I'm overwhelmed!

[trihero]

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.

This game is pretty complex. I'm not that far ahead of you in the game, but here's my 2 cents:

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).

[jztemple]

Great information! Thanks for posting it, I have a better idea now of what I am trying to achieve.

[Jeancly]

ok reached the stage of vipers, this is bs, needs heavy rebalance, vipers are simply too difficult to hit, the dodge stats needs to be lowered a ton, no point in having a guy with 80/90 aim if they get high cover and have 25 dodge

[Arcalane]

ok reached the stage of vipers, this is bs, needs heavy rebalance, vipers are simply too difficult to hit, the dodge stats needs to be lowered a ton, no point in having a guy with 80/90 aim if they get high cover and have 25 dodge

It's fine. Fight smarter, not harder. Here's some tips;

1. Use a Sapper-Grenadier or Technical Rocket to reduce or destroy their cover.
2. Use Suppressing Fire to pin them down and reduce their ability to attack you.
3. Use Flashbangs to reduce their mobility and disable their special attacks. (Plus you get to see the Viper's disoriented animations which are hilarious.)
4. Run up to them and shove a sword in their face.
5. Just straight up flank them.

You have a big box of tools at your disposal. Use 'em.

[Jeancly]

ok reached the stage of vipers, this is bs, needs heavy rebalance, vipers are simply too difficult to hit, the dodge stats needs to be lowered a ton, no point in having a guy with 80/90 aim if they get high cover and have 25 dodge

It's fine. Fight smarter, not harder. Here's some tips;

1. Use a Sapper-Grenadier or Technical Rocket to reduce or destroy their cover.
2. Use Suppressing Fire to pin them down and reduce their ability to attack you.
3. Use Flashbangs to reduce their mobility and disable their special attacks. (Plus you get to see the Viper's disoriented animations which are hilarious.)
4. Run up to them and shove a sword in their face.
5. Just straight up flank them.

You have a big box of tools at your disposal. Use 'em.

sword ? they dodge it, flank ? aisde from shotgun at 1 distance it does not work nice as the dodge bonus is huge

[Zavek]

ok reached the stage of vipers, this is bs, needs heavy rebalance, vipers are simply too difficult to hit, the dodge stats needs to be lowered a ton, no point in having a guy with 80/90 aim if they get high cover and have 25 dodge

It's fine. Fight smarter, not harder. Here's some tips;

1. Use a Sapper-Grenadier or Technical Rocket to reduce or destroy their cover.
2. Use Suppressing Fire to pin them down and reduce their ability to attack you.
3. Use Flashbangs to reduce their mobility and disable their special attacks. (Plus you get to see the Viper's disoriented animations which are hilarious.)
4. Run up to them and shove a sword in their face.
5. Just straight up flank them.

You have a big box of tools at your disposal. Use 'em.

sword ? they dodge it, flank ? aisde from shotgun at 1 distance it does not work nice as the dodge bonus is huge

flamethrowers are a wonderful invention, technicals are extremely useful for offence and then grenadiers for supporting.
kill it with fire.

i myself howeve have a slightly diffrent issue, im stretched WAY to thin.
i got 4 operations being prepped atm and the game litterally throws me 3-4 missions a week with 2 havens operating
i am scraping by just bearly when it come to supplies but i cant help to notice that missions that staff (sci/engi/soldier) are extremely rare.
but missions like go fetch a data packet are common but they rarely give me anything but 23-30 intel, no leads no supplies.
i just recently finished the GWS and i saw the upgrades to squad infiltration but how the hell am i supposed to get 350 supplies if i can bearly scrape 40 together for sorely needed laser rifles?

[Arcalane]

You probably shouldn't be jumping on every single operation that presents itself (because you're running into these issues). I would recommend reassigning some of your people from Intel to Supply to draw your income towards acceptable levels. Keep in mind that the Skyranger provides the equivalent of 4 agents on Intel.

Depending on how many personnel you have at havens, you may want to recruit more actively (I got kinda lucky with early rescue events) and make sure you have a soldier on duty to deal with any infiltrators.

[ShockmasterFred]

Its still unlikely even with that explanation, if you are going to start losing that damn much in supplies you are going to start doing things like guarded drops, or at least timing pick-up sooner, the fact that three quarters of your supplies from that Haven goes missing is just too much... It'd be like payroll losing 75% of the money they were meant to pay out, instantly that is massive warning signs and measures should be taken to overcome that.

If I was able to talk to my havens in real time, realistically, I would totally be going "Hey uhh... What the hell is the deal here? Its time for more secure routes to usher supplies." Underground tunnels to persistent supply drops, etc. If the Advent really wanted to hamper XCOM's ability to operate and infiltrated with a faceless they'd likely bomb you out, or would ambush you at where you pick the supplies up instead of trying to steal some meager supplies that likely means nothing to the vast war machine of the Advent.

Those supplies would be much more valuable as baits if they aren't willing to outright destroy the Havens int he first place.

At this point you are just rationalizing away every plausible explanation he gives you, just because you dont like a simple and fair mechanic. The scenarios he offered are just 2 of a thousand possible ways an infiltrator could disrupt a supply chain. Read about infiltrators in the IRB during the Irish Civil War to see the myriad of ways infiltraitors can wreak havoc on a rebellion. If the mechanic is that gamebreaking for you, then maybe LW2 isnt for you. Its a great addition to the strategy layer, and adds in a mission where you can capture some corpses, which is awesome. Im not saaying you have to like it, but you are being overly pedantic in your criticism of it, and dismissive of those trying to help/explain it to you. Good luck going forward man, I hope you work it out and have fun with the mod. (not sarcasm, i mean that)

[Arcalane]

At this point you are just rationalizing away every plausible explanation he gives you, just because you dont like a simple and fair mechanic.

I stopped replying to that chain for a reason. Let's not get off-topic here.