What is the optimal approach to hacking?

Success at the hacking minigame in EVE is mostly a stat check - if you've brought enough virus strength and coherence for the particular difficulty level, you get the loot 90% of the time, a bit less and you lose it half the time, farther and you'll rarely open anything.

There is a bit of strategy, which seems be limited to near - absolute rules learned very early on: prime examples being "kill buffing nodes immediately", "open edge nodes first", "don't use data caches unless you're out of options". I've been exploring in sovnull for a while, and I think I'm seeing some patterns to how nodes spawn relative to each other or the terrain - for example the system core is almost always in an edge node. However, I'm doubtful that most of those patterns really exist, and I've struggled to develop any strategy beyond the obvious things I've discovered in my first attempts. Is there any harder-to-see algorithm to approach the minigame with, or is it simply something that's easy to master and without any hidden complexity to it?

Solution 1:

You should have high virus strength and coherence, you should fly a ship that has bonuses to these stats.

There is no surefire pattern to the nodes, they change depending on the difficulty of the site, and this only effects the density of the spawns.

The one constant is that if there is a bad node, and it is surrounded on all sides by nodes, the system core has to be one of those nodes.

The optimal strategy is to try and find this bad node by sticking to the center of all the nodes, only revealing the nodes that are surrounded on all sides by other nodes.

By following this rule you either find the bad node, and thus the system core, or you find a positive node or nothing at all. There is a fairly high probability that the center nodes don't have a bad node, in this case the system core could be anywhere, but usually spawns near a bad node.

I've had the best luck clearing all the center nodes I can, knowing that they have no bad nodes, then I explore, and destroy any bad nodes I come across, always destroy the buff nodes first, as the system core has a high probability of being behind a bad node.