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New Soldier Recruitment model


Chris

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I don't like the idea of scaling the stats of the soldiers because it takes away from the glory of keeping your guys alive and getting their stats really high if you can just recruit good soldiers later on.

But why would you? If you're that good, you wouldn't need to. And it's not like they are getting comparable stats, it's still 2/3 or so. You could always have a max recruits could reach as well.

I take your point though =]

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I still think if you were going to allow recruitment of better troops it should just be the ability to recruit higher ranks.

Picking up a Sergeant with better stats than a rookie makes more sense than a super soldier rookie.

That way they will have limited progression as well.

In the long run would be no better than any other trooper who had survived a few missions.

Chris has repeatedly said he doesn't want to allow that sort of increase.

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I fully agree with the first post by Chris! This is extremelly smart and usefull system for hiring soldiers!

It is already used in the B-man mod in the game UFO-ET! Very, very, very useful and well this approach to recruitment! Any other system would not be as effective as the one that wants to introduce by Chris.

PLEASE, CHOOSE IMPLEMENT IT IN GAME!

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Hiring LOADS of soldiers at the start of the game will let youi get your hands on the top soldiers immediately, but that just means you'll only have terrible soldiers left for however many months it takes you to cycle through all the soldiers you fired at the start of the game. This means it probably won't be worth the investment of money required to do it.

In the end though, does this mean that any soldier (sub par, non-hired, fired) in the pool will automatically cycle out at the rate of one normal stat replacement per week?

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In the end though, does this mean that any soldier (sub par, non-hired, fired) in the pool will automatically cycle out at the rate of one normal stat replacement per week?

The soldiers in the current "for hire" pool will be cycled out per per standard cyceling rate (not sure what rate this will be, don't think Chris has decided on the final rate). However there won't be any new soldiers generated untill all of the soldiers in the hidden pool has been cycled into the current pool. (The hidden pool is made up out of the generated soldiers that did not fit in the visible pool after you were finished fireing the subpar soldiers. Includeing those you didn't hire in the first place, should any of them end up in the hidden pool)

Did that answer your question?

Edited by Gorlom
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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?

I think It's a great idea, but:

- I'd raise the limit from 12 to 12+X to be able ho have more choice

- I don't like the malus mechanics at all. Instead there could simply be a malus on the funding (Is there already? In that case, a *second* malus) if you lose too many soldiers (this should limit exploitation)

Edited by Nameless1
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Yeah I've pretty much decided what I'm going to do - it's the soldier pool system as described in my last post. I think it adds more flexibility with the hiring and also prevents exploitation, which the two main objectives.
Hmmm. Seems a lot of people are against penalising the player for excessive hiring. That's understandable I guess. The simple adaption to the system would be this:

You have a pool of 12 people, which is cleared and updated every month. If you fire a soldier, he goes back into the pool and displaces a soldier already in the pool. That displaced soldier is remembered, and put in a hidden 'pool' of soldiers which is of unlimited size. When soldiers are refreshed from the main pool (whether due to natural cycling over time or through hiring soldiers in the existing pool) they are drawn from the hidden pool first and only randomly generated once the hidden pool is empty.

That way you can recruit 50 soldiers at the start of the game and cherry pick the best ones if you want, but not only would it be expensive but you'd only be getting the soldiers you didn't initially want appearing for the next four months or so. That would effectively halt the cherry picking that the powergamers used to do, but it won't affect people playing the game normally.

Maybe the thread should be closed.

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The soldiers in the current "for hire" pool will be cycled out per per standard cyceling rate (not sure what rate this will be, don't think Chris has decided on the final rate). However there won't be any new soldiers generated untill all of the soldiers in the hidden pool has been cycled into the current pool. (The hidden pool is made up out of the generated soldiers that did not fit in the visible pool after you were finished fireing the subpar soldiers. Includeing those you didn't hire in the first place, should any of them end up in the hidden pool)

Did that answer your question?

Kind of. I think I narrowed the question down.

If the visible pool is full of subpar recruits (due to rapid hiring), will those visible subpar recruits cycle out without me having to do anything, and get replaced by decent soldiers?

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Kind of. I think I narrowed the question down.

If the visible pool is full of subpar recruits (due to rapid hiring), will those visible subpar recruits cycle out without me having to do anything, and get replaced by decent soldiers?

Yes, they will be cycled out and replaced over time. But before fresh "decent" soldiers show up you will have to depelete the hidden pool (which the visible pool will draw from untill it's empty). Soldiers in the hidden pool will not dissapear untill they have been cycled into the visible pool first and then left to deteriorate/cycle out of the visible pool.

PS. @nameless1: What does malus mean? Chris has expressed that he does not wish to make it a cost/economical limit. DS

Edited by Gorlom
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