All of the farming in this game is rather supply expensive, since you'll need to resupply your infantry/vehicles, so it's good to have either an extra supply vehicle or two and an armoured carrier nearby infantry. Plus not all farming gives you vehicles to sell, you just trade supplies for EXP basically.

This means that for Realistic difficulty some places are not viable, due to you having supply consumption much higher than usual. For Hard it's all good in my opinion.

Most enemy spawn locations are also not infinite it seems, since it'll become slower and slower to spawn enemies after a while and then stop completely (or I didn't wait long enough for the next spawn).

Why would you want to farm?

Well, I'm not sure. You want to get most of your troops to level 3 basically, since it improves them by about 50% in every department (health, accuracy, fire rate, damage for some weapons and so on) and doesn't take that long to get to. Plus on level 3 you get all the important perk slots open to polish the role you intend the squad to fill.

From level 3 to level 5 it's more than double the amount of EXP you need to get to level 3 and it's the next 50% increase overall. Like take your tank crews for instance - to get to level 3 they need merely 3000 EXP and for level 5 they need 12000 in total. And since light/medium/heavy vehicles(tanks) give only 30/50/250 EXP respectively... Yeah, the earlier you get them to level 3 the more comfortable you'll be in my opinion.

Farming form level 4 onwards will be quite slow due to EXP needed and you are better off just getting that EXP from the actual gameplay in my opinion.

Some general notes:

In general in terms of maximizing weapon loot you want to get to 6 dedicated looting heavy weapon squads asap (in Santa Fe you can get about 6 or more heavy plasma machineguns and these are kinda rare in the first half of the game, plus they are expensive) and maybe 4 marksman squads to get them barrets/laser loot. Don't upgrade them, don't give them weapons, let them drive some supplies vehicles or something - their only job is to take the loot with them and drive any new vehicle you may get from a mission.

You can also use mercs for looting, if you want, since they can loot LMG, sniper rifle and rocket launcher and thus basically pay for themselves.

Important note: you do not need to re-pick the weapons that you dropped when a person holding them died - these weapons will return to your global inventory if the squad had at least 1 member left alive when the missione ended and if nobody touched their dropped weapons. So if your 3 people marksman squad with laser rifles had 2 dead, but 1 was left somewhere safe till the map end - you'll be given these 2 laser rifles back automatically, if you didn't try to pick them up with any squad.

On which squads to avoid getting much EXP - the most useless squad is technicians in my opinion. You'll need maybe 3 to get to level 1 and take tank piloting to loot any bradley you may get before Vega (1 in abiquiu, 2 can be bought form Taos, 1 in tortuga, 1 in chihuahua) and from there you'll get professional tank crews. Plus you may want 1 who's gonna be your heli pilot, if you are going to use movement heli. Well, you maaay want to keep one on foot just to use airstrikes, but they are avaliable what - 2 times in the whole campaign?

If you want someone to drive ordinary vehicles and actually be usefull if they are not driving - level up your heavy weapon squads, rpg squads or founder drivers. At least they could use the EXP on something decent, since techinicians have kinda bad perks (mines do not matter in the campaign for the most part, EMP can be done by rangers/guerillas, bombs on legs is also irrelevant in the campaign, smoke can be given to a lot of squads, and fast deploy is useless since you'll redelpoy really small amount of times during missions). They can't even loot any gun from the ground, man, useless I tell you.

Important note: You squads do not get EXP if they are passengers to my knowledge. So if you place C4 or mines and then placed the squad to chill in some vehicles, like Armored Carrier - they will not get EXP from their C4/mines kills. Also Armored Carrier turrets kills do not give EXP for the same reason.
After some patches and DLCs this is no longer the case. Armored Carrier gives turret kills EXP to the first squad that's crewing it, making it perfect to level up militia for instance or any other unit that you are scared to throw in battle straight up.

Important note: You do not get EXP form hurting allied units, so you can't just infinitely farm Founder reinforcements in Oklahoma for instance.

How much EXP you get from killing things:


How much EXP you need for levels:

• (EXP) Rio Grande, tutorial second mission.
  
  If you don't get the doc to patients there's a thin stream of homunculi/wolves/swarm drones that'll come at you.
  
  Basically place your infantry in the house the game tells you to (there'll be occasional defenseless legion platform spawning from up north, so infantry will deal with it nicely even with just grenades). For most economy and risk - turn off rifle ammo, since LMG will does more damage, and rocket launcher will deal with platforms.
  
