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Over the years, various games have featured quite diverse recruitment mechanisms and I have no problem with coming up with more of my own as well. =) I'm mostly talking about soldiers here but the same applies to scientists and engineers, assuming they have an individual skill level at all. 1. Soldiers as wares This is the bare-bones minimalistic approach that was used in X-Com 1+2 and the Xenonauts alpha builds. You buy nondescript "Soldier, 7 pieces" for a constant price. The obvious advantage: it's easy to code and there is no real point in imposing a limit. It's not very exciting, though, and leads to the annoying "hire & fire" routine from X-Com where you would hire 20 soldiers and only keep the 2 whose stats didn't suck completely. So while basically the easiest system to operate for the player, it leads to a boring chore of weeding out the most useless candidates. No fun. 2. The recruitment pool That is how X-Com Apocalypse, Jagged Alliance, UFO-ET, and many other games handled it. The player is offered a selection of personnel and can see their stats before hiring them. 2a. The infinite pool The visible size of the pool is limited to maybe 10 soldiers. Whenever you recruit one, another soldier with random stats is added instantly. There is no advantage over 1. . The player would just hire / fire until he gets all "good" soldiers, making all the effort spent in creating a more advanced recruiting system pointless . 2b. The limited pool If the pool is only refilled / added to every day. (or whatever time frame) The player has to manage these limited (manpower) resources. Instead of buidling a small team with only the most excellent recruits, he might opt to use the training system and hire some of the clumsy recruits, too. That makes the game's training system more valuable and allows the player some leeway in his team-building strategy. Beats the drudgery of hire / fire any day.

Okay: believe it or not I am playing UFOET, UFO AfterMath(very underrated IMHO) and The latest and trendy XCOM (which I feel that other than graphics and tactical gameplay is far inferior to the other two) all at the same time for comparison purposes and yes, I still have the originals (even Interceptor and that horrible First person shooter) and am trying to get the first and original one running on Win 7. In UFOET you can select recruits from about 300 possibles each month and I place my criteria so high that I am lucky to get between 3 and 5/month and sometimes even none. This is done simply by that game and I was wondering if Xenonauts (at which I am still trying to look, so as to have some idea before playing) has any similar setup? Rookies who cannot shoot are a liability in infantry and hardly deserve a place in an elite unit.

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.

help tried to hire new troops for my new base and the hire selection bit was empty also tried to fire some of my original troops to rehire in new base and the hire page still hads no option available are we only able to play with one base???

Probably a silly question, but is there a reason to keep Scientists and Engineers around when they're not researching or building something? Does it cost money when you hire them or only at the end of the Month?

It has been raised numerous times in the forums that the current hiring system is inadequate. It's basically the same as the one from X-Com, which has a number of issues with it. The first issue was that it encouraged hiring / firing soldiers until you had a squad of randomly-generated supermen, which isn't very interesting and distorts the game mechanics too much. The second issue is that you might be looking for a soldier with a high stat for some reason - maybe you want a high-strength soldier to deal with lugging a rocket launcher around or something. The current system is blind luck when it comes to whether you'll get what you need or not. Instead, I'd like to implement a new system as part of the new GUI that will allow the player to manually select soldiers from a pool of twelve soldiers. This pool is always 12 soldiers; every time you hire a soldier another is added to the pool. Possibly firing a soldier would put him back in the pool (displacing the most recent recruit), to stop exploitation. The members of the pool will be refreshed at the rate of, say, one new soldier per week. There will also be a modifier in place to punish people for losing too many soldiers per month. If more than four additional soldiers are recruited into the pool in a calendar month, the sixth will have a penalty of -1 to all his attributes. The seventh will have -2 to all his attributes, up to -4 for the tenth soldier and beyond. What do you guys think about that?

Is there anything stopping me from firing all my scientists/technicians right before payday and hiring some other ones? With the soldiers I can't do that since they get better as they age, but what's preventing me from doing this to the nameless goons in the labs?

i found that the game immediately make scientist/engineer/soldier to be hired and started immediately in the base without some sort of "in transit" waiting period. while items/equipment purchase is not able to test yet because its functunality is not ready. will the development team consider to put in this "in transit" design? it sure adding realism in complexity as well as emphasize on planning ahead, afterall, this is a strategic game. thanks for reading!