A Kerensky career is possible in the base BATTLETECH game (v1.9.1).

Your game difficulty must have a full 1.00 multiplier, with the following mandatory elements:

• 3 parts for ‘Mech assembly
  
• Hard enemy force strength
  
• Normal or Generous salvage
  
• Normal or Slow ‘Mechwarrior progression

To maximize score, use the following strategies:

• Take most contract rewards as salvage and get as many pilot kills as you can, while also shooting off all the arms and side torsos you see to minimize non-’Mech salvage
  
• Cycle your cash by using excess C-Bills to buy up ‘Mech parts, assemble new ‘Mechs, and sell them back
  
• Maximize the number of high-value contracts available to you by raising reputation with two warring factions and then playing both sides of the war
  
• Make planetfall only on systems with short jump point to planet distances and jump through systems to accumulate visits

Your career should aim to meet the following benchmarks:

• Visit a new system every 7 days on average
  
• Run a contract every 3 days, or 5 contracts in a system every 15 days, on average
  
• Receive an average of at least 2,000,000 C-Bills per contract in rewards
  
• If using Slow ‘MechWarrior progression, maintain an average mission difficulty greater than 3 skulls

This is a guide on how to achieve a Kerensky rating in Career Mode, or a score of at least 760,000 out of 770,015. It is written for players who have a good handle on BATTLETECH’s mechanics and have done at least one Career previously. New players or players unfamiliar with the Career Mode mechanics will probably find this less helpful and I encourage them to look at the many other guides available on Steam, or look for tips in the Discussions.

All the strategies below were developed with the vanilla game, but apply to both vanilla and the DLC; there's now a section discussing DLC-related adjustments at the end.

When you start a new career, you will be presented with a set of decisions that will shape the direction of your game before you get to even touch a ‘Mech: the game difficulty settings. Your difficulty settings must yield a total score multiplier of 1.00 - you’re allowed a margin of only 1.3% off the maximum score, so a multiplier of 0.95 or lower categorically prevents you from achieving a Kerensky career. Anyway, it would be a bit of a sad sack achievement if you could max out your score with the difficulty tanked substantially.

When choosing settings, I’ve found the following to be essential:

• 3 part ‘Mech assembly. Maximizing salvage rewards and selling assembled ‘Mechs with this at 3 parts can get you enough C-Bills for a Kerensky career. I can categorically say that a strategy of increasing parts per 'Mech and taking C-Bills over salvage will not keep up in income generation.
  
• Hard enemy force strength. More enemies means more salvage.
  
• Normal or Generous salvage. I bet you can figure out why by now.
  
• Normal or Slow ‘MechWarrior progression. To get all the points for ‘MechWarrior experience, you need the equivalent of 24 max experience pilots in your barracks, and there aren’t enough days in a career to do that with Very Slow progression. It’s a horrendous slog on Slow progression, but doable.

The good news is that the rest of the settings are up for negotiation - as long as you’re willing to make sacrifices elsewhere for a 1.00 multiplier, it is possible to leave any one item on the easiest setting and still end up on the top of the heap.

Generally, that means you'll want to make a choice here on leaving either Ironman or Unequipped 'Mechs on. Turning off Unequipped 'Mechs gives you a faster startup and more C-Bills overall since every 'Mech you assemble comes with a fistful of components you can sell off. Turning off Ironman means RNG can't wreck your run, which matters a lot given how many hours it takes to complete a career. I've had successful Kerensky runs with Ironman on/Unequipped 'Mechs off, and vice versa, so this is entirely up to personal preference. Of course, you could turn them both on and mess with the other settings if you're feeling that, too.

My difficulty settings for my original Kerensky run:

Right, now you’ve picked out your difficulty settings, customized your commander, maybe rejoiced/raged over the starting ‘Mechs you got dealt if you went for a random draw - let’s have a look at the ways you can earn points for a Kerensky career.

Others have covered the basics of the career scoring mechanics and presumably this isn’t your first rodeo, so to start I’ll just say that contracts, ‘Mech chassis/weight class, Argo upgrades, morale and MRB reputation should all take care of themselves well in advance of the 1200 day mark, even if you’re a little sloppy about them. ‘MechWarrior experience also falls into this category on Normal progression. We’re going to leave all of those alone because you’re a reasonable adult mercenary captain and so I won’t insult your intelligence by spelling out the obvious in those categories. That leaves four broad areas that to discuss in more detail: C-Bills, ‘MechWarrior experience, Faction relations and Star Systems.

