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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Recruiting Tactics


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What are your recruiting tactics?

 

When I need new aquanauts I always recruit twice as much as needed (enough living space required). On arrival I sack halve with the worst stats. Especially everyone with bravery stats below 40 as those never tend to increase.

 

When I have a MC-lab and found out the MC strenght of my soldiers I sack everyone with MC strenght below 50. I even sack my best men if they lack MC strenght.

 

From then on I only train and take to missions the best of the best and keep recruiting and sacking men to find the ones with MC strenght over 90.

 

It is hard to sack the hero you used for months if you find out mc strenght is only 10, but live underseas is tough!

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  • 1 year later...

Soldiers with bad stats always take the point; for MC-susceptible soldiers, you can always bleed TU's off at the end of the turn, give them crap weapons (tazers?)

Plan on 2-3 sacrificial lambs for a landed small/medium sub, more for larger subs (I only go for landed subs)

Rest of the troop is soldiers that need training, plus 2 snipers for the times when 5 aquanauts use up all their time units missing a single alien

 

I know that the question was about recruiting and not training, but one led to the other. I feel that they cost me money, might as well put them to work. Most missions end with someone dead, usually the guys in the front of the formation. Put two and two together, and you get a scout you don't mind losing.

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  • 1 month later...

Exactly, don't sack weaklings, use them as scouts. The aliens always tend to shoot at the frontline soldiers. The good soldiers in the second line try aimed shots and grenades, and get most of the experience.

By the time you have no soldiers left with low bravery, you'll probably get mc labs, so you can use those with low mc strength as scouts.

 

As a result, only the best of the best remain, without spending too much money on buying/selling. Just natural selection, baby. B)

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Natural Selection is the best way to get rid of troublesome soldiers. Anyone who doesn't make the cut is doomed to the frontline massacre. Also, don't sack good soldiers! Just send them to some obscure base to be used for base defense. This way you have a good fighter for base defense missions, and have that MC liability out of the way for normal missions.
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  • 6 months later...

I only keep a limited number of Aquanauts, 10 at most usually - that's just my playstyle. I replace them as and when they die. At the early stages of the game I need living space for scientists.

 

Until I get MC labs. I build two MC labs if I can afford it then recruit up to 20 Aquanauts, then the next month I can put 20 people into MC training and find out their stats.

 

From those 20 people I usually have around 6-10 people with awesome MC strength, a few with acceptable, and I sack the rest. I'll recruit some new Aquanauts to fill up the empty MC spaces in case a new recruit has exceptional (90+) MC strength.

 

All the other stats can be improved, MC strength is the only stat I really worry about.

Edited by reckoner
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  • 2 months later...
Reactions are pretty hard to improve. Ditto on the aggressive scouting with sucky agents thing. It's more cost-effective to get some use out of them rather than replacing them immediately and sometimes they get lucky and score so many lucky kills they start to get useful. It also helps train bravery to take a few scout casualties here and there early on. Also, you never know who's going to be awesome with the psi stats, so once that first month of training for MC comes up, I try to keep everybody alive.
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  • 3 months later...

When recruiting I tend to look at 4 main things, which are Bravery, Reactions, MC strength and Time units. Anyone below 40 bravery 57 reactions and 55 time units gets sacked immediately. If MC strength is below 60 I'll also sack them. All the other attributes can be boosted fairly easily through regular combat experience. I strongly feel reactions is the most important attribute next to MC strength, it's just so useful in combat and makes missions much much easier.

 

I hire in bulk bringing in 20+ aquanauts at a time though you usually only keep 1-3 of them and end up sacking the rest per recruitment. Obviously at the start of the game you can't financially do this so I'm less picky and use the weaker ones to protect the aquanauts that I want to hold on to.

 

Reactions can be improved quite easily if they aren't low to start with, just give the lower reaction troops pistols or weapons that use less time units as it increases their chance of reactions in the alien movement phase, a good explaination here. But I generally avoid taking on anyone under 57 reaction units as it's easier to work up from a higher start value, anything below 50 or 45 units will tend not to react unless hit by fire and usually die quickly because of it. ;)

Edited by VPR
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There is the fact that all units that enter a reaction fire queue will get reaction experience even if they don't get to fire because a unit higher up in the queue killed the unit before they got a chance. This is a very strong argument for training reaction fire in groups.

 

- NKF

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