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Author Topic: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens  (Read 8762 times)

Offline Mobling

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[MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« on: April 27, 2019, 02:53:57 am »
Hi everybody. This is my very first mod, so feedback and criticism are welcome.
This mod allows you to screen the concerned citizens that you capture during League Apprehensions and similar missions for potential recruits to your X-Com personnel. Those pesky independent investigators can put their snooping to good use as dedicated X-Com agents, engineers, and even scientists, so long as they have the physical or intellectual talents necessary for the job. Most citizens you screen will either refuse or be unfit for recruitment, and ridding them from your prison cells can be a financial burden. A few may even be low-level cultists.

I am famously bad at explaining things on forum posts, so I'll try to let the images speak for themselves.

Spoiler:




To install, unzip the package and place the "Recruit Concerned Citizens" folder in your mods directory, usually located in /OpenXcom_XFiles/user/mods/.
As far as I know, this mod should be compatible with future versions. If it isn't, send me a message and I'll try to fix it.

Please let me know what you think, and tell me if you think I should add to or remove some of the possible production outcomes. Thanks!

Offline HT

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #1 on: April 27, 2019, 07:18:17 pm »
That's an interesting mod. Not sure how balanced it is, considering that money is usually very tight until the invasion has started (or you luck out with some UFOs and research certain techs early, or you get enough of these 'alien mini base' missions). Do these "manufactured" citizens occupy your prison slots while you decide whether to sell or recruit them, or do they occupy living space? Or both?

Offline Mobling

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #2 on: April 28, 2019, 04:10:19 am »
All of the outcomes of the screening process only take up the prison space of the concerned citizen that they are made from. If you wanted to, you could end up imprisoning a citizen with a negative sell value for the entire game if you don't need the prison space and don't want to pay the cost of selling them.

The citizens that you can screen for recruits are the Concerned Civilians found exclusively in missions like League Apprehensions. These can be somewhat rare to begin with, especially during the first year when money is the tightest. The research option for Screening Citizens is locked behind Promotion II, since it's unlikely for someone to encounter these missions and want to use this option before that.

The recruitment process requires the Intelligence Lab facility (a requirement that the X-Com Headquarters facility also fulfills) as well as engineers, so I don't think the Promotion II requirement is too restricting.

The outcome of "manufactured" citizens are negatively priced to outweigh the value that a soldier, scientist, or engineer has. You can turn a civilian capture with a 15k sell price into a potential recruit with a value of at least 40k that can be sold instead of recruited. Additionally, the most common result of screening citizens are currently Inept Volunteers which have a sell price of 0, so you can get rid of them immediately without a second thought. You can also get a few non-recruitable results that have a positive sell price, such as minor criminals or bottom-tier cultists.

The numbers still need some tweaking. Right now, you're almost certainly better off selling concerned citizens for 15k a pop rather than gambling on screening them if you're short on money. However, if you like random chance manufacturing, or just the idea of turning a nameless citizen into a unique soldier, it's an option worth trying out.

Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #3 on: April 28, 2019, 12:13:26 pm »
Hello and thank you for deeming my mod deserving a submod.
I don't think it's a bad concept, but one thing is bothering me: you can't set and properties on the produced soldier, so recruiting a white woman can give you a black male agent... :)

Offline HT

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #4 on: April 28, 2019, 09:26:51 pm »
I don't think it's a bad concept, but one thing is bothering me: you can't set and properties on the produced soldier, so recruiting a white woman can give you a black male agent... :)

Looks like XCOM developed a literal PC-serum of some sort. That, or we can consider it as a funny bug (such as a flying castle counted as an UFO overpopulated by Alien Hybrids I found several versions ago).

Offline Mobling

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #5 on: April 29, 2019, 04:05:51 am »
Hello and thank you for deeming my mod deserving a submod.
I don't think it's a bad concept, but one thing is bothering me: you can't set and properties on the produced soldier, so recruiting a white woman can give you a black male agent... :)

Yeah, it's a shame that we can't do this (or if we can I have no clue how to).

Luckily, the race and gender of a soldier is tied to the face, and anybody who is really bothered by the lack of continuity between captured citizens and recruited soldiers can manually change each soldier's avatar by pressing M or right-clicking on the paperdoll while in the inventory screen (this only works in the base, not during a mission). And of course, you can change the soldier's name and nationality within their stats page.