As stated before, the primary reward strategy of your missions revolves around salvage - specifically, assembling ‘Mech chassis from your salvage and selling the completed products. An obvious decision from that is that you generally want to take max salvage for mission rewards. Another factor is that you would like to see as many ‘Mech parts in the salvage pool as possible, so pilot kills and headshots are ideal instead of making a bloody mess and coring everything. But even the best reward packages max out at 8 priority salvage, meaning that a good headshot farmer will still tend to get only a little more than 3 full ‘Mechs at most from that 8/39 package. What’s a poor ‘Mech farmer to do?

The trick is to upgrade from a ‘Mech farmer to a ‘Mech surgeon, carefully cutting out the ‘Mech parts you want and disposing of the rest. This means that you want to blow off as many components as you can before you drop a ‘Mech, because the only things that make it into the salvage pool are the components on a ‘Mech when it drops and the sweet sweet ‘Mech parts. In practice, this is done by destroying both side torsos (and by extension the arms), plus any one leg on a ‘Mech. Such a ‘Mech is still worth 3 parts in salvage, while limiting the less valuable components to whatever’s on the head, CT and remaining leg. Ideally just the process of doing all that damage results in a pilot kill (two injuries for the torsos, one for the knockdown on the leg, and maybe one knockdown in there somewhere from LRMs) but in the late game you’ll need to finish the job by gently (or not so gently) bonking the ‘Mech on the head. This will lead to you being compensated like any other surgeon: way the hell more than anyone expected when they first signed you up for the job.

As an example of just how much this can affect your earnings, let’s take a hypothetical mission where you take 8/33 salvage and the OpFor is 8 Atlases. A stock Atlas has 22 components that you don’t want - 21 if you manage a clean first-round headshot - and can offer up only 3 ‘Mech parts. Perfect headhunting then yields 24 Atlas parts and 168 pieces of trash, and you can guarantee receipt of only 8 parts, so more than 90% of the pool is stuff you don’t want when it comes down to your 25 low-priority picks. On the other hand, if you reduce each Atlas to CT and one leg, you’re looking at 24 Atlas parts, 16 MLs and 16 heat sinks, or 16 of each after you take your high-priority share. All of a sudden, those low priority salvage picks get really valuable! Obviously, this is an idealized maximum case, but there’s still a substantial advantage to ‘Mech surgery in practice, and it adds up over hundreds of missions. ‘Mech surgery is the core of your income generation and could theoretically max out C-Bills on salvage alone in a lucky career.

The main shift in strategy as a ‘Mech surgeon is that you no longer care quite so much about the biggest alpha strike or pure DPS; rather, making sure damage goes where you want it to go becomes your first priority. Knockdowns also gain in relevance as they yield pilot injuries and free Called Shots. Slightly less optimal builds with a mix of damage outputs can ensure that you destroy side torsos with a minimum of CT damage; I used a specialist Marauder with weapons at 25, 35(x2), 45(x2) and 50 damage so that it could fine-tune damage output alongside a more traditional ERML Marauder. Additionally, the value of pilot kills means that LRM boats with an eye towards stability kills and not pure damage are more useful than normal; some Assaults have enough armor to survive getting dropped twice by LRMs without blowing up, and that extra pilot injury can come in real handy. Conversely, the highly efficient SRM boats have an unpleasant tendency to put too much of their damage on CTs unless you have a side shot. Tactically, you will likely leave enemy ‘Mechs alive for longer and get shot at a little more than you’re used to, and also have low-risk denouements at the end of missions where all that’s left are two weaponless Assaults you’re trying to headcap or some such. Trust me, though, it’s worth it - your account balance and score will thank you!

Of course, this only applies on missions where you can get good use out of maximum salvage. Under certain circumstances, particularly in the early game or on Defend Base missions, you may find that enemy ‘Mechs aren’t worth salvaging or you don’t have the time to carefully dismantle your OpFor. Treat those cases as vacations from your surgeon job and go golfing core as many CTs as you’d like!

