Early score drops:
Mission spawns are basically weighted RNG and can definitely be a problem for the player early on. Enemy missions that occur outside of your coverage will generate points that you can see in the Charts (ie. your base is in Europe, but you see lots of points for North America). Enemy flight time and landing time roll up the points for them. Consider that Excavators can stay on the ground for 20 hours, and you can get big point penalties for these missions. Govt Enforcers will do landings too, and cause point hits. If you can't take out these landings due to minimal crews (wounded) or not enough firepower, just doing a touch and go can help. Land, start the battle, look around, snipe if you can, then bug out. At a minimum this will cause the UFO to take off when your ship does, and it stops the Landing Timer from racking up points. These ships will often repeat a landing if interrupted so rinse and repeat until they depart.
Base Placement.
The short range of the airbus has made it even more critical to get as much land coverage as possible now. It will probably be months before you get true global response capability. I recommend the area near Turkey. Covers Europe, Asia, Africa. A good chunk of North and South America. Only parts of South America and Australia have been unreachable for me. I'd say this has become an optimal location now.
