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So I have a bit of a conundrum. I've cleared all rooms in the Avenger, and I currently have two engineers with literally nothing to do. I do have two liberated regions where I could staff them; however, the supply drop a day ago was 1320 supplies, with a penalty of ~300 due to Unknown Causes. So I'm losing around 20-25% of my supplies to Faceless. I've had soldiers advising all Havens consistently for at least the past month (it's August 18); however, I think I had an Infiltrators dark event activate a few months ago, and I'm probably still suffering from the afteraffects. Is there any way for me to figure out where I can put the Engineers as advisers short of a Hail Mary? Also:

• Do Faceless steal only supplies from the Haven they're in, or can they steal them from your total income?
• When you get a hunt-the-spy mission you can have multiple Faceless show up on one mission. Does this mean that you're guaranteed to have no Faceless remaining in the Haven right after a hunt mission, or can there still be Faceless you didn't discover?
• Is it ever worth it to put an Engineer as an adviser? IIRC Faceless steal 20% of a Haven's supply, and engineers give a +20% bonus- so it's not worthwhile if you miss a single Faceless.

You can figure out where the Faceless are by moving havens on and off supply for a whole month. Faceless only steal supplies from their own haven.

A rendezvous mission doesn't guarantee that there are no more faceless. You can eliminate 1 or 2 faceless on each mission (iirc 50% of each), but there could be more (I'm pretty sure the rebels you take on a Rendezvous mission can also be faceless). It can be worth putting an Engineer in even with Faceless in the haven, as it lets you cut your losses (putting the Engineer in now counteracts the Faceless penalty), and it also frees your soldier up for combat duty.

xwynns fought either 3 or 4 Faceless on one Rendevous mission, which was the first time I'd seen more than 2 spawn.

Alketi wrote:xwynns fought either 3 or 4 Faceless on one Rendevous mission, which was the first time I'd seen more than 2 spawn.

Later in the game, you can sometimes get Faceless as part of the normal pods. These are not the Faceless that were in your haven. Only the Faceless that transform on a Rendevouz mission are Faceless that were in your Haven.

Only losing 20-25% isn't really that big of a deal. Getting rid of all faceless is mostly unrealistic, the game is balanced around there being some. In the long run your likely better off with the Engi there rather than gambling on popping the rendezvous.

If you have a really high ranked officer you can try that, gives the best odds of hitting the rendezvous. But your probably going to 'lose' more supplies with the engineers sitting idle than you will lose to the faceless.

My strategy is put a high rank officer adviser in the region i'm trying to liberate, usually this pops up the rendevous. When the region is liberated i change to an engineer. Make sure you don't liberate more than one region per supply drop, this way when you get the supplies you will know in wich region the faceless are is there are any loses.

With this sistem i actually have seven liberated regions with 0 facelles, even having the haven infilttrators DE active

As I understand it even a faceless in a region where you're not collecting supplies will reduce your income.

Faceless only affect the region they are in. The effect is a percent per faceless which is 3/5/6/7 for each difficulty.

Faceless also have a secondary effect based on the job they are assigned to.

If the faceless effect was global, it would be too easy to hit 100% and the game would break.

I haven't tried this, but here is an idea.
If you have the DE active, stop recruiting and write down the name of every rebel, that still gets recruited. That way, you should know for sure about at least a few of the faceless. If you have a mission, where your rebels are present, you can kill them on purpose, even if they are not active as faceless.

chrisb wrote:Faceless only affect the region they are in. The effect is a percent per faceless which is 3/5/6/7 for each difficulty.

Faceless also have a secondary effect based on the job they are assigned to.

If the faceless effect was global, it would be too easy to hit 100% and the game would break.

Oh.... tbh I thought they were a 20% per faceless, which would make things a little more painful.

Goldenmonkey wrote:I haven't tried this, but here is an idea.
If you have the DE active, stop recruiting and write down the name of every rebel, that still gets recruited. That way, you should know for sure about at least a few of the faceless. If you have a mission, where your rebels are present, you can kill them on purpose, even if they are not active as faceless.

Nobody expects the spanish inquisition!!!

It is a bit radical, the DE doubles the chances of new rebels being faceless (from 1/6 to 2/6, i think). Kill then all is not really needed

Kharneth wrote:

Goldenmonkey wrote:I haven't tried this, but here is an idea.
If you have the DE active, stop recruiting and write down the name of every rebel, that still gets recruited. That way, you should know for sure about at least a few of the faceless. If you have a mission, where your rebels are present, you can kill them on purpose, even if they are not active as faceless.

