Strategy layer approach during the mid-game?

[S-Flo]

Although I've finally began to feel comfortable with the mechanics of the system and have gotten early-game liberation and expansion down to a fine science, I'm having trouble understanding how to approach Long War 2's strategy layer during the mid-to-late-game. Once I've expanded to around 7 or 8 regions and the strategy layer really starts to ramp up I begin to feel overwhelmed and too thinly spread (like I'm skipping more missions that I should be) and have no idea what to do with many of my havens.

• How aggressively should I be pursuing Liberation chains in regions other than my HQ? Should I focus on only having a tiny handful of them or should I be working on taking back large swathes of territory?
• Additionally, how should I be approaching the Liberation mission chains? Should I focus my efforts and precious scanning time on a single region at a time, or should I be trying to liberate several regions in parallel?
• What kind of jobs should I be assigning rebels in newer regions once I've really started expanding? My gut says I should be putting people on Intel for mission generation, but some of my havens don't become populated easily (jailbreak missions feel like a crapshoot after you're out of your first region) and I sometimes have issues with ADVENT Strength. Should I be using the Recruit job to build up more? Should I be more open to having rebels hide if things get heated in the region?
• How many well-trained soldiers do I need? I typically try and have around 30 active troops available on the Avenger in addition to my haven advisers and some emergency Tactical Ablative Armor (Read: Squaddies and Rookies) in case of injuries or death, yet feel like I'm unable to keep up with the stream of incoming missions whenever I'm using one of my A-teams for an HQ or Blacksite assault.

Thanks in advance for any help or advice!

[wei270]

i am in October and at this point i feel like there is like less point in liberation.

we have to think about why we want to liberate a region the benefits are

better supply and recruit opportunities and it get rid of 5 advent strength.

the problem with the ladder is that at this point in the game global advent strength is getting out of control and if we liberate too much region we are in effect compacting too much advent strength in to too little region. Do we really want to make our other mission harder like this i don't really know.

as for supplies we have to remember we are racing against time. time in this game comes in 3 forms the hard cap that is avatar project, the soft cap that is advent global strength and force level, and then there is the random permanent dark event upgrade advent get.

Time is not on our side, we have to balance benefit we get from the supplies vs how much time that is gonna take us because during those time advent is getting stronger.

Therefor once we hit mid game we should think about how we want to pursue golden path mission in order to to win the game before advent get too outrageous and not wast time on liberation unless you need the resources for some thing specific you are planing (coilguns, or maybe wraith suits)

[trihero]

How aggressively should I be pursuing Liberation chains in regions other than my HQ? Should I focus on only having a tiny handful of them or should I be working on taking back large swathes of territory?

I think it helps to make a goal and stick to it. My rough recommendation is to liberate 3 regions (less on legend cuz it's hard to), although there is nothing wrong liberating more or less than that it's just a manageable number that gives you a stable supply base. You can always liberate more if you want more income. And you can certainly beat L/I with just 1 haven liberated as well.

Additionally, how should I be approaching the Liberation mission chains? Should I focus my efforts and precious scanning time on a single region at a time, or should I be trying to liberate several regions in parallel?

If you have a region you want to liberate, you should focus it down. The longer you wait the more advent strength will build up that region.

What kind of jobs should I be assigning rebels in newer regions once I've really started expanding? My gut says I should be putting people on Intel for mission generation, but some of my havens don't become populated easily (jailbreak missions feel like a crapshoot after you're out of your first region) and I sometimes have issues with ADVENT Strength. Should I be using the Recruit job to build up more? Should I be more open to having rebels hide if things get heated in the region?

It depends on what you want to do with the region.

If you plan to liberate that region (eventually), it helps to set everything to recruit until you hit 10'ish rebels so you can then switch to intel. Like you said jailbreaks are crapshoots, and if you focus on recruiting you can get the ball rolling in a month or two depending on your luck. Also consider stationing your best soldier in a haven (you can always pull it out at the last second if you need to do a mission) since the higher rank = better faceless detection and better recruiting, both which are critical to making havens productive.

If the region you expanded into has no particular strategic value to you and/or the advent strength is really high for whatever reason, one of the best ideas is to simply set 4 rebels on supplies (this number avoids retaliations) and leave that region alone. You won't be getting any missions, but maybe you don't want to commit to more missions anyways and maybe the strength is too high there. So you might as well get a trickle of cash flow. If you have a lot of these little zones with 4 rebels on supplies, it adds up while not stretching your forces thin since you won't get retaliated and you aren't generating missions there. Expanding very wide and doing 4 supply rebels is a totally legitimate way to make enough cash to tech up while you focus your intelligence efforts in 2 or 3 key areas.

