Rebel Movement & Promotion

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quarter
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Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by quarter »

Why not allow the Rebels to be moved between Havens? It would fit the narrative of the game and would assist when Advent wants to do a retaliation or for some reason you find yourself low in a particular region.

Also, why not allow rebels to be promoted to rookies or squaddies after the Rendezvous or Retaliations? Having shown their mettle in the field they could now become a good part of the XCOM team! The thing where rebels who fight could still be faceless would have to change, but IMHO that seems pretty ridiculous anyway.

First post, big fan.
chrisb
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by chrisb »

I like the idea of being able to move them around. Sort of brings back some of the 'fleet' management from the air game. The hard part is balancing once you do that. It opens up potential for exploiting a lot of the strategy layer and so it would require some careful thought about how it got implemented. Coding wise it wouldn't be hard to add the ability to do it, I think the big part would be setting up some sort of cooldown/time to travel aspect to keep you from just being able to stack rebels in one region.

It does make more sense though. If advent can move troops, why can't xcom? Also it would help some issues with getting a haven wiped out, you could more quickly rebuild. Or move stuff out of high strength regions mid-late game into lower regions to setup an intel spam until the strength moves. It would make the strat layer more interesting, just need to keep it balanced.

Leveling up rebels is sort of already there it's just RNG based at the end of the month. It would be a lot of work to give them proper ranks I think and while nice flavor, I don't think it would be that beneficial overall.
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johnnylump
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by johnnylump »

Basically we didn't include that because it would make it too easy to work around the consequences of enemy retaliations.

Narratively, I think of the rebels as people who are tied to their home region and think of themselves as liberators of a particular nation, while rebels who want to fight the aliens globally offer themselves up as recruits for XCOM.
quarter
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by quarter »

Thanks for the replies.

I can see the narrative context of home base rebels. That makes sense. I personally would enjoy the new strategy layer though. I don't think it would hurt game play from retaliations it would just add a new fun layer to strike at advent!

My issue arose with one sole rebel left in a region after a retaliation where it seemed the whole base was faceless(es) [What's the plural of faceless?]. That sole recruiter is having some trouble making some friends in Western Europe now, and advent is up to strength 9 there. So I could really use some more boots on the ground and I've got 15+ per in my liberated regions on the Western continents. So as the Commander, you could see how I'd want to go all "United Airlines" on a few yanks, pull them out of their cozy havens and red-eye them over to Paris to aid in Le' Resistance. Americans saving Europe from invaders, where have we heard that before?
Zyrrashijn
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by Zyrrashijn »

quarter wrote:[What's the plural of faceless?]
That would be "faceless" same as with "fish". One Faceless, many Faceless. ;)
LordYanaek
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by LordYanaek »

If we could move them freely it would quickly lead to abuses such as (mostly) abandoning a region once alert level becomes high and move everyone to a newly contacted region to immediately run 13 intel. However allowing excess rebels (above 13) to be relocated to low population havens would be useful to help recover when shit happens without probably being too strong.
quarter wrote: My issue arose with one sole rebel left in a region after a retaliation where it seemed the whole base was faceless(es)
Try to see the bright side, you're not much worse after the retaliation than you were before if everyone was a faceless in that haven ;)

I just got my first Rendezvous (late May) in my starting region and killed 2 faceless then got a supply drop a few days later that makes me suspect there are 4 more of those in the region for a total of 6, the region was barely maxed. I thought i had some crappy RNG with almost half faceless in that region but you got some really rotten RNG at work for such a result :shock:
Would be nice if the chance to get a new faceless would drop after you already have a bunch of them (2-3) in your haven.
DonCrabio
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by DonCrabio »

Generally, I would like more interaction with rebels. Maybe management of local heaven arsenals and rebel loadouts or ability to pass unused weapons and armor to them. Promotion of rebels to Rookies would be nice too, maybe even make this standard way to get new soldiers?

