With 47 days remaining and our MRB career assessment having maximum points in all categories except for morale, I decide to spend those remaining days allowing the crew to enjoy shore leave at Leyda. It'll give them a way to spend the extravagant bonuses that I've approved for the coming monthly financial report. Not all of our trips to the surface are relaxing though.
Event - Criminal Ties: Hangover and I are returning from a tour when we realize that we're being followed. Turns out that the dangerous looking man has some friends, and is an associate of Hangover's from before she joined Gramps' Giants. My command reflex takes over before I have a chance to consider, and I find myself intimidating the guy.
Result: "Whatever your connection was, it's dead - now get out of my way. We're busy." Hangover's old friends don't resist our departure, and that's good enough for me. On the shuttle ride back, Hangover opens up a bit about her past. Hangover gains High Spirits for 30 days.
Weeks pass and as the clock ticks to zero, Darius arrives with the last monthly financial report. "Looks like this vacation time agrees with you, Gramps." I smile as I reply, "It's a nice change of pace. Seems like a great location for the MRB to come give us their official career assessment." He nods in agreement.
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Days Remaining: 0 ____ Career Points: 770,015 ____ Career Rating: Kerensky
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We are given about a twelve hour warning that the MRB will be sending a shuttle to give an in-person review of our company. After a quick meeting to go over what we should show them, and what we should definitely keep private, I encourage everyone to get some rest before they arrive. The MRB representative seems extremely impressed, and everyone on the command staff gives her a tour of their areas of expertise. I decide to stay with the representative for the whole time they are aboard the Argo, just to see her reactions. Darius displays our official plaque in the lounge, and Yang searches through the several crates of rewards, finding some salvage for a Star League Griffin and a Star League Black Knight, a Rangefinder+++, two ER PPCs, two PPC++s, and a dozen other assorted high-end items. Shortly after the MRB departs the Argo, Sumire and Farah take the Leopard down to the surface for a tour of some unique nature preserve. As I watch their path curving around the bright blue of the planet below, I take a long deep breath.
Life is good.
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Attached is my save game file, along with some screenshots of how the scores looked at the end, and my flight path to get to 170 systems. I didn't keep track of the last few months - the back and forth in the Magistracy of Canopus in particular would have been too tedious to follow.
I wasn't really sure if I would make it to a Kerensky rating until after the two year mark where I entered the Federated Suns at Lochmantle and sold 85 million C-Bills worth of mechs. After that point, I knew it was just a matter of grinding out the missions. Fortunately, Steam recognized the achievement - I'm glad that's working properly now.
One thing that I could have done better is making my reputation with the Canopians go negative earlier. For a long time, I was looking for missions against them in the Free Worlds League. Only recently did I realize that House Marik is not an enemy of the Magistracy, so I was looking for missions that don't exist! Purposely taking missions just to withdraw from them felt gamey, but it did lower my Morale score each time, which was a big problem. I was at the point where I could not take any more Morale hits and still max that score by the end of the game, so for the last six weeks I was just hoping that I wouldn't get a random event that would lower Morale. (Actually, with the way the end of the career worked, I had one last monthly financial decision to make, which would have let me boost my morale - I didn't know that when I was planning things out though.)
The biggest change I had to make to my gameplay was to focus on dismantling the enemy mechs. Attacking from the side and minimizing the damage to the CT as much as possible, trying to kill the pilot but strip off all of the other equipment. It worked... I'm just not sure if that's how I want to play my next game. In the end, having a TAG was useful to try to kill the pilot of a heavily damaged mech by hitting the head with a low damage shot that wouldn't destroy the CT. I usually didn't have the patience for such surgery, but it could be a helpful tactic in the early career when you have that random heavy or assault mech that unexpectedly appears, and you would really benefit from that upgrade.
It turns out that I could probably have maxxed out the score with Slow XP progression in the difficulty settings. I'm glad that I was able to develop some rookies and move them through Youngblood training into a combat ready lance, and then have them all survive to be Elite Max pilots. The key choices for difficulty settings to max out the career score seem to be 3 part mech salvage, unequipped mechs (especially when upgrading in the early game), and hard enemy strength. Everything else seems like you could set it to whatever combination gets you a 1.0 difficulty score and you'd be fine (although a Very Slow XP progression might be too tough - for those who are interested in the details, feel free to sum up the XP in my save file and report back on whether or not I would have made it.)
One thing that surprised me was how the contracts didn't regenerate in systems that I had already visited. Even if in-game years had passed, there were no new jobs. I read about this once before, but it was still surprising to see. Made me glad that I didn't have any loops that repeated through high-value systems as part of my plan.
Even without having Rare Salvage enabled, and even without a good reputation with the Pirates, I still ended up with a good amount of lostech from Flashpoint rewards and stuff that I found in the shops. I wasn't sure if the "take every contract that's offered" plan would work out, but it looks like it did, and always being able to attack the pirates was a nice change.
All in all, this was a good run and I'm glad that I decided to make it public. Comments and questions are welcome!
