Faceless and Raids in 1.3

[Izmir Stinger]

This line from the revised patch notes jumped out at me.

Retaliations (and mini-retals) will occur according to a different mechanism: every day you have a rebel on a job, the rebel has a chance to be detected by ADVENT. That chance is impacted by difficulty level, regional vigilance and alert. If detection occurs, a global bucket to trigger a retaliation gets a little more full. (There are buckets for each rebel job except hiding and a master bucket for full Haven retaliations). Once a threshhold is reached, a retal/mini-retal will occur and the bucket empties. They will tend to occur in busier regions. This reduces the minimum working rebels threshhold to trigger retals and should space out retals/mini-retals better. Increased regional cooldowns for these missions.

The way it used to work was that if you had 5 or more rebels working a job, that region was vulnerable to that kind of raid. You could stay safe by running only 4 rebels on a job UNLESS one or more of those rebels was secretly a Faceless infiltrator, because they counted double towards spawning raids. This new description of how raids are generated does not mention Faceless. How do they influence the situation? Do they have a higher chance each day to be "detected" by ADVENT? Guaranteed to be "detected" every day (i.e. reporting to handler)? Perhaps they fill up the bucket even faster than a detected rebel? Will this make purging the Faceless from your havens more or less strategically important?

For sure the non-violent method of identifying faceless by assigning 4 rebels to each of the jobs and seeing which raid spawns won't work anymore.

[trihero]

I'm sorry I don't have the detailed answer you seek, but if you want some unsolicited advice here is where it might not be worth knowing the details.

I take that change you quoted as the developers way of saying "stop trying to game the system, you were never supposed to be able to entirely avoid retals by knowing a precise lower limit" and I agree it was bad design. Even joinrbs called it out as well he's like I hate these logic gates if you have x rebels you know this will or won't happen thing. It just gave a huge advantage to those who datamined versus those who didn't.

I would imagine faceless get you detected worse, and lowering the bucket seems like the most logical choice, but does knowing the precise chances really help? As long as there is some chance you'll get a retal, with faceless or not, you have to keep some sort of "bench" team ready at all times. And it seems now as long as someone is working at all you will get a retal at some point.

It would be nice I suppose to know how the bucket fills up so you could get a sense of how fast you might get retaled if every single rebel got detected every day, but even then that just gets very micromanagey as your number of regions increases so the practical takeaway is: have a bench team ready for quick response missions, and simply expect to get retalled in higher strength/busier rebel regions. I think the fear of getting retaled and in general hiding/trying to avoid high strength regions has done more damage to players than not, and as a case in point I would point to xwynns most recently 1.3 playthrough where he was saying exactly this; by avoiding fights and hiding so much he is low on resources by not finding troop columns/supply raids.

As far as faceless goes, to me nothing has changed. You always want someone to detect them. Even if they gave no penalties to raids, even if they didn't take money from you, even if they didn't slow your jobs down...rendezvous missions are easy and rewarding. They give you corpses, loot, etc. The only reason you wouldn't be trying to detect them is if you literally have no men available, which is a result of either bad planning or bad luck.

All this long text aside, I wouldn't mind if someone posted the details, but it's one of those rare situations where I think knowing them no longer helps since they removed the "logic gate" system and rendezvous missions are so rewarding regardless of how faceless affect raids.