At time of writing, there is a small Amiga speedrunning community, although I am not aware of anyone speedrunning K240 in particular. Here are some suggestions and strategies.
Platform standardization
Naturally, K240 v2.000 should be used, since v1.886 suffers from the fleet bug, which can either end a run or waste time mitigating the bug by decommissioning fleets. It is also likely that the Amiga community would accept emulation, rather than requiring the game be played on original hardware. An emulated Amiga 1200 with a hard disk install would be entirely within the original intent of the gameplay experience. However, there is a question of whether an expanded emulated Amiga is legitimate, since it could in theory run the game faster than any real Amiga, or if WHDLoad is allowed.
Manual protection
The decision on whether or not to allow cracked manual-protected copies would also need to be standardized. A pirate copy is not playing the game as the developers intended, although it was common at the time.
It’s possible to memorize the manual protection codes. Although the English manual is 28,447 words, only 100 words are stored in the game for each language. Additionally, you need only memorize the page and line, since the English version never uses two words from the same line. German has two on the same line on page 164 and French has two on page 210.
Any%, 100%, and glitchless categories
Completing K240 only requires you to defeat the Swixarans. The hidden Swixaran home asteroid is always located in the space between the two asteroids with cloak generators, so I believe the optimal strategy is to Asteroid Engine it. You still need to defeat all the other Swixaran asteroids to win, however.
As speedrunners tend to prefer whichever metric results in the lowest time, I imagine the Any% run begins when you click to continue on the Last Minute Intel screen, and ends when the win screen graphic apears. By this metric, the de facto initial record holder is Thiima’s 2009 run at 1h 57m 2s.
A 100% run would require defeating aliens 1-5 in any order, followed by the Swixarans. It would require more player skill to avoid bad luck ending a run.
I’m not aware of any exploitable glitches yet. The cheat codes would naturally be forbidden, meaning that you cannot use PANEL cheat to set up the UI conveniently at the start of the game.
Optimizations
Asteroid Engines are probably the most cost-effective weapon. A new colony plus an Asteroid Engine costs 75,000 credits.
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