Defending liberated regions from Advent reconquest seems... overtuned

[Pandemonim]

So I'm pretty far in my current Veteran playthrough, and I think the balancing on most things feels pretty decent. There's some WTF moments, but that's part of LW's appeal. I played LW1 extensively so I can appreciate some masochism.

Except the Liberated Region defense missions. F those things, seriously. I think the tuning on those has GOT to be off.

I've had 3 so far, and each one has been a debacle. Here why:

- The sheer number of pods and the map size, in conjunction with how frequent the reinforcements are, means that you are very likely to get bogged down and overwhelmed long before you can get a party to the relay.

- Sure, you can try to cheese it with a shinobi scout and a squadsight sniper on another building to snipe the relay, but 1. that's lame, and 2. that's very dependent on map generation, and 3. it can fail MISERABLY.

- Let's say you do slog your way to the relay, or snipe it. Good job, congratulations! By the way, the aliens have killed 95% of your population, because they're behaving like a retaliation mission on steroids, so the haven you just saved has 1 guy in it. Oh, and you still need to clean up the alien horde, if you cheesed it with a sniper. You might as well have just let the aliens have it.

The last one I tried I was going to try to cheese it, so I moved my party along the bottom edge of the map on the first turn. The next turn, a greater hive queen barreled at me from one direction, and a gatekeeper from the other (btw, love the new gatekeepers. they're terrifying). I'm curious as to what some others' experiences are, or if I'm just being ridiculous. I really do feel the balance is broken on them given the fact that your most likely reward is a liberated haven with just some guy named Bob living in it. The reward does not even come close to outweighing the very high likelihood you will get absolutely ruined.

[Pandemonim]

Oh, and what's up with the civilians? Are some of them decoys? They disappear and I don't get credit, while others I'm able to run back to the Skyranger.

[lilyophelia]

I think some of the missions are definitely overtuned.

I had to drop down to Rookie, hoping that some of the near-impossible missions would become doable. It makes me a little bit sad, because Veteran was more fun/challenging, but some things are just brutally impossible.

[mattprice516]

Some of the civvies on invasions are just rando civvies enjoying the freedom living in a Liberated region provides, and some of them are actual rebels. Former will disappear after being contacted, latter will come under XCOM's control.

And yeah, Invasions are really really hard.