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So there was a little interest in this game by some forum members so I decided to do an AAR (sorta). There are three single-player campaigns you can elect to play: NASA, Soviet space agency or GSA (Global Space Agency). For the first two, whichever one you don't pick, the computer will play against you with that side - for instance, if you choose NASA, the computer will play the Soviets and you will therefore be trying to beat them at doing things. The GSA is a marriage between the two, but here instead of playing against the computer you will be attempting to achieve goals it sets for you. For the sake of familiarity, I elect to play as NASA. I'm also going to play on easy as it gives more leeway in terms of funding and prestige. As for funding and prestige, these both go hand in hand. For every action you successfully complete you will gain some positive amount of prestige points (conversely, unsuccessful actions will deduct prestige). These points are used as a funding determination every 4 years. This cycle is divided into quarters (4 quarters = 1 year, 4 years = 16 quarters). Do well, and you'll see a funding increase. In order to maximize funding though, you'll need to meet the max prestige level. Finally, I'm going to be following a walkthrough by mreed2 on the Steam forums. The first two screens you'll encounter are the information screens: http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212016_1.jpg http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212021_1.jpg And now we start to get into the meat of it: http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212025_1.jpg What this screen says is that in order to get the maximum funding increase of $10000 we need 1875 prestige. In the upper right corner you can see we already start with 250 prestige, so we'll only need to get 1625. This is really easy to get - we could just run all 3 X-15 flights and come up with way more than that. For now though, let's continue. http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212045_1.jpg This is the NASA space flight center - I've clicked on the "backhoe" icon to bring up the numbers of each facility on the map. As you can see, we do not have a Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB for short) for some reason and we absolutely need this for putting payloads on rockets and such. Best to build the VAB right away (all you need to do is click on the empty plot at 7 to start construction). Because we will be trying to maximize research capacity as much as possible to make our rockets and components reliable, we'll need to upgrade our SET (or research) center ASAP. Upgrading an existing facility is just as easy as building, just click on it if there is a number next to the building. http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212216_1.jpg As you can see, by upgrading we can have up to 14 researchers toiling away instead of the max of 7. This is what our current facility looks like: http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212354_1.jpg So now you are probably wondering why we aren't building an Astronaut Center yet. Well, since we know what projects we want to start, we also know that neither of them require astronauts. No sense in spending the money to build something and hiring astronauts when we don't need them yet. Let's save that money. The same goes for Mission Control. We aren't going to be sending anything to space (yet), so we can let this sit vacant for the time being. For the rest of the clickable icons on the screen you can see I'm hovering over the $ in the lower left, clicking on it brings up the Public Affairs Office screen. http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212359_1.jpg Obviously, there isn't much to see here as we haven't done anything, but it does give you a refresher on prestige and funding if you forget. If we click on the building icon (with 0/3 next to it), it'll bring up the Headquarters screen: http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212414_1.jpg From here we can click on a stellar object and see what missions we can research and run. This early in the game however, there isn't much we can really open on any object except Earth which has 12. I'm going to leave this alone for the time being as we are not going to open projects willy-nilly without setting up our research team first. It's important to formulate a strategy first, set everything up, and finally open up projects and construct buildings after we know how much money we have to spend. So let's get going on our SET team (that's the icon with 5/5/7 next to it which means we have 5 scientists not doing anything out of 5 total scientists employed and 7 total spaces for scientists). I had to do a bit of reloading to come up with a starting team which have more than 80 in learning potential (the walkthrough basically infers this), and luckily everyone was in the 90's which is incredible: http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212449_1.jpg http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212453_1.jpg From here, we can sort with the top icons, put scientists in advanced training with that big green button, hire more and manage the department. We aren't going to hire anyone yet as we need to wait till our SET building is upgraded (technically, we have 2 open slots so we could hire 2 more, but once you hire, you can't do that again for the rest of the year and there's no sense in waiting that long when our building will be functional in 2 quarters). From the manage department button you can adjust the budget (aka pooled salary) which will directly affect employee morale. If this goes too low a scientist might quit. In my experience, you can leave this at the base salary and morale will be just fine. As I've said before, we know what project we want to start (it's called Explorer I, or basically the Soviet equivalent of Sputnik), and that requires two pieces: the satellite itself and the rocket to get it into orbit. In order to increase reliability of those pieces, we need to research them, but our scientists are a little lacking in terms of stats so let's train them a little. The guide claims we need to put two of our best scientists into advanced training for space probes (the satellite) and the three remaining into rockets so let's just eyeball this as there's only 5. Now, there's nothing that says we have to send the satellite into space with a general rocket, we can send it on a human-rated rocket and that will work just fine as long as the rocket is powerful enough to lift the payload. The upside to using a human-rated rocket is that we can use it to put men into space later on with greater reliability (aka less failure). We'll start with the first on the list: Anthony Baldacci - he has a 41.5% skill in Space Probes and 36.1% skill in Human Rockets. Normally, you would probably put him in Space Probes because it's higher, but I can see from inspection that there are other candidates which can cover the Space Probe section so he needs to go into Human Rated Rockets. Let's click on the advanced training icon http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212813_1.jpg And click on Human-Rated Rockets: http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212823_1.jpg For now, we'll stick him in only a single training course which will raise his skill to 62.5%. That's a barely usable level so we'll probably need to put him in again for another round after this. http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212833_1.jpg Now we can see that he's in training and the Human-Rated Rockets section is highlighted in blue on his profile. Let's put everyone else into advanced training as well: http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026212921_1.jpg That's about all we can do this quarter except look at the hiring pool to see if there's any prospects in researchers. The pool is always 10 and there's no way to make the profiles smaller so I can only show 5 at a time: http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026214536_1.jpg The first 5 are excellent: all have 89+ in learning, and it's learning that we want since we are training a team specifically for one area. http://i579.photobucket.com/albums/ss235/Zombie1972a/Buzz%20Aldrins%20Space%20Program%20Manager/20161026214556_1.jpg The second group doesn't hold much except for the last one: Alexander Call which has 91 learning. Chase is borderline at 81 learning, but I'm going to ignore him as his overall stats are nearly 30 in everything. Sure, we could train him up alongside the rest, but he'll need multiple courses in order to make him usable. This means we'll have 6 possible recruits. The walkthrough mentions hiring 8 so that means we'll need to wait another year before we can hire again which may delay the program. Maybe that's for the best anyway, because when the SET center upgrades I fully expect to fill it to it's max capacity of 14 scientists and I should be able to hire 3 more with learning in the 90's from a set of 10. Since Anthony will require two training courses to get him up to snuff, that will probably mean that his human-rated rocket stat will be a little bit higher than the rest of the team. If that happens, I'll probably take someone off the project with the lowest stat and put Anthony in his place. Then I'll put that researcher into an advanced training course to raise his stat even higher. This means someone else on the project will be lower, so the process can start all over again until Anthony is the lowest again. At that point, I might take him off that project and put him in advanced training for something like crewed spacecraft which we'll need if we want to open the Mercury project. Anyhow, stay tuned. I'll have more when time permits. Hopefully this wasn't too boring. - Zombie