  After the initial wave is dealt with - send snipers and rangers to about midway between you and Lazlo, since the enemies will be occupied by immortal Lazlo and there'll be only infantry attacking there. Place your vehicles so that they'd just support your troops in times when they can't deal with the enemies fast enough. When it's time to rearm ATGM (try to attack only spiders with them after the initial wave with armed platforms, since these are dangerous and ATGM is costly to rearm) - use your humvee, since you'll need stryker to provide ammo for infantry/rangers.
  
  https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3456991926
  https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3456992015
  
  I tend to turn my vehicle guns off when it's an unarmed platform from the north and just let infantry deal with it (you can even grenade the hell out of it, since you don't have a use for grenades anyway), since it's rather difficult to get infantry to high level with no danger to them.
  
  When it's Lazlo's time to shine - you'll have about 3 waves of terminators that you can kill, but after that it's automatic game over, so after 3rd wave just go and end the mission. Best place to camp in my opinion is just above the cliff, but you'll probably run out of ammo if you farmed before, so just evacuate.
  
  https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3462892501
  You can get some troops to level 3 even here already. And Haven base has a convinient supply depot just around the corner.
  
  
• (EXP) Haven base.
  
  Man. Those. Turrets. I can't stress it enough. Place a tank a bit closer to the enemy to draw fire from MLRS and other bad things and wait till game triggers an NPC retreat. Then place your own troops in ASAP. On the left path park your ATGMs on the cliff across the water to snipe vehicles, plus some humvee with fast firing gun (since bomber drones will come for you). Game changed a bit from the release I guess and now tanks can come from the right path (don't remember them from there the last time I played in 2024), so it's somewhat effective to place all your remaining vehicles facing that direction. When your turrets will no longer be able to hold their ground - retreat your tank to the right cave that'd be now open, since there's a supply post there.
  
  Don't use mines, since they will steal your EXP. But if you really want to have an easy time in the mission - mine only the right path, but mine the hell out of it. The tanks that'd spawn there will have their tracks damaged/destroyed and thus will block the path for everything else except infantry. And since there's a limited amount of Legion vehicles that can be on the map it seems - you'll just have to deal with infantry this way. Plus you can somewhat snipe the stuck tanks with ATGMs from that opened up cave with a supply depot.
  
  If you play on realistic - there's some wave from the left at one pretty early point that has two platforms with 20mm rotary. Try to snipe them with your ATGMs ASAP - I tend to place my infantry just below the northwest supply point to farm some homunculi and these platforms can chew these infantry in about 2 seconds with no care even if they are prone, so it's really dangerous.
  
  Also don't self destruct - you'll get more enemies to shoot in the next mission.
  
  
• (Loot/EXP) Abiquiu.
  
  Double cross Balzano and kill the Legion outpost at the same time, don't call Movement reinforcements until you've dealt with almost every enemy. Tons of loot/extra squads and the most of EXP this way.
  
  Balzano goons that come after the map is over are easy - close the hatch on the Abrams and drive it in. It'll tank every explosive they have, while your snipers can pummel them from afar. No other weapons can scratch Abrams, so just scout with it to find some assault rifle/shotgun enemy troops there.
  
  Remember that lazer sniper rifles and 50cal can actually explode unarmoured vehicles very quickly, so it's best to use your defaul snipers to make them go on fire. They are crewed with snipers tho, so if you play on Realistic and your squads are not fast enough it'll lead to casualties.
  
  You can also Cheese the hell out of Movement vehicles - fire somewhere real close to light howitzer with your Abrams HEAT shell and force the crew out. After that use the same trick (with howitzer this time, since Abrams HEAT easily destroys light vehicles) to obtain eeeeverything else - you'll have just enough drivers to take all the vehicles without maybe a couple. This will give you HUGE boost in movement points right at the start of the game.
  
  UPD: Turns out that you rangers can do the Cheeze cheeper, faster and more controllable. Hand grenades and grenade launcher seem to fire out vehicles quite a bit more efficiently. At least they cannot miss 10 shells one after another wasting you about 700 supplies - 1 shell cost 70 supplies to rearm, while 20 grenades cost 80 supplies. You'll probably need around 10-40 grenades to fire out each vehicle here, so just turn everything but grenades off and go ham.
  
  https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3176957358
  
  There's also an option to just run away and do a hidden mission, but that'd mean that previous farming was for nothing mostly since you loose your squads.
  
  
• (EXP) Santa Fe.
  
