I decided to challenge myself to beat On the Run without any vehicle refitting: all starting vehicles must be destroyed, and their replacements built. I played on Normal instead of Hard because there simply aren't enough workers on Hard to staff everything you need to staff. One still needs to research and build a garage, even though it won't be used, because "Construct a garage" is an explicit mission objective.
Right away it was apparent that on Normal you start with more people or population growth is higher, because I had no trouble finding the workforce to staff two smelters from very near the beginning, and I had a vehicle factory running non stop from as soon as I could build it, eventually supplemented by a second one. Everything was going very well, and was on pace for victory until the Eden scouting wave showed up.
I had been planning on destroying my starting vehicles after I had completed the other objectives so I could get full use out of them, but didn't realize that when the scouting wave showed up all of my vehicles would go hay-wire and start wandering all over the map. It was chaos as I had to hunt every where to find my starting vehicles and destroy those (and not the ones I had built), simultaneously as Eden attacked. In the end I lost a few combat units, two spiders, and one cargo truck with metals in it, along with a lot of mining time as I had to build new mining cargo trucks.
With mining re-established, I had to frantically sort through my surviving vehicles, figure out which ones belonged in northwest vs southwest, and determine what vehicles I had left to build. I would have liked to have built decoy units but I simply didn't have the resources to do so. The last thing I built was a scout, and I only managed to get the metals for it just as the main Eden attack force was entering range of my vehicle factories:
Thankfully it finished just barely in time to escape the emp / thor's hammer. I was still checking to see which objectives remained when I realized that I needed to fill one more cargo truck with food. I managed to load it up and get it out just as the tigers arrived:
I watched the base get destroyed while waiting for "Mission Accomplished" to show up, but it didn't. Had I missed another objective? I checked the list:
"Construct a garage" strikes again! The garage had been destroyed before the cargo truck of food had made it to the northwest. If only I had built that garage, which I had never planned on using, in the corner where it would have been safe. Oh well, it is close enough to a victory for me.
(Incidentally at one point one of my vehicles had wandered over the garage and a message had printed that it had been refit, contrary to my experience on my previous attempt where I was unable to refit any vehicles.)
