Meh, I don't use plate mail.. wasn't there when I went through that phase of the game. Revenant/Brute + handle and power armor + zappers get the job done remarkably well, especially if you complement it with a steady supply of gas grenade. Sure, you're not doing it in the early game, but you'll have plenty of time to do it while waiting for the last few VIPs to finish a game.
Also, 1 gound op base, 1 intercept base, 1 storage base (which cannot be the same as your factory base, and hardly the same as your 3d printer base), 2 manufacturing base (1x factory for large scale production and crazy craft building + base defenses for all the high tech stuff) and 1 research base hardly not enough. If you want multiple teams active at the same time (which you should to favor combat training and have more space for gyms, unless you're playing at a low difficulty level and not suffering wounds/casualties), you can have 2 more. That's what? 3 active teams, maybe 6. Yeah, sounds like a lot, but 3 hasn't been more than I need, so I'm building towards 5 (not 6, because my main base just can't accommodate a 2nd team).
Are all these bases fully built? No, of course. Are tiles really scarce for my active raiding bases? Yup. No tile left free in my main base (main defense strategyis to swarm the 3 hangars from all sides, instead of the usual bottleneck, because I couldn't spare the tiles to create the bottleneck) and my two secondary bases are pretty busy. Especially now that you probably want a surgery room in each to speed up recovery.
Consistency (everything else upgrades), convenience (it's annoying to run out of prisons, and not even a great gameplay element. Luckily Meridian is addressing it) both ask for prison upgrades, and innovation (the cryo-freezing research line idea) could well support it. At least the annoyance will go away.
