What determines the number of agents for hire?

[karadoc]

Yesterday I started a playthrough of Apocalypse (playing on Superhuman, with no reloads, playing on my own balance mod).

 

It's going pretty well, and it's fun, and challenging and mod works well and so on... but I'm almost a the end of week 3 and I'm a bit disappointed that I haven't seen a single hybrid agent for hire; and I've only had one android for hire.

 

Mutant Alliance and S.E.L.F. are both neutral towards X-Com.

 

Have I just had remarkably bad luck? Have I done something wrong? -- I think it's a bit dull that I'm only getting ordinary agent for hire, and it this particular game isn't just a weird fluke I think I might change it a little bit in my mod... but I'm not sure which (if any) fields in Apoc'd affect that kind of stuff anyway.

[NKF]

For the hybrid and androids, it's quite luck based. They have a much lower probability of appearing than human agents. You could try scrumming for them by saving before the end of the day and ending it to see what new recruits are generated.

 

-NKF

[Sgt. Strike]

What NKF said, and moving them from neutral up towards friendly. That may give a little more frequency on the availability on hybrids.

[silencer_pl]

Don't forget time. After few weeks you get more candidates.

[karadoc]

Hmm.

 

I was just looking at A patcher, which apparently can edit how many agents appear for hire each day. I haven't actually tried it, but the source code says this:

 

"A random number between 0 and maximum is added to the hire list each day."

...

"Maximum of human agents&techs (default: 3) [0 - 8]: "

...

"Maximum of hybrids (default: 1) [0 - 8]: "

...

"Maximum of androids (default: 1) [0 - 8]: "

That doesn't seem right to me, or at least it isn't the whole story. It seems to be suggesting that the probability of getting a hybrid or android is each 50% each day, and if that was true then the lack of hybrids and androids in my current game would have less than 1 in a million odds.

 

I'm pretty sure that the relationship with Mutant Alliance & SELF has some effect on it. But do I really have to have them an 'friendly' to get any special units at all? I don't remember it being like that in previous games. Perhaps it has something to do with difficulty level?

 

I haven't tried save-scumming to get one because I just want to play the game without any unnessary reloads, but this is starting to get ridiculous. I've looked every day, and I'm now well into week 4 without a single hybrid, and only 1 android. (The fact that I did get 1 android suggests they don't have to be friendly...)

 

Maybe later on I'll start a test game so that I can experiment to see the effect of relations & difficulty level.

[Bomb Bloke]

They don't have to be friendly, but rumour has it that you'll get more if they are. In theory, keeping the Grav Ball League on good terms also affects recruitment rates of "regular" troopers.

 

I've a vague memory that androids and mutants do tend to get more common as the game goes on. Time moves really slowly in Apocalypse though I'd've expected to see at least a couple of mutants within the first month.

[karadoc]

Well, I just did some tests, and the results seem to indicate that info from Apatcher is completely correct.

 

Here's what I did:

 

- Start a new game.

- Hire all available agents

- fast-forward to near the end of the first day, and then save the game.

- end the day, and check which agents are for hire

- reload save, and check again, etc.

 

While doing this, I made a tally of how many times there was a hybrid available, and how many times there wasn't. I did this test on Novice difficulty, and on Super-human difficulty.

 

The results for Notice were 21 with and 21 without. The results for SH were 20 with and 22 without.

 

I didn't explicitly count the androids or normal agents, but I did notice that there was never more than 1 android, and never more than 1 hybrid, and never more than 3 normal agents. And so the most number of agents for hire on any given trial was 5 (and this happened a few times); and a couple of times there was no one for hire at all...

 

--

Those results seem to indicate that difficulty level has nothing to do with it; and that the probability of getting a hybrid or an android is 50-50. So then, what can I say about my current game? I still think it's pretty unlikely that I've completely missed through simple bad luck. It's just too unlikely. My guess is that although both of those organisations were listed as neutral for me, they were actually just slightly negative relations... Maybe I accidentally shot their buildings or something, and so they lost enough trust in X-Com to stop offering agents, but not enough to be listed as 'unfriendly'.

 

I don't know what else it could be.

 

Incidentally, in the game with no hybrids, I paid Mutant Alliance to become friendly - the next day there was still no hybrid, but I reloaded the save to test it and on the second attempt there was one. -- So... my guess is that any negative relations with those two organisations completely blocks them from putting up agents for hire, even if the negative relations aren't enough to make them 'unfriendly'.

[silencer_pl]

You can check my AAR and try to spot when and in what numbers hybrids do show up (Androids too). The first hybrid I got was on the last day of week 1. With time I had more. Some of them were not so good (stats that wouldn't be maxed 100/100/99) so sometimes I didn't show recruitment screen.

[NKF]

You can certainly accumulate more than 1 non-human for hire, but yes it's not common (if at all) for more than 1 to appear at a time. Like the powerswords. Oh, what wonderful tools these are, but they hardly ever show up for purchase.

 

Relations only matter on a binary level. That is, hostile or non-hostile. As long as it's not hostile, the chance that an agent of that race will appear will be there. That doesn't rule out having a bad streak of dice rolls. Happened to me for a bit in one game, and was very hard pressed to get any androids considering how much I enjoy using them.

