For Bronze maps, I usually get at least one Officer to run down hive clusters quickly.

All I know is my play style needs to change. I play a lot of skirmish and play very slowly. I am liking the fast paced feel of the weekly challenge.

I need some good strategy for the week 8 gold.

My usual isn't working.

Well... one tips to start off is when you start the weekly challenge map, try to find a circular pattern to capture all of the hives with. Your main objective with this is to leave only one open vulnerable area which the enemy can hit, to minimize the time and resources needed for defending. If done right, all you need is a soldier, upgraded bunker, and maybe a turret mid-late challenge. You can leave them all next to the healing bunker and forget about it.

So far, most of the maps have some sort of clockwise/counterclockwise motion you can move your main squad in, and only leaves the start location vulnerable. If you can figure out a good attack route, you can leave one soldier behind to guard your starting location, and just roll your death squad through the enemies w/o needing to ever look back. This frees up your resources so you can get minigunners and an officer to neutralize triple hive clusters.

My attack squad usually has one or two minigunners, and officer, and 2 or more medical pods. Depending on the enemy, I may sub in or add a flamer to handle brutes. In mid and late challenge, you may want to use helicopter strikes to clear out a path in the minefields, to save you some time. It takes a lot longer for your squad to clear a path through mines than it does for you to do a helistrike. By late game, helistrikes won't be doing much damage to hives, anyway.

I always try to open with Grenades upgrade and a medpod.

Is time the only thing that has an effect on your score?

I am playing Bronze. I am sticking around 44,600 points no matter what tactics I use. I just tried to improve on my previous by attacking across the top while placing a turret on the three hive cluster at the bottom (thinking it would be quicker than the circular strategy if I weakened the last cluster before I got there). I actually did a few points less than my best even though I finished quicker. I do use pause often to set orders and build. I am wondering if the clock keeps ticking while I am on pause. Thanks much for anyone who might have insights.