my Kerensky run few weeks ago, largely thanks to watching you.
About 70% of info I got from your playthrough and rest was forums and experience from three failed starts.
And I can give you mad props for your guide. I had a little bit different starting setup and I had stingy payout but lucked out titan mission with highlander HS in the first 150 days. That made it much more feasible (or it would be 4th restart)
That was the one thing I wanted to mitigate this time around, was having to get lucky with a Heavy or Assault mech. I'm sure you've read the same old Reddit thread I did, and the person saying they pray for those Titan missions. I had one of those on my 2nd Career run and thought I was going to get Kerensky then, but I didn't have the travel planning and faction parts down, so it still wasn't enough.
So this time, I wanted to find a path forward that didn't rely on the luck of a heavy/assault mech to get the player rolling.
Congrats to you JGD! It's a helluva thing, ain't it? Good job!
@@ColorsFadeGaming Yes, it is hellowa feeling.
Your guide is much more... guide-y I guess, as in universally applicable. My route was more based on trial and error in the beginning.
Planning travel and checking store/hiring hall/contracts on every jumpship is 100% most important thing.
Great Guide ColorsFade. It inspired me to try my own hand at this achievement. Been following your Redux Let's Play too.
1:35 Unequipped Mechs is probably worth turning off since you'll be assembling many mechs over the course of the game and the equipment stripped off of them will add up fast. This will make your c-bill score grow faster than with it turned on. It will also allow you to use mechs you salvage right away, speeding up the early game.
The bottom half of the difficulty settings can be juggled from system to system and even mission to mission to free up the extra points. Stingy Salvage and No Rare Salvage early on while your taking all cash, and even easy enemy difficulty if your are on your way to a 1 star system but don't have a heavy yet.
The thing with turning off Unequipped Mechs is, you gotta make up those points somehow. You need a multiplier of 1.00 or you have no hope of reaching Kerensky.
The other point - about juggling those settings - is good. I avoid doing it because I'm mistake-prone, but that seems like a very valid approach to me.
@@ColorsFadeGaming
You are absolutely correct, that 1.00 multiplier is mandatory.
To keep 'Unequipped Mechs' you are somewhat forced to turn off rare loot and decrease one other thing (experience, payment or salvage).
I started with salvage lower and rare loot off so I could keep pilot experience high. After the first star or two I dropped pilot experience down to slow so I could bump salvage up and periodically drop it to very slow if I want to turn on rare loot. Being able to juggling the bottom settings according to the opportunity of the moment helps.
I was able to start buying out mech salvage completely a bit earlier and hit my first 10k very quickly once I got BM access. I believe you get more gear from completing SLDF mechs than you get from having rare loot on. Completing Bullsharks are especially good as it comes with 2xUAC5's and 4xER M Laser++ and many dual heatsinks.
The Pilot Experience score is behind your benchmark, but still ahead of pace to max out before day 1200. Pilot Experience does not seem to effect the training rate of the training halls.
Kerensky Achieved! Maxed C-Bill score with 239 days remaining, Maxed Reputations with 172 days remaining, and Maxed visited systems and 770,015 total score with 147 days remaining.
@@Masochisto Holy cow Sean, great job! That's amazing!
@@Masochisto Nice, I've been looking for confirmation that equipped mechs can be viable. Not only is it great for SLDF mech equipment, it can also be pretty helpful to put a new mech to immediate use without having to wait for it to clog up the mech bay jobs. I didn't realize some of the difficulty settings could be toggled.
Awesome! Congratulations!
For what it's worth, I have generous contract payment with normal salvage and I only need 6 more chassis with 650+ days to go. The extra money has allowed me to finish a great deal of mechs through purchasing and I haven't had to neglect my argo upgrades over-much. I favor it because your cash payout gets a percentage-based boost every time you finish "optional" objectives instead of running to an evac zone like a big grouch who hates fun. So basically every mission that has bonus objectives. The salvage agreement receives no such bonus; so it just makes the most sense to me to max out payment and thereby maximize the output of the bonuses
Chassis completion isn't the hard part though. The settings basically make no difference for that aspect. It's C-Bills that are the pinch.
