What do you guys think about Battlefield Recruitment?
I see a few different mechanisms here.
1. Living civilians after a battle mission joining your available employee list. They are already dressed as Workers, Scientists, civilians (soldiers ?). A small % chance they decide to join the war effort.
2. Civilians going into a rage during a battle and attacking the aliens (or maybe he humans?). Don't come into my house and threaten me, This is Sparta. Claiming alien or fallen human weapons and joining the fight. They may die while fighting. They could be controlled by the system AI for the entire battle, or become player controlled at some point. If they live through the battle, they return to base with you as a Veteran Recruit. Veteran Recruits would be the hardiest recruits. Having attacked an alien with their bare hands and lived, they should start with a decent Mind stat.
3. Unique Heroes/Weapons only available through Random Field Recruitment.
Renowned Scientists who offer you a Unique Prototype Weapon (or research tree option) they were developing for the war effort. Adding the ability to have different research/weapon options in each playthrough.
Weapon Collectors with ancient weapons. These may start a mission with weapon in hand. Possibilities here are amusingly endless. Japanese Katanas, Roman Gladius, Spartan Grappling Nets, Scottish Claymores, French Revolution Era Muskets, Blunderbusses, Brass Knuckles, Paintball Gun (blinds the enemy), Wrench (think oilfield wrench something 3-4 ft long). Perhaps these are rare antiquities that can be sold on the World Market for significant credits.
This adds a wide range of fun and unique items you can not manufacture.
This would tie-in very well with the project to add soldier backstories. These would be rare characters with unique backstories.
4. Alien Defectors
You've captured an alien. They have been slaves to the Hivemind all their life until now. Never before have they known kindness, or friendship, these things were even more alien to them than you are. Your base is attacked they are freed, and able to protect the only friend they have ever known.
I think these things would add a significant variety to the game experience. Enhancing the randomness of each playthrough. While I'm not a coder, but I do understand the basic concepts. It seems that most of the work involved here is creating the call processes for introducing unique weapons and triggered changes to the research tree. Depending on how the code is currently setup it may or may not be extremely difficult or extremely simple to change a character on the battlemap from System AI control to Player Control. There is already a mechanism that could be adapted to this in the Panic system, which takes a Player controlled entity changes it to System control and later returns it to Player controlled. The Enraged system is already in use for System controlled Aliens. Providing preexisting code that could possibly be modified or may be already be functional as is, and just need new situational calls for implementation. I haven't tried the multi-player options, but I'm just going to assume that you can play as both human and alien forces. Meaning there is already a precedent and existing code for players controlling alien characters.
Like most things this could be implemented piece by piece.
1. Adding new Soldiers, Workers, Scientists to the available employee list after a battle. <Battle Result Options>
2. Enraged civilians becoming controlled by the player. <Random Battle Event>
3. Enraged civilians controlled by the System AI for the entire battle, attacking aliens, humans, or anyone that is close enough.
4. Enraged civilians being controlled by a mix of computer AI and the player.
5. Alien Defectors <Base Mission Event>
6. Unique Weapons / Tech Tree Options
Thanks for reading - I hope you like my ideas ...
Gnith
