I don't understand when I should recruit/supply/intel

[merkmerk]

The intel part makes sense - spawns missions with more time.

But I rarely see people talk about when to use them for supply, or recruit, or why on those. I kind of get how to use one area for a while then go to another to manipulate vigilance scores.

I've read some really gamey stuff where people don't use supply havens at all and just sell cores/whatever for their stuff but I'm not playing on legendary and not really interested in that.

But whatever I've been doing seems to be wrong and I'm having a hard time finding the information about the strategic layer.

[HerrDoktorMencus]

In my current L/H run I'm in late-April and completely strapped for supplies. My starting haven just survived a retaliation w/ 7 rebels remaining.

Ordinarily, I'd recruit up to 13 ... but because I know there are no faceless I'm on supply instead. Will get me enough $ to buy Vulture after the next drop.

[Psieye]

I've read some really gamey stuff where people don't use supply havens at all and just sell cores/whatever for their stuff but I'm not playing on legendary and not really interested in that.

I don't consider that gamey at all. It's ordinary play to never set any haven to supply until you've liberated somewhere - maybe around June or so. What are you going to do with 40 cores in the earlygame? In the earlygame, hack rewards and S&G rewards are bigger than anything your fledgling resistance havens can collect while on supply jobs. Then add in all the income from selling not-needed-now items (cores, datapads).

No, gamey is knowing the mission cooldowns so you know exactly how many days to wait before hoping for another Troop Column mission. Or knowing exactly how many working rebels guarantees you never get a retal. Those I agree you don't need for 'casual' LongWar difficulties. But selling cores? That's earlygame finance 101 around here.

If you don't want to know in-depth 'gamey' mechanics, then I'd just say "everyone in intel, all the time" until the region is liberated. It's not optimal, but it's an effective rule of thumb. If you don't want to do missions in a region, do recruit. If it's liberated, do supply. Very broad rules of thumb which will get you through. Provided you don't shy away from doing as many missions as possible (3~4 simultaneous infiltrations from April onwards) and you prioritise research towards core techs: guns and armour with detour for EXO suits and incendiaries. Don't die from chasing after a million toy projects: the aliens are advancing in tech and you need to meet basic 'DPS' thresholds to stay in the game.

[Dwarfling]

Basically the most important resource in the game is not really anything you see on the top bar, it's the experience on your soldiers. Higher leveled soldiers are who win you the game (and having them die is a cause of campaign failure). So you need to have them constantly busy doing missions to win experience, and to do that you need to spawn the missions. So the Intel job is the most important job, until you have no soldiers to send in missions or no missions can spawn in that region (because of cooldowns) or the missions that spawn are too risky for your soldiers (strenght too high).

If you can't do Intel job because of reasons above, then Recruit job is the best next option so that in the future you can better detect missions. If the region is liberated then Supply is what you want to do, unless it doesn't have 13 rebels, then you recruit until 13 and switch. If the strenght is too high, or you have an almost full haven, then you can do Supply in a non-liberated region, but you will face Retaliations there.

If you want to get all gamey then you should also know that missions don't infinitely spawn, they have cooldowns and requirements to spawn. If you know the missions you want won't spawn, then you can switch the region out of Intel for maximum effectiveness.