  Try to have EMP before the map on your ranger squad - it'll make storming buildings at the first and second points tons faster and easier. If I recall you get a guerilla squad from Movement Outpost hidden mission that has EMP already (it's as if it was the intended way of progression, huh).
  
  The moment your ally start deploying light platforms to the left building block - steal them with your vehicles and take them elsewhere. Otherwise they'll 100% die to tank convoy and you won't get them in this case (one of them has 20mm rotary). Same thing with the 20mm rotary your ally place near the first point - it's in a bad place, so it will be sniped either by tanks, or by that ATGM spider that spawns at the upper-right at some point.
  
  After map is over the building block to the left will be constantly under attack by thin stream of terminators and some random spider from time to time - just sit in the buildings (if you didn't change Pastor's gun it's even better). There's also some very random wolfpacks spawning from the right and roaming the map, but they give eh amounts of EXP.
  
  The prison is best stormed from the north. Just smoke the hell out of everything there and order your infantry to storm the building - you can then order them to storm other buildings in chain. I usually split my infantry in two forces that go at the same time to the left and to the right building.

• (EXP/Loot) Tortuga.
  
  Honestly people discussed this map to death already. Just C4 everything particularly dangerous, collect everything you can before the actual fight starts and move it somewhere safe, like behind the place you need to get your truck to.
  
  Otherwise endless enemy spawn, nuff said. At least it seems endless, since it didn't slow down at me at all. Control the main street and place snipers in the middle tower of the prison, since they'll demolish incoming infantry.
  
  If you want to reliably get vehicles on fire - place some units near the checkpoint that leads to the mayer and wait. When the fighting starts - kill the crew of the cartel tank that wants to get it and take it yourself, then use it's AP shells to put enemy vehicles to fire.
  
  If you want an even easier time - don't capture one of the depots that you need to capture with the first wave of reinforcements. This way you'll have all the time in the world to clear the map and take positions you want. This method also doesn't allow prison sidemission to start before you capture both depots, so it's another stress moment less.
  
  
• (EXP) Bridge map.
  
  Game tells you to hold bridges - don't listen to this. Camp around "Danger" spots and kill everything before they have time to react - the lower right corner of the map has buildings just near spawn points, so just man them. RPGs can just make vehicles go on fire, so it's useful to have them. This way won't give you much salvage, but trust me, you are gonna get all the salvage you want from the next map.
  
  I had a twin light plasma cannon heavy platform on this map just for fun and it can easily hold a couple of upper spawn points by itself. Just don't park anything right in front of "danger" signs, since this way enemy will be able to shoot before you can deal with them, even if your units reaction is instant - camp a bit to the sides.
  
  When you'll need to protect civvies - place something anti-infantry there (rotary cannons or minigun) and forget about it, or just mine/C4 the hell out of the place. For me two plasma shotguns guerilla squads and one light platform with 20mm was enough to hold it easily.
  
  No real need to kill the command center this way, since you'll farm more.
  
  
• (Loot/EXP) Chihuahua.
  
  Same old - refuse to do what the game wants you to do. Actually don't hold the points and camp in the buildings outside of them. The first one, near the barracks will spawn only infantry, while the other one will spawn a vehicle and some infantry. Again, RPGs will just fire light vehicles, so you can steal them for yourself. This one is the most chill, since you can just place your people and move away if you don't want vehicles.
  
  Just remember that if you don't want anything to spawn there during the main storming action - capture them before liberating the campus, since after that you won't be able to stop reinforcements from there anymore.
  
  Farm spot in the Barracks:
  https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3456198164
  
  Farm spot near the campus:
  https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3456198781
  
  Honestly the best farming spot in my opinion. You can get A LOT of vehicles with no effort and danger whatsoever. I started Chihuahua with 2 humvees and look what I got from camping 1 RPG/militia/snipers combo near campus for about 1.5 hours:
  https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3456263091
  
  Got to lvl 3 with my militia from lvl 0, got to lvl 2 with RPG and snipers. Plus some random squads got to level 2 since I was rotating newbies there. And it costed me maybe 1 casualty and about 8k ammo supply. Small trick - let that RPG squad have only default launchers before mission - it'll scavenge one RPG and the other will still be LAW. After said LAW fires you will never have a situation where you fire 2 rockets at the same time, potentially blowing the vehicle up.
  
  Upper-left corner of the map can be easily cleared with a Heli, since there's no AA there. I like to board some snipers and anti-infantry HWT on it, make mortar Humvees burn and then just land. Once you clear the island you can then use Heli to fire out other Humvee just across. Just don't go north since there's plasma HMG Humvee there that'll demolish your Heli.
  