I always complete the missions - never evac - and there's always a bonus for optional objectives. Question is: Is the bump in bonus pay from Generous Contract significant enough (in terms of bonus objectives) over the course of an entire Career to merit taking it instead of Generous Salvage, which results in more mech parts and thus more mech sales. I don't know, but my guess is the answer is 'no'.
@@ColorsFadeGaming Yeah, can confirm at this point (just under 200 days left) that the cash for contracts, even with maxed-out bonus objectives, doesn't really put any kind of dent in the C-Bills goal. I got to maybe 20,000 points or so before I wised up and switched to maxing salvage; so I'm going to miss Kerensky for this run but I'll at least rank in Legendary so that's not too bad for my first career if I do say so myself.
Also looking like I'm going to have to pick between star systems and reputation completion since I made some mistakes in my mission choices early on that led me to have to spend way too much time searching the western map for Steiner missions I was allowed to do.
I saw someone post a guide on steam where they had pissed off Kurita instead of Liao and I was wondering if you had any insight into that strategy because while it's tempting to keep Capellan in good standing all the way through the endgame, but it seems like you really have to luck into getting enough missions against Draconis to get them all the way to -100 considering how few systems they're active in.
Sorry for the novel but just one more thing I had thought of during my run was that in the final days once you've finished all the contracts you plan to do, if you're still short on C-Bills you can store all your active mechs and sell off all equipment weapons and ammo for a little bit of a boost. I know I I have a good 300,000 c-bills worth of basic heat sinks at this point, for example. I also figured out that you can scrap partial mech salvage from the storage menu even though you can't sell mech parts in the the store. Obviously you don't need this tactic when you've hit Kerensky with 100+ days left, but I thought it might be helpful for people who were cutting it close.
@@johnnyandtheinsatiablevoid I sell my stored gear at various points along the way. It's not just full mechs I sell, it's all the parts I never plan to use as well. You keep a few heat sinks and such in reserve, in case you need repairs, but otherwise I always sell it all.
On the Kurita thing - my thought is, both Kurita and Steiner have so few systems where you can get missions that I don't see any point in trying to go -100 with them. Getting Kerensky is already hard enough. Capellan can be maintained at a high level for the whole game if you get the rolls your way (meaning, you land in systems where the mission distribution is such that you can raise Capellan, or improve it, without hurting anyone else). A lot of this comes down to luck, but lowering Kurita just makes it harder to have good luck. You know what they say about success: it's making your own luck.
@@ColorsFadeGaming Yeah that was my initial impression on the Kurita thing as well. Neglecting to realize how little territory Steiner has is why I squandered half my days and I wasn't about to repeat that mistake with Draconis. Worse, though, I didn't piss off Canopus enough while I was over there so I have to waste time revisiting their area if I want reputation completion.
@@johnnyandtheinsatiablevoid Magistracy of Canopus is always my first stop, because their systems are low skull and you can get their faction really close to -100, if not all the way. If you don't bury the needle, you can finish them in Marik space.
The way I usually run the game is: 0.5 skull systems until I get a Heavy, then Magistracy of Canopus, then Marik (trying to keep Capellan high) then Kurita/Federated Suns, and then run the Capellan space for as many C-Bills as possible. That's the high-level version, anyway.
Excellent guide.
Thanks!
Absolutely splendid piece, good sir! I am happy to say I was groping my way towards some of the things you covered but I would say that on some things I was dead wrong! In particular, for my current run, I look at my basement level rep with the Pirates and the fact that I have been system hopping through Taurean space visiting every planet :O I had started to see that there was no way I could do the 170 system achievement this way, which is what lead me to searching about that ... which lead me here :D
A couple of questions if I may. Do you make use of the Alliance system for rep at any point in your progress? And as far as I could make out from your video, you actually didn't do the 170 system thing?
170 Star Systems is necessary to get the Star Systems Visited portion of the achievement, and it's absolutely necessary. You can't achieve Kerensky without it. So yes, I did 170 Star Systems.
But the thing is, with DLC installed, there are 230+ systems. So that gives you 50 systems you do not need to visit. Also, you mentioned "Alliance" rep, but I don't know what that is. Do you mean Arano Restoration Rep? If so, that can be a good place to spend the last couple of stops in a Career run, to bury Pirate faction.
