At the start of the game you want to rush !Mission! researches, they unlock new purple missions, more enemies, more researches, more loot and more tech. They don't need interception ability, and because of them there are less enemy ships (which generate negative score in the air).
The fact that you don't know basics of playing with score graphs to find enemy ufo spawns (which tanked your total score and did lead to a loss) says that you aren't ready for high difficulties.
John Silver is the default mode the game is balanced around.
Right now there's a big update which made early game very hard, possibly too hard.
As for rating - brainers generate infamy upon research completion, infamy gives money upon the end of the month, brainers pretty much pay for themselves. It's worth it investing early into them. Just for the thousands of researches that awaits you. Runts are profitable on their own. It's worth it making bases just for the runts to continuously produce things for sale.
Potential noob trap - repeatedly interrogating enemies. Usually it takes multiple weeks to interrogate an enemy unit and it usually gives info about a weapon you already had in the stock and could research in three days. Money-wise it's a negative because said weapon is usually cheaper than selling the unit on the market instead of saving the weapon, plus you brainer makes less researches total = less infamy. There ARE some key topics which you will want to get by repeatedly interrogating enemies (knowledge of Human citizens leads to many unlocks, Shadowmasters tech leads to early codex ships which are great starting interceptors).
And you want to have a solid and diverse roster. Some missions limit your unit types which can enter them, and reward might be gorgeous. For example, gals can't enter isolated valley, which can be entered by peasants. It gives upon completion an item worth 500k which can generate 50k/month and almost 20 units for enslavement (20 storage space +20k/month). There's freshness limiter on amount of turns unit can participate in missions in a row, so have some swap teams. Hideout assaults is a thing, this patch we got Sky ninja hideout assaults, on the second difficulty in the first year you can expect 40 enemy units (normally it's like ten until second year), each as good as a gal(normally you can expect 1-2 terror units as good as a gal, the rest are weaker) with, most likely, much better equipment than you will have at the time of happening (normally the same or worse).