Aside from your core ‘Mech surgery business, there’s a side hustle that can help boost your C-Bill score once you find yourself flush with cash (and you will, don’t worry.) The key is that any income increases your C-Bill score, while money paid out as expenses doesn't change a thing. Therefore, if you have excess funds, cycle your money by buying up ‘Mech parts in stores and selling back the assembled ‘Mechs. While this does reduce your cash on hand, you still get points for those sales, and the money’s no use to you anyway if it’s just piling up in your account. This can be good for tens of millions of C-Bills over your career, which may not sound like much but in a close run could be the difference between being a legend and a legendary failure.

Right, we’ve talked about what to do in missions and what to do with the proceeds from them. The next item is how you get those missions in the first place: contracts, and the reputation management related to them.

The first consideration is maximizing the number of contracts you can get. At any given system, there will always be 7 contracts generated when you first search for jobs; these will be divided up among the active factions in some manner, and most of the time two or more factions who are at war with each other will have contracts on offer. Because you want to maximize the number of contracts you can take, it’s helpful to keep good relations on both sides of a conflict. Additionally, the faction reputation gain from a mission slightly outweighs the reputation penalty for taking the same mission against a faction, so taking a mission for the Capellans against the Federated Suns and then following up with a Federated Suns mission against the Capellans nets a small reputation increase with both factions, assuming the missions were of equal difficulty and you didn’t hit the reputation cap.

A second consideration is that high-difficulty contracts are especially valuable to you in the middle and late game, since in addition to boosting you in the reputation game, they pay well enough to keep you on pace and also make up for your poorly-compensated early contracts. Most of the high-difficulty systems (3.5 skulls or higher) are concentrated in the map’s northern end, and the Free Worlds League, Capellan Confederation and Federated Suns collectively have a presence in all of them. The Lyran Commonwealth and the pirates are in a reasonable number as well. The Draconis Combine and the Taurian Concordat are basically in a subset of the Federation planets only, while the Magistry of Canopus is represented in only a handful of Free Worlds systems.

With these two points in mind, if you want a bunch of high-level contracts, playing the Free Worlds, Capellans and Federated Suns off each other is an excellent approach, with the goal of eventually getting all of them to Honored at the end. It mostly doesn’t matter who you pick for your fourth Honored faction, as long as it isn’t the Magistry. Note that you only need to be Honored by 4 factions and Loathed by 4 others at the end of the game, so I like to also maintain good standing with the pirates for Black Market access for most of the game, and then tank their rep hard in the last couple hundred days. It’s also not unreasonable to try for decent rep with the Taurians for a while if you’d like the extra contracts. If intending to burn the Magistry, the Commonwealth or the Combine, do so aggressively because it’s a bit harder to get contracts against them and their limited reach should not cost you too many missed contracts.

A special note on the Arano Restoration: their reputation doesn’t count for any points, but they have only two enemies (Taurians and pirates) and almost exclusive control over a decent bit of space. As a result, I prefer to visit them in the late game to drive my rep with the Taurians and the pirates to Loathed without having to worry about angering one of my Honored factions.

Okay, so we’ve talked about C-Bills, experience and faction rep. If you’ve been keeping an eye on the scoring system on the way, you should have realized that there’s a little bit of slack in the scoring. Specifically, you need 760,000 points for a Kerensky and the maximum is 770,015 points, so you can come up a touch short on any or all of these categories and it wouldn’t cost you the run necessarily.

The last category to discuss, Star Systems, is by comparison brutally unforgiving. There’s a completion bonus of 25,000 points for visiting 170 star systems, which really means that there’s a penalty of not getting a Kerensky career if you don’t collect your 170. The good news is that you don't have to hit every system; there are 219 systems and so there's some leeway to skip the really inconvenient locations. As a result, when it comes to the star map, you need to start thinking like a travel agency and follow three principles: try not to backtrack, avoid problem destinations and look for opportunities off the beaten path. Let’s go through these one by one.

