More careful hostage selection

[srmalloy]

It doesn't really make a bit of difference to gameplay, but there are some missions where the hostage selection needs to be better to fit the story. I just finished Long Jack's "Rescue unwilling recruits" mission, where you free four unwilling recruits from the clutches of the Council. Two of them were fat men in business suits; it seems to me that the Council would pick people in better shape when they run their press gangs -- you start with someone who's significantly overweight, and they may have some underlying medical condition that will lead them to croak before they get through conditioning training, wasting the time and effort put into them.

[Rudra]

I'd especially like this if it translated to being able to select what NPCs looked like in our bases. The problem is that NPC selection outside of set NPCs like Countess Crey is purely random. The game allows selection of male or female NPC, most times at least, but otherwise simply draws from a pool of NPC presets.

[biostem]

Doesn't the Council use a lot of drugs and other such implants/procedures with their soldiers?  Maybe they selected them for their sizable savings, and gaining another body was just a convenient side-effect.  Another possibility, related to my 1st point, is maybe they have some inherent compatibility to becoming warwolves or vampyri...

[srmalloy]

There's a separate mission in a different arc (Rise of the Vampyri, IIRC) where you assault a Council base where they have vampyri candidates wandering around, who are existing Council members who have been through some sort of selection process, which means that the fatties would need to make it through the intake conditioning and training, then prove themselves as Council agents to be selected for the vampyre conversion process. The wolf conversion, though, has less information available about it, so there aren't any good conclusions to be made.

[Akisan]

As I recall, the wolf conversion is part of the Galaxy soldier program - they're what results from a failed fusing with the Nictus that inhabit the regular Galaxy soldiers. They'd still be pretty well conditioned by that point anyways, and it seems unlikely that the Council would waste that many resources to deliberately train & convert a "poor" candidate for the Galaxy program.

[TheZag]

Maybe the fat ones go to administration or services.  I dont think the entire organization fights on the front line.  Someone needs to run the counter at the recreation area and the kitchen.

 

[Rudra]

5 hours ago, Akisan said:

As I recall, the wolf conversion is part of the Galaxy soldier program - they're what results from a failed fusing with the Nictus that inhabit the regular Galaxy soldiers. They'd still be pretty well conditioned by that point anyways, and it seems unlikely that the Council would waste that many resources to deliberately train & convert a "poor" candidate for the Galaxy program.

The canon for vampyri and wolf creation is rather conflicting. The wolves were supposed to be failed galaxies in the lore, but they are also created intentionally in the game with candidates carefully selected for transition to wolves just like with vampyri. And they are also created as punishment. So in the game on three different missions we have three different iterations of wolf creation where it is a failure, it is a desired outcome as reward even by the individual being transformed, and it is feared punishment.

[biostem]

Maybe the degree of care taken in the conversion process has some influence on the outcome - so just tossing a rando into the process results in a nearly mindless and feral warwolf, but one where the candidate is carefully selected, tested, conditioned, and otherwise prepped for the process results in one with their mind intact... just guessing, here.

[Rudra]

All I know is that there is a mission where you rescue a conscript that was specifically bred to become a War Wolf (one of the Striga missions I believe), there is a mission where Council candidates are looking forward to becoming War Wolves (just like the Vampyri candidate missions), there is a mission where you have to rescue a Council defector before he is punished for betraying the Council by being made into a War Wolf, and there is the old lore of War Wolves being failed attempts at making Galaxies. So the lore for the wolves is all over the place. The main point of which was in response to @Akisan that in the case of the War Wolves, the lore is rather ambiguous and even contradictory in the game.

 

As for the OP, I would definitely like being able to select which actual NPC model gets used in AE missions and in SG bases. So the devs making it possible for themselves in existing missions would be a very welcome first step.

Edited December 21, 2022 by Rudra
Edited to remove unnecessary "a" before "War Wolves".

[Wavicle]

What I want is for rescuees to be untouchable until AFTER you free them. When I rescue Thunderhead Bartlett he should NOT be able to be killed by AoEs before I've even freed him.

[Rudra]

1 minute ago, Wavicle said:

What I want is for rescuees to be untouchable until AFTER you free them. When I rescue Thunderhead Bartlett he should NOT be able to be killed by AoEs before I've even freed him.

Or injured Rogue PPD in the burning building mission being killed by the Malta boss in the last room because the downed officer has a health bar? Or those three heroes with 1 HP being held by the Freakshow that die if you don't pull the Freakshow away from them with a ranged attack the moment the Freak Tanks do anything?

[Wavicle]

Just now, Rudra said:

Or injured Rogue PPD in the burning building mission being killed by the Malta boss in the last room because the downed officer has a health bar? Or those three heroes with 1 HP being held by the Freakshow that die if you don't pull the Freakshow away from them with a ranged attack the moment the Freak Tanks do anything?

Seriously. I consider them trap missions designed only to be infuriating.

[Herotu]

21 hours ago, srmalloy said:

It doesn't really make a bit of difference to gameplay, but there are some missions where the hostage selection needs to be better to fit the story. I just finished Long Jack's "Rescue unwilling recruits" mission, where you free four unwilling recruits from the clutches of the Council. Two of them were fat men in business suits; it seems to me that the Council would pick people in better shape when they run their press gangs -- you start with someone who's significantly overweight, and they may have some underlying medical condition that will lead them to croak before they get through conditioning training, wasting the time and effort put into them.

I would love to see fat Nosferatu in business suits coming out of those conversion chambers ...

[RikOz]

On 12/21/2022 at 1:30 PM, Rudra said:

Or injured Rogue PPD in the burning building mission being killed by the Malta boss in the last room because the downed officer has a health bar? Or those three heroes with 1 HP being held by the Freakshow that die if you don't pull the Freakshow away from them with a ranged attack the moment the Freak Tanks do anything?

I recall one mission where I had to stop the bad guys from destroying a specific object. Alas, on this particular running of the mission, in addition to the regular mobs whose job it was to start attacking the object when you show up, the random mission spawning placed two other groups of mobs in close proximity to the object. So the instant I showed up, two lieutenants and six minions all started unloading on the thing, and it was destroyed and the mission failed before I could even start my first attack.

 

As far as random hostage spawns, I would love to see, at the very least, the named hostages use the same model every time. For the others, yeah, it's odd when the "recruit" I'm rescuing from the racist 5th Column is a black guy. Or that hero alignment mission where the DE has abducted three heroes, and they are either overweight or elderly.