Priority #1 is to make sure you are getting enough quality missions to be sending your soldiers on constantly, but you can reach this threshold fairly quickly it seems so after that you are just making things frustrating for yourself if there are too many missions to pick from. A starting point for you to consider is to have about three regions that have mostly intel rebels to generate you a steady flow of missions to pick from, and any other regions than that are dedicated to supplies or recruiting.

You might ask which regions do you want to focus intel/liberation efforts in. There's no particularly great advice here except avoid regions that have too much strength (6+) because they will make missions significantly more difficult to be successful in. On the other hand, don't be too scared of advent strength either because the higher strength means they will have some key quality missions (troop ambushes, counter dark events) that don't show up in lower strength areas. It kind of makes sense to have your most populous havens to be your "intel" zones since having more rebels on intel significantly makes missions easier to detect. You can always do the lowballing 4 rebels on supplies in areas you don't have immediate interest in, this helps secure your supply line and 4 intel rebels won't detect much of worth anywyas.

How many well-trained soldiers do I need? I typically try and have around 30 active troops available on the Avenger in addition to my haven advisers and some emergency Tactical Ablative Armor (Read: Squaddies and Rookies) in case of injuries or death, yet feel like I'm unable to keep up with the stream of incoming missions whenever I'm using one of my A-teams for an HQ or Blacksite assault.

Anywhere between 20-40 sounds reasonable. I try to have 4 of each class because I like the variety and all the roles get filled that way. I like to go thicker on gunner/ranger than other classes because they are doing most of the "wetwork" and when they are injured I can't go into very serious battles.


Too long didn't read version: pick 2 or 3 regions that will be your "intel heavy, mission generating regions." The rest should be either 4 rebels on supplies, rest hide (to avoid retaliations), or max recruiting if you plan to liberate or make new "intel heavy" regions. The worst thing you can do to yourself is have 5+ havens with majority intel since it will frustrate the crap out of you with too many missions to pick from and too many retaliations going on.

[aimlessgun]

A liberated haven with 13 guys on supply and an engineer is over 500 supply a drop, so 2-3 liberated zones should be enough. However if supply raids get nerfed going for more might become a higher priority. So after you liberate your first zone target 1-2 more places for ASAP liberation to be your supply base.

Jobs in new regions: depends on how much stomach you have for missions popping up in your face constantly I just went intel everywhere in an effort to stop as many DEs as possible, with maybe one token recruiter and recruiting from the haven advisor. So I did find a pretty good amount of DEs and a TON of supply raids and ambush troop columns. For like 2-3 months I painstakingly ground these out at low infiltrations so I could do all of them. And dealt with all the resulting retaliation missions (sooo many datataps defended...). This was, quite frankly, exhausting. Yes, I had plenty of resources and hundreds of corpses, and yes, the AVATAR project progress was slowed by like 115%, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. On my next playthrough I might go more with what trihero is describing.

As for roster: A big A team is pretty much required so that's 10 guys right there. I liked having a full 10 man B team for supply raids/retaliations/avenger defense while the A team was in infiltrations, but apparently this is not strictly necessary. Then you've got some backups. Then your stealth teams including as many shinobis and specialists as you have spare rookies to stick into the GTS. So 30-40.

[Flapdrol]

Jobs in new regions: depends on how much stomach you have for missions popping up in your face constantly I just went intel everywhere in an effort to stop as many DEs as possible, with maybe one token recruiter and recruiting from the haven advisor. So I did find a pretty good amount of DEs and a TON of supply raids and ambush troop columns. For like 2-3 months I painstakingly ground these out at low infiltrations so I could do all of them. And dealt with all the resulting retaliation missions (sooo many datataps defended...). This was, quite frankly, exhausting. Yes, I had plenty of resources and hundreds of corpses, and yes, the AVATAR project progress was slowed by like 115%, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. On my next playthrough I might go more with what trihero is describing.

As for roster: A big A team is pretty much required so that's 10 guys right there. I liked having a full 10 man B team for supply raids/retaliations/avenger defense while the A team was in infiltrations, but apparently this is not strictly necessary. Then you've got some backups. Then your stealth teams including as many shinobis and specialists as you have spare rookies to stick into the GTS. So 30-40.

I'm using a size 60 team. 4 large squads (10-10-8-8), 4 small stealth squads, 1 assassination squad (a shinobi with a kamikaze squaddie Specialist to blow up enemy VIPs) and the rest in various training tubes. I have liberated 2 areas, will liberate 2 more soon, am currently spread out in 12 regions and am aggressively spreading out (I hope that if I have havens everywhere, I can stop *all* future Dark Events).

