"Which of you, wishing to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost to see if he has the resources to complete it? Otherwise, if he lays the foundation and is unable to finish the work, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, ‘This man could not finish what he started to build.’
-Yeshua

First, before any step is taken with any undertaking, first count the cost. The quote above, was meant to warn potential followers that The Way was costly. In such a manner should you consider anything that is worth doing, so let's count the cost of the full Iron Will achievement.



There are 18 "challenges", most of them designed to make the game longer or tailor the game play to a certain degree. All you need to do is 15 of them, so 3 can be safely ignored. Instead of talking about the ones I did, lets talk about the ones I threw away, and why.

1. No Time Limit. 30 hours seems reasonable, but in actuality it took me 100 hours, so this was wise to ignore. If you want to do the speedrun, do it alone without any modifiers.

2. No Crazy Tech mode. I would be O-K with the random tech, but it starts costing you 8000 for each tech, and it increases. That means in order to get basic iron and power, you blow most of your starting memory! Plus, if you refuse to get construction cannon, matter storage, matter fabricator, or teleporter, they keep popping up in the choice list and you could blow a ton of early game memory. Most games have re-roll for this type of thing, but not Final Upgrade. If you think you can deal with this, I could understand trying it and freeing up another challenge option.

3. No Disassembler mode. The mechanic of having to disassemble things is a nice change, completely revamping the entire game, but it also makes planets require more input for the more people it has. Example = a +6 planet also consumes +6 input instead of +1. What this means is some times the planet desires a higher tech and gives you a lower tech, basically becoming a black hole void where items go to die. It becomes a drain and a strain instead of being valuable. Logistically crazy. Maybe this would work well alone without the other long play modifiers. Beyond that, when I tried it, I was swimming in nickel, oil, and copper, while everything else, especially gold, was hard to come by.

So whats that leave us? A relatively peaceful game where you can expand calmly using way points and robot builders, fight the Ancients first, and before you win you also begin wars with the rest, wipe them too, fill up the planets and get the trophy.

If you think you could do the random tech, you could free up a challenge spot to get transports or something else, but as far as I can tell, this is the most relaxed and certain game choice to guarantee the positive return.

A comment posted for an alternate play style said to enable dissembler mode and disable the planetary production needs constant resources. That would be literally the only way to accomplish that mode, and might allow access to more complicated parts later on.

"When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it."
-Yeshua

Again, the quote above explains how with single minded devotion you can find the Kingdom of Heaven, and we will be using this logic of searching to find a "galaxy of great value"


By the way, turn this option on. Whole Map Explored. Takes the guesswork out of finding a good location. It is entirely possible for you to land on a terrible galaxy and have a terrible time, or you could get a great one. Save yourself 30 minutes each new game, and just plow through them until you find one worth committing to.


What I did when creating a new save was to set these options. Also in the options screen you need to reduce ship size and station size to the smallest they will go. Some times you will see a challenge as red when it should be white because you broke that challenge on a previous game. Try reloading. Also you can use this glitch to see if you broke a challenge on accident.


Next, plan to generate a ton of new saves. When ever you find one that has a bunch of planets for you to expand into, start counting the 2 star planets. If you can find a save with 20 planets, that is 20,000,000 people! Good enough for the first few population upgrades. With that many planets, they will offer a ton of resources. You want basically 2 of each resource. Its ok to have just one planet of gold, copper, biomass, and oil, for now, but you really need 2 silicon, titanium, nickel, and uranium.

You get memory upgrades for population goals, and you can count the people this way.

0 star, 6 levels - 10,000,000
1 star, 6 levels - 10,000,000
2 star, 9 levels - 25,000,000
3 star, 12 levels - 50,000,000

So if you have just 4 planets that are 2 stars, they can get you to 100 million. So, count the planets and star values, to try to get a big potential bonus, and count the ores - can't win if you don't have any titanium!

"Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing."
-Paul

You can build someone up by encouraging them, or you can literally build robots. Its good to do both so why not.

This is the only point in the game you can loose. You will loose if you run out of iron or power at this early stage so I believe the following is a good plan.

1. Place the remaining 7 robots on your flagship to make 8 total, the max.
2. Open up the tech tree and right click the iron block and the fluid tank (que research)
3. Place more research on your flagship.
4. Begin mining, and build 2 smelters on your flagship.
5. Once the tank research completes, right click on Fuel from Oil. If its too many for the Que, then start with fuel processing.

