Month 1: Ops 1-18 sprint. Months 2-3: faction reputation to Respected, first G3 fleet maxed. Month 4: camp Ops 26, dual-faction grind. Months 5-6: G4 transition and your first Epic ship.

Scattered resource spending, skipping refinery pulls, and building ships “because they look cool”. Every Parsteel spent outside an event window compounds into weeks of lost progress by Ops 30.