  
• (EXP/Loot) Vega.
  
  Simple - don't capture the eastern road. The enemy will send waves with 1-3 vans/technicals (with sometimes 1 light platform towed as well) or 3 infantry squads or truck with heavy platform at random attacking either central church, central-south gas station or the roads near garbage piles. There'll also be waves of about 1-3 infantry squads attacking gas station from time to time and going through northest street towards Kelso's HQ.
  
  There's a particular strong building closest to the easter road spawn that's filled with enemies. Try to capture and man that, since a couple of HWTs with plasma recoilless and snipers can hold there quite successfully.
  
  Heavy platforms can make it difficult to farm here, but otherwise waves are frequent enough to be worth it. Getting salvage from this is dangerous since there's a lot of snipers everywhere and reinforcements pop up suddenly, so mainly it's an EXP farm. Enemies do not even have that much in terms of barrets and such.
  
  If you didn't bring your own light artillery and kinda want to try and steal ally vehicles (HEMTT are a juicy target to grab for instance) with it - in the lower bottom corner of the map there's a lightly protected one, you can clean it with a Heli even, if you want to.
  
  https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3456543535
  As you can see - a lot of enemies can be farmed before you'll be bored. But it comes at a cost, literally - I've spent about 58k in ammo supplies, every supply option was drained and maybe 3-4 vehicles were salvaged from the enemy.

From about this time you'll be swimming in SMAW rocket launchers everywhere and will probably struggle to think how to get all of them, since you will not have a lot of RPG squads. You'll probably want these squads to pull their weight in battle, so you don't want to leave them with defaults to pick launchers up.

Well, there's a little trick you can do before going on the new map. Place old RPG in the first slot, while something better (SMAW or SRAW) should go in the second slot. This way when you order the squad to pick something up - they will trade the RPG for it.

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3545377772
Works the same way with sniper rifles, but since we only have 2 in game (barret and laser) it's a bit more difficult to do, since you don't have a lot of laser rifles to switch for them. Again just place the laser ones in the second/third slot, while the first one should be barrett.

Do not try to use default weapon on the first slot for this. If you try to leave the first slot empty - game will just move whatever you have on the second slot to the first one and thus you'll not be able to loot like this.

So while you can't loot both weapons at the same time you can at least work around it a bit like this.

• (EXP/Loot) Oklahoma
  
  Honestly from this point you'll fight Legion, and they bring good EXP by themselves, plus farming them is dangerous on hard+ difficulties.
  
  Oklahoma here is just constantly spawning enemies from obvious direction, so get comfortable and farm till your ammo will start to run out. The easiest to farm place is the Tank one. For instance you also can just C4 the Legion tank spawn there and get your rangers/guerillas a quick couple of levels for very cheap supply cost/danger.
  https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3457622680
  
  You can also surround this spawn with RPG squads or plasma recoilless HWT squads or anything anti-tank really.
  
  Remember that you can steal Abramses/Bradleys and every vehicles from your ally like you could in Abiquiu. Light vehicles can be damaged enough with light howitzers/mortars and maybe grenade launchers, while heavy vehicles can be damaged with heavy howitzers/paladins.
  
  
• (EXP?) Fort Worth
  
  Fustercluck of a map. At the beginning there's a small useless farming option of just destroying infinite resupply vehicles that go to the Legion base. It's not really worth it in my opinion, since they give pitiful EXP (50 each I think) and you don't have a lot of ammo for this.
  
  You can theoretically farm the spawn points again, just using tons of mines and C4, but it's never enough from my experience - whenever I thought that this particular ammount of mines (about 10 full deployments from engineers) is enough the game spawned just more tanks from there.
  
  One good point is that the north spawn points can be easily covered since you can place your tanks/platforms/bradleys from the sides, looking at the spawn point. It's the south spawn points that are a headache and require mines/C4.

After that there's no real need to farm at all. Even Fort Worth is not farm worthy in my opinion.

Well, that's it. If you wanted to get some bump in EXP, but didn't know where to camp in this game - here it is.

There sure are other spots, but there's not a lot of reasoning to use them in my opinion. For instance Mt Taylor has a nice farming option (C4 everything, kill everything in the Legion base and camp the spawn from the sides, plus you can rotate your troops freely), but there's really no reason to do this at this point in the game, plus it's only for your Movement troops.