Liberated regions and intel

[artifixer]

Is there any reason to keep some people on Intel activity in liberated regions? Any missions available there?
Also, I know for shure that there are some Faceless left in my liberated region. Can I drive them out with soldier liaison without any personel put on Intel job?

[Steelflame]

Intel - One core reason is to detect an invasion by Advent. You can see it coming from a mile away though, as Invasions require Advent to build up at least 8 strength in a neighboring region.

You still build up the intel resource (At a much higher rate, at that) as well, especially if you staff a scientist. Not that you need it by lategame generally.

Faceless infiltrator missions exclusively scale on the soldier liason's rank and if they are an officer/psion. Intel gen from resistance personnel has absolutely no impact on detecting them.

[Phaseless]

A bit misleading, I think you wanted to say faceless Rendezvous detection is based on the rank of the soldier Liaison, is that correct?
What does the actual difficulty of the Mission depend on? Advent STR in the Region?

[Steelflame]

A bit misleading, I think you wanted to say faceless Rendezvous detection is based on the rank of the soldier Liaison, is that correct?
What does the actual difficulty of the Mission depend on? Advent STR in the Region?

That is what I meant. As far as mission difficulty, it just scales on standard pod scalings methods, so Force Level as well as whatever Dark Events are buffing them. I don't think Strength impacts it at all, due to the restrictions of what types of units can spawn to only being officers, trooper variants, drones, and the faceless themselves.

[LordYanaek]

Intel - One core reason is to detect an invasion by Advent. You can see it coming from a mile away though, as Invasions require Advent to build up at least 8 strength in a neighboring region.

In other words, don't worry putting anyone on Intel if no adjacent region has at least 8 str.

Whether or not you want to go Intel when an ADVENT gets an adjacent region to 8 str is another story.
The first think to know is that you have a grace period of 21 days after a liberation (no invasion can occur even if ADVENT has enough strength) so there is absolutely 0 point in having anyone on Intel for the first 21 days.
Then you have to be aware that when trying to detect Invasions, it's all or nothing. The activity isn't terribly hard to detect, but it's quite short (4-8 days) so you must accumulate enough "Mission Intel" to detect it in a short time. If i consider a middle value of 6 days we have those detection chances :


First let's see what happen if i put everyone on Intel : 13 rebels, 3 being level 2 and 2 being level 3. We are looking at a very good haven here :

13 rebels (3 lvl2, 2 lvl3)

InvasionDetection13Rebels.png (16.29 KiB) Viewed 14810 times

As you can see, you have a good chance to reliably detect this activity with around 3 days left! It's pretty short to infiltrate. Even if you're looking at 50% detection chance you only have slightly more than 4 days left. You better be prepared for an under-infiltrated Supply Raid because unless you're lucky (with duration and/or detection rolls) you'll rarely have time to properly infiltrate an 8 man squad.


Now, let's see what happens if you decide to put most of your rebels on Supply and you keep only 5 of them (all level 1) on intel "just in case"

5 rebels

InvasionDetection5Rebels.png (16.84 KiB) Viewed 14810 times

Forget about it unless you fancy 0% Raids. You'll almost never detect it with enough time to infiltrate at all. You can't even reach 95% detection chance (which i consider "reliable" due to some old statistics lessons). You just wasted 5 rebels working on Supplies.

Is it worth stopping gathering supplies in order to prevent the potential loss of supply gatherers? I don't think so but if you can create a "cluster" of liberated regions with only one of them adjacent to an 8 str region, it might be a viable strategy but then go full intel. No half measures here.

[Phaseless]

Very informative, thanks!