Gavinmad
Mr. Poopybutthole
So apparently if you don't select Operation Slingshot as the very first council mission, you're fucked out of it for the entire game. Can't even imagine what kind of fucking retards they have doing their DLC design. Also, their 'teleport fix' that they rolled out with Second Wave actually made the bug happen more frequently instead of fixing it, and caused a host of other issues with aliens. Unbelievably disappointing how retarded the dev team at Firaxis is.
I did get a zero countries lost run going on my third attempt. You have to have to go balls out on adjacent sat uplinks and have enough engineers to build a new uplink at the beginning of every month. Satellite Nexus is basically worthless because it takes 42 days compared to the 28 days for an Uplink, and even more engineers to be able to build. If space management in your base was actually an issue, I could see building a nexus or two to replace uplinks, but you have more space than you could possibly need.
Also, to answer my own question in case anyone was wondering, no you don't have to shoot down the battleship in Slingshot.
I did get a zero countries lost run going on my third attempt. You have to have to go balls out on adjacent sat uplinks and have enough engineers to build a new uplink at the beginning of every month. Satellite Nexus is basically worthless because it takes 42 days compared to the 28 days for an Uplink, and even more engineers to be able to build. If space management in your base was actually an issue, I could see building a nexus or two to replace uplinks, but you have more space than you could possibly need.
Also, to answer my own question in case anyone was wondering, no you don't have to shoot down the battleship in Slingshot.