I've finally completed my first campaign! crosses off more achievements
Many thanks to @mjbroekman for the Career Scoring Guide, to @ninte000 for the map analysis, and others who answered my questions along the way. I was glad to be able to get a Legendary ranking the first time through (even though Steam didn't register that achievement - I've logged a bug report there, and am watching a similar bug report on this forum.) I don't have any of the DLCs, so no Flashpoint missions for me. The only gameplay restriction I set for myself was to not use any jump jets. It took some getting used to, but I don't feel like every mech needs to have them anymore.
I saw that C-Bills was going to be the score limiting factor for achieving a Kerensky rank, so I set Contract Payment to Generous, and I think that helped the most in the beginning of the game. During the middle of the game, I was able to guess the value of the 'mech pieces I'd be able to salvage, and sometimes it was an easy choice to go all salvage or all C-Bills, but most of the time it was about even. The +10% / +25% bonus to contract payout from optional mission objectives gave a nice boost. The rest of the difficulty settings are below. I liked the No Rare Salvage option, which gave the AI a bit better of a chance. I only bought a few lostech pieces of gear, and it made finding them in the stores much more of a big deal.
Navigating the stars to max out the systems visited is way easier with the new systems in 1.6. Below is how the map looked by the time I was done. Using the maps I generated (posted here) made it easier to determine if a system was worth visiting, or if it should just be skipped. One thing the map below doesn't cover is the time I spent in Davion space retracing my route multiple times because of how my relations with Kurita didn't work out the way I had hoped.
I started my game planning to become honored with the Pirates, Liao, Steiner, and Kurita. I went "northwest" through Marik space first, over into Liao a bit, then down through the unaligned / Canopus space, east through the map edge until Taurian space, up through there with a long detour to mark off most of the Arano systems, and then into Davion space, finishing back in Liao space.
By the time I got to Davion space, I had to make a choice about Kurita. Should I visit the two 1 skull systems to try and slowly improve my reputation, or should I visit the new systems where Kurita appears as possible enemy forces, and try to get five contracts against them to quickly send my reputation negative? Well, I tried it, and it didn't work out. I suppose that being honored by Davion would have helped with that, but it was worth a shot. By the time I gave up and started increasing Kurita reputation, I was running out of time to bring the Pirates from +100 to -100. As you can see, I didn't get there before time ran out.
Full score details are below. I did add a note on what my C-Bills score was before I sold off everything I could. I almost sold too much and wasn't able to make payroll for the last month, but I double-checked before clicking and managed not to shoot myself in the foot.
One other area where I didn't max out points was Mechwarrior Experience. About 200 days before the clock ran out, an enemy Victor fired a Breaching Shot and killed a 10/10/10/10 mechwarrior with about 65,000 extra experience. If 50 XP is 1 score point, then that cost me about 3,500 score points. That still would not have been enough to make up the difference, so next campaign I think that my experience gain needs to be Normal and not Slow. I did initially like how my recruits didn't get better after almost every mission, but it looks like for the best score, that needs to change.
Lessons Learned:
1) If you get lucky with your random lance of mechs and have an Urbanmech, keep it. It might not be a great mech, but it does its job okay, and you also avoid having to hunt for it to complete your 'mech chassis score.
2) It is way easier to be Honored by Steiner and Kurita than it is to be Loathed by them. Planning to include them in your group of four factions that you're going to bring to 100 reputation is a good plan.
3) The Capellan Confederation has the best series of systems (maybe 12) to cycle through at the end game when you're looking for contracts, followed by Davion (maybe 7), and then Marik (maybe 7.)
4) Set your Mechwarrior Experience difficulty to Normal if you want to max out the score. Slow probably won't be quick enough.
5) Recent experimentation shows that contracts refresh on every visit to a system, which makes a big difference when looking for those 3 skull missions when you're trying to move a reputation off of Indifferent. I wish I had known that earlier, since it would have made improving Kurita reputation way easier as there are two systems right next to each other in Davion space that could have those sort of missions.
6) Day Zero 'mech builds are good to think about. Here, I'm talking about modifications you can make to your mechs without any time in the mechbay that will improve their performance before you start your first contract. I don't have any builds that I can recommend, but I'm sure that someone has done their research on this. The general concept would probably be to remove CT ammo and sub-optimal weapon systems, and add armor instead to improve durability.
Closing Thought
How will anyone get the Kerensky achievement? I don't have any DLCs, but do Flashpoints add that many more C-Bills to make up the difference? With a target score of 760,000, you'd need 700 million C-Bills in addition to every other category.
Thinking optimistically, say you can get 100 million C-Bills at the very end by selling everything possible. That's 600 million C-Bills left to earn. Say you get an average of 1 million C-Bills per contract during the entire career, and that you can complete 6 contracts per planet that you visit. You'd need to visit 100 planets, which seems possible since you need to visit 170 jump points to complete the Star Systems Visited scoring category. Say the average jump distance for the 100 best planets to visit is 6 days. That would be 3 days coming in (using the Visit System bug where it only takes 3 days, regardless of the system) and 4 days going back out to the jump point (assuming a fully improved Argo drive) and then 3 more days to jump to the next system. That's 10 days per system, at 100 planets, which is 1000 days. That leaves 200 days left to visit the other 70 systems required, which would take 210 days.
I suppose it's technically possible to get the Kerensky achievement, but it seems to be far more luck-based (mostly on what contracts appear) than it is skill-based, which is a bit disappointing.
