Pavonis Interactive Forums

In your experience, would you do the the liberation chain asap or only after certain technologies are researched?
I have, once again, waited till my squad had regular lasers and predator armor (in May) - but I wonder if the increased alien power offsets this advantage.

Is there a "best attack before date"?

I think lasers is very important, and that is my benchmark, pred armor is just a nice bonus.

I've used a full squad of 10 in my past games.
Overkill? I'm considering taking only 8 to cut down infiltration time. Advent Strength is 4. What is the general consensus?

"What power level should my squad be at before my first HQ?" is the wrong question. Slightly more important is "what corpse possibilities should I wait for before my first HQ?". Much more important is "On success, all the neighbouring regions will get +2 to desired Strength beyond their local vigilance - have I already contacted them to monitor this? If not, will I ever want to contact them?"

When you're not used to HQ, it's best to err on the safe side. 8-man is enough, Laser is a good baseline. Later in the campaign, 7-man will suffice.

In my highly limited experience the increased strength is not a big factor. Its just more corpses at the end. Advent strength doesn't increase their tech, so its just more tier 1 cannon fodder being thrown at the meat grinder squad. The larger enemy pods tend to bunch up. They can't all get good cover and most just end up being really easy kills.

Doing lib early has the advantage of getting you those fat supply drops earlier, which can get you steamrolling in equipment. If you have the resources available to continue expanding pretty rapidly to 2-3 other regions to mitigate the strength increase I would say go for it ASAP. The most difficult HQ I've done was with lasers, no predator armor, strength 5 - but it was manageable. If you have a good squad comp running them at the higher strengths just takes a little bit longer (unless you are behind in tech). I'd say if you do it before June you are in good shape. I've only had success at commander though, so take everything with a grain of salt if you're playing legend.

If you play for first time . Just go.
Psieye description of what follow is accurate. All the neighbouring regions will get +2 to desired Strength beyond their local vigilance (copy/paste).
Advent will increase Strength in those regions. If you are doing missions in them they become High Strength regions over time.
Make sure that you can contact non neighbouring regions for more fair missions.
Supply issue can be solved with - supply raid . Delayed HQ in not game over so you can - delay it .
First region is worst region for supply -( if this region have tag "Home" region ).
Liberate 2nd region for more supply.

I never get this right in my own campaigns. Joinrbs recommends going early and he understands the strategic layer probably better than anyone.

Strength is not a worry. It's a long mission regardless and you don't want to rely on consumables.

Taking the full 10 is very punitive on infiltration time. 8 is probably optimal.

I find they get much harder when M3s and the T2 general arrive so ideally do 2 or 3 by end of July and leave it there. I've nearly lost campaigns to later ones, even when I thought my squad was awesome.

The issue with going early is staying power and the general. Lasers are essential. Armour is very nice but not necessarily essential against M1s. I take 4 medkits and usually use most or all of them.

I take 2 gunners for the never-ending AoE CC. Sharps of any kind work well, but especially DfA. I like left side rangers as my other damage dealers. Then shinobi for scouting. And I've taken to using an arc thrower / rifle assault. Good on the general. Lifesaver vs beserkers. Also the guaranteed disorient is very nice if there's a rocketeer or lancer you can't kill or control otherwise. And with a rifle he can also do wide flanking (needs good aim).

The best time for HQ assaults are just about when you reach a new weapon tech tier, but really, anytime is good as long as you're not at T3 Advent already. I've settled for 1 Liberation with a bunch of high strenght regions doing supply, just to give ADVENT more regions to put their legions in.

When I first started, I had the silly notion of trying to catch every single counter-Strategic DE mission that could spawn by constraining their spawn locations with liberations. It's impractical. None of the DEs are game-ending (except for UFO hunting Avenger if you don't understand when to have an elite squad on standby). You certainly don't need to liberate for supply (it's only +20% efficiency if the region is liberated). Doing a HQ solely for corpses is silly too: just do a somewhat-underinfiltrated Troop Column GOp.

Global Vigilance:

Low ( value below -10)
Guarded ( -10 and 0)
Elevated (0 to 10)
At Elevated and above, i.e. when Net Global Vigilance is above 0, the AVATAR project progresses more slowly. Each point of Net Global Vigilance increases the time to generate a new AVATAR point by 10 hours.
High (10 to 20)
Severe (20 to 30)
At Severe and above, the aliens gain access to a "Super Reinforcements" activity which creates twice as many Strength points.

At severe HQ is last of your problems.

I once intercepted 3 UFOs in 2 weeks from severe vigilance. It was very rewarding.