Balancing insurgencies can be tricky. There a lots of ways to go about reducing the speed or frequency of insurgents recruiting civs at civ Recruitment HQ’s. Some of which I prefer over others.

If you reduce the amount of civ spawns around the map, this will make it so there’s less civs to recruit (this is my least favorite way so I only do this gradually if I have to, and do it at the end).

You can raise the amount of civs needed around an objective that need to be present to be recruited in the Military Commander module for the insurgent commander (this is my favorite first choice. Default is 2, raise this number to slow down recruitment).

You can lower the amount of simultaneous objectives in the insurgent Military Commander module (I do this a lot too. Default is 10, lower this number).

You can reduce the amount of preplaced “installations” in the Commander module (I like the “low” setting, but you can go as low as “none”).

You can lower the amount of enemies that spawn on mission start to a really small number, smaller than you’d want a few hours later, the idea being that as they recruit they’ll get to the number you initially wanted. You really don’t need that many.

Example: AuTigerGrad and I made an Insurgency on Kunduz where we hand placed and virtualized a small number of insurgent groups. I actually ended up raising the amount from 14 or so where he had it, to around 25 (give or take) starting insurgent groups, which after an hour or two double in size, which is pretty decent for a 5x5 map (if anything I could probably stand to delete a few of the groups in the editor and still have plenty to do).

Mission is here if you want to see:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1456510242

What I like to do is build the mission, then let it run for a few hours, then debug virtual AI and see how big they’ve grown. If not to my liking, I’ll adjust and run the mission again.

I have lots of other insurgencies you can check out too and open in the editor and see how I set up if you want.