Infiltration suddenly became way too hard

[Adenru]

Infiltration percentage barely drops all of sudden on each mission even if I send one soldier, and it feels weird because just before I was doing fine.

[Heau]

there's barely any diff for the first four soldiers by design. It's every soldier beyond 4 that increases it a lot.

I don't know how much LWOTC you've played, I'm only getting started, but if I don't have at least 6-7 haven staff on intel, I tend to discover mission opportunities with an already very short timer to work with.

I think this is intended by the game design. Gives some opportunity cost to mass recruiting or mass supply work in the shape of higher risk missions or ignoring missions and letting advent strength in the region grow.

Surveying the Haven counts as 4 staff on intel if I remember what I read on ufopedia. So in the early game with only one Haven, you might be able to scrape by on that 4 intel worth to have sufficiently long mission heads up for infiltration if you work supplies or recruitment, but it rapidly goes sour to neglect intel.

[nephilimnexus]

What Heau said and I'd like to add that there is also, not surprisingly, a bit a RNG element added in at the end as well. The thing to remember about LW2 is that you're not supposed to attempt every single mission that pops up in front of you. I've had missions show up that started with less than six hours before hitting their deadline. Sending in even one soldier would have left me facing 30+ enemies due to have less than 10% infiltration. This is the game's way of saying "Don't even think it, bub" and "Try putting more peeps on Intel in this area."

Scientists (if you can spare them) give a huge intel boost when assigned to a sector. Also, intel accumulates over time. I don't just mean the intel pile up in the corner of your screen. I mean the hidden intel levels for that region that aren't shown to you. Point being that your infiltration timers should (as an average) get longer as your spend more time working that zone.

Meaning that even if you've got eight rebels doing Intel, a new scientist and your Avenger all working in a zone you can't expect good, long mission timers on day one. Any missions that do show up on the first few days will probably have those annoying short timers that make them impossible. Don't get frustrated - like an old car getting up to speed, it takes a while for the full impact of all this intel farming to kick in. After a week or so you should start getting much better timers and after two weeks you can probably even start backing off on the amount of units you've got gathering because by then you're in 5th gear, metaphorically speaking.