Some of your complaints is about the vanilla game, not CI.

But I agree they are not very interesting/enticing missions to play, especially in CI where enemies reinforce infinitely and on every turn (in vanilla, you can actually by default get all remaining supply crates if you wipe out all enemies). Getting 2-4 crates is not worth the risk of losing 1-2+ soldiers (even a Rookie is 45 supplies, which is more supplies than 1 crate) that you can alternatively use on covert ops/infiltration missions or on assault missions. Early and mid game, you are hurting to have enough soldiers to do everything. Late game, there is no need for extra supplies as having control of many regions is big income.

Your suggestion to scale down the mission is good. There is no need for ~10 crates in CI when realistically there is no way to even get more than half of them. Just make it 4-5 crates (the ones that spawn closer to player initial location) and maybe decrease initial pod count by 1 or 2 so the player doesn't have to wait forever to get into position on top of the crates and since Advent gets infinite reinforcements anyway.

Regarding "Why does marking the location of a crate immediately break concealment for the whole team? What action are you performing, exactly, that makes your presence known to everything on the map, even if absolutely no one sees you do it?": I recommend davidtriune's Stealth Objective Interaction mod to fix this. Doesn't work with Reaper's Shadow but you can use Phantom Rangers to mark crates undetected.

Originally posted by ZJwh5S:

Some of your complaints is about the vanilla game, not CI.

Well, I'm not playing the vanilla game, I'm playing with CI. And it changes several things that actually make that combination (supply raid + Lost) worse than in the vanilla game. It should either change the bad parts for the better or (if that's not possible in a mod), at least not make it even worse by adding endless "reinforcements" every two turns.

And some of the things (such as the Lost preferentially targeting XCOM soldiers) can be fixed, at least partially (IMO the Lost should just attack whoever is closest, but even with the game's default AI, they can be made to pick XCOM 50% of the time by changing a single variable - CI leaves that value set to 70% XCOM and 30% ADVENT). I know there's a mod for that, but if CI is going to change the reinforcements, the least it can do is make the targeting vaguely fair.

Originally posted by ZJwh5S:

Your suggestion to scale down the mission is good. There is no need for ~10 crates in CI when realistically there is no way to even get more than half of them.

Well, you can get more than half the crates (possibly even all of them, I haven't really bothered to try), but it requires either:

a) being significantly "overleveled" (having very high mobility and enough HP to take a couple of hits - but by then you probably don't need those supplies anyway), or

b) exploiting the illogical behaviour of ADVENT (they don't start airlifting crates until your squad is revealed, so you can just station 5 soldiers next to 5 crates, mark them, immediately evac, and keep the last soldier hidden or cloaked until the crates are actually airlifted, two turns later (because if you evac all soldiers, the balloons already attached to the crates somehow "forget" to inflate and you get zero crates).

But doing that adds yet another level of ridiculousness to this mission type.

I'd be fine with doing full stealth missions when rescuing VIPs, for example (which is not possible in CI, BTW, because "overthrottling" causes enemies to magically know where your cloaked soldiers are and run straight at them if they're not attacked for a couple of turns), but crates being lifted by balloons (presumably while my own ship hovers above to catch them) isn't really the kind of thing that should be "stealthable".

i think you deactivated on purpose the mechanic of CI that Advent is extracting crates right away.

just as a counter to popular opinions ... i like the crate missions. Mainly for being different and one of the few missions where you need to consider how long you can stay in the field. Especially with delayed and random evac zones this makes for a nice tactical gameplay.

I will share my approach which usually nets one or two crates with minimum risk. I take only two soldiers on the mission, usually a soldier with enhanced concealment and one other, a good choice being the bondmate of the other soldier, if the concealed soldier has a bondmate. The soldier with concealment moves in to pick up a few crates. The other hides as far away from the action as possible. If this other soldier also has concealment ability safety is seldom an issue. I almost always get one crate and most often get two. The concealed soldier evacuates on the turn crates are marked. The second soldier waits for the evacuation option to be available a second time.