New Soldier Recruitment model

[Chris]

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?

[Drayd]

I like the idea of being able to see your soldiers before you hire; as with all top special forces they don't just get sent random recruits. Best of the best etc.

The only issue I can see with penalizing people for hiring too many recruits is you could get stuck in a downward spiral; e.g. you lose all your soldiers in one engagement, go rehire, new soldiers have lower stats due to penalty, lose again.

You could have a minimum base level of skill, and reward those who don't lose many soldiers by having recruits with higher basic stats. E.G. higher reputation results in more people applying to join, meaning better selection of recruits.

[SmilePic]

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?

Wouldn't it needlessly hurt hiring defense squad for additional base?

[peren]

Wouldn't it needlessly hurt hiring defense squad for additional base?

That's when you have to think farther ahead. If you feel that you are going to build a base soon, then you start hiring a month before hand. That way you interact with the hiring process more often without making it boring. If you suddenly need alot more people, then you shouldn't expect to draw the best of the best on such short notice. I think even if their attributes are -1 to -4, it wouldn't matter too much because you'll have more people during base defense. Therefore, having weaker soldiers at home would make base defense both more realistic and challenging.

[Jean-Luc]

Normally I'd be in favor of a system that would discourage "scorched man" tactics but SmilePic is right I think. There are periods that see a spike in recruitment that is unrelated to mission fatalities like the above mentioned base defense or when a new base is established and needs to be staffed (the two are closely related obviously).

I think I have a thing that would work and is even simpler. Have a 12 soldier pool, like you said, but let it be finite for the given month (no insta-replacements upon hiring). So one could hire as many guys as they like (up to 12) with no penalties but the pool would get depleted and the player would have to make do with what he's offered that month (take it or leave it).

When a new month begins a new batch of fresh recruits would appear to refill the recruitment pool. The depleting pool would also remove the exploit of spam-hiring soldiers in order to get new ones. If you want to be extra cruel the unhired soldiers could remain with only the empty slots being refilled.

[peren]

Normally I'd be in favor of a system that would discourage "scorched man" tactics but SmilePic is right I think. There are periods that see a spike in recruitment that is unrelated to mission fatalities like the above mentioned base defense or when a new base is established and needs to be staffed (the two are closely related obviously).

I think I have a thing that would work and is even simpler. Have a 12 soldier pool, like you said, but let it be finite for the given month (no insta-replacements upon hiring). So one could hire as many guys as they like (up to 12) with no penalties but the pool would get depleted and the player would have to make do with what he's offered that month (take it or leave it).

When a new month begins a new batch of fresh recruits would appear to refill the recruitment pool. The depleting pool would also remove the exploit of spam-hiring soldiers in order to get new ones. If you want to be extra cruel the unhired soldiers could remain with only the empty slots being refilled.

I like the unhired soldiers remaining idea, but maybe add an option to refresh troop list at the end of the month for money?

[Okim]

Penalties after sixth recruited soldier isn`t the best idea IMO. And honestly there should be a wider choice of personell. Imagine hiring a new base garrison of 10+ people. The next month you`ll get pancies and greenies to refill your losses or even worser - garrison another new base.

A list of up to 50 soldiers that renews over time (say 1-2 weeks). The screen can show up to 10 soldiers for simplicity with prev/next buttons to show remaining recruits. Each week or two some soldiers from the list are replaced, some added and some just removed.

(one of my ideas from another topic).

50 might be too much for a 1-2 week renewal basis... 25-30 might be better. This needs some testing.

Speaking of penalties. There should be another way to punish you for your actions, not just for people being lost. The skills of your recruits should be based on your current progress. The better you fight the aliens - the more and more elite soldiers will be willing to fill your ranks. Get yourself constantly pushed back - and you`ll be have less elite soldiers (representing distrust of funding nations and unwillingless to send experienced troops under your command). The exact number of available recruits can also varry depending on your progress. Cost of hiring soldiers could also be a good way to punish you.

