Things like live deep one and tasoth soldier are essential for your MC career and calc corpse for your melee weapons, I don't like it.
In this idea, we distinc between res live alien and interrogate. The 7 terrorist aliens cannot be interrogated.
First you must res a corpse to be able to hold live aliens of that race in the containment. Then you res a live to be able to interrogate. (learn language and pain weaknesses).
Then you build an interrogate chamber and hire torturors (80k). Each chamber can do 1 alien at a time. Maybe a cleanup day is needed in between. 10 torts man one chamber.
Now the times to break an alien vary with race, rank and tort xp. Success rate is not 100% initially, if you fail you just lose the alien, and you get a corpse.
Ressing a live alien no longer kills the alien. Successful torture also kills the alien of course.
Success chance is 50% first, and with each alien you gain 10%+ for that race, leading to 100% after 5 tortures. But that is per base, other base inherits half the gain of the best other base, and starts from there. But experienced torturors take more time, and each step incresases time by 25%, to +125% at full xp.
Basic times for example, gill sold 2 days, Lob Cmd 10 days, Aq sold 2 days, T Sold 3 days, Lob sold 4 days. Soldiers being easiest to break ( or medics nad techs?)
Sqls certainly some days more. These numbers then increased by 125% at full xp.
Moving interrogators to other base doesn't move the xp.
Now what do you get from each rank? I have lots of ideas, not writing everything down yet.
Cmds: Alien origins, UT, MC gen, Bomb shield, The Lev, and new stuff, all needing a separate cmd. (bomb shield not free with the Lev anymore)
Navs: locate alien base
Soldiers: They unlock weapons (TSL, DPL, melees, melee no longer behind corpses of calc? and gill?), each sold gives either an unlock of a weapon you have in store, or gives a +50% inc in res speed for a weapon you can already res (not one that is almost finished). This bonus then shows in the projects list of research. You can get it twice on one weap for +100% bonus.
Tech: unlock Zrbite, Ion acc and Magnav.
Aqua plastic is free, so you get to PAA very quickly if you want.
My path to MC disrupt:
- find MC reader (more plentiful at start? and less valuable to sell)
- interro Sqleader to unlock it (need the MCread in store or the sql will give an alien mission or so)
- res MC reader.
- interro technician to unlock MC lab (this has the highest prio, so you get this before Zrbite and such)
- res MC lab, make it, train nauts.
- interro MC using alien (T sql, aq nav, gill cmd etc, no more T sold)
- res MC disruptor.
MC generator needing a cmd after all this still.
Each interrogate gives you 1 thing. Maybe each race can have fav weapons so they give them first, like toids like light weapons like pistol and Lobs the heavy weapons.
I'd say you need to fill all ufopaedia entries to win the game. Makes a lot of sense in both ways (gameplay and realism).
That is, before you res your final commander or he won't give Tleth the aliens city.
And why is the final cmd a Lob cmd, they are too easy to get from a Dreadnought. And they walk around in the bases.
Harder would be a Toid that stands still at the Syn device of a base. A new rank cause DNs have aq cmds too.
