Gaming the System - "Very Hard" Difficulty Guide

A Guide For "Very Hard" Difficulty achievement.

Prologue

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Warning: beating very hard is all about being calculative and exploit what is advantageous in the game and push it to extreme. It is not going to be flavored as "realistic" space race.

The game have two kinds of resource: fund and research. But there is a difference: extra fund does not give any advantage as long as you have enough to execute missions while more research always get you to Mars faster. So the Mars landing race is simply reduced to:

Maximize Research Output while keep fund at sufficient level.

I rate missions in 4 metrics:

1. [research-time-efficiency] Total research output / number of months it occupies a mission slot.
   
2. [research-fund-efficiency] Total research output / fund cost.
   
3. [support-time-efficiency] Total support output / number of months it occupies a mission slot.
   
4. [support-fund-efficiency] Total support output / fund cost.

Ideally we fill our mission slots with research-time-efficient missions but limited by fund, we will also have to leverage research-fund-efficient missions and support-fund-efficient missions. Support-time-efficiency is not of much value.

Preparation - Agency Start Settings

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Because it is not easy, you need an agency much stronger than the stock ones. Here is the recommendation:

Agency Choice

Recommendation: China

You DO NOT HAVE TO choose China to beat very hard. It just makes it easier.

China is the best choice because of the ridiculous 8000kg moon landing payload. All other agency uses 45000kg payload. This means China could execute the moon landing mission with just medium launch pad and at a much lower fund cost. This gives Chinese moon landing the highest research-time-efficiency, support-fund-efficiency, support-time-efficiency and fairly good research-fund-efficiency.

(Telescope missions may have higher research-time-efficiency on the paper, but their research output is rewarded over 10 years period which greatly reduce their practical value.)

Perks

• Operation Specialist (+1 Mission Slot)
  
• Pathfinders (-25% Research Costs for Missions)
  
• Economical Construction (-20% Vehicle Build Cost)
  
• Not Because It's Easy (No milestone support bonus for 2nd and 3rd place)

"Operation Specialist" is the strongest perk in the game. Even when you do not have enough fund to utilize all mission slots, more slots allows you to increase training time to increase output and also allows you to choose research-fund-efficient missions over research-time-efficient ones.

"Pathfinders" is selected because mission research is going to be the lion's share of total research spending.

"Economical Construction" is debatable and may be replaced by "Economical architecture" as I did not calculate the exact gain for the two. But never the less it should be enough.

"Not Because It's Easy", if you choose to always load game for every failure, you could replace it with "Failure Not an Option". Do note that if failed too many times you won't be able to beat very hard.

Diplomatic Relation

• Ally with Japan. (For the best contractors)
  
• One Enemy. (+5% fund bonus)

Core Strategy - Gaming the System

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The Rules

Our goal is clear - maximize research progress. The majority of research income comes from Request Missions, and these are what we want to optimize. Here is how request missions are generated:

1. You only get a fixed number of Requests at the same time.
   
2. Requests are generated ONLY for Milestone Missions you have completed.
   
3. Requests expire after a certain duration of time.

In a normal game, you would wait the unwanted requests to expire to get new ones. This, however, would usually result in empty mission slots which reduces your overall output. So in very hard you want to exploit rule #2 by execute ONLY the efficient Milestone Missions and give up the inefficient ones. By doing this, you eliminate the inefficient request missions from the request pool and is guarantee to always get efficient request missions.

Milestones to Execute

ONLY execute the Milestones in the list.

• RFE - Research-Fund-Efficiency
  
• RTE - Research-Time-Efficiency
  
• SFE - Support-Fund-Efficiency

(I will explain how they are calculated in the next chapter.)

Mission	RFE	RTE	SFE	Comment
Test Launch	Good	Good	Good	Only 4 request missions. No refresh.
(Optional) Artificial Satellite	Good	Poor	Very Good	Recommend to skip due to poor RTE
Lunar Orbit	Very Good	Fair	Good
Animal In Space	Extremely Good	Good	Poor	Only 3 Request Missions, no refresh.
Satellite Imaging	Very Good	Good	Fair
Commercial Satellite	N/A	N/A	N/A	Huge amount of fund.
Venus Impacter	Good	Very Good	Poor
Venus Orbit	Good	Very Good	Poor	Venus Impacter is a little better on everything.
Moon Landing	Fair	Extremely Good	Very Good	ONLY IF you run as China.
(Optional) The Grand Tour	Very Good	Very Poor	Extremely Good	Occupies slot for long time but worth it. Unlike Telescope / Neptune / Pluto missions. This does not come with Request Missions, which makes it more worth running. (You do not want request missions from long duration Milestone Missions because later in the game you do not have time to finish or fully realize the output.)
(Optional) Both Telescopes Missions	Fair / Poor	Extremely Extremely Good	Very Poor	RTE is almost twice of Chinese Moon Landing on the paper but the research output takes 10 years to fully realize. Making it less attractive considering the high fund cost. Not recommended but listed for the sake of it.

