For those who have won Campaign on Guru, who did you use and how did you do it?

[Terotrous]

I've been trying with Anastasia Xu but honestly even though I think she is the best character it still seems completely impossible to win.

IMO, the only strategy that might allow you to win is to abuse the Pleasure Dome. I feel it's fairly clear that the Pleasure Dome is by far the strongest building in the game, routinely generating 600+, which is effectively essential given the penalties from Guru. Anastasia starts with 2 Pleasure Dome Managers, giving her by far the easiest access to it. I also use Seneca every time, as their extra shares feel mandatory on Guru, since you get one less share per level.

The problem is that the advantage given to the AI on Guru is just too much. Even though I was able to narrowly win the first 3 missions, the AI gets +400k to their income, causing me to face elimination on the fourth round anyway even with 3 straight wins. I feel like of all the changes to Guru, the bonus money for the AI is the straw that breaks the camel's back, since even if you win it doesn't matter.

Maybe the secret is to play the 4 week campaign, since then you only face elimination once, and maybe with some crazy luck you could win the final. I also think you'd want to save scum the first mission until Mikhail Nekrosov is not present (he's by far the most dangerous AI opponent), the mission reward is the free claim, and there's a pleasure dome manager to hire. Even then I doubt this is enough.

[Terotrous]

I managed to beat Campaign CEO using much the same strategy I was using on Guru, so I can share how I did it, some of these tricks would probably also work on Guru but I'm still not sure how you overcome the AI's income advantage.

For starters, the 4 week campaign is definitely the one that you want, mainly because you start with more money and thus can actually hire some stuff. the mission rewards also seem to be better on this difficulty.

The strategy I used was that I used Asastasia Xu for the pleasure domes, and I hired Transparent Aluminum on the first stage, essentially turning her into a better version of Mikhail Nekrosov. For three of the four missions, I played as Reclamation, as we all know that Reclamation + Transparent Aluminum is extremely strong, it lets you upgrade comparably fast to the normal difficulty, especially if Carbon is also expensive. When playing as Anastasia, the entire game revolves around getting to level 3, as once you hit level 3 you can build the pleasure dome and instantly win.

On later missions, I contracted the Patent Lab a number of times. Besides the obvious synergy of Virtual Reality, Cold Fusion was also super useful to reduce the pressure on Fuel. I also used Teleport on one map where the resources were really spread out.

[Terotrous]

I have now beaten Guru. There is definitely a trick to it, which is to beat it on Hangil Hwang's Io Campaign.

Hangil and Phillipe have unique campaigns on Io, where their campaign is broken up into 4 separate chapters. Beating each chapter unlocks a persistent bonus, but that barely matters. The important thing is that the final chapter is just a single map skirmish battle against the AI, with each player starting with a lot of money. Completing the final chapter on Guru does count for the achievement even if the previous 3 chapters were done on a different difficulty.

Of course, winning a knockout battle on Guru still isn't easy, but you can restart the last chapter over and over until the items that are for sale are extremely favourable. I went with Free Pleasure Dome + Minimum Quarry, and focused on buying out Anastasia first, who was the only other player who had the ability to build Pleasure Domes. I also had a map where it was possible to monopolize Aluminum, so I abused that heavily. It still took a lot of buying and selling resources on the market to gain extra money and a lot of other trickery, but winning a single map is well within the realm of possibility with some luck.

I actually think beating a full 4-chapter campaign on CEO is probably a little harder, but I'm glad to have that challenge out of the way in any case.