Try not to backtrack: aside from the obvious short-term meaning, the idea here is to divide up much of the map into chunks so you can focus on visiting most or all of the systems in any given chunk, mark it as completed, and then leave it alone for the rest of the game. This is most easily demonstrated by looking at the territory owned by the Magistry of Canopus - it’s possible to take a linear path through all of their holdings by starting at Addasar, traveling to Dunianshire in the corner, and then going from there to exit Magistry space at Early Dawn. As long as you’re not relying on the Magistry for contracts (and you shoulldn’t be, in case you missed it above), this is an efficient way to deal with that portion of the map. Similarly, you can break down all the unaffiliated Rim systems into a few chunks, and Arano Restoration space is also amenable to such treatment. You don’t want to do this with the entire map, since it’s helpful to be able to vary up your contract partners and targets as part of the relations game. Even then, though, if you plan to cross Capellan space repeatedly, try to route one of your trips along the southern end of their systems, another through the middle, a third along their northern edge, and so on. Some repeat system visits are unavoidable, but they can be minimized with some advance planning.

Avoid problem destinations: specifically, avoid systems with a long travel time from the jump point to the planet itself. Mechanically, making planetfall in a system includes the travel time from your starting planet to the jump point, one or more jumps to your destination system, and then travel time to the destination planet. Jump time is fixed at 3 days, while travel time from planet to jump point is highly variable, ranging from 3 to 18 days in an un-upgraded Argo. Note that if you make planetfall in a system, you pay the planet to jump point distance twice: once on the inbound trip and again on the way out. This makes systems with a long planet to point distance very costly. The good news is that you can look at the time costs for any destination, subtract out the jump times, and use that to get an idea of how problematic a system is. There are also maps of system travel times available outside of Steam. In general, anything with a travel time of 10 days or more is not worth it, and you should look around for better options than systems in the 7-9 day range, though a few are okay.

Look for opportunities off the beaten path: when at a JumpShip while traveling along a previously set course, you can pause the game and use the map to set a new destination. This is advantageous if you’re trying to maximize travel to new systems because each system has a different set of connections with its neighbors and so changing course midway through can get you to some systems that the map would normally route you around. It also allows for very long journeys designed just to visit systems quickly. Note that this doesn’t work if you’ve already detached from the JumpShip and are traveling under the Argo’s own power, and once you reach a system that you have designated as your destination, you immediately undock from the JumpShip and proceed to the planet with no option to change your mind. Therefore, if you want to travel three systems away and then change course, set an initial course four systems away so the game gives you the chance to change.

An additional tip on a game traveling bug: Since my Kerensky run, I learned from ColorsFade that If you plot a multi-jump course to a system and then use the Travel to System button on the Argo screen when at one of the intermediate systems, the travel time from the JumpShip to the planet is fixed at 3 days. To use this trick, you would find your preferred target system, set a course that goes one system beyond that, and then use Travel to System as soon as you get to your target system, shaving some time off the JumpShip to planet travel. You still have to spend the full system to JumpShip travel time on the way out, though, so its benefits are a bit minimized if you're avoiding problem destinations. Nevertheless, it's another way to squeeze a few more systems in.

So now you’ve got some strategies on how to maximize your points for your career - all well and good. But a career is a marathon, not a sprint, and it can be tricky to figure out if you’re staying on pace with the relatively limited records the game itself provides. Up next, we’re going to go over the metrics you can use to judge if all your shooting and looting is actually making up enough ground. There are three main metrics: new system visit rate, average contracts per system, and average reward per contract, plus an additional metric of average contract difficulty if you’re using Slow ‘MechWarrior progression.

New System Visit Rate: Over the course of your career, you will need to visit a new system every 7 days or less on average. This is because you must visit 170 systems and you have 1200 days, which works out to 1200 days / 170 systems = 7.06 days per system. During your campaign, then, you can quickly check the number of days elapsed divided by the number of systems visited to see if you’re staying on pace overall. Additionally, when planning jumps, it becomes easy to see if that three-jump path you’re planning will set you back in terms of time. It’s possible to run a little faster than this benchmark - in my Kerensky run, I hit system 170 on day 1079, or 6.3 days per system with 121 days to spare - but as long as you stick to this pace you should max out the star system points by the end.

Average Contracts Per System: Completing a contract every 3 days on average, or more relatably, visiting a system with 5 contracts every 15 days, puts you on pace for 400 contracts over the course of your career. That’s enough contracts to generate sufficient C-Bills and pilot XP on Slow Progression (more on both of those in a second) while leaving in some room for error. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t track total contracts for you, so you will need to keep a count separately to use this metric. My Kerensky run had 366 missions over 1079 days, or 416 missions over 1200 days, both for an average of a mission every 2.9 days.

