Growing havens : recruit or intel?

[LordYanaek]

This is probably best discussed here rather than this thread. In my first attempt i managed to get a few high population havens with rebels working on a mix of Intel and Supplies and one on recruit in the early game. It was a veteran game started in 1.0 that i finally abandoned due to bad decision (such as having rebels on supplies early with faceless eating all of those in 1.0) and i wanted to start fresh with 1.1. I'm now attempting a commander campaign.

After reading about running recruiting first until your haven grows in several threads, i decided to try this in the first newly contacted regions, keeping intel for my first one to try and liberate it quickly. The first region i contacted was 6 rebels and i put them all on Recruit with a soldier adviser. In april i had 7 rebels all on recruit in that same region and triggered a recruitment raid where i lost one (back to 6 so no progress at all in the first month). After that i left 4 on recruit to avoid the mini retaliation and 2 on supply (since 2 intel doesn't really help) and managed to grow to 8 by june where i'm now 4 intel/4recruit. I've read posts by people who max a size 4 haven in 2 months using recruit and i don't understand how it's even possible. My biggest haven (3rd region) is at 12 Ok, but that's because i had a 3 rebels jailbreak in that region. Recruitment will occasionally give me a rookie but rarely a rebel and i wonder if i wouldn't max a haven faster by running all intel and hoping for a jailbreak.

I'm not sure whether the faster growth of my havens in the first campaign was due to the difficulty, to version 1.0 being faster or to me running more intel jobs from the start but i sure got several jailbreaks by june in that first campaign compared to only 2 in this one, the first being 2 rookies in my starting region and the second being a lucky 3 rebels/2 rookies in the 3rd one.

What's the usual strategy for growing havens? Do you really have success with recruitment jobs or are you better off running intel and hoping for jailbreaks? How fast can you usually max out a haven? It seems to me like maxing a size 4 haven in 2 months is extremely lucky given we get more rookies than rebels from recruitment (at least in 1.1, i think the ratio was better in 1.0)

[8wayz]

You have to keep in mind that the more regions you have, the more missions will be generated and thus you will have a lesser chance of getting exactly a jailbreak. Also Jailbreaks are no longer available once Vigilance for the region hits 6 from what I recall.

Thus my strategy is the following:
- contact a region. Put all but one of them on Intel with a Soldier overseer.
- get one or two jailbreak missions within the first month. Get the Haven to a respectable 8-10.
- Put everyone now on Recruit. With some luck (getting more rebels than recruits) you should get to 12-13 at the and of the second month.

It gets harder of course the higher ADVENT Strength and Vigilance is in the region, cause it lowers the effectiveness of each job.

I only have 2 regions on the 23rd of June and liberated my starting one. I have 13 and 14 rebels respectively.

I did get at least 2 jailbreaks per region, probably because I did not expand too fast by contacting other regions.

[trihero]

Do you really have success with recruitment jobs

Yes, jailbreaks are a crapshoot past your first region. Don't know when you're going to get them, don't know if they're going to be successful, and they could be full of rookies instead of rebels. They are also on a 14-19 day regional cooldown.

I've done experiments where I had one region with 6-7 intel + 1 on recruit vs a new haven with all recruit. A couple months later, the all recruit haven has greatly surpassed the intel region in terms of rebel population. Can't depend on jailbreaks on average.

It sounds like the retaliation freaked you out so you put less rebels on recruit. Well, if you put less rebels on recruit, then you expect to get slower results, shrug. I don't understand your complaint then. You would be complaining about the same thing if you put rebels on intel and then got an intel raid.

given we get more rookies than rebels from recruitment

Where did you get this idea? The ratio in the code is 2 rebels : 1 rookie. I think you just got unlucky and then inferred way too much.

But I will say this - you should have at least 1 region where you are focusing on intel, and this is so you are expending your soldiers on missions to level up. Even though max recruiting is FAR FAR faster than hoping for jailbreaks in terms of increasing rebel population, you want to be going on missions in general because of experience and good rewards. I.e. don't have all havens set to max recruiting unless you had some weird disaster leaving everything at 1 pop.

And of course if you have no soldiers to actually do a jailbreak, recruiting is the only option to increase your population.

Thus my strategy is the following:
- contact a region. Put all but one of them on Intel with a Soldier overseer.
- get one or two jailbreak missions within the first month. Get the Haven to a respectable 8-10.
- Put everyone now on Recruit. With some luck (getting more rebels than recruits) you should get to 12-13 at the and of the second month.

This is a workable suggestion. In a newly contacted region in the first 2 months of the game I actually do set them to intel but not to look for jailbreaks - I look for rescue vip for engineer/scientist, then immediately swap to recruiting once that mission pops since it's on a cooldown. If I get can get a jailbreak great before that mission shows up sure I'll try it, but I'm not going to stay on intel for jailbreak alone.

And by the way, if you get recruit raided, you can't get recruit raided again in a short period of time (maybe 21 days?), so you should actually go full recruiting immediately after a recruit raid to replenish your population and thank the stars you have freedom for a while.

[LordYanaek]

It sounds like the retaliation freaked you out so you put less rebels on recruit. Well, if you put less rebels on recruit, then you expect to get slower results, shrug. I don't understand your complaint then. You would be complaining about the same thing if you put rebels on intel and then got an intel raid.