Many thanks to @mjbroekman for the Career Scoring Guide, to @ninte000 for the map analysis, and others who answered my questions along the way. I was glad to be able to get a Legendary ranking the first time through (even though Steam didn't register that achievement - I've logged a bug report there, and am watching a similar bug report on this forum.) I don't have any of the DLCs, so no Flashpoint missions for me. The only gameplay restriction I set for myself was to not use any jump jets. It took some getting used to, but I don't feel like every mech needs to have them anymore.
I saw that C-Bills was going to be the score limiting factor for achieving a Kerensky rank, so I set Contract Payment to Generous, and I think that helped the most in the beginning of the game. During the middle of the game, I was able to guess the value of the 'mech pieces I'd be able to salvage, and sometimes it was an easy choice to go all salvage or all C-Bills, but most of the time it was about even. The +10% / +25% bonus to contract payout from optional mission objectives gave a nice boost. The rest of the difficulty settings are below. I liked the No Rare Salvage option, which gave the AI a bit better of a chance. I only bought a few lostech pieces of gear, and it made finding them in the stores much more of a big deal.
Navigating the stars to max out the systems visited is way easier with the new systems in 1.6. Below is how the map looked by the time I was done. Using the maps I generated (posted here) made it easier to determine if a system was worth visiting, or if it should just be skipped. One thing the map below doesn't cover is the time I spent in Davion space retracing my route multiple times because of how my relations with Kurita didn't work out the way I had hoped.
I started my game planning to become honored with the Pirates, Liao, Steiner, and Kurita. I went "northwest" through Marik space first, over into Liao a bit, then down through the unaligned / Canopus space, east through the map edge until Taurian space, up through there with a long detour to mark off most of the Arano systems, and then into Davion space, finishing back in Liao space.
By the time I got to Davion space, I had to make a choice about Kurita. Should I visit the two 1 skull systems to try and slowly improve my reputation, or should I visit the new systems where Kurita appears as possible enemy forces, and try to get five contracts against them to quickly send my reputation negative? Well, I tried it, and it didn't work out. I suppose that being honored by Davion would have helped with that, but it was worth a shot. By the time I gave up and started increasing Kurita reputation, I was running out of time to bring the Pirates from +100 to -100. As you can see, I didn't get there before time ran out.
Full score details are below. I did add a note on what my C-Bills score was before I sold off everything I could. I almost sold too much and wasn't able to make payroll for the last month, but I double-checked before clicking and managed not to shoot myself in the foot.
One other area where I didn't max out points was Mechwarrior Experience. About 200 days before the clock ran out, an enemy Victor fired a Breaching Shot and killed a 10/10/10/10 mechwarrior with about 65,000 extra experience. If 50 XP is 1 score point, then that cost me about 3,500 score points. That still would not have been enough to make up the difference, so next campaign I think that my experience gain needs to be Normal and not Slow. I did initially like how my recruits didn't get better after almost every mission, but it looks like for the best score, that needs to change.
Lessons Learned:
1) If you get lucky with your random lance of mechs and have an Urbanmech, keep it. It might not be a great mech, but it does its job okay, and you also avoid having to hunt for it to complete your 'mech chassis score.
2) It is way easier to be Honored by Steiner and Kurita than it is to be Loathed by them. Planning to include them in your group of four factions that you're going to bring to 100 reputation is a good plan.
3) The Capellan Confederation has the best series of systems (maybe 12) to cycle through at the end game when you're looking for contracts, followed by Davion (maybe 7), and then Marik (maybe 7.)
4) Set your Mechwarrior Experience difficulty to Normal if you want to max out the score. Slow probably won't be quick enough.
5) Recent experimentation shows that contracts refresh on every visit to a system, which makes a big difference when looking for those 3 skull missions when you're trying to move a reputation off of Indifferent. I wish I had known that earlier, since it would have made improving Kurita reputation way easier as there are two systems right next to each other in Davion space that could have those sort of missions.
6) Day Zero 'mech builds are good to think about. Here, I'm talking about modifications you can make to your mechs without any time in the mechbay that will improve their performance before you start your first contract. I don't have any builds that I can recommend, but I'm sure that someone has done their research on this. The general concept would probably be to remove CT ammo and sub-optimal weapon systems, and add armor instead to improve durability.
Closing Thought
How will anyone get the Kerensky achievement? I don't have any DLCs, but do Flashpoints add that many more C-Bills to make up the difference? With a target score of 760,000, you'd need 700 million C-Bills in addition to every other category.
Thinking optimistically, say you can get 100 million C-Bills at the very end by selling everything possible. That's 600 million C-Bills left to earn. Say you get an average of 1 million C-Bills per contract during the entire career, and that you can complete 6 contracts per planet that you visit. You'd need to visit 100 planets, which seems possible since you need to visit 170 jump points to complete the Star Systems Visited scoring category. Say the average jump distance for the 100 best planets to visit is 6 days. That would be 3 days coming in (using the Visit System bug where it only takes 3 days, regardless of the system) and 4 days going back out to the jump point (assuming a fully improved Argo drive) and then 3 more days to jump to the next system. That's 10 days per system, at 100 planets, which is 1000 days. That leaves 200 days left to visit the other 70 systems required, which would take 210 days.
I suppose it's technically possible to get the Kerensky achievement, but it seems to be far more luck-based (mostly on what contracts appear) than it is skill-based, which is a bit disappointing.