Yeah, that is a good question to ask. Are things actually fun?
It is okay for things to be challenging. But we need to be awarded for defeating a challenge. And the way that retaliations work is that we are never awarded for success, we are punished for it. Personally, and I assume most people, would want to build up a haven. Keep on making it stronger. Keeping on having it destroyed, without anything we can do about it just isn't fun. If the reason for it is to prevent XCOM from getting too much supplies or intel points, then a diminishing returns system could be put in place. Or every haven, radio tower, and rebel could cost a monthly maintenance of supplies. That way we need fully functional havens in order to expand further. The fact is it is more fun for players, if there is an expensive goal to achieve, then if what we have keeps getting taken away.
The retaliation missions them selves could be made fun. Having missions with expendable chaff that your soldiers can try to save, is a nice change of pace. But that is if a loss isn't so major as losing a haven member which you had to work so hard to get there in the first place. I think only one (or maybe 2 or 3 determined randomly) of the rebels in a mini retaliation should be a haven member. The rest are underlings to the haven member. The haven member should have decent equipment. The underlings can be almost naked like they are now. Saving the haven member should be hard, but reasonably doable. The underlings though can be very hard to save, but a fun challenge to try. Each underling lost could cause a temporary loss afterwards to intel, supplies or recruit for a period of. But each underling we are lucky enough to save should provide a reward, such as getting that underling as a recruit afterwards, or maybe just an experience bonus to the haven member.(I would like to see haven members have more then 3 levels)
We would also need a way to be able to eventually halt or slow down retaliation missions. One way would be if hide does not mean the rebel hides, but they hide the haven 's activities (by having multiple levels of communication hierachy, etc) Every rebel on hide makes those working harder to detect. And if it takes 2 rebels on hide, to almost completely hide the actions of one rebel doing a task then the haven would be at max efficiency at 39 members. (or maybe less if you count experience) It gives as something to always work towards
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So to make the game more fun I am saying:
- we want to keep growing havens in both numbers, and their members experience. I myself care about liberating the world and raising an army, more then care about the avatar project.
- Restoring haven members is exhausting and tedious. Don't have the results of a retaliation mean multiple dead haven members. Instead the aliens can just steal some supplies , or similar.
- missions where we have to defend expendables would be fun if the cost of the loss of one of them is minor
- have ways for us to slow down retaliations while still building havens.