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I think that it's really cool that you get a list of resumes before you hire soldiers now, so you can pick the ones you want the most or whose skills you need. However, it makes it very hard to hire a "bad" soldier, which I miss from X-Com, where it wasn't even clear if your soldiers were professionals or hobos given guns. I remember getting someone with Bravery 10, or Strength 20, or some other poor skills, and thinking to myself, "Oh look, a door opener. Guess who isn't living to see their first paycheck?" When hiring, could you implement a system to get a random soldier? They would arrive in just one day, but you wouldn't know their stats. It would really be for something like a Chinook was shot down and you need replacements...fast. Maybe the pool would be lower for stats, and very rarely be above 55. I think the potential for a quick replacement team with terrible stats would easily make up for any game balance issues from them arriving two whole days early.

Are those moddable? And by that I mean ratio of which type of soldier you're likely to get. From which country, which sex ,etc... ATM it looks like the male/female ratio is 50/50. I want to change that. Possibly even the specific stat range for each sex. Also, possibly ratios of different nationalities.

This could also belong in the modding sections, but it is a modification of the stock game necessary to make modding this possible. What I mean by this? - The abiltiy to set the ratios (percent chance) for different soldiers to appear. Right now every nationality and sex has hte same chance of poppingup. Let's say I want to set the male-to-female ratio to 4:1 (thus, that for every female soldier on the rooster, there are 3 males). Lets say I want to set the US to everyone else ratio as 2:1 - the ability to set stat ranges for specifc soldeir groups. For example, I want to make all males stronger then, and all females having better reactions. Right now it seems all stats are in the 40-60 range for everyone. Possibly even set them on a national basis if on is so inclined... AFAIK, these things are hard-coded so far.

Okay, so you obviously are trying to avoid the hire/fire cycle that dominated some games of X-COM, where people were hiring massive amounts of soldiers only keeping those who fit certain requirements while getting rid of everyone else, or just using them as cannon fodder. Providing a pool of soldiers is one way of avoid this behavior, but it is far from perfect. There is however a better solution. Allow the player to specify target attribute scores for recruitment. And vary time/cost of recruitment based on how broad or specific the target is. The player will end up with the soldiers he deems worthy of combat sooner or later anyway, so you might as well allow him to be more specific about it, thus giving him more control over what he gets for his money. You can compensate this by increasing the time and cost of finding premium soldier material. As said above, recruitment time and cost as such should vary depending on how specific / high the target attribute range is. If you want everyone who can hold a gun, that ain't gonna cost a lot and it can be done substantially faster than looking for the few people out there who can blow up an alien's ship with two hair pins and a spent battery, while still able to hit the fly sitting on the head of the alien in question from a mile away. Just an idea.

First I will start off by saying so far the game is looking great! I think this game will still do well despite Firaxis's Xcom Enemy Unknown being released Oct 9th, due to the access to beta. Also, the preservation of the basics of combat and action points remains so the game play is familiar and already well loved. The "modernization" of the new Xcom by Firaxis is yet to be seen if it will be considered a true xcom game by fans. I'm holding my fingers crossed that you guys do well on this game and decide for the first major upgrade/expansion/sequel of the game will include multi-player in much the fashion of xcom tts. I know its been said that multiplayer is not in the scope of the current game and that the general feel is that it will add nothing to the game, but I feel that it is one of the things that will keep the game alive and kicking in the long run along with the obvious of good game play and modding capabilities. Obviously I don't speak for everyone but I do believe that many will agree with me. Multiplayer in this fashion even is not balanced for "fairness" is still a load of fun for the alien player even when its a generally speaking loosing battle. Now to get actually on topic. One of the things things that has bugged me about the game currently is the combat experience flavor text on the recruits. The game takes place in 1979 and soldiers with different nationalities can have combat experience in Afghanistan. The ONLY soldiers that should have Afghanistan combat experience are Soviet Soldiers from the Soviet invasion of Dec. 1979. In the current game world technically no one at the start would have combat experience in Afghanistan. As a flavor note with the Red Bear having to deal with all the UFOs the invasion may not even happen. I would start to compile a list of possible combat experiences with date ranges for soldiers of different nationalities in this thread if it is something of interest. **Edit: Sorry I just realized I posted this in the Goldhawk general forum instead of the Xenonauts.

I thought I would create a topic on this subject, what makes you attached to your soldiers? How can this be encouraged even more through in-game systems/features? Personally I think that getting attached to your soldiers is an important step to getting you seriously hooked on the game and makes you keep coming back to more and also makes you feel scared when doing missions because you are so attached to them! Soldier progression (leveling/stat increases) is of course an important part of this but there are already posts on this subject so that is best discussed there, what I would like this thread to focus on is stuff besides that, more "fluff" material so to speak. An example I could think of is for example your soldiers earning individual awards/medals and creating their own history and/or having their own personality. This shouldn't be something that is forced into the player's face but something you can check up if you are the kind of player that wants to know these things, I'm thinking in lines of Dwarf Fortress here for example where your Dwarfs basically have likes/dislikes as well as any notable action they perform (or injury they get) will be recorded in the background of their guy, this is not vital to the actual gameplay however but it can a lot of times be very interesting to read and will make them feel more "real" Now how much of stuff like this is too much? Is the time needed to add something like soldier history/background etc. etc. not worth it? What do you all think? Personally I love this kind of stuff and I know that a lot of people making Let's Play series do as well. Another example of games adding uniqueness/personality/attachment to your soliders is Jagged Alliance 2, there every character had their own personality and quirks and this made them much more lovable (or hate-able) and thus you got more attached to them... Basically I think that them just being more then just a stat sheet that you min/max would be a good idea but this is just my opinion. What do you all think?