As a note, I originally recommended aiming for 350 contracts, or one every 3.4 days, but that's more the practical minimum for a maxed-out score than a good target for a career.

Average Reward Per Contract: An average mission reward of 2,000,000 C-Bills from both cash rewards and selling salvage is about the minimum you need to max out the C-Bills score given a 400 contract career. Conveniently, it's also enough to get at least 700,000,000 C-Bills given a 350 contract career if you're trying to finish with time to spare. This can be a little hard to track on a running basis because you should only sell ‘Mechs once fully assembled instead of selling the parts on their own, and trying to guesstimate the value of all the ‘Mech parts you’re carrying around is an unpleasant process. Instead, I prefer to check each mission by calculating 9% of the raw salvage value (or 10% if Unequipped 'Mechs is off,) adding the cash reward, and seeing how that stacks up against the 2,000,000 C-Bill benchmark. Obviously your starting missions will fall under this, so I use this mostly to make sure most missions are over this benchmark after day 300 or so. Using this conversion, I made an average of 2,176,457 C-Bills per mission in my Kerensky run through day 1079. My overall average was a little lower at day 1200, at 1,854,090 C-Bills, but only because I stopped maximizing rewards when I finished out the scoring.

Average Contract Difficulty: Given a minimum of 350 contracts per career, you will also want to keep up an average contract difficulty of approximately 3.5 skulls over the course of your career if you’re playing with Slow ‘MechWarrior progression. In all likelihood, you’ll be doing this anyway - the C-Bill benchmark is about the average reward I saw for 3.5 skull contracts - but it’s worth noting because if you went for Generous mission rewards in the difficulty settings, it’s possible for XP and not C-Bills to become your slowest category to complete. As with total contracts, there isn’t a nice way to track this with in-game statistics, so I logged all my mission difficulties in a spreadsheet. I had an average mission difficulty of 3.4 skulls in my Kerensky run and finished XP just a few systems before C-Bills.

DAY 300: 275,654 (Regular). Completed ‘Mech chassis. 7,169 on C-Bills, 20,900 contracts, 20,000 weight class, 9,555 experience, 24,000 star systems, 23,600 positive faction, 7,100 negative faction, 40,000 Argo, 21,500 morale, 31,815 MRB.

The only completed category is ‘Mech chassis, as I’ve been hoarding one copy of each that I find. I just recently acquired a LosTech Marauder and Griffin, as well as a LRM assault, so my score still reflects the weaker drop capability I had for most of the first quarter where a Centurion, or later an AC/5 Marauder, was the core of my lance. I am pretty close to weight class completion (which doesn’t show in the score), as well as morale, although that’s not surprising as it has a direct bearing on my combat capability and so should get cranked up quickly. Note that a few categories are way off the pace, most notably C-Bills and experience.

DAY 600: 619,175 (Elite). Completed ‘Mech chassis, weight class, Argo, morale, MRB.
40,470 C-Bills, 69,250 contracts, 34,240 experience, 46,500 star systems, 39,000 positive faction, 24,700 negative faction.

A bunch of categories clear in the second quarter of the game now that my company is hitting its stride - I have added a Gauss-wielding MAD-3R to the team, and all my top ‘Mechs have good components, plus the company includes experienced pilots to make the most out of these machines. Contracts is basically done, and the faction scores are close, so it’s mostly down to C-Bills, experience and star systems.

DAY 900: 715,243 (Legendary). Completed contracts, ‘Mech chassis, weight class, positive and negative faction, Argo, morale, MRB. 70,972 C-Bills, 52,256 experience, 67,000 star systems.

The contracts and faction relations categories clear in the third quarter, although the faction relations scores will continue to fluctuate a little until I head to Arano space to finish up. I added a second LosTech Marauder during this period and outfitted it with a range of laser weaponry for maximum surgical potential. As discussed, C-Bills, experience (on Slow progression) and star systems are the three lagging categories. If this had been Normal progression, experience would be long done and I could hit Kerensky by never running another mission and just tagging all the systems needed.

DAY 1079: 770,015 (Kerensky). All score categories complete. I finished experience, then C-Bills, and finally star systems, although that’s due to a conscious decision on my part to leave star systems last because there’s no chance involved in maxing out that score, and if I had wanted to rush a Kerensky score I would have prioritized finishing star systems since its completion bonus was the only item holding me back.

