Is it bad to leave HQ assault for a while?

[the cup]

Middle of may and have been running missions non stop in my first region and did the network tower so I have access to HQ assault.

advice on the internet says to do it now but I think thats crazy. I've been doing as much missions as I can but I don't have hugely high rank soldiers yet. I have laser weapons unlocked but im completely starved of supplies so I havent been actually able to buy much. my tech is good and I can get mag weapons soon but I dont actually have the resources to make them

The region is on STR 4, and like 16 vigilance or something high lol. my plan is to leave this region and go run missions somewhere else, continue to power up and then when the vigilance cools down and they move troops to my second region return to liberate. Is this a good idea or a terrible mistake? I dont see how trying to liberate with my current stuff is feasible.

[Heau]

Lib5(HQ) removes up to 5 points of strength globally, local STR in excess of 5 will spill to adjacent regions upon liberation. So ideally, you would want to do it with 5+ local STR to have the most global impact.

Standard guerrilla ops missions have a vigilance threshold after which they stop spawning. The hard line where almost everything stops spawning is vigilance 15. Given your starting region is vigi 16, the only infil missions you should get in this region now are smash and grab (2 at most at anytime around the world so there may not be any in your region on a given cycle), UFO precursor missions (bring STR from space to earth), and supply raids(transfer troops from adjacent regions). UFO precursors and supply raids are pretty hard to detect but if you pushed vigi>15 while maintaining STR this low, you probably caught a few and likely have a lot of resistance personnel in the region.

Given that you've already capped the missions you can really do in that region for a while (until vigi drops naturally which is very slow), it's probably wise to queue up lib5 now, expecting that either a UFO or supply raid will go through by the time you reach 100% infil so you get to liberate a region with at least STR5.

If you have say >10 resistance personel in the region, you could consider a scientist advisor and scanning locally with the avenger for a while to maximize local intel gathering. This should let you detect UFOs and supply raids fairly reliably. Since both are full salvage missions, they would replace the income you're delaying from not liberating the region immediately. I would not recommend that to newer players. It's pretty niche.

Both are viable. Although most people avoid scientist advisors beyond STR2 because of the risk of them dying during retaliation missions. If you have <=10 personnel, I'd just recommend to queue lib5 as soon as you have a solid 8 units for it available at once.

If vigilance had still been below 15, since the local STR was still manageable to run missions locally, it's fine (and actually better for aggressive play) to keep it active a little longer to milk that cow dry before liberating. With very aggressive play, which you seem to be doing if you pushed vigi 16 by end of May, you want to avoid liberating a region before you push 15 vigilance because otherwise you risk finding yourself later in the game with too few regions with manageable STR to run missions in and lose some of that snowball from extremely slow supply raid intervals. Basically, you'll have stretched your resistance contacts capacity and intel too thin too quickly by liberating an underexploited region.

To answer a question in your last paragraph, since Vigi is so high in that starting region, if you shut it down so-to-speak (put all but 2 personel in hidding), what will happen is aliens will reinforce the region over and over, up to very high STR. Doing a lib5 with very high STR>5 is fine, its a bit more risk but a lot more bodies to recover. But since the STR in excess of 5 will spill to adjacent region, it can make for a very painful geoscape after the liberation if you wait too long and let it pile up to like STR>=10.

Lib5 late may/early june is doable with advanced laser and no armor tech. You just need to make a slow and methodic progression while doing everything in your power to maintain a concealed shinobi all the way until the last pod. This allows you first strike at longer distances with 2-3 snipers to thin the herd before they reach your group. If you are not comfortable with maintaining concealment extensively, you can use a reaper as backup scout. Losing early concealment is why lib5 tend to become a ♥♥♥♥ show for newer players.

To sum up, its not universally bad to leave a HQ mission sitting for a while. Usually if you keep having a steady source of bodies from other full salvage mission detection, you'll be fine resources-wise while delaying and then you can hit lib5 in a drought. But if you already pushed above vigi>15 in the region and local STR>=5 by the time you launch the mission, there's very little incentive to delay. June-July is a good target for first lib5.

[Nico]

The great thing about liberating a region is that you then can easily gather tons of suplies from that region as you no longer need to do much intel and you get a supply bonus in liberated regions and you can even use an engineer to boost it further. Sadly it will eventually drop by 50% if you extracted too many supplies (aka the region ran dry of suplies) but by the time you usually should already have enough supplies to liberate another region.

Also, Vigilance doesn't increase the difficulty of misisons in an area. The difficulty only depends on the Force level, which is global anyways and defines the quality of the enemies, and the strength is the amount of enemies you will encounter. Vigilance only makes Advent trying to move more strength into the region (which always happens with missions that you can detect and then counter) and if the global vigilance is high enough it will slow down the avatar project and wil cause them to send down UFO's to increase.

Vigilance also affects the types of missions you can find, like, on low vigilance there won't be retaliations while on high vigilance there won't be prison breaks.

Meaning that on the short term waiting will just cause the advent strength to increase (and Force goes up regularly anyways). Only on the long term they will again move strength away to other regions with more vigilance. also liberating a region destroys up to 5 strength in that region (the rest gets moved to nearby regions) so having more stength to destroy might also be nice. also, more strength means more corpses, which is especially relevant on full salvage missions like the HQ assault.

So in theory it's good to liberate the region, especially if it's your very first one as you really need those supplies. but I can see how a lack of proper equipment could be a problem. I guess you could just try to sell some stuff to the black market just to get enough supplies to equip your squad that has to liberate the region?

Also, if you want to avoid unneccessary vigilance, the sabotage a monument mission gives 3 vigilance, it's main purpose is to just generate vigilance, so if you don't want that you can just ignore those missions.