Hi! In the soldier's screen, It would be much easier to see the soldier's attributes if they were measured by colored bars. It's ok to have the number on the far right, but instead of the dots ............... leading to them, colored bars makes it easy on the eye.

So there is one glaring thing that happens in all games related to the Xcom universe from the original, here to xenonauts, and from everything I've read also will be in the new Firaxis game. This same factor breaks my initial Immersion in the game. Or if you prefer the more technical terminology - something that breaks my suspension of disbelief. The item I am referring makes 100% sense from a gameplay point of view. It would DESTROY balance to not be the way it is now. With that being said however here's my issue. When the game starts your troops SUCK. There I said it. They suck. We ARE after all talking about the best Earth has to offer. Apparently we are $%#*ed in every Xcom game. The best of the best soldiers in the WORLD are awful at the start of the game. You can have two people stand next to each other and face the same direction - for example away from the main rear entrance to the chinook. These two genuises will somehow, despite years of specialized training and weapons experience, manage to say shoot EACH OTHER. If you throw grenades (thus far in any game) they clip into nearby objects. Like a box in front of you lower than your waist. How this happens just kills me with laughter every time something like that happens. I mean really? That's the BEST we can come up with? It makes me wish for a comedy movie to come out based on a spoof of this stuff (you know like a bad movie that becomes a classic because it's funny bad... like Tremors). I mean from a gameplay perspective sure, you want your soldiers to get more powerful as they fight aliens, they get more confidence fighting the strangers from other planets. I mean I get that totally. Like I said to do it any other way would break the gameplay balance early on to a degree if your guys were fairly competent (high APs, accuracy etc). That being said I think it's an aspect to these types of games that will always make me scratch my head the first few encounters of every new game I start.

If you send a chinook to a second battle without returning to base your wounded soldiers get healed up, and your dead ones join the fight. Disappointingly, he did not appear to be a zombie or any other kind of undead creature. He did not have any gear other than armour though.

I had a guy come back from the infirmary. The unassigned list says (0), but he is in the list. See? Just a small thing.

So here I'm getting ready to post a note about a German soldier from the "5th Shock Army". Only the Soviets ever used the "Shock Army" designation (and maybe the Chinese, but I digress) so how could a German have served in that unit? Duh, says I to myself, it's 1979 ... the guy's obviously EAST German. Soviet practice was to incorporate Warsaw Pact divisions within Soviet Armies ... which would be like the US putting a British division in V Corps. They figured letting their satellites have all-East German or all-Polish corps and armies would be a bad, bad thing. You guys are on TOP of this! So, any chance of a Czech? With their consonant-rich names? (Heh.)

I have come into this habit of naming the Sargeant you get at the beginning after myself. I die alot

It would be a nice idea to have facial expressions in each soldiers personal screens. You could have new recruits looking clean shaven and raw, veterans with stubble etc. , and their expression would instantly indicate what state they are in (panicked etc.). This could maybe even be animated. The unique art style was a key feature in the original.

I wonder if we could have minimum age experiences by having a field in the experience tag that sets the minimum age for a soldier to have fought in that war. i.e. <experience minAge="26">Vietnam</experience> I'm guessing a soldier's age is generated before his regiment etc. when he is constructed so when it comes to selecting previous combat experience, the program checks if age > experience.minAge and if it is, the soldier can get that experience otherwise it discards that experience from the list of possibles.

I think operatives should look more like ghostbusters/scintists/pilots but not like soldiers. It is a special high tech organisation not a stupid army. Current operatives we can see on the screenshots can be used for auxilary forces. Smth like if aliens fought x-com and megapol in x-com 3 apocalypse. This soldiers act independently but on the side of player's operatives and die more or less quickly if they meet serious aliens. I will give a little better explanation: you can meet this auxilary troops when aliens are attacking military base or during some terror missions etc. thy are not a part of your drop team

There have been many (and extensive =) threads on the old forum about how training in general could work. Pretty much everyone agrees that while some in-base training is reasonable, experience through missions should be paramount. So I've been thinking about how exactly the game should decide how much experience / stats a soldier gains from which actions during a mission. The stats we have are action points resilience strength accuracy reflexes bravery missions kills rank 'rank' experience points as a hidden stat (assumed) For some stats it's obvious which actions to assign. Firing guns increases accuracy. Duh. For other stats it's not so clear cut. While it is the obvious thing to attach reflexes to reaction fire during the alien turn, it leaves the issue of overall progression. Firing guns happens a lot in the player turn but also in combination with reaction fire. That leads to a lot more accuracy skillups than there are for reflexes. If important stats just won't go up, that is frustrating and often leads to... Gaming the system / exploits. A soldier should not gain accuracy by silly actions like firing 20 magazines worth of aimed shots at a ground tile in front of him. In JA2, the easiest way to gain strength is to overload your soldiers to several hundred percent of their carrying capacity, ordering them to travel to an adjacent tile (ideally of "difficult" terrain), and immediately canceling the order while the game is still paused. Repeat. Some considerations will certainly apply to all stats, others to particular stats or situations. I don't know what everyone will come up with or in which order so... just gunna have to play it by ear. =P