That just my thoughts here

[nutbarz]

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 Like the Idea of Selecting from the list of Soldiers, I think 12 is a good number.

I would like to see a few things:

Allow 12 soldiers a month, with a replacement a week, once depleted you have no more to pick from.

Option - For a Fee, say half the cost of a dozen soldiers, you can host a "recruitment Drive" to replenish that group of 12 within that month. (I suppose if you wanted to get really detailed you could choose to recruit only some of them, and the fee would be half of the soldiers base cost (Essentially making the soldiers cost 1.5x normal once hired)

When a Soldier is fired. They should be Gone from the game. What about making a Severance Package for them as they are fired, the cost could again be half of the soldiers cost. (In my mind is someone wanted to go through all the trouble of hiring and firing to get a super squad, it would cost them 2x the soldiers normal cost to hire and fire someone just to hope for the chance to get a Super Trooper.

So In a Month you can get up to 16 (12 monthly, 1 added per week= 16) soldiers to choose from. Hiring them would incur no additional fees. Monthly Salary for them would be 20,000 (For Example because I cant remember the cost right now)

Once they are gone you need to have a recruitment drive at the cost of 10000 per soldier you are trying to recruit in the same month. I would Suggest limiting this to only be done 2 times a month, for a max of 40 per month (the one a week never changes)** Just thought about making this variable depending on how your reputation is at the time, the worse the reputation, the more aggressive and costly the recruiting drive would need to be.

Now the Soldiers that you fire, well they have families, so you need to provide for them too. So they lose their job, and get half a months salary as a severence package.

So your First 12 soldiers in a month cost you 240,000 (@ 20k each). Your Next 12 will cost you 360,000 (@20K each with 10k recruitment (Signing Bonus), and any you need to fire will cost you 10k each to fire. So if you only have room for 12 soldiers.... it will essentially be 480,000 for 12 in a month beyond the first 12.

One other thing - will transfer times be included for People and Equipment like before?? Just a Random Question

[Sectoid Navigator]

What if the act of screening recruits has a sliding cost associated with it? You get a certain number of potential recruits vetted every month for free. You can increase the number of candidates by paying money. You could also work in a way to increase the quality of the soldiers vetted using this method. If wanted your pool to only contain soldiers in the upper 25% statistically, you have to pay a cost equal to vetting four times as many soldiers under 'normal' vetting procedures. The idea is that your HR guys are having to screen four times as many candidates to create a pool of top-quarter soldiers. Depending on how far you take this, you could even be screening for the top 1%, but each such soldier would cost 100x as much (and would still die if shot in the face with a plasma gun).

[TheTuninator]

As others have noted, I think being penalized for excessive recruiting might be a bit harsh. I know I can easily lose 12+ soldiers in a month, and then things become a downward spiral where I keep recruiting worse soldiers and losing even more as a result.

Seems like it might be better to simply force players to turn to the vagaries of the RNG after having their choice of 12 soldiers; that will prevent people from abusing the select system while also preserving game balance.

[anotherdevil]

I like it but with a couple of stipulations:

negatives only come into effect once you have hired all 12 soldiers (ala Jean-Luc, otherwise how do you explain their stat drops?), with 12 being the maximum you're allowed. But, the list should refill every fortnight or so, not every month

just because a player is doing bad shouldn't be punished. losing the troops (and the experience) is already the punishment, instead some way of limiting the numbers of troops you can hire/fire needs to be found. I do like the idea of fired soldiers back in the list though.

Another option I thought of (before I read your post fully) was some way of hiring depending on a specific skill kind? Suppose you need a high strength guy, you choose the 'find me this guy' option, and you maybe get 3 guys with high strength but random stats otherwise that you then need to pick from. Rather exploitable though I imagine

[Beagle]

I strongly dislike the player's success/failure having an input on the stats of the soldiers. It just feels so wrong. Additionally, I'm very, very against forcing people to play a certain way by penalizing them for recruiting lots of guys, and that's coming from the biggest fan of caring for your soldiers here. If a guy wants to play human wave tactics and the game penalizes his soldiers for it, nobody is benefiting out of that.

