It seems this mod in the current state is almost impossible to accomplish. I were beaten again and there are no levels down in difficulty...
Problems:
- Aliens receive tons of points while player receives minimum. So either accomplish EVERYTHING in a month or you start to lose to much point around april-may and onward. Not even Alien base raids can help.
- Money problems. There were a month when I got no money (have six base for radar coverage, three interceptors to air assaults, 10 soldiers per base for protection albeit no retaliation ever occured). Interceptors run out of Avalanche quickly and if no money to resupply then no shot-down then minus point then bad score then defeat then restart then... And even more interceptors may need as to much repair time occurs since weapon ranges way under the UFO's and these bastards shot really hard. And since repair occurs before rearm there is no meaning to send out damaged interceptors only wait while all the UFOs fly away and generates some really nice amount of negative score...
- Research is sometimes took just to long. I mean an autopsy needs only 1-3 days at best since those corpses and their internals decay. Strange when 10 scientists work on laser rifle, 10 on snakeman autopsy and 10 on floater leader (as it were in my case) and all research started in the same time AND finishes in the same time (well, 4-8 hours in difference).
- Terrains. Some of them, as I noted in an earlier post, is just to dense and sometimes there is no way to get through except to burn and explode everything. Floaters laugh on me as they flought above obstackles and shooted my soldiers stucked in the bocages. I know that terrains are not made (at least not all) by you but such things make the game unintentionally harder.
Otherwise it do challenging just there is no "winner" strategy I found so far. Maybe I need to try debug mode? That kills the fun but give some chance to generate above -3000 per month. On the other hand this mod is REAL so it contains only what happen in a real life alien invasion: No matter how hard we try we utterly lost... All hail our new alien overlords!
Why do you even bother shooting them down? Wait until they are landed and raid them. I strongly advise building 3 Large Radars at each base, radar detection chance improves greatly. Also you have the graphs and once you have a infiltration mission some were, you need to counter it. Raid those landed infiltration UFO's its essential.
You only need to have a positive score. Alien bases do also generate some other missions and also give the aliens more points, building a base near a alien base will grant you loads of loot. Raid more, receive more money, research faster or get slowly pummeled into submission at least when your weapons do no more damage to new enemies occurying.
I recommend "Force Craft Launch" for a reason. The Airgame improves once you get Retaliators, they can even shoot down Terrorships once you put 4 of them on one, i tend to use Laser Cannon + Avalanche on them, works great.
The more you fight on the ground, the more money you get. The more success you have, the easier it becomes.
The following goals should be fulfilled until end of may:
- Alien Containment unit build
- Lasers / Personal Armor researched
Optional: Laser Canon Production for money
Fight fight fight!
There is a winning strategy, find it. Actually there are more then one
The terrains will be fixed in the future, i myself do not like some of them, thats already of a long list of mine.