The latter puts you under more pressure, the former is more sedate and relaxed, so you can choose the style to suit you. The good news is that M.A.X. units can use reaction fire, so you don't have to comamnd them to open up on approaching enemies, you can build defences which will automatically attack targets in range. Resources and Production Cue the second relatively novel feature. M.A.X. requires you to mine gold, materials and fuel to build your colony up. Rather than have a central pool of resources, in M.A.X. resources can only be shared between connected buildings.
Offshore deposits are often rich, but risky to harvest with water platforms.
However, unless that site is connected, it will need to be manually reloaded by an ammo truck. Locating material, fuel and gold resources is critical to quick expansion. Allocating production between materials, fuel and gold. Each mine can only harvest 16 points of combined resources per turn, so you may have to tune between materials, gold and fuel as it's needed. Luckily the game will automatically do this for you, eg. if you build a training hall the game will turn on a power generator if needed, and adjust fuel mining if required.