More stupid newbie questions: Mass Effect 3

I do not have Kasumi's DLC. I do have Zaeed's DLC.

Miranda, Tali, and Zaeed ended the game disloyal. Everyone else was loyal.

Shepard had about 3.5 bars full on the paragon side, and I think about 1.5 or 2 on the renegade side. I hope to play ME3 with making morality choices for roleplay reasons, rather than metagame reasons.

...done the Mars mission, talked to two journalists and got them on my side (with one on the ship), visited Kaidan in the hospital, and got Dr. Chakwas back. I am about ready to go look for the Turian primarch, which I understand is where I will see Garrus again. (I mean, I had to look up where the LI would return )

I have Citadel DLC, Leviathan, the Earth cities freebie (and a few other freebies), and Extended Cut.

That was an intense beginning! I definitely felt Shepard's frustration with having to leave Earth behind in the middle of an attack. I had such hope that the little boy was going to make it out alive, but no, of course he has to get blasted out of the sky! And then, Shepard must be tortured by dreams of him!



RUB IT IN, BIOWARE.



Go ahead and spoil just this: is it possible to save the boy somehow? Perhaps by choosing the renegade option to get him out of the duct in the earlier scene?



I was impressed by how easy it was to import my ME2 Shepard and just tweak her appearance to make her look nearly identical to her old self. Why couldn't BW make it a bit easier to recreate Hawke in DAI, if they clearly have the capability to import character models between games? 

(Mini rant: playing Mass Effect so far has me feeling like BW got a little bit lazy with Dragon Age, especially DAI...or maybe just tried to make DA bigger than they could really handle. I said this in the previous thread, but ME2 feels much better written than DAI, and feels more full of meaningful things to do even though it is probably only half or a third as large as DAI. I really hope they didn't take the DAI approach with Andromeda, and that they will scale back the world size of as-yet-hypothetical DA4 to something they can actually handle.)


ME2 Shepard:



ME3 Shepard:



I was also pleased to see that I got to keep all of Shepard's skills, which makes setting mooks on fire much more fun.

I kind of miss the old Normandy SR2. It looks the same, and yet so different and empty without the old gang hanging around. Time to fill it up with new people, I suppose.

I saw the message about probing having a chance of bringing Reapers over to investigate. Is this a high chance? Will I even need to do much probing? I came into ME3 with a little over 65,000 element zero, over 200,000 platinum, and over 300,000 of iridium and palladium. I saw that they got seized for the war effort, though, and I got some points for them. Will I need them for upgrades again?

When would be the best time to do Citadel DLC? I actually did google this, and the responses are all over the place. Some people say you can do it in pieces throughout the entire game, leaving the party for right before the final mission. Will it be obvious which bits I can do when without missing content due to not having the right squad members recruited? (Please no major spoilers. I'd like to be somewhat surprised by the content here.)

Are there any mission countdowns I need to be aware of in this game, such as the ones for Horizon and the Collector Ship?