Being able to take fewer missions

[Manifest]

So, with the focus going away from stealth, we'll be able to be accept much fewer missions because we'll need more soldiers on every mission (can't 1 or 3 man anymore) and because with increased combat frequency we'll have more casualties. Was there anything explicit done to combat the lower accessible mission frequency?

[RookieAutopsy]

Yes. Reduced pod sizes mean you can take fewer soldiers on missions you would otherwise fight on.

I am now fielding lots of 4 man squads instead of 2s (for stealth) and 6s (for loud) so I'm not really seeing an overall change.

[Dwarfling]

What you say does seem right on paper, but from my experience it hasn't felt that way.

Now don't take my word for it since I've been fielding combat squads (4-5) on my (legendary) campaigns ever since they announced they were making stealth harder, so maybe that's why I haven't felt a difference, and yes, I've been skipping those 3d missions, but my campaign is going pretty well despite of that and having to skip my first engineer mission. You can take a slower pace, as in missions per month, since ADVENT strenght is easier to control.

[Saph7]

Yes. Reduced pod sizes.

This. Assuming you're in a low strength region, you should be able to beat most missions with a team of 4-5 soldiers now.

[stefan3iii]

I'm in mid April, what I've noticed so far:
1) Missions with lots of remaining time are easier to detect.
2) Missions with smaller squads are easier, entirely feasible to run extremely lights with 4-5 soldiers, or even 3 very strong soldiers.

I always dial the number of rebels on intel to only generate the number of missions I can handle. I was putting rebels on recruit instead of intel within the first supply drop, simply because it's so easy to generate missions. I'm definitely doing way fewer missions than in 1.2, since in 1.2 you could solo or duo so many of them. The result is that I'm generating intel much slower, coupled with the increased cost of expansion (100 intel), I'm expanding much slower.

Note, it's still very easy to solo rookie suicide Hack Workstation missions, something I would highly recommend unless you happen to have like two entire teams idling with nothing to do. I save my rookies with awful stats for these missions.

This all feels fine balance wise from what I see so far, the new Smash and Grabs are making early game resources other than intel much easier to come by. My first 2 havens have reached 13 rebels very quickly, and I now have many of them generating supplies instead.