Wow, this thing is addicting.
Been playing LW on noob difficulty with cinematic mode and savescum turned on because I suck like that. Cost me most of my sleep for the weekend.
Maybe it is the slow progression, but I can't help feeling like I am losing the strategic game despite my savescumming and money cheating.
I made the early mistake of tasking my first two satellites to the highest funding countries rather than places that were requesting them. I think this has had two major effects:
First, it stopped me from getting 2x2=4 engineers as rewards, which means it is almost an extra month before I have enough engineers to build my next uplink facility.
Second, it means I am not actually observing the countries with the highest UFO activity. This means I'm not catching as many UFO's flying by, and not spotting any medium or large ones on the ground. I think this is true anyway, I might just be imagining it.
Another minor mistake is that having cheated some money's, I hesitate less to throw interceptors at small UFOs. This means I didn't salvage as many in-tact UFOs as maybe I could have, because I've been shooting them down. This in turn means fewer eleriums and computer parts and power cores and such.
Should I start over? I understand the strategic game cascades away from you as you start to fall behind, and I'm wondering if it is already too late. I think I'm at the start of May or something like this, and just got my first lab up. Also just had my first terror mission, and saved something like 6 of 18 civilians. Is that good? They said it was poor, but from other LW players it sounds like this is pretty good.
Maybe I can catch up on earlier mistakes by rushing to Plasma and skipping Laser and Gauss? I just got my first Lab online. Is early May too late to be doing that?