To give some more meaningful feedback on this, I never fired/rehired guys in X-Com, it felt cheesy. I strongly believe if you make this system too convenient you may as well just give all the recruits great stats and raise their prices - I think the obvious choice is, as others have said, make the 12-man or 24-man or whatever pool be finite for that month/week/whatever. This gives us a lot of interesting implications beyond just stopping stat cherry-picking - now we have to think strategically about our hiring policies from the get-go. Let's go back to our guy who wants to use lots of dudes - does this limit him? Not at all, he just needs to start hiring everyone he can as soon as possible. He can't hire 50 dudes at once, sure, but if he starts hiring every recruit presented to him from Month 1, he'll have 48 soldiers in 4 months. Maybe you have a plan in the future to use a lot of heavy weapons, but not now - you would start looking through the monthly pools for good heavy weapons troopers and you'd stockpile them for the future.

Of course, to make this less fiscally punishing for people, you could make the pool be added to, not refreshed. As in, Month 1 we have 12 people in the pool, Month 2 we get 12 more and now we have 24, etc. Simulates that the applicants to Xenonauts are being told "we'll call you".

[plucx]

I organised this by topics:

What I did in X-Com and Why:

I almost never kept recruits with low bravery. The associated cost with them is so great, firing them is often the best thing to do for all the party involved. Usually, a Soldier under 30 of morale is not worth the trouble.

Problem with Bravery system in X-COM

The problem X-Com had with the Bravery system is how linear stas are. In real life, soldiers usually improve on the physical side but several lose mental stability. Sadly, in X-Com, Soldiers only improve and the more they break up the stronger their Psych gets.

This is not only a lie but it also encourage player to screen so to never encounter the "morale" system.

Solution to the Broken Bravery X-Com legacy

Being too often in the field and seeing too much stuff mess you up. Human brain can cope with a lot of thing but there is a breaking point for each of us. This is not he case with X-com soldiers. The more gore they see the merrier they get. By implementing a way to make tried and true soldier lose their nerve would make the bravery system a lot more usefull. Player would then need to rotate members.

Where does that link with recruitment?

There could be some stat that are hidden and shown later on. You never know if a soldier will be functionnal in a battle zone until he gets there. Why not hiding the moral stat until he is evalueted in debriefing. Also, an fresh soldier is more stable than one that has been in the field for 6 month in a row. Post traumatic syndrome is not a new thing in the army. In 1970 it was called being shellshock.

Where does that help me in the recruitment UI

I understand your view point on player "abusing" the system. But in a way, they don't want to hire a recruit that is already unstable. You did implemented training to manage basic skills and I loved that idea.

Another argument?

When you see some action you want to cool down a little.

Soldier found posting for other "jobs' usually transfer from a military outfit where they had field experience but almost no leadership background. This is because ranking soldier are worth a lot more to their organisation. Also, when they transfer they usually loose rank but not pay ($$$).

All of this mean that some soldiers are worth more than others.

How Can I use that?

Let say there is 12 soldiers in a month with visible minimal stat. This pool of soldier could only be replaced each month (with a fee?).

In a case where a player lost a lot of guys, he could cope by hiring unscreened staff in another pool in wich the soldier stat are hidden or partly hidden. For example you could see TU, Accuracy, ect. They could also have assymetric stats, IE: Impressive accuracy but does not meet TU requirements.

Losing such soldiers would not impart as great a loss than the other "political" soldiers. They would also cost substiancially less. Limitting the pool could also help in the possible abuses.

A good mixt would have a unique pool where screened soldiers are replaced by unscreened soldiers until next month.

Edited February 3, 2012 by plucx

[FreeClaw]

Hi! First post of mine, be gentle

Sorry if my English is not very good, I have been following the development for a while now and would just like to pitch my idea on how I think recruitment should work.

