I totally disagree with the idea of "wasted" Intel, but this leads us to a pretty good point. IMO no Intel is wasted until you've detected enough Hack the Box and Troop Column missions to maintain global vigilance.LordYanaek wrote: Not quite. All Intel is only useful as long as you have enough squads to handle all the missions it throws at you. Detecting more missions than you can take (after discarding "bad" missions with too low timer or too high activity) is useless. All the subtlety of the strategic layer is to find the right balance of jobs so that you get enough missions but not too much. Intel is king of the jobs but other jobs are also useful because too much Intel is wasted especially if you can't field all your squads due to resources shortage (by not running any supply job). Finally in order to reliably detect those missions you'll need more than 4 guys in a haven which is why the recruit job exists.
Hack the Box is the easiest mission, Troop Columns the most rewarding. If you could, you would do only those two missions, ever, forever. Now, because you have to meet your Vigilance quota, sometimes you have to do other, less desirable missions, because you didn't detect enough Hack the Boxes and Troop Columns. Maybe you could have, with more Intel.
The main point here, though, is that "detecting more missions than you can take" is totally the wrong metric. In fact, using that metric is the reason Marbozir lost his campaign so spectacularly. If you are detecting more missions than you can take, but you are not maintaining Vigilance, then it's not that you are wasting Intel and should detect fewer missions. It's that you need to train more troops. Everything revolves around maintaining Vigilance.
Which brings us to the pretty good point. In the early game, it is not feasible (due to time it takes to contact regions) to maintain this. So in the run-up to a fully functional XCOM, you may want to liberate regions far away from each other to lower the Vigilance decay rate until you can train enough fire teams to operate in all regions forever. At which point (what we might call "mid-game"), you really want to start giving regions back to Advent (which will be easier if your temporarily liberated regions are all distant). There's some math here where we could probably figure out a formula that takes, as input, # of fire teams you can train up in a week and gives, as output, the # of regions you should liberate until you have 15 fire teams (probably 10 two-man stealthing teams and five actual, legit teams. ~40/45 active soldiers) in order to maximize Vigilance - Strength (minimize Avatar progression). Once you reach 15 fire teams, you really want to give all your regions back to Advent.
Something like that (obviously in need of refinements, but you get the idea) seems like the actual shape of the optimal strategy, and narratively speaking it's totally bonkers.