It's a bit of a hassle to do all that manually, but then again I think a commander who would go the extra mile to do all this would develop an even stronger attachment to the soldier in question, which is essentially the purpose of this mod anyway. :D

Offline DevFried

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #6 on: April 29, 2019, 12:41:50 pm »
Man, I wish recruited citizens would match their looks as agents. Case in point, I had a "monsters vs citizens" type mission and a local beach babe (absolute hero) not only survived the attack (whereas every other civvie just died), she also charged in and started punching them, even though she was unarmed, even though she was bleeding and gravely wounded, bravest woman I've ever seen. Unfortunately she lost her consciousness but I stabilized her and didn't let her die. This is where I had the idea of "recruiting" brave citizens such as this, but all I could do at that moment is to roleplay that my most recent recruited rookie was her, although I couldn't find her exact appearance which made me a little sad. Plastic surgery exists though, right?

Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #7 on: April 30, 2019, 09:32:08 pm »
Yeah, it's a shame.

Remember that even if you change the portrait to a different sex, the screaming will be the same. ;) But it's easily fixed with save editing.

Offline justaround

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #8 on: April 30, 2019, 11:08:30 pm »
The concept is really interesting but it's questionable one would be able to recruit a regular citizen, no matter how able and experienced, into a government organization just like that. Even the most able individuals need a background check and, even more important and what's currently ignored - some idea of what they're getting themselves into.

But alright, let's assume we think of it like of a thing worthy of handwaving for the sake of interesting story. It worked in the first Men in Black kinda-sorta after all (though IIRC the guy they recruited was already a policeman at the very least). I still think it's very important to get code support first which so the game could track face and other qualities of the person. No feature that requires external fiddling (like save editing, manual modifications) is a finished, decently working feature. Even fluffwise, brought above example of "we turned this caucasian lady into a burly black man" would be a huge stretch even if someone would try to improvise fluff for it.
Especially since the point of it is to recruit those particular individuals, not merely be able to pick them to get some other, random individual added to the roster.

Offline Mobling

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #9 on: May 01, 2019, 04:29:44 am »
The concept is really interesting but it's questionable one would be able to recruit a regular citizen, no matter how able and experienced, into a government organization just like that. Even the most able individuals need a background check and, even more important and what's currently ignored - some idea of what they're getting themselves into.

The Screen Citizen job is meant to represent the process of background checks and carefully revealing to the citizen a sense of the scope of what they're getting into. The ones who are ineligible are represented by the sizable number of outcomes that describe their issue (a lack of discretion, a criminal background, a lack of talent). Keep in mind that the stock of citizens you're facing in these missions aren't average people off the street like the civilians in terror missions and such are—they're civilians who've gotten wind of the paranormal happenings going on in the world and have banded together into leagues of independent investigators and vigilantes. As the mod's chances are now, less than a tenth of these people are considered to be roughly equivalent in loyalty, athleticism, and professionalism to the agents you recruit from intelligence and investigative agencies around the globe.

In the second version I'll rewrite the research article to convey these points a bit better. I'll also probably make the chance of a recruitable soldier even lower, but make the other outcomes more rewarding and less punishing. I plan on bumping the engineer hours for each screening up to 120 from 72, to better reflect the difficulty of the screening process. Under these numbers, it would take a single engineer 5 days to do a background check, interview the citizen, and carefully reveal to them what they need to know.

I still think it's very important to get code support first which so the game could track face and other qualities of the person. No feature that requires external fiddling (like save editing, manual modifications) is a finished, decently working feature. Even fluffwise, brought above example of "we turned this caucasian lady into a burly black man" would be a huge stretch even if someone would try to improvise fluff for it.
Especially since the point of it is to recruit those particular individuals, not merely be able to pick them to get some other, random individual added to the roster.

I wouldn't say that the purpose of the mod is to recruit specific individual citizens. I'd say my motivation in creating this mod was to:
1. Add an interesting feature that expands the purpose and rewards of League missions
2. Add a feature that uses the new randomized production feature (which I think is so gosh darn cool)
2. Provide a mechanic that aids the player in imagining a backstory for recruited soldiers gained from the screening process

The code you're describing would first require a broad range of qualities to exist in civilians that only exist in soldiers. Civilians and enemies don't have a race or gender other than what their paperdoll, sprite, and sfx depict, and those paperdolls have absolutely no variety in facial appearance. Citizens also totally lack generated names, nationalities, and randomized stats. If code existed that gave civilians those qualities, that would be pretty neat, but I don't think anybody will take the time to write this (I doubt OpenXcom could even support this without breaking a whole bunch of things).