Well, the retaliation negated entirely the effect of a full month of recruitment with all 6 rebels on recruit. If i get an intel raid, i might loose a rebel or two (or all if things go really south), but i won't loose the intel i gained from the missions or the VIP i managed to extract. When you run a 6 men haven for a full month at total recruitment and loose the only rebel you gained to a retaliation, you wonder "what's the point, i might as well put only 4 and keep the rebel i will eventually gain within 2 months". Also i wasn't complaining, at all, just wondering how you (as you post in the other thread actually triggered this question) managed to grow a haven from 4 to full in 2 months when i got only 1 rebel in a full month with 6 recruits (and then lost it )

Where did you get this idea? The ratio in the code is 2 rebels : 1 rookie. I think you just got unlucky and then inferred way too much.

From my huge list of available rookies (in addition to those i already recruited) and small list of active rebels
Might be bad luck. I didn't really look at the code for this so if you did, i'll trust you, but i can tell you for sure if my ratio was 2 to 1, it was 2 rookies for 1 rebel, but i wouldn't be surprised if it was 3 rookies for 1 rebel.

But I will say this - you should have at least 1 region where you are focusing on intel, and this is so you are expending your soldiers on missions to level up.

This i did in my first region in order not only to train my men but also to liberate it reasonably fast. My plan was to work on that one region while the other two grew and after i liberate the first scan in the others for missions and hopefully detect enough troop ambushes to prevent an invasion. Where the plan failed is that the other regions didn't grew, except for the one where i actually got a jailbreak.

And by the way, if you get recruit raided, you can't get recruit raided again in a short period of time (maybe 21 days?), so you should actually go full recruiting immediately after a recruit raid to replenish your population and thank the stars you have freedom for a while.

Given how many rebels i get from 6 men recruiting, i might not even gain a single new guy within 21 days

[trihero]

I'll repeat how I got max rebels in 2 months - I put everyone on recruiting, including the new rebels I got. It might not be exactly 2 months for you depending on luck, but you don't even have to believe me, just try a simple experiment. Have one region max recruits regardless (don't just half-bake it by putting 4 on recruits), and try one region with 1 recruit + rest intel. You'll find that the region with max recruits very quickly, even if it's not exactly 2 months but 2.5 months or even 3 months due to bad luck, will have higher population than your intel region.

There's no point in denying the facts that jailbreaks are not reliable. You don't know when you'll get them, they have the same % chance of giving you rookies as rebels as the recruiting job (so even if the ratio were 2 rookies: 1 rebel, jailbreak has the same ratio....), and they are not guaranteed successes.

Relying on jailbreaks to fill your population has consistently failed me until I realized the recruit job is actually very important. A lucky jailbreak can increase your population in the short run but if you don't have a number of people on recruiting, your population won't be going up to max any time soon.

Jailbreaks also literally do not show up once vigilance has reached 6 or 7 or something like that.

[Tuhalu]

I blame the Faceless. If you have only 5 or 6 guys in a Haven and you set them all to Recruiting and just 2 of them of them are Faceless, it will torpedo your recruiting efforts.

The math goes like this. Each rebel is worth 3 points. Each Faceless is worth -5 points. A Soldier Haven Advisor is worth 3 points, but you also get a multiplier worth 1.0 +0.05*rank (so between 1.05 and 1.4).

With no soldier in your haven, you are looking at 4 rebels and 2 faceless on recruiting being equal to 4*3 - 2*5 = 2 points. If you have no faceless, because you put a soldier (with a decent rank) in there and flushed it out, then your remaining 4 rebels are worth 4*3 = 12 points. With a rank 2 soldier in there, your total will be (4*3 + 3) * 1.1 = 16.5 points.

Note that Faceless have a similar effect when assigned to the Intel job as well. The takeaway here is that having Soldiers with some ranks detecting Faceless in your Havens is extremely crucial to your efforts while a Haven expands.

[LordYanaek]

I blame the Faceless. If you have only 5 or 6 guys in a Haven and you set them all to Recruiting and just 2 of them of them are Faceless, it will torpedo your recruiting efforts.

Thanks. It's probably what happened!
Some time after the mini-retaliation i actually got a rendez-vous where i fought 2 of those
In addition, that region was at 4 str when i contacted it and Advent str reduce the efficiency of rebel jobs

So now, i'm wondering about something else. Before you get your first rendez-vous, is it worth the risk to put many rebels on recruit in high str regions (>=4, the minimum value for those min-retaliations) or are you better spreading them to get some income (rather then hide them all) while avoiding the highly risky mini-retaliations; wait for some forces to move towards your high activity region and at the same time, hopefully, eliminate those 1-2 faceless; then start doing some clean job. This would delay your growth, but maybe not much as my recruiting really sucked in that region early and it would be a safer approach.

The other region (the one that actually grew) was str1 and if i recall correctly i only ever found one faceless there. It's now maxed which means that i got 6 rebels from recruit in addition to the 3 from the early lucky jailbreak so yes, recruiting actually worked in that region, even with only 4 rebels on recruit.