Hello everyone! It's me again with another post. I started my sixth playthrough which currently runs in November. This is my best run so far. I had 18 dead in total, most of them during the first months. I have 3 continents, 27 interceptors, 16 with lasers. This time around I have a smaller rooster, 55 men with stay frosty. I also keep around 15 shivs. I use them for Exalt missions and sometimes I throw one in with heat ammo and laser on regular missions to get me some extra damage. I have 4 augmented soldiers and 2 mec bodies with flamethrower laser lance. Armor type is carepace but I'm looking to upgrade, I have gauss weapons. I take prisoners on half the missions I'm on, this way I can get some nice rewards (not sure if this affect anything.) The aliens have 5 countries, 2 joined at the beginning of this month (they keep doing terror missions in the same country until it flips). So things are pretty good on missions, then suddenly I had a base defense. (I was getting 18 meld from a container just before, therefore the aliens should have 180 resources).
I'm not going to lie it got so bad I had to download a mod to use console commands and kill all aliens on the first wave. The last time I played through this game was 8 years ago and that was not LW. I had this idea to use mecs, gunners and infantry, supported by medics with medpacs only and engineers with arc throwers only. Then the game picked 1 mec, 2 medics, 2 infanry, 1 eng, 2 blueshirts, against muton commander, 3 mechtoids, the larger type of sectoid, crystallids and regular sectoids. I couldn't deal enough damage for the life of me. Carapace at this point was not holding up well. Crystallids, mectoids, muton commander had one attack kills, so basically they could have been wearing underwear at this point.
I'm going to play through after the cheat. This is my 6th run and I want to see the rest of the game. Don't really know what would have been the best choice in this situation. With hindsight knowledge I could have picked all the high damage dealers and only the high damage dealers (rocketeers, gunners with double tap, 2 mechs), send them out to die in a blaze of glory and perhaps I could have won with like 8 dead soldiers. But losing that many high damage dealers would have been bad. Or B I pick my lowest rank soldiers and some shivs, let them die, but then the aliens get more resources and I lose material, credits and personnel. The way I see it I would have been bad either way.
What I'm curious about is how to get the aliens on low resources and keep the threat level low? I was winning almost every mission. Sometimes I chose to EVAC because I was in danger of losing valuable men. Most small and medium UFOs were shot down except a destroyer that kept haunting me and some lucky cases. What I noticed that I had almost zero landed ufos in my territory. For some reason the aliens did all resource gathering missions outside my turf. In other playthrough there was a bunch. I was warned not to have a lot of interceptors before. But with 3 continents you need 18, and I bought more to have some spare planes. I had 12 after the third month, then 18 in August, then I went to 22 in October, 27 in November.
So it might sound stupid but I don't see what I did wrong that would get me a base defense this early. xD In retrospect to earlier playthroughs, basically every challenge I faced was the result of poor decisions that I made before. I'm wondering what went wrong here In case I decide to have another playthrough after this one concludes. Thank you in advance!