I think one of the most important part of the original x-com game was how it made you grow attached to your best soldiers, while your troops were always fragile and expendable facing an overwhelming alien menace, forcing you to replenish losses often. All the sequels and clones tried to improve on this formula but I think they all fell prey to either making the system too complex or made suffering losses too painful which encouraged frequent savescumming. If Xenonauts wants to keep the feeling of the original then it should keep troop recruitment quick and simple, letting players micromanage their recruitment process if they desire, without it becoming long and tedious, filled with arbitrary rules.

To achieve this I propose to have a maximum pool of 20-24 soldiers with high variance of skill available to the player. This maximum number should be around or a little over the capacity of the highest tier troop transport. Such a number would give players plenty of soldiers to choose specialists from during lulls, keeping enough recruits available n case a mission goes horribly wrong, but not enough to make the use them as cannon fodder viable.

Have the rate at which new soldiers appear around one new candidate every day or two and have the new recruits cycle out the old ones when the soldier pool is full. Have the new recruit replace an existing recruit in the pool that have been waiting for over a month, with a preference towards replacing soldiers that have the lowest total amount of skill points.

Firing a soldier should put him back into the pool if there are any spaces left (maybe even keeping check of how long their injuries will last in case the player wants to rehire them in case of an emergency)

The player should have the ability to sort among the recruits by specific skills, total number of skillpoints, or by the date they appeared for recruitment. Sorting by specific skills will let players who like to micromanage choose specialists, sorting by total skillpoints will let players quickly recruit the best soldiers available at the time, and sorting by date will help players check on newly available recruits looking for soldiers with specific skills.

This setup would have several advantages. The player would always have a good number of soldiers to choose from, having to resort to picking weaker soldiers if things are going bad. The penalty for exhausting the recruit pool would be the player having to consider skipping missions until enough new people are available. On the other hand if the player suffers only minimal losses and keeps the amount of recruitable soldiers he has available at it's maximum, then he increases the likelihood of more desirable soldiers taking the place of poorer ones, having overall better soldiers available for recruitment over time. This mechanic would be transparent to the player and feel natural, rewarding good play with better soldiers over time, while also keeping enough new recruits coming in to replace losses, benefiting both styles of play, and most importantly, keeping soldiers expandable and not encouraging savescumming after suffering heavy losses.

Overall I’m very much against the idea of applying direct penalties to the stats of available recruits, but I do like the idea of being able to directly hire soldiers when the pool is empty. The hired guy would be weaker then the average soldier you would normally get to choose from and it would cost more as well.

That’s about all I can think of right now, thank you for considering, and keep up the good work!

Edited February 2, 2012 by FreeClaw

[Gorlom]

Normally I'd be in favor of a system that would discourage "scorched man" tactics but SmilePic is right I think. There are periods that see a spike in recruitment that is unrelated to mission fatalities like the above mentioned base defense or when a new base is established and needs to be staffed (the two are closely related obviously).

I think I have a thing that would work and is even simpler. Have a 12 soldier pool, like you said, but let it be finite for the given month (no insta-replacements upon hiring). So one could hire as many guys as they like (up to 12) with no penalties but the pool would get depleted and the player would have to make do with what he's offered that month (take it or leave it).

When a new month begins a new batch of fresh recruits would appear to refill the recruitment pool. The depleting pool would also remove the exploit of spam-hiring soldiers in order to get new ones. If you want to be extra cruel the unhired soldiers could remain with only the empty slots being refilled.

But in Chris example you can hire 16 soldiers without penalty. you're suggesting to limit it to 12? With the motivation that you gave I expected you wanted to be able to hire more then Chris suggestion without penalty?

Is my reading comprehension lacking and if so is it in Chris post or in JeanLucs?

PS. For the record I intensly dislike your system Jean-Luc, I would rather have the current recruitment system then yours. DS.

PPS. Is there any way to give soldiers some jobsecurity so that the player cant fire a soldier for say a week after hireing him or something? Systems limiting the ammount of people you can hire or refusing to refresh feels lacking imo. Maybe have it cost money to fire a soldier (breaking his contract?) DS.