Nobody expects the spanish inquisition!!!

It is a bit radical, the DE doubles the chances of new rebels being faceless (from 1/6 to 2/6, i think). Kill then all is not really needed

Sacrifices must be made to defeat the enemy... Good bye my friend!

Goldenmonkey wrote:

Kharneth wrote:

Goldenmonkey wrote:I haven't tried this, but here is an idea.
If you have the DE active, stop recruiting and write down the name of every rebel, that still gets recruited. That way, you should know for sure about at least a few of the faceless. If you have a mission, where your rebels are present, you can kill them on purpose, even if they are not active as faceless.

Nobody expects the spanish inquisition!!!

It is a bit radical, the DE doubles the chances of new rebels being faceless (from 1/6 to 2/6, i think). Kill then all is not really needed

Sacrifices must be made to defeat the enemy... Good bye my friend!

Ooops, did I just let that intel raid go through? My bad!

Ithuriel wrote: Oh.... tbh I thought they were a 20% per faceless, which would make things a little more painful.

They are, or are at least supposed to be - I'm not sure where chrisb is getting that information.

It is applied per region, though, so if you have multiple regions doing supplies a few faceless aren't likely to be that crushing.

In the Outposts config there is some sections at the bottom that configure the templates for each job and setup an income modifier which is difficulty based.
Looking at the generic template interface I found this section regarding the 2 variables for each template.
It looks like what PI has changed from a fixed value per faceless penalty per job to a regional % penalty per faceless adjusted per difficulty.

The last section is configuration for one of the income modifiers that may be attached to one of the above templates. For intel/recruit templates there is this line. It's not added to supply at each update as that would make it easy to analyze the output numbers and determine if there are faceless or not. Intel/Recruit 'income' are hidden.
This modifier is one of many, others include dark events, diminishing supplies, liasons, liberation status, faceless, prohibition and relays. Most are simple and look something like this.
So we can see here that it's declaring a variable from the outposts config and setting a modifier from the difficulty by number of faceless in the outpost. So on Legend if you had 3 faceless in a haven, this would return 0.79 for 1 - 0.7 * 3

chrisb wrote:[info]

Hmm... did it get changed in 1.2? Because when they changed it from a flat supply penalty in 1.1 I know for a fact it was 20%, and I was under the impression it was the same still, but apparently not?

EDIT: No, I don't think you're right, actually - from the very top of XComLW_Outposts.ini:

FACELESS_SUPPLY_DRAIN=20f ; Percent of supplies drained from the monthly supply in this haven per faceless, factoring number of days active.

Did some digging for where that variable was used, here's what I found.
This is taking the total total income for the region (GrossSupplies) and calculating Penalty based off this value against the number of FacelessDays which is calculated daily. So if you had 2 faceless the whole drop then you'd be hit with a 40% penalty. If faceless are aquired/removed during the month then their contribution to the penalty starts/ends with that event.

This also makes sense because the LocalFaceless modifier is not added to the supply template. I was assuming they were using that later on somewhere but hadn't found this snippet of code and wasn't aware of that config var. So it seems that the per difficulty setting only applies to intel/recruit jobs.

So it seems like there is some strategy here you could use. If you plan to switch a haven over to full supply, it might be worth waiting until near the end of the supply month, maybe like 5 days before. Once the supply drop hits you can do the math on how much supply you lost compared to what the month summary screen said you would get. If you find 60-80% is missing, it would be more worthwhile to go with a high ranking officer to help flush out the rendezvous as an engineer would have little impact to this much penalty. It would effectively make your engineer worth 4-8%. Dropping a high ranking officer in there for a month should have pretty high odds of detecting faceless.

I suppose you might also add to the equation what you'd be getting from completion of the rendezvous mission, i.e., Faceless corpses, various loot items, etc..

If you really want to have a large number of the camouflage vests to lower infiltration time, you might want to keep right on harvesting from your local crop of bit-too-eager rebels.

KevlinTallfellow wrote:I suppose you might also add to the equation what you'd be getting from completion of the rendezvous mission, i.e., Faceless corpses, various loot items, etc..

If you really want to have a large number of the camouflage vests to lower infiltration time, you might want to keep right on harvesting from your local crop of bit-too-eager rebels.

I prefer to render for 2 elerium.