@@ColorsFadeGaming Ahh, I see - my mistake; I think I misinterpreted what you were showing us when you were talking about getting score points from system visits.
What I meant when I spoke of Alliance rep was making use of the system made available in the DLC to Ally with a given Faction when you are at 100 rep with them. Mostly it seems to be a more negative thing in that it restricts your mission choices, so I was just seeing if someone like yourself had a view on whether Allying was useful or not.
@@dallassukerkin6878 I see what you're saying now. Allying with a faction is actually harmful if you're trying for Kerensky, so I definitely don't recommend it.
Still more questions (thanks for responding!!): a) did you ever even do a drive-thru of the Aurigan area (Green area on the map at 13:38)? What about the central gray area of Spencer/Ur Crunine/Bellerophon? b) did you ever route plan to deliberately go thru red/yellow systems OR did your route planning to hit blue planets just naturally take you thru the 170+ needed systems?
a-1) I did drive through the Aurigan Reach this time, about midway through the game. In the past, I had saved that for last, but those are not great systems for anything other than tanking pirate or Taurian faction. So this time I felt free to pass through some of those systems if I needed to, and it worked out. So, by the time I got down to the last 100 days, I already had 75 Arano faction and could do any of those systems I wanted for the final cash to push me to a perfect score.
a-2) I did pass through those systems, but did not stop to do missions. If you download the Excel/Calc sheet from the link in the description you can see the annotations; you can trace my entire route using the ordered numbers.
b) Yes, I plotted routes deliberately to go through red systems. I felt like those were good systems to capture for the Star System Completion score, because I knew I wasn't going to land on them.
@@ColorsFadeGaming Wowzers...I had no idea you had hit 50-ish systems by the time you hit Tarragona. It's weird that you were passing thru places like Turin and Calseraigne during your 1/2 skull Marauder hunt. Did you do this intentionally or only because you had early lengthy repairs/heals you needed to cover?
@@BellMichael-sh4xi Oftentimes it simply had to do with best path, and me not having the mechs/levels to do those systems. The game scatters high level systems among low level systems, and when you're chasing Kerensky you don't want to repeat systems. So, you just have to fly through those high level systems and ignore them.
@@ColorsFadeGaming It's still not clear to me how you "chose" where you wanted to go, i.e. your "best path." Was it skulls? Faction? Planet color? Heal/repair times? Avoiding repeats? General area of the map? Example: why did you choose to go to Claybrooke (which is red) from your starter planet instead of a closer blue 1/2 skull like Arn or Lyreton?
@@BellMichael-sh4xi Each situation is unique. If you look on the "System Stops" tab of that spreadsheet, you notice I stopped at Viribium after Claybrooke, and marked it in red, and only completed 2 missions. It's because I took a lot of mech damage and pilot hits, and needed time to repair coming out of it. I made an error there, thinking I could take a 1-skull system. I avoided going directly to Arn because Salardion is in-between, and it's a pirate system I wanted to save for later, until I had the faction to land there and buy from the pirate store.
When choosing destinations I'm taking into consideration ALL data points, not just one. I'm thinking about blue systems, I'm thinking about travel time to make sure all mechs get repaired and my pilots are healthy, I'm thinking about faction I want to boost, I'm thinking about pirate systems, etc. I'm considering a lot of things.
The key thing to understand is, other than the half-skull systems, I'm rarely targeting a specific system and going there. What I'm doing is charting a course using a directed graph, that takes me through a bunch of systems with as little duplication as possible. Then, I'm pausing over every system I pass through, checking the store (to see if there's a mech part or weapons I want to buy) and the missions (and the faction of those missions) and making a determination. I'm also looking at pirate systems (which I want to avoid until I have pirate faction). There's a LOT to consider, which is why there's no "best path" through the game, and why it's so critical to plot routes that allow you to pass through systems and change course. You have to Evaluate-As-You-Go.
Nice guide, using it for my own run. You might want to add a legend for your color codes with the map, so people actually know what each color means, I know you explained it in the video but sometimes I forget and go "What does this color mean again?"