As you might notice, one additional advantage of these missions is that they do not require astronauts (except Chinese Moon Landing which is totally worth it), nor do them require Large Launch Pad. This saves you a lot of cash from building cost, maintenance and salary in middle game. (You do need both for end game Mars missions though)

Research Strategy

Because research is scarce, you want to skip unnecessary research items as much as possible. This means:

• Give up all crewed missions research except final Mars Landing. (Except for Chinese Moon Landing)
  
• Give up the whole space station research line (they are also crewed but just want to emphasize).
  
• Give up unnecessary building and vehicle items. Do not research them just for Era bonus perk (Except for the Era I building research bonus which saves you a lot of fund in obstruction removal).

Execution - Devil's in the Details

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Calculations

Before getting into execution details, here is some calculation which will later explain why we should do things the way we do. You can skip this section if not interested in whys.

Total Research output = Base Research Output * Difficulty Modifier * (1 + Perk Bonus + Building Bonus + Training Bonus + Contractor Bonus)

Mission Slot Occupation Time (MSOT) is the time a mission would occupy a mission slot.

Base MSOT (BMSOT) = Payload Build Time + Vehicle Build Time + Operation Time

Full MSOT (FMSOT) = BMSOT + Training Time + Contractor Vehicle Build Time Adjustment

(Operation Time is shown on "Overview" page of a mission, e.g. 1 month for earth and moon missions, 4-5 For Venus and 9-10 for Mars.)

Discounted Payload Cost = Payload Cost * (1 + Building Bonus + Agency Perk Bonus + Payload Random Perk Bonus )

Discounted Vehicle Cost = Base Vehicle Cost * (1 + Building Bonus + Agency Perk Bonus + Payload Random Perk Bonus + Contractor Bonus)

Total Fund Cost = Discounted Payload Cost + Discounted Vehicle Cost

Research-Fund-Efficiency (RFE) = Total Research Output / Total Fund Cost

Research-Time-Efficiency (RTE) = Total Research Output / Full MSOT

Mission Execution

As mentioned in the Prologue we will focus on increasing fund-efficiency and time-efficiency for research output. Our list already contain only the fund-efficient missions so support is of less concern.

We use these 2 contractors:

• Astronautica [-30% Vehicle Cost] [+20% Vehicle Build Time]
  
• Ito Industries [+20% Research] [+20% Vehicle Cost]

And we primarily use only Science Training for research bonus.

General Rules of Mission Execution:

1. When low on fund, use Astronautica and prolong Science Training. Do the opposite on excessive fund.
   
2. Maximize Science Training if there is a 100% Training bonus on payload.
   
3. Maximize Science Training on missions with long BMSOT.
   
4. No Training on mission with short BMSOT.
   
5. Use Ito Industries on missions with short BMSOT or low Vehicle Cost.
   
6. Use Astronautica on missions with long BMSOT or high Vehicle Cost.

BMSOT of missions in the selected list:

Earth & Moon Satellites: "short"
Venus & (Chinese) Crewed Moon Landing: "long"

But note that the longer time vehicle takes to build the longer BMSOT

Rationale for rules above: (Skip if not interested)

1. Empty mission slot due to insufficient fund dooms efficiency of everything.
   
2. This increase fund-efficiency and usually (depending on BMSOT) also increase time-efficiency because of the high bonus.
   
3. This increases fund-efficiency while damage to time-efficiency is offset by the long BMSOT.
   
4. Training would drag down time-efficiency too much.
   
5. This might slightly reduce fund-efficiency but improves time-efficiency by a lot.
   
6. Opposite of above.

Other Hints

Fund Management

Depending on the Era, definition of "sufficient" fund changes over time. Generally, 2K / 4K / 10K / 25K for Era I,II,III and IV respectively is the line where you can start spend a bit luxuriously, e.g. putting Ito Industries on all missions, use -1 month vehicle build time upgrade, etc.

One thing to note that the less milestones you unlock, the more likely hood you get requests from Commercial Satellite milestone. So certain strategies such as postponing the unlock of Venus milestones could also help if you feel financial pressure.

Racing Milestones

1st place is possible for all the missions selected in the previous chapter. The Venus Impacter might be a bit difficult but not too bad. The early ones are more worth it because they jump start your fund income which may form a positive feedback loop.

However, most likely you will start falling behind very soon. Artificial Satellite (again, not recommended to take) and Lunar Orbit are the only two low hanging fruits. Do not worry about it. You will start to catch up in Era III and back to lead in Era IV because of the huge amount of research saving from the given up building and mission research items. Just keep your cool and proceed with your own pace.

Mission Resolution

Manually resolve the mission execution mini-games to secure bonus will increase your chance to beat the very hard difficulty. It is of less significance once you reach mid-game, but definitely recommended for early game.

