I made a "sprint to the moon" GSA game, landed in 2.1968. I had some events that tied me down (in one of the last turns i got the "no launches this turn" event) and there was a mercury bug that inhibited my game a bit (reported to the devs).
My soviet playthrough ended with a L3 landing in late 1972. A Vostok bug similarly impeded me early on. I also spent time and effort diverting to a L1 flyby, which turned out was mostly useless for my moon landing. I had a catastrophic failure of a Voskhod, losing 2 crew. I had a proton failure that interfered and later had one more non-critical L3 failure. This kept my timetable behind schedule, I barely managed a landing before 1973.
My overall impressions:
1) Soviet soyuz technology spacecraft are slow to research and they do not share goals (L1 with L3-LOK for example), which is something I suggested to be changed. Currently in-game the problem for the soviets is always spacecraft, not rockets as it was in RL.
2) NASA spacecraft make more sense, although I need to thoroughly test all the gemini variants to see how they relate to one another.
3) UR-700 imho is a bit too easy to research and is too cheap. This was the foundation of my early 1968 GSA landing.
4) N1 is too reliable, especially in comparison to the Proton. Proton flew many times in RL without issues, N1 never got off the ground, but the ingame stats do not reflect this. Proton has a max R&D reliability of 85% (total max 95), N1 currently has 89% R&D reliability (total max 97%). Feels like it should be the other way around.
So it seems like the soviet heavy rockets need to be nerfed a bit, while soviet spacecraft made better (sharing goals between various soyuz-based systems).
5) The soviet Venus program goals interact in a way that seems odd. Currently I need to make a Venera 15 (RL flight 1980s) in order not to have a reliability hit on a Venera 7 (RL flight 1970).