With all these areas, I get way more missions than I can handle, so I cherry pick the ones I want, with Dark Events and Ambush Troops high on the list.

I have 4 squads, so Gamma and Delta team have no armour and are currently on lasers, with some mags. I use them in areas with low Advent strength in missions with generous infiltration time. Delta team is slowly dying: I buy max soldiers from Black Market, but they die faster, and squaddies are kinda weak, so at some time I will switch to three full teams.

Alpha and Beta team can do Supply Raids, but they also have to do story missions, Network/HQ missions and I usually do this at high infiltration, so they are often occupied.

It works fairly well in keeping Advent strength low, and alloy/supply/elerium income high.

[Elfich]

Jobs in new regions: depends on how much stomach you have for missions popping up in your face constantly I just went intel everywhere in an effort to stop as many DEs as possible, with maybe one token recruiter and recruiting from the haven advisor. So I did find a pretty good amount of DEs and a TON of supply raids and ambush troop columns. For like 2-3 months I painstakingly ground these out at low infiltrations so I could do all of them. And dealt with all the resulting retaliation missions (sooo many datataps defended...). This was, quite frankly, exhausting. Yes, I had plenty of resources and hundreds of corpses, and yes, the AVATAR project progress was slowed by like 115%, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. On my next playthrough I might go more with what trihero is describing.

As for roster: A big A team is pretty much required so that's 10 guys right there. I liked having a full 10 man B team for supply raids/retaliations/avenger defense while the A team was in infiltrations, but apparently this is not strictly necessary. Then you've got some backups. Then your stealth teams including as many shinobis and specialists as you have spare rookies to stick into the GTS. So 30-40.

I'm using a size 60 team. 4 large squads (10-10-8-8), 4 small stealth squads, 1 assassination squad (a shinobi with a kamikaze squaddie Specialist to blow up enemy VIPs) and the rest in various training tubes. I have liberated 2 areas, will liberate 2 more soon, am currently spread out in 12 regions and am aggressively spreading out (I hope that if I have havens everywhere, I can stop *all* future Dark Events).

With all these areas, I get way more missions than I can handle, so I cherry pick the ones I want, with Dark Events and Ambush Troops high on the list.

I have 4 squads, so Gamma and Delta team have no armour and are currently on lasers, with some mags. I use them in areas with low Advent strength in missions with generous infiltration time. Delta team is slowly dying: I buy max soldiers from Black Market, but they die faster, and squaddies are kinda weak, so at some time I will switch to three full teams.

Alpha and Beta team can do Supply Raids, but they also have to do story missions, Network/HQ missions and I usually do this at high infiltration, so they are often occupied.

It works fairly well in keeping Advent strength low, and alloy/supply/elerium income high.

I went to wide at the beginning of the game (ok, I'm on rookie this time out) and am paying for it now. Trying to fit out multiple squads with gear at the beginning compromises your ability to advance up the tech tree, either by affording tech you have researched or affording the research cost of new tech. So right now I have 1mreally good kill squad, 2 decent squads when they can get the right combination of goods and the rest are slowly being chopped up for spare soldiers because if they head out on a "light mission" the mutton elites/centurions will nuke them from orbit.

I also sank early bucks into the PsiLab and it has not provided the punch I expected it to. That will be out next time unless there are major revisions.

More than 3 full size squads (plus micro squads) cannot be equipped in a sustainable fashion after laser weapons and predator armor. Even then 3 squads is really tough. After a point it isn't the supplies, its the alloys and elerium that choke you. And after a point all of your military advisors need up to date weapons as well or the three faceless surprise will ruin your day (or you skip those missions).

[Zyxpsilon]

Two simple words for mid-late gameplay pacing; HIT FACILITIES!!

While you certainly should have enough of anything by that time..
(2/3..5 -- Liberated Regions locked on high Supply flow) +
(3/5..7 -- Intel intensive on various Missions digging) +
(then.. whatever else reveals to be hosting either the remaining Storyline places or Pips-Wiper Facilities)

As long as we can keep the Avatar/Doom tracker bar away from filling too close for defeat -- we are just managing a solid set of ranked-up Squads supported by plenty of the essential resources that should concentrate on mopping up anything blocking our ways to ultimately -- Waterworld.
What else is there? Global domination via full coverage? Completed Tech-Tree? Optimal gearing maximums?

Up to ya.

[aimlessgun]

I'm using a size 60 team. 4 large squads (10-10-8-8), 4 small stealth squads, 1 assassination squad

That's pretty crazy. Even getting that many dudes is a challenge, much less making them mission-ready.