As China, it is pretty safe to use auto-resolving from the very beginning. (With loading on too expensive failures here and there)

Do note that values such as heat, radiation and displacement are randomly placed on instructions in the mini-game. Sometimes the problem setup you get just have no viable solution. So it would be prudent to make a save at the last round of each stage for multi-phase mission stages that involving such values (especially for the final Mars landing) so that you could load back from a dead-end.

Event Decisions

Remember you have to maintain alliance with Japan (if you are not running as it) for its contractors.

You also have to maintain your enemy for fund bonus. Also try drive the other two into being your enemy for additional fund bonus.

Buildings

2 Mission Control Expansion (5 Mission slots in total) should be enough. The 3rd Mission Control Expansion takes a lot of research but should be affordable if you really like it.

Robotics Research Lab is crucial to reduce your mission research expense so get it early.

Mobile Launch Platform is useful but not required, I only get it after I finished mission and vehicle research.

Contractors Office is too expensive for mid-game in both fund and research. I usually do not get but if you are ahead in research and well-funded you could consider it.

The End - Mars Horizon

Once you have unlocked all the selected milestones, the rest is just repeating the requests and proceed your mission research tree.

There are 4 optional and 2 mandatory prerequisite milestones for the final Mars Landing. All 6 of them would increase your payload reliability in the final Mars Landing. Only 3 out of the 4 optional ones are available to us because we abandoned the space station research line.

With a little luck + good fund management, you should have enough fund to execute all 3 optional ones. However, even with none of the optional executed your Mars landing payload reliability would be somewhere between 40%-60%, plus payload reliability training bonus. So it is just a little bit long short to beat the final with auto-resolve without executing any of the optional missions.

And there comes your Mars Horizon.

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Feel free to leave comments if you have any question or doubts.

Also please consider up vote and/or rate the guide if you find it helpful. Thanks!

[Chevayo]

Figures. Thanks for answering anyway
Calculating it seems fairly difficult with the number factors involved. It does seem to be working decently well on the Veteran setting however.

[logic observer]

@chevayo This guide was written 1.5 yrs ago and I haven't played the game for quite a while. While I still have the calculation sheets with me, I cannot judge the setups I did not consider during the writing.

[Chevayo]

I'm curious what your opinion is on taking the/one of the 20% faster Vehicle/Payload construction perks? They kick in sooner as one might think, already reducing 4 month builds down to 3 (Not sure how that math works, probably something to with the game running on month long chunks and rounding).
At any rate they would somewhat boost the RTE of all the missions.

I have not yet advanced to Very Hard myself, so i suspect other constraints (the money) would make that non viable. But then again - the extra time might allow to fit extra profit launches in? Usually in turn based games time is the most important factor and especially early turn savings have the potential to compound into a huge advantage.

[ssnake42069]

yeah i just finished my very hard run. once i started focusing on the prep/req missions, the other agencies focused on the other stuff. I did all 6 mars prep/req missions at once for kicks. That n1 booster is a beast, though the first time i used it, even with 75% reliability or whatever lvl 0 is, i still kept failing. I had to reload over 10 times, no joke.

Now im doing the normal run trying to get 1st in all milestone missions.

Im wondering, the win the race to mars as all 5 agencies, does it count if you change your agency flag and agency name to something else?

[logic observer]

@ssnake42069 researching the mission does not mean you have to execute it. As I mentioned in the guide Venus mission can be postponed under certain circumstance.

[ssnake42069]

another thing, commercial satellite is unavailable until after Venus impactor & orbit. why is it listed before them?

[ssnake42069]

i know in an earlier post you said you considered a "research order" but decided against it, i wish you had. My brain isn't working right but i really want to win on very hard difficulty.

[Double Dark]

Doubt I'm doing another Very Hard run to compare. My main issue was that I didn't feel like I got enough Crewed Moon requests to make it worth paying for the astronauts. I'd almost want to pair it with Orbital EVA and Multicrew Orbit. Considering we're forced to research those missions it's not there's a problem doing them.

I agree I need to do the math for a better comparison. The problem is it's very complicated with all of the variables. At best doing Crewed Moons would get you 35 more Funds/month (1 more tier). There's also some upfront costs for the building, clearing trees, and the astronauts. The astronauts and upkeep are approximately 35 funds/month. Then you have the 5000 research cost for the mission.

[logic observer]

Also moon landing pays for itself with the large amount of support comes with it, whereas telescope does extremely poor in support return.

[logic observer]

You have the feeling moon landing being expensive only because all the other missions are so fund-efficient. Telescope and space shuttles will simply be more costly if you really try it.

Take a pen and do the math you will find the truth. Telescope's RFE is strictly lower than Chinese moon landing and the research takes 10 years to realize which significantly drag you behind.