DAY 1200: 770,015 (Kerensky). All score categories complete. After first reaching the maximum score, I punted around in Arano space to get an idea of just how much leeway I had on completion. Despite an event dropping my morale, I retained the maximum score at the end. I ended having visited 172 systems, orbited 70 planets, completed 416 contracts and a lifetime income of approximately 910 million C-Bills. I suspect 1 billion C-Bills is possible since I more or less stopped doing 'Mech surgery and cash cycling after day 1079.

A Kerensky career is absolutely possible in v1.9.1 base BATTLETECH - more than anything, it’s an achievement of planning and consistency. If you decide you want it and keep to the plan you too can score something like this:

Since completing this guide, I've picked up the DLC and can report that none of the core strategies listed above change with the DLC. Here’s a quick impact assessment of the most important changes if you’re running a ‘Mech surgery practice:

‘Mechs: of the new chassis, ECM Cataphracts, HQ Cyclopses and especially Bull Sharks are all very high value chassis for their tonnage and should be priority salvage targets if you’re looking to maximize C-Bills.

Equipment: the inclusion of the TAG (Target Acquisition Gear) means that securing pilot kills once you have reduced the OpFor to bunch of armless ‘Mechs is much more reliable - a head hit is still an injury, and a hit anywhere else probably won’t be lethal, even if you have to ping a ‘Mech a whole bunch to get that last head shot. Granted, this approach to ‘Mech surgery is rather time-consuming, but it’s a nice option to have if you absolutely need that Atlas salvaged or you’re running behind on C-Bills. None of the other new items should cause you to fundamentally alter the plan from the base game…although the fact that there are now more items in the random pools means that getting what you want out of the black market takes longer.

Mission types: the new missions Target Acquisition and Attack and Defend tend to be harder than the base game missions given a particular skull rating, since they both have starting OpFor of 2+ lances, incoming reinforcements and some serious complications in terms of objectives. Be careful with these in the early game! In general, Target Acquisitions aren't good candidates for 'Mech surgery due to the time limit; don’t linger to maximize salvage unless you’re absolutely sure you can get away with tanking hits from at least one whole lance while you tag objectives and cut up a few targets. Attack and Defend, on the other hand, is a gift to late-game lances; the OpFor is huge, meaning lots of chances for good salvage, and also all reinforcements are telegraphed, so you can ambush them on the way in. Once you can handle anything the game throws at you, you can turn the waves of enemy ‘Mechs into big money.

Flashpoints: at least in theory, Flashpoints can be helpful - they yield bonus contracts over the standard 7 per system, can be great sources of faction reputation and offer the possibility of lance-defining loot in the early game. The trick, though, is that taking all the Flashpoints you can will wreck your travel plans. As the star systems score is the least forgiving, this means you should mostly ignore Flashpoints unless they’re in a system along your preferred path anyway. Additionally, most of the Flashpoints are in systems below 4 skulls, so after the early game you'd have to weigh their benefits against the opportunity cost of going to a higher-difficulty system that might earn you more on its standard, higher-difficulty contracts than 7 easier contracts plus the Flashpoint. As a direct comparison, I ran a career taking every Flashpoint, and while I managed to complete more contracts (422) on fewer systems (64), I was also 16 systems short in terms of score and had a lower average contract difficulty of 3.2 skulls. Those are serious problems if you want a Kerensky career!

With all that said, Of Unknown Origin, Hunting Season and Hourglass are the only Flashpoints I’d plan a path around because a free Bull Shark MAZ is great and getting access to Bull Shark M3s is even better, as they are far and away the highest value chassis you can salvage. Prototype may also be worth it so you can salvage ECM Cataphracts later, and anything that's along your path and not in a low-difficulty system *cough Baying of Hounds cough* can be helpful.

Overall, the DLC slightly increases the tactical difficulty for a Kerensky run, as some of the new enemies and missions are more troublesome than average, but slightly decreases the strategic difficulty as average salvage value is higher and Flashpoints make reputation management easier.

This guide would not have been possible without the efforts of those who came before. Particular acknowledgements go to Uncle Fester for their guide covering the fundamentals of Career mode, and to MarkDey on the Paradox forum for posting a very detailed Kerensky run that filled in a lot of the blanks for me. Thanks also to HBS for a fun game!