Pavonis Interactive Forums

Thank you a lot for posting this. I've been going through both the .uc and the .ini files to figure out how Activities work and that video helped to get the big picture.

That streamer guy is a genius... not only do i now have a much better understanding of such Gop/Missions cyclic methods but the whole gameplay structure and its ruleset is beginning to shine through even my most stubborn critics on proper balance.

It's helped my early game, now what I do is keep scanning/intel up until one of those shiny rescue engineer/scientist/soldier (not rebel/rookie jailbreak) occurs, then I put everyone to recruiting in that region and move to another region and repeat intel fishing for that engineer/scientist/soldier mission, because of the cooldown for that valuable mission. I was beginning to feel that certain missions stopped showing up at certain points and there were cooldowns, but that video really put a light on exactly what was going on.

Once I contact a haven, does it start with 0 vigilance, or with how many?

Starting region has 1 vigilance but new havens will have a randomized (but usually low) vigilance because the aliens and rebels are fighting even without your control through the hidden Repression activity. That activity will adjust Vigilance, Alert (strength) and Rebels count in non-contacted havens every 14-21 days so regions contacted after a few month from the start can deviate a lot from the initial state.

So I can't really plan out how much vigilance I have in a later region without losing it via not doing missions, or inferring it via which missions pop up?

Not really, but you can use the console to read that data. It's a bit more involved than just typing stuff into a console. I explain how to do it here.

Personally, using these commands has greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the strategic layer. I say this while still agreeing that leaving it hidden was the correct design choice for the general audience. I am hoping that some hero will come along and create a mod that just adds this data to UI, but until then, there are console commands.

Icarus wrote:So I can't really plan out how much vigilance I have in a later region without losing it via not doing missions, or inferring it via which missions pop up?

You can't but don't need to either.

Usually when you contact a new region, you want to allow the Haven to grow which means running some recruit job and not doing any mission for several weeks. During this time, Vigilance will usually drop to 1 unless the RNG acted funny and decided to increase it and it's late in the game but if you're really late, you probably don't care much for political prisoners or such missions anyway and Vigilance doesn't prevent GP or liberation missions.

The growth phase also serves to allow vigilance to "cool down".