More tips to help y'all get started, in no particular order at all.
1. When raiding the Cult of Sirius, take special care not to over-use explosives (AP nade). Stun and smokes are okay. This is because those explosions will destroy the equipment on the ground, which is the whole reason you are raiding in the first place! Their heavy rocket launchers will cause you much pain early on, both due to their effects on your units and their destructive effects on the "loot".
2. I'm not sure about easier difficulty levels, but on medium: trust me, you'll need to do a fair bit of cult raiding to boost your funds. Early on, the prized item is this drug that initially sells for 4500, which you will find as many as 8 or as few as 0 in a single run. After selling all the weapons as well, I'd get about 5000 to 25000 per run.
3. Try to avoid standing on dead cultist bodies when in a firefight (or for that matter, when you are fighting aliens as well). Cultists in particular, tend to be heavy launcher/HE autocannon/AP grenade happy and any explosion in your vicinity will ignite all the munitions on the ground, with disasterous effects on your units.
4. What did I use my money on? Probably aircraft, bribing organizations back to neutral level after collateral damage during UFO runs, base purchases and upgrades, then lastly everything else. The first is a good investment because you can always sell your aircraft for the same price if you need quick cash for some reason (it's just like money in the bank). The second is a terrible waste and avoid it if possible (don't bother attacking fast moving UFOs with too many missles.
5. You can manufacture items for cash, but don't expect it to be as profitable as it was in UFO1/2. Most of your cash will come from recovering motherships. After I finished researching personal cloaking devices, I sold all the ones I had in my base inventory for a sweet 1/2 million. Don't sell the personal shields, they are essential and time consuming to make yourself (they look like handheld mirrors).
6. On the topic of aircraft (we all know ground vehicles are trash), I decided not to use bikes because they are simply too fragile for me. I started with valks with a couple hovercars, then upgraded to all valks, and so on.
7. Unlike UFO1/2, you can let a few (theoreticall, all) UFOs do whatever the hell they want and not lose any support if you keep tract of where aliens were inserted and raid those buildilngs. Make use of the UFO influence graph and check it often. You don't want the level of influence to exceed that middle line in the graph.
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