I never liked Eden. Every time the game has something interesting, it's Plymouth that gets the cool thing and Eden that gets the boring thing. The campaign is especially frustrating because, militarily, you have literally only lasers and railguns until mission 8.
I did take a peek at the Eden campaign, and it looks like there would be much more of an emphasis on glitches in the early missions. The land rush mission has even the agridome in a convec at the start, and mining in mission 3 sucks to the point where I'm pretty sure cloning and recycling CCs is the way to go.
Regarding the glitches, you could certainly do a "glitchless" speedrun; some players are into that sort of thing. It's really hard to estimate how much time gets saved by the glitches, though - it's huge in mission 2, but then in later missions, a slower clear means more population and research for future missions which speed those later missions up for some portion of the time you had lost. I suspect that Tokamak Bombs are still the best way to handle defense in missions 5 and 11 even without glitches, it just would take more resources to keep up. In the later missions, starship part duplication can be swapped with mining from an actual mine; in mission 8, I'm mainly doing the glitches just to avoid the risk of my convoy setting up the 3 bar rare mine in the mountain getting killed by a quake or a vortex along the way; I think the two strategies finish at about the same time overall.
I made a video for the starship part duplication a while ago, but didn't link it here yet. Here it is:
I happened to remember it from my childhood; people talked about it on WON back when that was a thing.
