So you want that sweet, sweet 40000 lives saved score with the added cherry on top that is every island perfect? Read on. There are no new mechanics involved in Unfair, just more Vek. The most critical step towards ensuring victory is simply making sure all the tools at your disposal can do 2 or 3 things at once. One mech stopping 1 vek isn't going to cut it. All you really need is the right start and one of the right items to show up by the end of the first island.

Pilot: Mafan
The most dangerous time for any run, though especially unfair, is the first island. Most mechs have glaring weaknesses until they get a few reactors in, to mitigate this we will be taking a max level Mafan with +1 reactor and conservative on the Smog Mech. The starting 2 reactor is critical as it allows the Smog Mech to unlock the "more smoke" upgrade instantly. Conservative isn't necessary, but if you get an ice-generator, a smoke-pellets, smoke-drop or any tank. The Mafan shield also neatly complements the generator.

Mechs: Smog, Exchange, Boulder/Rocket
The key thing about unfair difficulty is that you need extreme efficiency of action. Each of your mechs needs to be capable of countering 2 or even 3 enemy actions reliably. To this end, I have found that the best mechs in the game are Smog Mech and Exchange mech. These two form your core squad, with either Boulder Mech or Rocket Mech to round it out depending on personal preference.

Smog Mech:
Your bread and butter mech. The value of being able to drop 4 tiles of smoke in a cross pattern with a single action while also adding a DOT to the center tile cannot be understated. Even if the smoke disappeared every turn it would be amazing, but it sticks around permanently. This means that every turn you can almost always drop smoke in 2 melee-range tiles, often resulting in the melee vek spending the last 2 turns simply standing around with nothing to do. The nanofiltering means you are never going to accidentally ruin your own day with your smoke, allows you to repair from incidental fire damage without wasting precious actions, can be used to resurrect dead mechs by dropping smoke on them and also makes the mite objective a freebie.

Exchange Mech:
Almost as much raw efficiency as the Smog Mech. A single swap can reliably stop the attacks of 2 vek, if you are baiting vek to attack one of your other mechs this can also reliably kill a 3rd. Every turn. Add to that the ability to set up instant kills by standing one of your mechs in a hazard tile then swapping them out. You can also swap veks into and out of smoke, and they will not get their attacks back.

Boulder Mech:
Far less efficient than the above mechs, but has the most utility of the mechs with 2 base damage. Primarily this mech's job is to kill the leader on island 1, after that you can slap your Mafan and single-use item in it (unless it is a science one). Better than the alternatives due to the incredible utility of the rock to shove, block spawns or block projectiles if you don't need the raw damage. Rocks also make incredible swap targets for the exchange mech.

Rocket Mech:
This fills much the same purpose as the boulder mech but is more aggressive, swaping out the added safety of using boulders as shields to chip away at the veks stuck in smoke and hit with 4-damage missiles. The backfiring smoke also allows a 2-for-1 if you set it up properly. Does not synergise with ice-generator or frost-beam, making it slightly worse.

Unfair Difficulty Differences
Unfair difficulty increases the number of alphas, starts spawning leaders in standard missions on the later islands and generally increases the number of veks. You also gain double energy rewards, but for a perfect game this is irrelevant.

Choosing Islands and Missions
Generally you are going to be pushing/interrupting vek far more than killing them, so the "kill 7 enemies" missions are very difficult and should be avoided. A less obvious problem is that there is a cap on the number of vek that can be on the board at once, meaning that it is actually very difficult to do the "block 3 vek spawns" objective too. You should, as always, be prioritising missions that give reputation or cores instead of power. For the first island, it is best to pick either RST or Detritus, as you always have at least 2 choices of mission, whereas Pinnacle and Archive have bottleneck missions and you can be stuck with one of the unwinnable objectives. Of these 2, prioritise the one with a non-spider, non-blob, non-advanced-mode leader, the specific enemies generally won't matter.

Mech Actions
There is no foolproof guide to every situation, this is written under the assumption that you can reliably win hard games and have unlocked each achievement for each squad. The most important thing is to ensure every action is interrupting at least 2 enemy actions whenever possible. As always, if you can position your mechs to attract an attack from a vek that is an attack you can ignore for the turn. However, it is even more useful here as you can trick the vek into clumping to maximise the smog mech hits or bait a big hit which you can swap in another vek for.

Reputation Rewards and The Store
Energy is useless, so you should always take the pilot or equipment for a perfect island reward and likewise you should only sell items/pilots when you can get a core or a critical upgrade. These critical upgrades are anything that further increase your efficiency of action: tanks, single-use AOE items or, RNGesus willing, the wind torrent. If one of these doesn't show up by the end of island 1, or definitely by the end of island 2, you may have a doomed run. When you get your victory-condition item, slap tanks/torrent/smoke-drop on your Boulder/Rocket Mech so it has added utility when you aren't killing leaders with it or on your smoke-pellets/ice-generator on your exchange mech since it will be on the frontlines.

Reactor Cores and Pilots
As noted, the most important cores are for the "more smoke" upgrade on the Smog Mech. Leave Mafan on there until you find 2 spare cores to plug in, after which Mafan is far more useful on whichever Mech your limited-use items are on. Upgrade mech movement as soon as possible, but health is generally unnecessary. Of the other starting upgrades, the only one that is particularly useful is the bonus damage on the Smog Mech, but it isn't necessary until island 3 or 4. Pilots aren't particularly important otherwise, prioritise reactors and movement as normal etc. You will be scoring very few vek kills, so they generally won't level very quickly.

Island 1 Mission 1
Turn 1 Start:


Moves:
Smog Mech: Cracks tile to halve movement options of bouncer, blocks 2 sides of building with smoke, stops 2 attacks
Exchange Mech: blocks attack from alpha firefly and kills psion in the process, stands in position for a 50% chance for the bouncer to attack it instead of building
Boulder Mech: Blocks vek spawn, ensuring it will never spawn as the tile will collapse next turn

Turn 1 End:


Turn 2 Start:


Moves:
Smog Mech: blocks the attack of both fireflies and also places smoke preventing the fireflies from shooting across the water
Exchange Mech: swaps firefly and bouncer (before smog mech), so bouncer will trigger the sand into smoke and knock itself into pit. sadly won't actually block the emerge. by baiting the bouncer attack it is no longer threatening a building and will kill itself
Boulder Mech: blocks the building with a boulder so the emerging vek can't attack it next turn. firing at the same tile if the bouncer had chosen to attack there would have blocked it with smoke instead of a rock

Turn 2 End:


Turn 3 Start:


Moves:
Smog Mech: blocks the alpha firefly from attacking
Exchange Mech: positions the boulder mech so that it can kill the firefly, stops the bouncer from hitting the building, sets the bouncer up to kill itself, sets the bouncer up to kill the alpha firefly
Boulder Mech: moves into the smoke cloud to clear it up with nanofilters, (after swap) drops a rock into the water tile forcing the firefly to fall into the pit

Turn 3 End: