This game is pretty complex. I'm not that far ahead of you in the game, but here's my 2 cents:I do have a question about when you contact a second region. I still have my first region set to all six rebels gathering Intel. Should I do the same on this new area? I'm going to be spread thin covering all the missions.
I guess I'm not understanding the overall picture of Havens. Have I made contact too early if I'm still running a lot of missions in my first Haven? When is the proper time to start working a new region? I've looked through the Archive Updates and maybe I'm just not able to see the big picture.
You should get to 3/3 contacts somewhat quickly. You don't need to beeline it but having those other contacts means you can scan for easy missions in other regions (if all you do is win win win in your first Haven the Advent Strength level goes up and makes your life a bit harder), and also start to build up your havens since this game is quite Long (pun intended). The earlier you can station officer soldiers in new havens, the sooner you can root out faceless which means you'll have a solid supply chain in the long run. And the earlier you can start working on the quest chains to liberate further regions.
Once you get to 3/3 contacts it will probably be quite a while before you go further due to the massive supply sink it takes to get extra power, resistance communications to expand your capacity. I don't recommend expanding past 3/3 until you know where the blacksite is and you're working towards it.
I think it's generally OK and in fact perhaps preferred, after you get 3/3, to tunnel in one region like your starting one as long as advent strength isn't too high, so you can get the quest to liberate the region sooner, which is a super fun mission and also hugely rewarding in terms of supplies and material. Once you get the huge rewards, you can look to invest to upgrade your troops and repeat the process again in more regions, hence slowly aiming towards the end goal of better troops to keep up theirs and moving towards stopping the avatar project.
Also, I realized it's a mistake to go 100% on intel with rebels, in the long run. In my opinion, you really should put 1 guy on recruiting, rest intel. Reason #1 is you eventually want maxed havens (13 can actively work them) and you probably won't get there through missions alone (sometimes you liberate the region so no more missions to get rebels, and sometimes you lose workers for reasons you will see). Having 1 guy recruit means you're looking to the long term so you can build up to your maximum supplies/lintel working capacity. Reason #2 follows reason #1; you want a steady trickle of recruits that you can buy as you need them. The missions to get recruits directly are rare, and recruits don't replenish unless you have rebels working on it. One guy on recruiting is just enough to keep your population ticking upwards while the rest focus on giving you intel for favorable missions (and convert intel to supply once you've liberated).