I used fuel for energy initially, then carbon ingots, and finally uranium, in that order. You will not have enough memory in the beginning to complete the energy from fuel upgrade, so build a gnat.


The mothership takes a lot of power to warp around, and we need to save as much as possible. The gnat only takes 70 per warp! Yay! Just claim all the sectors in your starting star system. It won't anger the enemies (nothing will, except a ship inside their boundaries) and you have enough power to claim the beginning area. The resulting memory will help finish the power from fuel upgrade.

Begin hand delivering iron blocks to the oil planet from your flagship to get things started. Create a quick oil refinery and power station. Get that power going. You can also make the gnat into a energy carrier.

Now we need to begin moving tasks from the flagship to other ships. Mining and smelting can be done with waypoints and smart construction. A ship told to mine in an asteroid field can move its cargo to another area to have it smelted, or you can stack them like in this picture. The ores will flow downward into the processing ship. Go ahead and make a ton of miners. 10 or so.

The Mining Bug and Smelting Nugget.


Until you can upgrade your planets and get a good trade route going, its going to have to be mining all the way. Most if not all of my stations looked like this;





Go ahead and start mining all the ores that you feel you need to. Begin upgrading stations and claiming sectors. Ships can feed into ships to make goods. Because of this, the entire map is your factory floor. All you need to do is make more fabrication ships, instead of doing stuff in the stations.




Each playthrough is unique, and the priorities are different, so I am simply showing you how I fabricated the products instead of telling you what to do first. A lot of the fun in this game is figuring things out, and now that you know this is possible, please enjoy coming up with your own factory solutions. If you would like to get some of my blueprints, look on the workshop for my Mod - 7 series. Mod = modular factory , 7 = seven inputs and outputs. Also the number for "lucky sevens..." ... completion, and Shabbat (rest).


Some hints on the numbers, though. I had 8 circuits per second, and it still felt slow. Might want to get 12 circuits per second, 8 of them going into T2 and 4 into T3, each with dedicated raw ore inputs, instead of drawing from a common shared pool.

Its easier to move oil around then plastic plates.

You can get by with +4 steel per second, but +8 is better. +8 ferrotitans and gold/titanium plates is also essential late game. That barely scrapes by, because everything is made with it, seemingly.

You don't need to make EVERY composite available. Just what is needed. You can re purpose composite production easily.

Store extra constant demand resources near the station so you can be in charge of the amount and speed they are used. One full tube = 2 a second, where demand is 1. So if you want 10 million people, and are using a tube, stop at 5 million and wait.

1 constant demand product = 60,000 people.

Liquids are HEAVY. Tanks slow you down so much when they are full, but they should - the small ones carry 100 and the big ones 400.

Waypoints for miners does not break the no trading rule. You can also bring up the trading screen to see who needs what, and even set a ship AS a trader (accidentially, and switch back) ... but if it goes out and does a trading run, you need to load a previous save as you lost that cheev.

Stopping a waypoint logic, and then moving the bottom to the top and then restarting the waypoint usually is enough to get the ship to restock if its not empty, or to drop off if its not full.

Don't put more then a fill up and a drop off waypoint per ship. Its too much for the little shippy, and if you use 2 or more on the same elongated route it gets hectic. One ship, two stops. A to B. Wait full, wait empty. If you go A to B to A to C, then B and C have 50% downtime. Just use 2 ships. Unless you are transporting liquids, but even then its best to use A to B.

Optimum number of ships per route is 2, one filling up and dropping off. So that is 4 ships for 1 product! 2 for input and 2 for output.

Don't worry about the machine limit number. You can go over it. I never had a problem with energy because I prioritized uranium. I almost never used more then 6000 per second, so one planet could possibly charge your entire operation.

Use sorters for input. Ships will wait in random places if the spot is full and cargo might transfer, clogging up the place.

Use smaller ships to have less downtime. Use larger ships to make more at a time and ease to balance loads.

Transferring cargo by click and drag works better the larger the storage and worse the smaller the storage, so if you plan on doing a lot of balancing manually, use large storage areas and move large to small.

"... and the one without a sword should sell his cloak and buy one."
-Yeshua

Choose peace, if it is a choice.

However, if you look at the other factions, you notice they are holding the planet hostage, and I would assume the 25,000 people there are being held against their will. When you claim a sector, you notice how people are already there? Well, its time to liberate them...


