Please introduce an “Ocean’s Eleven” element to the game. An aircraft flying all over the world recruiting the best specialists for the job for the Biggest Heist of humanity… Problem is, now I have to recruit a soldier before learning what their unique personal skills are.
Eg. in my last game I had a blast with a berserker - assault guy, having a personal talent for sniper rifles! The clumsy part: I saved the game then traveled 3 ships around recruiting anyone matching the profile, to see if they can also snipe. Once found someone, reloaded and went straight for that guy.
How?
What I wished was this: when a faction becomes friendly enough (25+), they’d also share the “resume” of their recruitable folks, so that I don’t need to abuse the save system.
[5 star variant]: The “Recruitment Overview”: a list with the names, 3 unique talents, and a pin icon of every known available soldier. If the pin icon is clicked the world map focuses on the haven they are located in. (Fetching them is still the player’s task, I merely wish to have better access to information.)
[4 star variant]: “Details” next to the “Recruit” button when viewing a haven. Provides the same information. ((I think)) it’s cheaper to develop, but requires me to click heaven by heaven to find the perfect candidate I’m looking for. Still, it’d get the job done.
Why?
I enjoy combing through the most interesting combinations of available soldiers to tailor a highly elite 9 person squad, unique to each playthrough. By my perception some soldiers are more special due to how hard it was to find, recruit, and train them. This, - I’d argue - adds another layer of variety for the kind of people who (re)play games mostly for the skill building.
There is a mod over on Nexus mods to show the recruits available traits. An overview of what havens have available recruits and their classes would be awesome as well. I always seem to struggle finding heavies for my 2nd, 3rd and 4th teams… Sure i could crosstrain a guy for it, but then have to swap over production to making the specific gear for a heavy.
Anu berserkers and priests can be so different. For instance you can get human like berserker wearing armor or you can get alien like berseker with mutated body armor. Second option is much better because that mutated armor has lot of armor points (head has 34), and mutated body heals 10 hp each turn. That amount of armor with break armor ability makes them good frontline grunts.
It would be nice that I can see who I am recruiting.
Good point… This detail did miss my attention. I somehow always ended up recruiting non-mutated people. Maybe because I happened to multiclass them into a berserker, not the other way around. (Didn’t pay much attention to that, as rookies were flown straight to a base with 6-8 training facilities for a few days, until they learned which end of their stuff gives the loud band sound.)
I played a game called Battle Brothers where you recruit characters without knowing what their skills are (actually, they changed it later on so you could pay to reveal some before hiring), and they have level up development points which are as far as I can tell fixed on generation, so you don’t know how they will advance. It’s annoying from the perspective of wanting to min/max, but there’s no reason the game has to let you do that - it’s also a valid gameplay choice that you just have to deal with what you have.
It’s a fair point. Indeed, min/maxing in this sense is a critical reason that makes this game fun for me. Even after the ambush missions my squad gets a little stronger. (I don’t know how representative my preferred playstyle is though…)
If the game played the way you described I’d instead ask for a way to send soldiers away, because I’d recruit all I could, send them to training camps and either let them “graduate” into one of the 9 positions that are allowed to get skills from the squad pool, or set them aside, so that they don’t get in the way on the user interface.
Optimal strategy would dictate that I keep B-list guys scattered around the globe, but psychologically they’d dilute the uniqueness of my squad too much making one playthrough more like another, thus taking my motivation away to replay the game with a different squad. (Not to mention that the UI would be way too cluttered to my taste.)
Yes: actually seeing the new candidate in its interity would even make sense: I e mean the 3D model
Having a list of the models next to each other with filtes on the top or right hand side like “nearest to Phoenix Point Base”, “Sniper” “Lowset Cost in Metal” etc…
Seeing the model helps the player to evalaute quickly what amount type and kind of armor, wepons and head mutation they bring with them