Order within squad

[mackal]

What determines the order of XCOM agents within a squad, in a tactical mission? Dragging and dropping the agents around always produces the same order, no matter what I do on the squad assignment screen (right before the mission is started)...

 

Is there anyway to override it? (sometimes it'd be nice to have a particular agent in the first slot, say if he's carrying a motion sensor, etc.)

[megaman357]

as far as i know the sloting is based on the rank of the soldier, the highest rank goes first followed by second highest and so on, though its been a while since i actually checked so its not entirly tried and tested, if u want the motion scanner up in slot one either rank up the person or give the highest ranking person the motion scanner

[Kret]

Don't know how the game handles the order of the units, but it's constant for the entire campaign and you can't change it without resorting to savegame editing.

 

In other words, if unit A was in front of unit B in one mission, it will always be in front for all missions, how much infront is the only variable.

[NKF]

It sort of goes like this:

 

All your soldiers are stored in a sequence.

 

A

B

C

D

.

.

.

 

And so on. And yes, they stay this way forever. (Although I used to use the XED 1.4alpha editor to sort my units and my vehicles - but that doesn't work on all systems)

 

Now, I have a theory on how the soldier ordering works. When agents are killed, they will leave empty slots and new soldiers will try to fill the empty slots. For example, if soldier C in the above list is killed, agent E should fill C's slot, like so:

 

A

B

E

D

 

This is all just a guess, but it appeared to work this way in UFO/TFTD.

 

Also note, your techs also share the same slots as your soldiers. So if you had any gaps, and bought any techs in between hiring new soldiers, the techs should fill the empty slots. Vehicles are stored in a similar manner.

 

Hmm. I must run a few tests some time.

 

- NKF

[Alex_D]

What I dislike a lot is resorting them prior to each battle. I normally take teams of 6 to 9 soldiers for alien and raid missions respectively, arranged in triads. So, to have them already sorted by speciality I pick these in the same order as in the equipment screen. Once I have reach the right number of scientist (so no internal slots used there, where better scientists replace older ones) then I "force" the soldiers to fit the sequence to fit the triads I use.