We will fight according to these rules.

1. One weapon. Rails, Rockets, Lasers, all are good choices, so we will be using top tier ammo, but just one type.
2. Get the big guy first. All those observation outposts aren't doing a good enough job warning the ancients.
3. Get the other guys too. Smack them around before you finish the big guy. Get the red faction after the yellows and before the green one.


So after you upgrade your starting cluster to the best of your ability, decide which planets are "essential" and which ones are non essential. Basically if they give you something you need, at a decent price, its essential. Keep these up 100%. Other ones are luxury planets.

Play pizza delivery ad nauseum until everything not bolted down is fully upgraded. Each upgrade adds memory, so we need to upgrade everything to get the most memory, so we can upgrade more stuff, so we can finally get the top tier ammo.

the top tier rail does a really good job piercing, but the wounds will heal over with enemies using nano armor... The nuke is kind of a joke, the explosion is tiny, but I bet it might wear down nano armors well. The laser could be considered the best choice, but there is a bug that makes it stop shooting if something warps in the system, as well as you needing a entire new item each shot, plus its mad expensive. I beat the game with proton lasers, but if all you can get is green lasers, use something else.


(one nuke's hole)


(rails tearing me up)


The rail penetrates the top layer and middle layer. The nuke explodes the middle layer very well. The laser erodes all layers down to nothing.

Using that knowledge, you can consider the best weapon. Honestly the rail could do a good job for how cheap it is.

Ship combat is quite simple. You surround them. You win. The engine is the "ship". The ship dies without it. The engine is invincible if there are guns. The guns and engine all have 1 hp, a simple tap is enough. You automatically target the guns. The guns create a hole when exploded, and ammo floats off into space.


Nano armor uses energy to heal. One tactic is to keep the ship healing, and then the power dies and it becomes a huge target.

There is an enemy electrical power ship, but more then likely there is no power station, so even that will run out. They don't have logistics.

Every now and then, new enemy combat ships are sent to a system and attacks you. These ships come out of nowhere. So, in order to fight the least amount of ships, capture their stars and win as quick as possible. Try to outnumber, and overwhelm, every system all at once. (try.) I had 4 squads of 15 initially for pushing, 1 squad of 15 for backup, 1 squad for self defence, and 2 squads for the green and red. Thats close to 100 ships. That is close to 5000 laser lenses. The war wound up needing me to make close to 10 000 proton laser lenses. I underestimated how much ammo I needed.


(special military operation)



(surrounding tactics)




Basically, in summary, upgrade everything, forget some tech to get other tech, and when everything is fully upgraded, forget more tech to get top tier weapons and armor. Nano armor is not essential, but a good supply of weapons is. Only start the fight when you know you can finish it quickly. Do not have a drawn out fight as their reinforcements will wear down your factories. Win quick. Its ok if it takes you a while to build up, remember, we are not time limited.

"Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled; do not be afraid."
-Yeshua


Just like if you followed Him as your guide, you will receive peace. By following this guide, and ordering the steps carefully, you should come out on top of your attackers and challenges and be in the peaceful part of the run. You already have completed the hard part of the game, namely getting resources going in abundance, and clearing out the enemies in a certain order. Feel free to self destruct the combat ships, because now we are in the assured victory. All you have to do is continue building out the factories, and delivering orders. The only thing that will make you loose at this point, now that you are comfortable with the challenges, is if you get bored of the game. Make sure to just take a few hours here and there to do this part because it is peaceful, but a bit mundane.


At this stage, the advice to store resources above the station is important. If a colony requests what another colony also requests, you can pull from one to feed another's upgrade orders.

Keep upgrading, building, and supplying. You can prob forget the laser tech for now if you need to unlock something specific. You do not need to upgrade production on each colony, just the population caps. Usually it looks like this. They want iron, then some ingots, then mech t1, then gold, then circuits t2, then uranium, then consumer t3, etc. There is a pattern, so just overproduce and store in extra the common items you see coming up again and again.

Overproduce all the chips, and the mechanicals t1 t2 t3. The 3 star systems are the worst, they almost all need 2200 t3 terraformers, or battle droids. So just plan for that and it won't be so bad.

Once every planet is done, begin feeding everyone their favorite items. press O and wait until you see every planet is full, and pop through the finish line!

Congrats!