[Heau]

Originally posted by Nico:

Also, if you want to avoid unneccessary vigilance, the sabotage a monument mission gives 3 vigilance, it's main purpose is to just generate vigilance, so if you don't want that you can just ignore those missions.

The vigilance increase from these missions was reduced in v1.2. It went from 1+3 to 1+2 (basic mission completion vigi increase + reward bonus vigi). Additionally, the vigilance thresholds for key missions (VIP rescues for scientists and engineers) was bumped from 6 to 8. The general objective for those changes was to make it more intuitive for newer players. i.e. all playable missions are worth doing now.

There are some rare situations where I may still skip them but as a general advice, I wouldn't recommend new players skip them if they can field a viable team to run them.

[the cup]

Originally posted by Heau:

Lib5(HQ) removes up to 5 points of strength globally, local STR in excess of 5 will spill to adjacent regions upon liberation. So ideally, you would want to do it with 5+ local STR to have the most global impact.

Standard guerrilla ops missions have a vigilance threshold after which they stop spawning. The hard line where almost everything stops spawning is vigilance 15. Given your starting region is vigi 16, the only infil missions you should get in this region now are smash and grab (2 at most at anytime around the world so there may not be any in your region on a given cycle), UFO precursor missions (bring STR from space to earth), and supply raids(transfer troops from adjacent regions). UFO precursors and supply raids are pretty hard to detect but if you pushed vigi>15 while maintaining STR this low, you probably caught a few and likely have a lot of resistance personnel in the region.

Given that you've already capped the missions you can really do in that region for a while (until vigi drops naturally which is very slow), it's probably wise to queue up lib5 now, expecting that either a UFO or supply raid will go through by the time you reach 100% infil so you get to liberate a region with at least STR5.

If you have say >10 resistance personel in the region, you could consider a scientist advisor and scanning locally with the avenger for a while to maximize local intel gathering. This should let you detect UFOs and supply raids fairly reliably. Since both are full salvage missions, they would replace the income you're delaying from not liberating the region immediately. I would not recommend that to newer players. It's pretty niche.

Both are viable. Although most people avoid scientist advisors beyond STR2 because of the risk of them dying during retaliation missions. If you have <=10 personnel, I'd just recommend to queue lib5 as soon as you have a solid 8 units for it available at once.

If vigilance had still been below 15, since the local STR was still manageable to run missions locally, it's fine (and actually better for aggressive play) to keep it active a little longer to milk that cow dry before liberating. With very aggressive play, which you seem to be doing if you pushed vigi 16 by end of May, you want to avoid liberating a region before you push 15 vigilance because otherwise you risk finding yourself later in the game with too few regions with manageable STR to run missions in and lose some of that snowball from extremely slow supply raid intervals. Basically, you'll have stretched your resistance contacts capacity and intel too thin too quickly by liberating an underexploited region.

To answer a question in your last paragraph, since Vigi is so high in that starting region, if you shut it down so-to-speak (put all but 2 personel in hidding), what will happen is aliens will reinforce the region over and over, up to very high STR. Doing a lib5 with very high STR>5 is fine, its a bit more risk but a lot more bodies to recover. But since the STR in excess of 5 will spill to adjacent region, it can make for a very painful geoscape after the liberation if you wait too long and let it pile up to like STR>=10.

Lib5 late may/early june is doable with advanced laser and no armor tech. You just need to make a slow and methodic progression while doing everything in your power to maintain a concealed shinobi all the way until the last pod. This allows you first strike at longer distances with 2-3 snipers to thin the herd before they reach your group. If you are not comfortable with maintaining concealment extensively, you can use a reaper as backup scout. Losing early concealment is why lib5 tend to become a ♥♥♥♥ show for newer players.

To sum up, its not universally bad to leave a HQ mission sitting for a while. Usually if you keep having a steady source of bodies from other full salvage mission detection, you'll be fine resources-wise while delaying and then you can hit lib5 in a drought. But if you already pushed above vigi>15 in the region and local STR>=5 by the time you launch the mission, there's very little incentive to delay. June-July is a good target for first lib5.

OK, I think from what you say I might sit on it for another month and see if I can advance enough in tech and income to pull together a squad that can confidently take it out on STR 5.

Unfortunately as soon as I revealed the HQ I got a chosen intel retaliation which im going to have to send my A and B team and almost certainly will give me some wounds with long recovery times.

The main thing I was worried was a lot of guides make it sound like you are catastrophically behind if you dont liberate by X month. I hoping I could leave that region to go cold and then take it out on STR 2/3 but I see your point that it could to lead to a lot of spillover of strength and headaches.

I'm playing on commander and what has sunken my campaigns most of the time is not being strong enough to defend against the chosen avenger assault. Its usually corpses and science rather than supplies that sink me. This time I have way more scientists and I will try and attempt more fully salvage missions.

[Heau]

Lib5 mission difficulty doesn't scale remotely as much with local STR as timed missions or other full salvage missions on small maps. Even at like STR12 with over 50 enemies, the largest pods are pods of 8 like the raindow pod. And the map is so large that extreme caution can generally manage to have a single pod at a time, 2 at most.

Since it is a mission without a timer and the maximum will that you can lose on a mission is 1/3 of units' max will, you can super slow play it to make sure you never or almost never engage more than 1 pod at a time, a luxury you don't have on a timed mission.

There's a learning curve as with anything else. I think I was still running it with 9 people in my early legend playthroughs for perceived safety.

June is a great target for first lib5 but I've had weird games where I would catch supply raids, ufos and troop columns all day and delayed lib5 until september on legend and still did ok. However, if you aren't getting early full salvage missions for bodies, you kinda want to press on an early lib5. Getting drone corpses for skullmining and t2 gremlins really snowball your geoscape just because of how much intel gathering it contributes.