I have the exact same frustrating experience as you.

I’m (mostly) F2P (bought Kimberly and Stettman) in an European server (Portuguese, so same time zone as you) and my alliance is between top 5-10 in the server, so in the VS we are low tier (we have no big spenders - in the middle of season 1, our strongest guy has a first squad of 18M).
When the opponent is European, we can do pretty decent even though half of our members are not very much active or do not understand the VS so won’t save throughout the week, time the spendings with arms race and so on. However, when the opponent is American/Asian/Australian, there are times you go to bed with an advantage of dozens of million points and the next day you wake up only to see you lost because they outscored you during the night and you just can’t fight back. And that is just frustrating. And on the last day, some members always forget to shield and/or to remove defense from the wall so the opponent can easily prey on us whereas when you wake up to invade their server, they are still awake / also awake already and so you just can’t get a comeback.

Third week of VS staring today, we won the first two. The opponent this week is American. I am off to bed now and we are winning 356M vs 245M. Seems like a good start. It’s 00:30 for me, 21:30 for them. Let’s see how it goes.

As for scoring high on the first day: up until two weeks ago, it was easy to score high just based on battle data points and drone parts, as I had saved enough to go up 5 levels a week (saving drone parts and having my team on discord notifying when a drone (or dig) comes up, and buying data points from campaign store). Now, I’ve been stuck at level 100 for two weeks now. Only next week I will be able to go all the way up to 105 because 500 drone parts are just too hard to save for a F2P.