Me and a couple friends take the game way too seriously; reading posts and watching videos about how game mechanics work. But we quite often end up playing with other friends who don't take the same approach and just enjoy killing everything and complete the main objectives as fast as possible. Note that they're the ones having more fun in this scenario.
Part of the reason for that is there's so much misinformation and myth that's been manufactured by the community about how the game works. To add to that, it's a live service game that keeps changing, and it's built on an engine that was discontinued by Autodesk is 2018.
I don't think anyone whole plays the game has all the mechanics figured out, and there are some mission types that definitely don't work like other "standard" 40 minute missions.
What is more efficient in terms of resources per minute, speed running main objectives or 100% completing every optional objective? Genuine question. I know in deep rock galactic you get more stuff just blasting through missions as fast as possible, the rewards for completing all secondaries isn't "worth" the amount of time it takes when that time could have been spent blasting through a second mission.
If you want to collect samples and SC at a sensible rate you need to look for them, otherwise short and speedrunny missions are the way to go if you want to get medals.
Yeah it all depends on what you're looking for. If you speed run everything, you'll end up with more medals, but less samples and super credits. I'm not sure how requisition slips and experience work out - my guess is probably fairly balanced since you get bonuses for side-objectives but also mission completion and mission time.
Couldn't say for sure on the requisition slips, but I think the bonus for time plus faster cycle rate works out better for XP doing speed runs. Probably for R slips as well, but especially at higher difficulty I don't know how the bonuses stack
Sometimes carefully combing the map and tactically taking apart all objectives in the most effective way possible is more fun.
But sometimes, you're just in the mood for a mad dash sniper bomber blitz running from objective to objective and taking them out without even getting close all the while spewing hot shrapnel at anything that moves, getting ragdolled across the landscape as you miscalculated that last eagle or the reach of that cannon tower.
The main thing is as you complete main objectives the spawn rate of patrols goes up. Finishing the main obj basically halves the time between random patrol spawns. Main obj should be left for last so you arent swamped during side stuff. Also around halfway down the fabricators or bug holes clearing side objs will also reduce the patrol spawn timer.
It logically doesn't make sense but it serves the purpose of making the mission feel like it gets harder over time and extract serves as the grand finale of chaos.
This kind of makes sense from a balancing perspective. Once you complete the main mission, you can't fail it anymore, even if you fail to extract. This stops the player from rushing the objective so they can clear the rest of the map stress-free. So you either risk failing the operation or have a much harder time exploring. Completing side objectives as you move along the main objectives seems like the ideal play with these mechanics, and I feel like that's the most intuitive way to play, anyways.
I think completing the last main objective increases the enemy spawn rates by close to 4x. So if you're looking to find samples or do side objectives, completing the main objective first cranks the difficulty up significantly