Soldiers That'll Grow A 'character'

[Haba]

I bet that a lot of people who are fanatical about X-Com have also played Jagged Alliance's and Silent Storm. The following idea might feel against the feel of X-com to some, but I think it could add a lot to the game.

 

It has been a fact that soldiers tend to die in X-com games. Maybe we could add in some extra reward for keeping your squad alive against impossible odds.

 

1) Personality. Some characters might be more prone to panic, go berserk while others might have the tendency to exceed themselves in really tight situation (increased ap's or something). Make the soldiers shout, swear, scream in panic, taunt the aliens and so forth. They are humans, after all.

 

2) Relations. If you manage to keep same squad for a longer time, maybe they'd start developing 'feelings' of each other. Friendships or romances, doesn't matter. Basically if someone's pal is threatened, the character might go berserk or have an anime-style superhero fit. And once again, some short strings of text as discussion between the squadmembers.

 

3) Traits. In addition to having statistics, have the soldiers also have a random trait(s). Ambidexteriousity, special psionic abilities etc. Just rip SS and Fallouts freely And again, maybe you'll discover some of the traits only if you manage to keep the soldier alive for longer?

 

And so on and so on.

 

While it might feel like a lot of work, in fact you can make quite a good appereance of personality with just a few lines of text. Just have some hidden stats randomly drawn that decide what kind of personality the guy is going to have. And to avoid having identical characters introduce 'volume' in their behaviour as well. One is louder than another.

[The Master Maniac]

Sounds good to me, although they've already debunked the soldier-relationships thing I put forward. Making the soldiers seem a bit more human and less like dispensible robots (which, technically, they are from a professional standpoint). Adding such things to a soldier isn't as tough as you might think. Heck, it could all be entirely random, for all it matters. Nice suggestions.

[Paladin]

Yeah, those are nice ideas, I especially like the random ability like the Ambidextry, it could reduce the penalty for 2-handed weapons from 20% to 5% for instance.

 

Anything that makes the soldiers feel less like robots and more like humans is good, as long as it does'nt get tedious... Then again, a little more text or voice-over and voilà!

 

Keep up the good ideas!