Edited February 3, 2012 by Gorlom

[Jean-Luc]

But in Chris example you can hire 16 soldiers without penalty. you're suggesting to limit it to 12? With the motivation that you gave I expected you wanted to be able to hire more then Chris suggestion without penalty?

Is my reading comprehension lacking and if so is it in Chris post or in JeanLucs?

Not sure but I think you misunderstood Chris' post.

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.

It's 4 guys before the penalty kicks in.

Edit: Oh wait, I get it. Four replacements + twelve starting ones = 16. The main idea was for the pool to get depleted to prevent the hiring/firing lottery. The size of the pool could be adjusted to whatever Chris deems to be balanced.

Edited February 3, 2012 by Jean-Luc

[nutbarz]

I Guess the way I Understood it was that you get twelve in a month and they will replenish at one per week once there is an opening, so hire all twelve, and get one additional a week for the next 4 weeks, so 16 in a month without penalty.

I really dont like the Idea of having abilitiy penalties because you have to staff a second chinook, or want to staff a third base when you have a particularly profitable month and can afford things like that.

[Gorlom]

Not sure but I think you misunderstood Chris' post.

It's 4 guys before the penalty kicks in.

Edit: Oh wait, I get it. Four replacements + twelve starting ones = 16. The main idea was for the pool to get depleted to prevent the hiring/firing lottery. The size of the pool could be adjusted to whatever Chris deems to be balanced.

Isn't Chris idea with the stats penalty already doing that? I'm sorry I just really dislike the depletion system. Id rather be able to hire soldiers that are no more dangerous then plush teddybears or buny slippers then none at all.

Although the best solution imo would probably be to get penalized for fireing rather then hireing.

Edit: what about a stat reduction to the soldiers you keep if you fire too many soldiers? be it bravery because they are insecure about getting to keep their job. or call it stress and reduce overall stats.

Combined with "can't fire for a month" the soldiers you fire are sure to have bonded in some way with the guys you keep especially if they have gone on a mission together (this is just for motivating the idea, not for the game mechanics) Haveing their friends be deemed as inadequat and fired should have a negative effect on the soldiers.

Edited February 3, 2012 by Gorlom

[irongamer]

Talent Scout Missions

Drop your troops in the middle of a city and start chasing down civilians with stun rods. The ones that are most difficult to catch you keep, haul them back to base and indoctrinate them to your cause! Too much? =p

[irongamer]

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?

Talent Scout Missions aside. I don't like the idea of penalizing the player in this way. How about some positive reinforcement? If you complete X number of missions without loosing more than 2 guys or you don't loose more than X guys over X time the recruit pool starts to get better guys showing up or buffing 1 or two guys in the pool? There would have to be a limit of course.

This would require a baseline Xenonaut rating. Say all the stats for a guy adds up to 50 (using some function). Recruits coming into the pool would have the baseline but may be better in some areas than others. Then as you do well on missions or over time some of those recruits get a +10 baseline or new recruits showing up in the pool get a +10 baseline. If you loose too many guys in mission or over time that +10 drops to a +5 and then back to the standard baseline, but doesn't drop below the baseline.

Edited February 3, 2012 by irongamer

[Gazz]

The main issue, that made the hiring / firing from XCOM almost a necessity, was, that in the late game, a soldier with rookie stats was not an asset but a liability.

A one-time Basic Training is not likely to change that unless it's reaaaaally effective.

What could work, is to base the stats of new recruits on the average stats of all the player's soldiers.

There would still be randomness but the base value would be like 66% of the average soldier stat.

The "weekly soldier supply" would all be created with this base value.

By hiring new recruits, the average stats automatically go down - if not by much.

A player who already has a substantial army and is only opening a 2nd base, will not get complete trash because his existing army is keeping the average stat level up.

A player who is just starting out, has no skilled army, and is "fishing for supermen", is not going to get his army of I-Win.

The "dimnishing return" mechanic from the first post could be added on top of that (and I think that's a good idea!) but it wouldn't be quite so painful if your recruits' stats didn't go from "bad" to "runhometomommy" from that.