What were your negotiation settings/philosophies in the 2nd qtr (days 900-600)? Cash vs salvage vs faction?
Once I had a Heavy mech and could start reliably clearing planets of missions (and had a bit of a nest egg; 6+ million or so) I started taking all Salvage all the time. On a couple rare occasions (maybe 3-5 total mission) I had to go all Faction, to keep Pirate/Capellan from dropping too low.
One of my starts was on Claybrooke. But i was still figuring everything and I am now kind of mad that I threw that game away.
Follow-up question; how do you build your commander? I like to make sure someone on the team has sensor-lock right out the gate but would be very interested to hear if you have a preference
Also, what was your ending lance for the 4.5 skull missions?
I show them at the end. Here are the timestamps:
31:01 Atlas II
31:18 Annihilator AC 10 + ECM
31:24 Annihilator 4x AC5
30:48 Marauder
This was the lance I used for the bulk of the last half of the game.
BTW: 10.000 points cbill is just 100 million c-bills.
So the game wants you to earn up to 800 million, and your recommendation is 100 million every 100 days.
So rule of thumb is 1 mil per day.
10 days of travel between systems? You should earn about 10 mil in the system.
1 assault mech is about 1 mill to sell, so about 30 part salvage, if you take 5/xx salvage and headshot every assault you encounter, that is about 6 missions to earn.
You will probable earn little bit less, but that is helped by recycling through buying parts. But if you hit 1 mill per day you know you are on the roll.
Also to put it in the numbers: 100 million earned used to buy parts and sell again will make you another 30 million, that will give you 9 million, that will give you about 3 million and that will give you 1 million.
So 100 mil earned will give you >> 143 million in points. >> ~ +43% for buying partial salvage.
Another question: did you withdraw or eject from any missions?
Did not withdraw from a single mission, and only failed one mission (An Attack/Defend where the geography kept me from killing off the last structure, so reinforcements arrived and nuked my base; I left it unprotected because typically I can destroy the enemy base before reinforcements arrive)
I did eject a couple pilots along the way, on Target Acquisition missions. I did that because on those missions it can be difficult (especially at 4.5 skull missions with Assault mechs) to get everyone back to the evac point, so your mechs that are further away can eject. You only need one mech to reach the evac spot to successfully complete the mission. But I tried not to do that very often because late in the game I had nice gear in the head slots (comms devices, rangefingers, defense, that sort of thing) and it can be difficult to replace that stuff. Still, if I thought I was going to lose a pilot, I ejected instead. The only pilots I lost were to unlucky headshots.
Just to be clear, regarding maintaining pirate and Capellan faction rep, you just want to keep it no lower than -19, so as to have access to their stores? Is it safe to keep it at -19 or do you try to increase it beyond that wherever possible?
Increase whenever possible and keep them as high as possible because in the last 600 days what you really want to be able to do is stop at the 4-5 skull systems and do ALL the contracts available. If you have anything lower than 40 faction you'll be locked out of those missions.
It doesn't take very long to tank a faction. Two systems of negative contracts, really, and you'll be locked out of most contracts. It's a constant tug-of-war trying to keep everyone high, but that's the only way to march into a 4 skull system and ensure you can do all the contracts.
Buying partial mech salvage is good and important and necessary. But so is simply getting a lot of salvage from contracts.
I have so far had several instances where there seemed to be no way to hit a system without a direct approach because travelling to any other system in its vicinity would not create a path through it. Usually it happens near the corners of the map or near a border, and I was just wondering what thoughts you had on dealing with this issue. Is it just that the number of times this happens is not enough to tank the viability of the overall effort?
Ah, may have commented too early, thanks for the map lol
@@johnnyandtheinsatiablevoid I was just gonna say, "You need a map" 🙂
About what day did you hit $20m to start flipping mech pieces for the cash requirement?
I'm not 100% certain because that's one of the few data points I didn't collect, but if I had to guess I'd say it was somewhere around day 900-800. I got my first 10K toward the C-Bill point score at day 753 and to do that I know I had to sell a few mechs, many of which I'm sure I assembled from salvage buying.
You should mention at the beginning of this guide what is a Kerensky Achievement :). But a great guide.