Long story short, the only viable way to give those faceless, nondescript civilians an identity is to make them a soldier and use the identity randomly generated for them or to manually create one yourself.

Assuming you finish the mission with no civilian casualties, you're going to be screening these captures in groups of around 4-12, depending on the particular mission. These citizens don't have a distinct identity to begin with, and you're going to be screening them in bulk, so I don't think it's a big deal.

When you screen 10 concerned civilians and only get one potential agent, and the agent ends up being a black man, you don't have imagine a white woman transforming into a black man. You can do the much, much easier job of imagining that the only member of that civilian league you recruited was a black man. And if you really, really, really wanted that soldier to have been a white woman to represent a particular civilian that stood out to you, you can make that happen with about 10 seconds of clicking.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2019, 07:04:38 am by Mobling »

Offline tarkalak

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #10 on: June 03, 2019, 04:44:43 pm »
Hello and thank you for deeming my mod deserving a submod.
I don't think it's a bad concept, but one thing is bothering me: you can't set and properties on the produced soldier, so recruiting a white woman can give you a black male agent... :)

She didn't join X-Com, but when interrogating her we found out about that guy she met at a night club, that is a really good ... um ... masseur and had been a Special Ops, and our Intelligence officer really charmed him with her coffee, so we recruited him.

Offline Kozinsky

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #11 on: December 29, 2020, 02:11:07 pm »
Yeah, it's a shame that we can't do this (or if we can I have no clue how to).

You can now use "spawnedSoldier" to individualize the generated soldier. I just checked it - it works!
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,8615.msg132649.html#msg132649

Offline Solarius Scorch

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #12 on: December 29, 2020, 03:26:37 pm »
You can now use "spawnedSoldier" to individualize the generated soldier. I just checked it - it works!
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,8615.msg132649.html#msg132649

Indeed you can!

I like the idea, it's silly but fun. I might do it one day, if time allows.

Offline 8mono

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #13 on: January 02, 2021, 11:00:55 am »
This mod is actually pretty much what happens during the second episode Gerry Anderson's UFO TV series (one of the main inspirations for UFO defense), test pilot witnesses a UFO being shot down by SHADO (the x-com-like organization in the show) and immediately starts investigating and snooping around (like the league's missions), he gets the "Concerned Citizen" treatment at some point via some melee by SHADO agents themselves too LMAO, at the end he ends up getting recruited as one of the combat pilots.

This also gets me closer to the dream of having the "Fulton" mechanic of the metal gear solid series...without the fulton of course, just a lot of ...uhh physical violence and screening, nice job!

Offline Corento

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Re: [MOD] Recruit Concerned Citizens
« Reply #14 on: January 06, 2021, 03:03:08 pm »
Hi, I like the idea and I thinking about a bit more different change - why not to do this with every saved citizen from every mission from the begining. And forbid any purchase of the soldier/scientist/engineer till some research or unlock with Promotion I or II.

So it means that on begining nobody can send you reinforcements but you can save citizens from mission with small chance to turn them into hireable "interested citizen" and after fast interogation on each (like 2-10hours of convincing to join) the person could change to normal soldier (which is now normaly for buy), or small chance to become scientist or engineer, or rare high tier soldier (I assume it is allready exits in game but possible to buy/research later in game now). Or kind of injured ex-Swat or else soldier (...took arrow into the knee...) with one high stat (like 90% of max) and one low stat (like 10% of maximum) or other possible personalities allready built in game.

If RNG gives you more scientist or enginner you can´t use on begining, you can allways fire them. And from soldiers you can choose the one´s you need, rest fire/sold. Or use rest as cannon fodder.

And after some research or Promotion the Council finally allow you to buy soldiers/scietists/engineers. But still you are able to turn saved citizens into anything you need.

And the difference between avatar (before / after) it is doesnt matter. The boy could wear women clothes, because he has notnig else, or he is part of LGBT community... what ever reason people have today to looks different... no big deal.

That´s could be more "real" on the beginnning as the group without support, so convincing people wherever and whenever it is possible rather to have all easily accesible from beginning. And also could helps to play a bit more cautious to save more citizens....

Just an idea :)