I think that what this mechanic should do, is affect the "% of average" base value of recruits that are instantly added to the pool as a result of hiring.

It would start at maybe 66% and go down 3-4% for every soldier hired. Low cap of 50% or some other "reasonable" base value.

The "average stats of all the player's soldiers" value is not just queried every single time.

It is saved permanently.

Everytime the value is queried, the game does a

Average_base_value = MAX ( Average_base_value ; Queried_Average_value )

The "average stat progress" of the player is saved so recruits never fall below the reduced (66-50%) percentage of that.

This prevents the player going into a downwards spiral where losses lead to worse recruits that lead to more losses that lead to worse recruits...

Simple mechanics, nothing cryptic and convoluted.

Easy to rationale.

Your first bunch of boy scouts is not going to attract the best of the best.

In the later game, when your force has a reputation in the professional community, you get far more... interesting... job applications.

But if you hire all the good soldiers, you quickly get to the bottom of the barrel.

The smart ones are going to be wondering where all those bodies went before them...

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.

I think the pool should not have a strict size limit.

If 12 soldiers are in the pool and you fire 2 of yours, there are now 14 soldiers in the pool.

If you hire any one soldier from the pool, there will be 13.

Only if it drops below 12, new recruits are added.

That prevents "cycling" the pool too easily. You need a lot of barracks room because to get new recruit offers, you can not just hire 3 and dump them back to the pool because that would merely increase the pool to 15 instead of generating new recruits. Evil. =)

If the player does build a lot of barracks specifically for this purpose - cool beans. He's paying for this ability with base space and upkeep. That's only fair.

For anyone who does not intend to abuse hiring / firing, this is actually an advantage, because it allows parking a few soldiers "outside" while you rearrange things or barracks.

Just be sure to re-hire them before the pool refreshes. =)

Additional idea: (and I like this one a lot!)

For every barracks you build (increasing your army size), the soldier pool size is increased by one.

In the late game with multiple bases and a larger army - and proportionally higher losses - the player would get and need a bigger weekly pool without hitting any penalties.

That's easy to do and scales the entire feature, keeping it sensible as the game progresses.

Edited February 3, 2012 by Gazz

[anotherdevil]

this I like =] Well done Gazz, been missing you =p

[Gorlom]

While its nice that it removes the penalty of haveing to use a fresh soldier (Chris has to comment on if this is even desirable) I'm wondering a bit if theese new recruits wont have superstats after they level up?

When does soldiers get stats up in Xenonauts? at rank promotion or at x missions completed? Is there a cap on how much extra stats a soldier can earn?

Would theese fresh recruits with average vetran stats be able to push past the stats of your veterans or would they not be able to get their stats up because the veterans pushed the fresh recruits stats to the max already?

[Jean-Luc]

I don't know Gazz, wouldn't it basically create two slippery slopes? The strong player (with lots of veterans) gets stronger and the weaker player gets even weaker. It slides towards extremes.

Maybe you're assuming an early to late game progression where the player is supposed to become gradually more and more powerful (like in most games) but in X-Com-like games the amount and quality of manpower tends to fluctuate (sometimes wildly), at least for players who don't reload after every loss.

From a purely gameplay perspective (all rationalizations aside), why should the well off player get even better recruits when he's less likely to need them than someone in a worse position? One might argue that it's realistic and if you screw up you deserve what you get and vice versa but I don't think the game should push the player towards success or failure in such an artificial way.

Yes, the strong player will lower his average by hiring a lot thus preventing uber-rookie spam but the weak player has no such rubber band in this case and spirals further down the drain.

Edited February 3, 2012 by Jean-Luc

[Ziggarius]

I'm going to have think on suggestions for this for a bit. However, I am in agreement with the others that posted that penalizing the player's new recruit's stats for hiring too much and/or losing too many is a poor way to go. Especially for those that have to hire a fresh squad after losing a mission, just losing that squad is enough of a penalty.