[Suggestion] Score penalty for sacking personnel

[Rubber Cannonball]

Is it possible to penalize the player's score for sacking soldiers or even sacking scientists and engineers?  Would anyone be interested in a mechanic like this?

Story Rationale: XCOM is a secret organization.  Every fired employee is a high security risk.

Game Rationale:  At some point money is no longer a limiting factor and the player can hire thousands of every soldier type and weed out the low stat ones.  A small score penalty would discourage this.  A big penalty would significantly limit sacking.  A huge penalty spread over multiple months would stop it, until the player hacks his save file of course.  At any rate the idea is to get the player to play the cards he is dealt instead of stacking the deck.  Min stat values would have more meaning than just a sack signal.

The penalty amount would be set by the modder in the ruleset and the player could be warned by a ufopedia entry.

Also for soldiers the player can still get rid of them the regular Klingon way:

Spoiler:

By glorious death in battle!

The scientist engineer thing may not be worth the effort unless a modder had reasons for limiting player flexibility with their numbers.   And I suppose a player could still sacrifice a base to get rid of excess scientists and engineers, but would anyone really do this?

PS If something like this exists, it just means I suck at searching for things in this forum.

[Meridian]

I am not interested (as a player).

Story Rationale: XCOM is a secret organization.  Every fired employee is a high security risk.

Easiest solution for XCOM to prevent such high security risk is not to hire people with 10 bravery and 20 strength in the first place.

The player should not be penalized (even more than (s)he already is) for something (s)he cannot influence... moronic HR in this case.

[Rubber Cannonball]

On the other hand shouldn't the player that takes on the challenge of crappier rookies score higher if successful?

[Meridian]

On the other hand shouldn't the player that takes on the challenge of crappier rookies score higher if successful?

Sure, why not... if it's implemented as an optional bonus for such a player... instead of a penalty for a player who is not interested in such artificial challenge

[Rubber Cannonball]

Well I just felt that if a modder sets the min stats in the crap zone, that it was't just meant to be a cash sink or to get the player to click the sack button more often.  The real penalty would be that players would just have more Gomer Pyles running around the bases for awhile.  And the player wouldn't be able to field a squad of 30 psi strength 95+ soldiers by mass hire/fire.

I respect that many players don't want to deal with crap rookies.  But I just thought it would be simpler for them just to raise the min stat value on the stat(s) they care about in a mod and avoid the tedious soldier sort and cull.

PS  Also I bet it is harder to come up with and implement an algorithm for bonus points for crappy soldiers than a penalty for clicking the sack button.   

Edit: fixed 2 missing words

[Meridian]

You're correct in both the modder's view (they probably want "more diversity") and the developer's view (it's easier to code a sack button penalty).

I was just describing my personal view from the player's perspective, as mentioned in the first post.

[betatester]

Personally, I always view the "sack" button as a "kill, sorry sack this guy" because dead man tell no tales. The only sure way to manage the  security risk. I'm a big fan of Nikita (Anne Parillaud or Peta Wilson) that have many ways to dispose of unwanted, mentally unstable, recruits. Maybe sacking can be counted as killing (and thus penalty). Also will appear as dead.

[Solarius Scorch]

Maybe in a properly degenerate mod.

[Rubber Cannonball]

Well I suppose to offset the penalty to the player for dealing with crap rookies, the modder could offer another soldier type say mercenaries or soldiers of fortune.  These guys would have much higher min stats so that the player wouldn't need to sack any because of poor stats.  They would also have lower stat caps than the standard soldier since these skilled mercs would be near the peak of their capabilities when hired.  The player then could use these mercs to keep his regular soldiers alive long enough to develop their skills.  The ones not worth developing can still be used as cannon fodder.

[Alex_D]

Myself, I "abuse" the system by hiring hundreds of soldiers to screen out for Psi >= 90. Then I fire whoever is less than that, filtered using StatStrings.
I see this as what the HR dept. ought have done it before reaching my "desk", like it is done in Apoc. The only drawback at the moment, if any, of this mass hire and fire is the soldier IDs are in the high four digits easily.

(What was the shortcut to mark for sale everything that the screen shows?)

I'm not sure if I'm 100% correct code-wise, but I'm thinking the following:
As per hiring process, one could hire different type of [human] candidates (rookies, veterans, etc). Then a free, attribute-less transformation (call it "workplace induction" if you must) would convert the soldier from candidate to agent, to which all the other transformations could occur.
Alternatively, and I'm not sure if the transformation code would work this way, additional transformations (at a cost, both money and in time) could be included to bring the soldier to a higher stats, but only to a certain max.