Supply raid suggestion

[gimrah]

I had a thought building on a thought from joinrbs. He thought the majority of supply raids (i.e. strength movements) should be undetectable and the remainder should have more reasonable chances of detection such that a) 0% with 10 men didn't have to be go-to strat but b) they would still be fairly rare such as not to break the resource balance.

I would take that a stage further and suggest that the alien AI have two different actions for strength movements. Essentially borrowing the concept from LW1 where aliens could run missions normally or, if XCom threat was high, the aliens could spend resources to ensure that missions were run where XCom was not active. In LW2 you could instead say that the aliens can transfer 1 unit of strength per X days into a given region with very little chance of detection, but incremental strength movements into the same region within the X days are much easier to detect.

This would mean that continual mission-mining in a region would gradually build up vigilance without you being able to do much about it (except troop columns). However, when the AI really wants to put strength into an area you have more chance to stop it. So in particular for regions where you are pursuing the liberation chain. Personally I think that would be a good change as I find the build-up very punishing if you don't manage to do Lib 2 and Lib 3 the first times they come up, leading to too much of a difficulty spike. It would also give you a chance to resist invasion, albeit probably not forever. And finally it would give more of an incentive to do "get advent attention" missions. As things stand, if I have a low strength region next to my lib chain region, then I would rather simply pursue lib there too in parallel - which will serve a similar purpose in drawing strength towards it AND give me more options for liberation. But if you could also use attention missions to bait them into viable supply raids, that could be pretty cool.

In terms of the supply raids themselves, I think it would be nice if the 10-man big fight was still an option but not necessarily always the best option. I would consider giving them high base enemy count (but not stupid high), long base infiltration times and remove the infiltration penalties for large squads for these missions. Ideally infiltrating a bigger squad would lead to a bigger but slightly easier fight, but the opportunity cost of having more people out for longer will start to bite (kind of a cross between HQ missions and regular missions).

[johnnylump]

Noted.