ADVENT region strength feels too sticky

[rloutlaw]

tl;dr: How to get worldwide ADVENT strength depleted (don't care from which territory) so that they have to pull out of high strength regions to cover vigilance around the world?

As time progresses, total ADVENT legion numbers on the map will continually increase due to UFO-driven reinforcement and start to get into a position where there's well over 40 total strength points distributed across a shrinking number of territories. This will mean you'll have some regions at 6 or higher and others in more manageable ranges (2-4).

This kind of distribution is expected, but what I found is that the strength in the regions is very sticky. Once they get up to a high value they stay that way, even as you spike vigilance sky high on the other side of the world. Reinforcements come, but they come from the UFO strength and from other low-strength regions (that you haven't contacted) and not from the regions where your rebels have been hiding for months under 6+ ADVENT strength. What actually happens in those regions is that ADVENT strength goes UP so they can attempt an invasion on your neighboring terrorities.

Running intel operations in regions with high advent strength is really bad-you'll get an unwinnable data tap protect mission (anything above light-moderate, you will never get there in time through that many aliens to save the data tap, it has too low HP and is too poorly defended) or you wind up with haven retaliation missions that drain your headcount. So you can't really detect transport and troop column assaults to lower strength in high strength regions. Also supply raid missions have extreme detection RNG to them even with 10+ haven on intel and a scientist.

So my question is this-how to get worldwide ADVENT strength depleting so that they have to spread themselves thin to cover vigilance around the world? Right now the reason I feel "get ADVENT's attention" feels really weak is that they simply have too many legions and you're just moving water pouring into one overflowing bucket to a bucket that's not full. So it's actually anti-productive. If they had, say, 32 or 33 legions spread out on 9 nonliberated territories, that would be a different thing entirely.

As a note-it would be real nice if the base chance to detect UFO insertion increased with the number of radio towers you own or get a lead to a UFO mission sometimes when you decrypt a data cache. This would make it easier to get resources late game and bleed ADVENT if the player doesn't want to just railroad the golden path, but not have it happen so soon in the campaign that you choke their ability to fight back when they are spread out. You also never get to run UFO missions, and they are really cool (though the timer on them is too long IMO).

Just an aside, if anyone could check the below and make sure I am right about this:

Right now there appears to be a handful of ways to eliminate a point of advent strength on the map:

- Successful supply raid (1, removes a legion point moving from place to place)
- Successful troop column ambush (1, removes a legion point in place)
- Repelling a ADVENT invasion (2, removes points from the region mounting the attack)
- Interdicting a UFO troop deployment (2, prevents the addition of new legions to the existing strength in the affected region. I believe these drops happen every 14 days).

Not sure if there are other means, and if those numbers are right. It's what I've experienced so far.

[Arcalane]

AFAIK there's three types of offworld reinforcement, even - scheduled, emergency, and extreme priority. Scheduled increments the global Force Level, the second increments one region and an adjacent region by 1 ADVENT Strength, and the third increments one region by 2 and adjacent two regions by 1.

If you're willing to try mods, RealityMachina made a custom Guerilla Job that specifically attempts to spawn Troop Movements in any region so long as the local strength is above 3.

As for other force movements, I think the problem is that there's likely some limits to how quickly they move forces. Even if they can move a point of force strength every two weeks, it could take a good four or five months to relocate forces from one end of eurasia to the other.

[RXTXK]

Do liberations remove advent strength or just relocate it?
If I liberate a strength 5 region does global strength go down by 5?

(I know I can test this but my campaign in in a bit of a death spiral and I'm not liberating anything soon).

[rloutlaw]

I am pretty sure legions that were in liberated territories are dispersed in the surrounding regions, which actually helps ADVENT if you are operating in adjacent regions. Due to the way radio towers and contacts work, this is always the case. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong since it's not transparent about what happens to ADVENT strength in this (common) event sequence.

IMO it should be a 50/50 chance for each legion to evaporate (surrounded by rebels while disorganized due to no C3I, defeated in detail) or reconstituted in a random unoccupied region (significant loss of material and forces, but was reinforced with existing partial strength assets somewhere else).

there's an obvious elephant in the room here of "man just head to waterworld and win the game" and I know that's a thing, and it's a perfectly balanced response to this kind of thing (you really don't need more than a one or two liberated regions to win the game). Just throwing that out there.

[johnnylump]

On a won liberation, 5 legions are destroyed and the others are moved.

[trihero]

To answer the central question

So my question is this-how to get worldwide ADVENT strength depleting so that they have to spread themselves thin to cover vigilance around the world?

You can't really, and I think it's by design that you can't win the game by minimizing advent strength. You win the game by doing the avatar objectives, not by trying to bleed advent thin. It makes it so the game doesn't get too easy once you've liberated a lot of regions. You can only put a bandaid on advent strength every now and then, but it's going to go up over time and it's going to concentrate very high in a couple of areas no matter how you play it, and I honestly think that's good for the game otherwise it would be too easy to have advent strength level 1 in all zones.

As a side note: if you liberate 16/16regions, advent gets mad and simultaneously launches Invasions on all of your havens, it's pretty hilarious

It's a reminder the game isn't about countering advent strength primarily, but managing it while your goal is to kill those avatars...

[RXTXK]

So liberating a less than strength 5 region can lead to under kill, i.e. str 4 - presumably only 4 die, which is less than the theoretical ideal.
Something to throw into the decision making mix next campaign.
Thanks for the answer.

[rloutlaw]

On a won liberation, 5 legions are destroyed and the others are moved.

Thanks for clarifying-I didn't have the mod installed on my Mac so I couldn't look it up myself. That's a good balance and I like it.

You can't really, and I think it's by design that you can't win the game by minimizing advent strength.

I definitely think there has to be some kind of floor of total global strength or the aliens can't do anything, and it provides a soft cap on the player liberating half the world (which is excessive and drags out the game a lot).

However when I'm running 14 or more gops a cycle half way across the world, opening up network tower/assault HQ to try to draw advent strength away from havens under heavy occupation so that they can do work again, and those havens STILL sit on 6-8 strength for months, it's just too sticky. They can reinforce with new legions without having to draw down their presence from ones where I'm not running gops at, and everyone's been in hiding for months.

Note that there's another goal here, to prevent invasions from triggering so as to protect my income. Invasions are very undesirable missions up there with LW1 base defense, anything the player can do to control them from triggering is worthwhile. Again, I'd run Intel in those regions to prevent invasions but you just get nailed by an impossible data tap protection mission if you try that in a 6+ region.

Those legions should drain into the place where the conflict is raging to push back on my expansion, not have 1/3rd of the overall global ADVENT force presence just milling around in places where there's nothing going on.

[cmdrspyker92]

To add onto this, it seems like advent doesn't respond aggressively enough to "get advents attention" missions.

In my current test campaign I have both africa and europe unlocked, and parts of asia. Africa has been locked down under 6+ advent stacks while I've lit europe on fire with near endless missions, grabbing every get advents attention mission I can so I can get egypt under 5 or lower for the network tower mission (its currently an 8 ) it seems to be pulling more units from "off the map" and no contacted regions then appropriating its response from the africa nations. While it will occasionally jostle them around in response to me daring an intel tap or retaliation mission, it has never moved them north into europe where the AI is leaving territories with 2-3 strength. Been like this for about 2-3 months.