Timing for initial spawn of Super UFO and Lib 1 missions

[galith]

First off I want to give a big thank you to Pavonis for creating a truly engaging strategic layer. LW1 was great, but it always felt like a conveyer belt of missions to me. I love how the infiltration mechanic such that you can start working on a mission but still recall those troops (or spend intel to rush the mission they are on) if you find something more important for them to be doing.

I play Long War 2 with a spreadsheet open that I use to track daily strength values, missions found (with timers) and soldiers assigned to those missions. Every now and then I miss a day or two as a I scan ahead so I can't say exactly when something happened, and I'm sure I've made various record keeping errors, but I'm pretty meticulous.

In my 1.2 commander campaign I was also checking vigilance values after every mission using the dump region info console command. In my 1.4 legend campaign I am using the LW2 mod which displays vigilance and force levels by region.

Two things I've found that didn't match my expectations in both campaigns. These may be bugs, but they are probably just me not properly understanding how the strategy layer works.

(1) The biggest one is when Advent should start getting super heavy UFOs. In both my 1.2 Campaign and my 1.4 Campaign Advent global strength started jumping up by 4 every ~20 days in July, in both cases before I liberated any regions. I assume this is from super heavy UFO reinforcements, which I thought required threat level to be "Severe," (which I understand from the wiki means Global Vigilance - Global Strength = 20 to 30). However, in both cases the "threat level" was listed as "Elevated" (which I understands means GV - GS = 0 to 10) when this happened. In my 1.2 Campaign there was a brief blip where it went up to "High" (which I assume means GV - GS = 10 or 11, not clear at which of these is the cutoff) around the time the first Super UFO came in. That may have also happened in my 1.4 Campaign and I missed it. This was a bit shocking to me, since I had been timing my liberation so as not to trigger the Super UFO for as long as possible, but I was doing really well in my commander campaign so it didn't bug me, and in my Legend campaign it has kept things interesting. Is it possible that the display of Advent Activity on the Resistance Management Tab doesn't match the values on the ufopedia page (http://ufopaedia.org/index.php/Advent%27s_Agenda_(LW2))? Or that SuperUFO reinforcements start appearing in July regardless of whether the vigilance prereqs are met?

(2) My understanding is that liberation missions start 9-10 day timers as soon as you contact a mission. In both my 1.2 and 1.4 campaigns I detected "looks like Lib 1" missions with timers that expired 6 or 7 days after the mission was contacted. In my 1.2 Campaign I freaked out, thought I must have found a UFO and 0%-ed the mission (it had a less than 2 day timer) with a 10 man squad. After suffering some nasty wounds I found out that it *was* actually Lib 1. In my 1.4 Campaign I let the mission go and nothing happened (no strength or force increase), so it was probably also Lib 1 on a too-short timer. Is it possible for Lib 1 missions to spawn while the region is still uncontacted? Or that the variance allows for less than 9 days? If it matters, in both cases I started contacting the region, went and did something else for several days, and came back when I was reasonably sure I could dedicate 4+ days of Avenger scanning to the new region.

In my 1.4 Campaign I've also noticed what I thought was Protect Data missions spawning back to back in the same region with timers that should have been impossible due to the cool down, but I'm chocking those up to record keeping error. In one instance it was *almost* possible for the min-14 day cooldown to have been met (so I assumed it was record keeping error) and in the other I didn't actually do the mission so I didn't pay much attention to it, and it may have actually been a HVP mission which I mistakenly noted down as PD.

Has anyone else noticed the above happening in their campaigns?

[Antifringe]

1) Can't really comment on this, because I've never really tried to prevent the super UFOs. The cost of restricting your mission count is much, much worse than ADVENT getting extra legions.

2) Liberation missions spawn in every region, everywhere, all the time, even if you haven't made contact yet. This is why you will sometimes contact a region and then find a Lib1 with a silly low timer. It's because you found one that was already near the end of the cycle when you contacted. You can confirm this with LWDumpActivityLog and checking your Launch.log file.