Datapads / Selling stuff

[Undershaft]

I always seem to have several Advent datapads lying around. Since there is never a lack of stuff to research, I rarely get around to decrypting one of them. They sell well on the black market, though - is it reasonable to do so or will there come a time when every drop of intel is of supreme importance and I will regret it?

[Sines]

I find myself working in a data pad on a regular basis... but I still have more than I need. Mostly, you'll want them to expand, with expansion to deal with AVATAR pips being the key motivation. If you're doing fine on AVATAR, then you can afford to sell more.

Intel is valuable, but I also think it's use is more limited in this game. It's used to expand, and it's used to make missions easier. Two very important purposes, but it's also pretty narrow. If you don't need either of those, you're all set.

[trihero]

The question is too broad. The basic intel requirement is you need enough to expand into regions where the avatar objectives are, and you probably also just want to be able to expand a little more than that to pick up some nice continent bonuses or just to have more room to maneuver, so 80 intel x number of regions you expect to expand into. But even this calculation is not too helpful since you don't have to build a relay in every region if you don't want to, so you could expend up to 160 or even 240 intel for one region if you don't want to build a relay. Then you have to factor in what kind of hacking rewards you get that could affect that.

It also depends on how well you do missions - do you regularly succeed in missions with reward intel? How often do you intel boost or extend timers on missions? Do you plan on liberating more regions? (each HQ gives you something like 5+ datapads on victory).

I've had runs where I never cared to research datapads and was fine, and I've also had runs where I'm glad I kept datapads around so I could keep expanding.

If datapads are on sale and it would give you a lot of supplies to do something important now, then go for it. Otherwise you might want to be conservative.

You tend to spend more intel that you make later into the game because

1) your best men are usually out on big missions
2) as advent strength increases, you are more reluctant to do even small man ops

so you want to be aware of that, but if you pile up enough intel before that you don't really need to use datapads. There's no particular special event that makes you wish you had tons of intel, it's just how many territories you want to expand to, and how many boosts you expect to use (you'd probably want to boost HQs because they take so long, for instance).

[Undershaft]

Thanks, a very helpful, comprehensive and sensible answer as usual.