 

- NKF

[karadoc]

Well, in my tests the probability of a hybrid showing up was almost certainly 50%, and same for androids. If that was true in general for the actual game I was playing, it would be a truly remarkable string of bad luck. Failing 50% odds each day for three weeks would have a probability of less than 1 in 2 million; and my losing streak was more than that, because it was for both hybrids and androids, and it went for more than 3 weeks. Using my calculator that comes out as roughly 1 in a million billion. (ie 10^15) -- so I'm pretty sure it isn't just bad luck.

 

Maybe tomorrow I'll try other test in with 'unfriendly' relations to see if it makes a difference.

 

As for having multiple non-humans for hire; in my tests there were certainly cases with an android and a hybrid, but there were no examples with two of either of those. Based on the apatcher info I'd guess that the only way there can be more than one hybrid available for hire at a time is if one of them was carried over from the previous day. Or maybe things change when Mutant Alliance is friendly. But in any case, in the 44 trials I did for the previous test, there wasn't a single case of either two hybrids or two androids.

 

--

 

@silencer_pl, I don't know what 'AAR' is.

[NKF]

AAR = After Action Report.

 

No, definitely not likely you'll get several new ones in one hit, but certainly you can build them up with the carryover if you don't hire them right away (and they don't drop off the list/get replaced).

 

- NKF

[silencer_pl]

@silencer_pl, I don't know what 'AAR' is.

 

https://www.strategycore.co.uk/forums/topic/9859-protecting-the-future/

[karadoc]

Ahh. AAR. I see now. I've never read one of those before. It looks like fun. (But I guess it's a fair bit of work to gather & upload all the screenshots etc... Do you write it up while mid-mission, or do you just take screenshots and then comment on them afterwards?)

 

I read through the first three pages, and I counted how many times there were hybrids available.. I counted with 7 times with, and only 3 without; although, it's a somewhat biased sample because you didn't show the hire screen on every day, and so sometimes we'll actually be seeing a hybrid from a previous day. -- I think this is consistent with the 50% result I observed with my own trials.

 

I'll check out some of the later stages of that AAR later on. It looks like you're doing pretty well so far, but I imagine it going to get pretty difficult later on without using any of the advanced weapons.

 

--

 

In my own game, I was actually defeated today; which is a shame because I was just getting to point where some of my latest balance changes were about to come into play. My research was good, and I had good equipment (I had toxin B and personal disruptor shields.. and I was researching the small shields for craft), but I just didn't have enough agents to do all the ground missions. I had to skip some missions because all my guys were injured, and so organizations started to go hostile... but I still didn't have enough agents to do anything about it. In the end I figured I had to make a stand before MegaPol flipped to the alien side, so I sent in my last 5 agents... but I got wiped out! and so I had no choice but to resign.

 

Now I'm going to have to start a new game. And I'm going to try harder this time so that I can actually test those late-game balance changes! When I'm done, I'll upload the mod and maybe someone can then use it to do an AAR without any special self-imposed rules. It's going to be hard enough anyway.

[karadoc]

I just did another set of trials, and the results support my negative relations theory. ie. Hybrids will not be made available for hire if Mutant Alliance has negative relations towards X-Com. They don't need to be 'unfriendly', and they certainly don't need to be 'hostile'. Any negative effect on their relations, no matter how minor, is enough to completely block hybrids from being available for hire. I assume the same is true for S.E.L.F., but I haven't tested that.

 

Here's what I did to get the results:

 

I started a new game on Superhuman; hired everyone at the start of the game, and carried out a single investigation in a Mutant Alliance building (without any aliens being found). This lowered the relations, but not enough to make them 'unfriendly'. ie. Mutant Alliance was still 'neutral' towards X-Com.

 

With that done, I saved the game near the end of the first day. Then just ended the day and checked the hire screen for hybrid agents; then loaded the save, ended the day again, checked again, etc...

 

This is essentially the same test as I did last time except with an investigation at the start to lower relations.

 

I did 14 reloads, and there was not a single hybrid in any of them. So I think that's pretty conclusive.

 

--

 

I'd appreciate it if someone else would repeat the test on their own computer so that I can rule out the possibility that my game files are corrupt or something. After all, I have modded the .exes a bit; maybe this is a bug caused as a side-effect of one of the modding changes or something like that.

[Ki-tat Chung]

Sounds about right. I played a SH game about two months ago before the new XCOM, and I hired a hybrid right at the start of the game on the first week. Checking for new recruits every day, I never managed to hire another hybrid, nor a single android. Playing on SU, throughout most of the game, funds were too tight to afford payouts and by end game, I had already lost interest in the game itself to care enough to actually pay organisations out. The last thing I remember doing was actually long range bombardment on CoS and Diablo (100% infiltration) whilst flying near Transtellar buildings, and trying to get them to hit Transtellar. It certainly was fun venting out on another organisation, and the relations tab suddenly became much more interesting.

 

If you want to have a more empirical test, you could use Midnight X-Com Editor to set organisation relations manually, though doing an investigation is a pretty good way to just tip the scales.