I've been thinking about it some time ago, but I never got to actually trying it. Maybe I'll attempt it in the future.
The rules I decided on are that no branches are allowed except for
and entering Wastes or Garrison also breaks the conduct.
There's that problem of
You won't have any TRs, so you will have to dig. Terrain scanning will help here, but you're likely to suffer from multiple caveins, wrecking your processors and other low integrity (or damaged) parts. You'd probably want exp. shieldings to protect your parts from caveins while digging. Using melee weapons for digging helps a little -- attacking with melee doesn't destabilize your tile (each time you fire a ranged weapon from a dangerous tile, it has a chance to collapse) and tiles dug with melee weapons used to not collapse on a timer, only on movement (not sure whether this was changed).
I think the flight hacker transition into flight melee has a really good chance of completing this conduct. This type of build was shown to be able to earn ++ and doesn't rely on branch rewards. But you do get fewer fabrication zones (no Armory, no T, can't loop through Wastes or Garrisons) and you have much fewer terminals to get your high rating schematics (can't use terminals from branches). I think that some other players might be able to win this challenge with this approach (maybe you could convince some people to stream their attempts
), so I thought about another approach.
The other approach is to play combat and use whatever you find. Prepare a KI stack with 50% cycling for MC and probably use EM weapons in A0 except for the final boss, who can be killed with some TH cannons. Tri-rail Accellerators should be the best for MC? Maybe even a single Tri-rail Accelerator with 50% cycling will be enough? Failing that Linear Accelerators should work. Or maybe you'd prefer ~5 KI guns? Luckily MC phase 1 drops ~500 matter.
A0 won't have Enh. Progs, so the only units with significant EM resistance are some of the A-series, who have 75% EM resistance at best, and we already know that this only makes EM damage on par with other damage types against them. QC + HERF or cycled Gamma Bomb Arrays should wreck all bots other than the boss.
For shooing Arch you'd want to deal 80 core damage (maybe 75 is enough?) in a single volley and the best way to do that is to have a weapon that can do that much in a single projectile, e.g. overloaded Cld. Nova Cannon or some other overloaded weapon with Particle Accelerator and/or Overload Amplifier. Failing that, a stack of Nova Cannons should be good enough. And looted Neutron Cannons aren't much worse than that. Plus you can always loot Adv. Particle Chargers. Terrain scanning will help you locate telepads, so you'll need to fight fewer squads. Killing Arch when you've dealt with telepads and his goons is easy and can be handled with a looted Neutron Cannon + QC (or maybe even QC is not required after that... just destroy all his parts).
Streaming my attempts with this approach is on my TODO list (while I think the first approach will be attempted by a few flight players)