Movement between heavens can be balanced by timers and cooldowns, for example it can take 1 week to adapt and start work in new environment and no more than one rebel can be moved at the same time from or to chosen heaven.
Zyrrashijn
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by Zyrrashijn »

I think, a mission to relocate a small number of resistance members would be nice.
You'd have to assign a small squad (maybe 5 Soldiers + 3 rebels max) to guide those rebels to their new region (maybe only one that is adjacent to their origin) and it would have a decent chance of being discovered by an ADVENT patrol, resulting in a wilderness (which are a bit underrepresented) or city outskirts defense mission they'd have to do on their own.
It would not make much sense, though, as one could argue that we can fly the rebels anywhere with the Avenger no problem.
Just thinking.
quarter
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by quarter »

What if we allowed rookies to be demoted to rebels and could assign them to a region? This would come with the cost of recruitment which would be a determent to abuse, and it would fit narratively with JL's thinking that rookies fight globally and rebels stay in their home regions.
LordYanaek wrote:If we could move them freely it would quickly lead to abuses such as (mostly) abandoning a region once alert level becomes high and move everyone to a newly contacted region to immediately run 13 intel.
Wouldn't those rebels still be able to trigger a retaliation in the lower alert level region? Or does advent strength affect chance of retaliations?
DonCrabio wrote:Generally, I would like more interaction with rebels. Maybe management of local heaven arsenals and rebel loadouts or ability to pass unused weapons and armor to them.
I would enjoy this as well. I'd like to be able to equip my rebels appropriately to fit their perks and skills like my soldiers. Or at least, like you say, build an arsenal in regions to guarantee the rebels are strapped well for rendezvous and retals.
LordYanaek
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by LordYanaek »

quarter wrote:What if we allowed rookies to be demoted to rebels and could assign them to a region? This would come with the cost of recruitment which would be a determent to abuse
Rookies are extremely cheap once you get some supplies income.
Wouldn't those rebels still be able to trigger a retaliation in the lower alert level region? Or does advent strength affect chance of retaliations?
Under 4 Str there is no retaliations but retaliations are not the real issue.
Once Str becomes high, you loose some missions like High Value Prisoner (VIP), Jailbreak (Rebels+Rookies) while you gain access to troop movement (Column Ambush). VIP missions can be hard to detect with good timing and require a lot of rebels on Intel (especially in high alert level regions as it reduces the efficiency of every job) and you probably don't want to run them in those high alert region as you would get a lot more enemies on the map (enemy activity is directly related to alert level) while ambushes are relatively easy to detect in high Str regions (there is a bonus to detection in high str regions). if you could just swap rebels around you could contact a new region with low alert level, remove most of your rebels from the old one (keeping just enough to detect ambush missions from time to time) and immediately start hunting high value missions in the new regions. Obviously this applies to the mid game as in the late game you don't care much for an additional engineer but mid game it would probably be a big deal.
I would enjoy this as well. I'd like to be able to equip my rebels appropriately to fit their perks and skills like my soldiers. Or at least, like you say, build an arsenal in regions to guarantee the rebels are strapped well for rendezvous and retals.
This would definitely create a nice supplies sink if you had to equip all your rebels rather than get free previous tech weapons. It might be interesting but the entire balance of the strategic layer would be affected and if Supply Raids are no longer possible at 0% it might delay your own development quite a lot (which is not necessarily a bad thing for a 'long" war but would require a lot of rebalancing)
dstar3k
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by dstar3k »

Zyrrashijn wrote:
quarter wrote:[What's the plural of faceless?]
That would be "faceless" same as with "fish". One Faceless, many Faceless. ;)
I thought the plural of fish was 'fishies'. :)

Or maybe I'm just having flashbacks to when my kids were tiny.
dstar3k
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by dstar3k »

LordYanaek wrote:If we could move them freely it would quickly lead to abuses such as (mostly) abandoning a region once alert level becomes high and move everyone to a newly contacted region to immediately run 13 intel. However allowing excess rebels (above 13) to be relocated to low population havens would be useful to help recover when shit happens without probably being too strong.
That's easy to fix, actually: You can move one rebel out of a region per month (which I think is the same limitation Advent has, isn't it?).

