Huh, the google doc laying out the mission details is offline. Falling back on this old reddit post for data.1.5 patch notes wrote:Region vigilance gets a little sticker. Reduced the number of workers at an outpost for the baseline vigilance decay time of 1 week from 9 to 7; reduced the impact of having more or less than that from a max of 3 days to 2.
Assuming you're not insane and trying to do missions at Str 8+, it's only Vig that matters for locking out missions.
HighValuePrisoner: max Vig 6
Prisoners: max Vig 7
Propaganda: max Vig 6
ProtectData: max Vig 12 (Intel + PoI)
ProtectResearch: max Vig 10
TroopManuevers: max Vig 15
If you don't have the mod that shows what Vig is, then Propaganda is how you tell if a region is ripe for HighValuePrisoner. SonnyWiFiHr's preaching boils down to "keep Vig low to fish for Scientists, cancel unwanted GOps quickly to make regions try to spawn a Scientist GOp sooner". Where "cancel a GOp" means "deliberately fail it (without taking wounds)". It's been noted in other threads that the Vig decay timer (7d if you have 7 working rebels, 9d if 13 rebels, 6d if 4 rebels) resets if you win a mission. Can someone confirm that it doesn't care if you fail a mission?
Are all ProtectData missions are "throw your own evac flare"? If so, then there might be sense in cancelling these missions in low Vig regions to force them to be snatched up by mid Vig regions. I'm thinking of the midgame, when you're contacting the 5th and 6th regions with about 2~3 regions starting to get hot. The ideal is for all the S&G to be taken by high Vig regions, all the ProtectData to spawn in mid Vig regions and keep low Vig regions quiet enough for continuous Prisoners and HighValuePrisoner.
Don't underestimate what you can get out of deliberately failed missions if you have manpower to spare. Lamp hacks, loot drops, kill XP, halved mission XP - they all add up. Sure you'd get more if you succeed the mission but that would harm the long-term objective of farming HighValuePrisoner.