I need help... underground nuke

I'm so fed up I'm close to giving up on this game.  I know I must be missing something about it, I'm playing it just wrong...

I'm in my first campaign and I'm just getting hammered, the ai just blast each of my good tiles in turn with an under ground nuke.  Goon squads can't protect me, nothing can.

I'm also failing to keep up, I just can't figure out what will remain in demand and when I try to adapt all my claims are in useless places.

So I tried to build glass, as it's worth a fortune, but the ai kills all my water prod, so there's no o2 for the glass.... I just can't work out when I need to build steel mills and when not to, if steel is cheap and I don't build them, it gets expensive, if I do build them it stays cheap...

I think in the end I'm focusing too much on trying to build the more expensive complex goods rather than mining what's good to sell... 

But after watching my latest good water get blasted for the third time, I just quit. 

So tell me what I'm doing wrong cos I have something conceptionally very wrong...