That means that you can't easily instantly recover from e.g. a retaliation, but you also aren't stuck with 0 rebels and just the advisor to do recruiting.

If this was added, though, I'd suggest that recruiting after a failed retal be half as likely for 6 months, -1 per rebel that's been moved into the region since the failed retal, meaning that for the first three months minimum (you move the third rebel in in the third month, so on the fourth you've reached the threshold) you've only got half the chance to recruit.

Hmm. That might be too harsh. 3 months, maybe? Or simply reduce the penalty by 8% for every month that passes _and_ every rebel moved in? That way, if you move a rebel in in the first month, the second month is only at -33%, and if you move a rebel in the second month as well the third month is only at -16%. And if you move a rebel in the third month, there's no penalty for the fourth month.
LordYanaek
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by LordYanaek »

dstar3k wrote: That's easy to fix, actually: You can move one rebel out of a region per month (which I think is the same limitation Advent has, isn't it?).
That's another option if this feature was added. There are actually many ways it could be implemented in a balanced and interesting way.
  • Limiting movement to rebels over the 13 rebels working cap would mostly help avoid having useless rebels and could open for new strategies such as recruiting in liberated regions (with the liberation bonus) even over the 13 limit to staff neighboring regions but wouldn't help (much) to recover from retaliations unless you have some 18 rebels haven somewhere.
  • Limiting movement to 1 rebel/month from a region would help avoid abuses such abandoning a high str region and would allow quick recovery after a failed retaliation by moving 1 rebel out of several havens to put in the now empty haven but might be too strong.
  • Limiting to 1 rebel/month to a region would limit the recovery a lot and might only barely help compared to simply recruiting with a high ranking soldier. It might also not avoid the "flee from high str" issue if you can just dispatch them to multiple havens.
  • Combining both of the above limitations would certainly avoid having movement too powerful but might have a low effect on post-retaliation recovery.
  • Another idea would be to limit movement only to adjacent regions (no West Africa guy moving to New Arctic). It would keep a regional effect and might help avoid abuses but probably wouldn't be enough on it's own.
dstar3k wrote: If this was added, though, I'd suggest that recruiting after a failed retal be half as likely for 6 months, -1 per rebel that's been moved into the region since the failed retal, meaning that for the first three months minimum (you move the third rebel in in the third month, so on the fourth you've reached the threshold) you've only got half the chance to recruit.
Hum. Someone has to do the math but that might actually make recovering harder if you can only move one guy and your advisor can't recruit correctly and you would be forced to actually weaken another haven if you want to actually recover. That might be an option if you think retaliations aren't punishing enough of course :twisted:
Solomani
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by Solomani »

And now you just made all the programming, testing, AI balancing, etc more complicated. Easy to see how a simple idea can turn into a ton of work.
LordYanaek
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by LordYanaek »

Well, as johnnylump posted in another thread :
We'll be the judge of which ideas we are able to spend time on
Throwing ideas is different from requesting changes :) If they want to consider the option, this thread might contain interesting ideas to avoid making the option too powerful. If they don't want to consider it it's also fine for me. I don't really miss the option but it might be interesting if implemented correctly.

Finally, 3rd party modders are also fishing for ideas in those forums and they don't always care about the global balance so the idea is probably not lost :lol:
guypapyrus
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Re: Rebel Movement & Promotion

Post by guypapyrus »

I've thought a little about this and wondered if being able to transfer only promoted rebels while losing their promotions; and/or, being able to transfer soldiers to rebel duty, but only squaddies or lcpls or something. Doable, but hardly costless.
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