Can someone explain why recruits hired at my base or received as a reward for a mission have fewer attributes than those who start or are hired at havens?
Is it “real hardcore” or old-school design?
Because those base recruits are basically nobodies from your base that you haven’t fielded in combat, whereas haven recruits have presumably been in combat before, lore-wise I guess.
So the haven recruits are higher level from the get-go and have higher stats. Not that it really matters, because eventually you’ll just make some training facilities in your base and you have bunch of haven recruits sitting in your base gathering exp until they are lvl7.
Starting recruits are “nobodies from your base that you haven’t fielded in combat” too. Why are they better?
“Base recruits are worse then recruits from haven” is same as " No one will recruit recruits from base".
If no one will recruit recruits from base, then making recruits from base is useless wasting of time.
I mean, you dont have to recruit anyone from your base if you don’t want to. Most people do, because those recruits are easily available.
And the recruits from base aren’t any weaker than any other recruits, because their maximum potential is equal. In the lategame, you want to have them maxed out anyway. If you hire “stronger” recruits from havens (which are more expensive), you still have to level them up and as soon as they level to 7, they are about equal in strength as base rookies when leveled to 7.
The first rookies you get indeed do have higher average stats at level 1. This is presumably so that your first team has easier time to deal with all the stuff that it is going to be facing soon.
The bigger issue isn’t really how strong the recruits are at havens or anywhere else (because you can level them up passively with training centers), the bigger issue is that leveling them up to their max potential is extremely tedious process regardless of whenever they come from havens or elsewhere because their progression is maxed at lvl7 and 120 SP in total.
One Haven recruit easily costs more than a base recruit + training facility. As soon as you find your second base, you can get living quarters there and pump out training facilities there if you’d like and station new recruits there as well. Even then, you’ll eventually be frustrated at how much effort it takes to get more SP past lvl7.
The current problem isn’t really how recruitment works, the current problem is how much effort it takes to level up rookies. Only easy way to do it is spamming steal research missions (which can be done in 1-2 turns with infiltrator + frenzy priest), and legitimate ways on the other hand will drive you insane because you only get 12 SP per match.
So to me, it sounds like you’re still in the early or midgame, and you’ve just begun assembling your second team. You’ll face far bigger problems eventually with doing that, especially once you want to assemble your third and fourth teams.
My tip is, might wanna drop the insidious attitude. You’re making far too many assumptions based on inexperience. If you’re experienced in the game, you don’t care nearly as much about how good the rookie is when you hire him, you care much more about its class and perks. If you got good perks with a good class, you want that rookie really bad. And havens usually are not preferred source for rookies unless you want a specific class (such as frenzy priest) without having access to it otherwise. Haven rookies are just really expensive and not generally worth if you can avoid them.
No. Isn’t.
They have less at start. They get same with levels. So theyr potential is weaker.
PP should have unlimited default weapons and armor which you can’t scrap. Otherwise it’s just a hell to have a second team after hero difficulty as everyone is naked or not have weapons and game is way harder faster… your second team won’t survive to lvl up…
Recruits don’t get any bonuses when they level up, the only thing that happens during level up is SP gain (I think?) and they unlock their abilities.
Go and take a look at character panel. The max STR they can have is 30. The max WP they can have is 20. The max speed they can have is 20.
Every recruit you will ever have can only have these as their max stats and they might be altered by perks (except perk alterations are not shown in this panel). So a perk might give you +2 STR but you will not see it here, you will still see x/30.
This is their max potential. What they begin with is absolutely irrelevant.
However, you’re right in one way that I just checked out. If you hire a haven recruit (which still is 2-4x more expensive), overall you have to spend less SP to “max them out”. Which actually is pretty legitimate reason to hire them, but sadly they are overall really expensive too.
But do understand, their max potential is still the same. What this does mean is that you have to spend significantly less time in combat with these recruits in order to get them to their max potential. And by significantly I mean A LOT less time.
Soldiers recruited from Haven are significant stronger than recruits at your base.
If you train PP recruits from level 1 to 7 in training facilities, you only get 20 SP per level, 120 SP at level 7.
Haven recruits start with extra SP, expanded to their abilities, so if you recruit a level 6 soldiers, he may be stronger than your own level 7 soldier already. Also haven soldiers can exceed the stat cap, so i have often see level 6 soldiers with 21/20 agility.
So lategame, you will most likely recruit haven recruits because you save tons of training time to train them.
Currently it’s a bug that causes base soldiers to come with lower stats on lower difficulties. It seems that those are the stats that should come in legendary campaigns. With easier difficulties you should get closer or the same as your starting soldiers.
2 Likes
It is not a shame to play on lower difficulty 
At lower dif, tactical game play is easy for me.
But not for everyone because of lots of different reasons (disability and memory issues being one of them!
).
there isn’t that much difference in number of enemies between legend and hero actually… veteran is also very close in that regard to rookie… But game progression is much faster on Legend
And that is one of the reasons why I completely ignore higher difficulties than Veteran.
The others are lower stats on my starting soldiers and from heavens and also their reduced equipment (when I recruit from heavens then I will have squaddies that are ready to go, for ‘naked’ soldiers I have the PX base recuitment).
Make enemies harder in quantity and/or quality on harder difficulties but for me it is a nogo to mostly make my soldiers weaker without equipment and decrease the time to go only to make the game more stressful than harder.
I liked the way FXcom manged the Legend diffuculty. Yes my soldiers are also weaker but you have also to invest more time to finish a campaign, all is slowed down and not up. In fact, my squaddies on legend were mostly higher levelled at the moment the more difficult enemies are coming up than in lower difficulties because they have done more missions because these enemies are coming later.