Please modify/change the way starting Councillors are assigned

[neilwilkes]

This is the part of the game that I find the most frustrating as it is close to impossible to get a sensible starting pair without massive amounts of restarting. Let me try to explain what I am banging on about.
We are supposed to be in charge of one of 8 Deep State factions set up to handle the news that ET is not only out there, but down here as well.
I will look first at The Resistance - why oh why are my starting pair invariably either old (late 40's and early 50's is far too common) or the wrong skill set or even both. On the current start, I have a 47-year old diplomat who cannot do a public campaign and the one with a decent persuasion stat cannot inspire (and she is also old). So not much use, and it's restart time again (this will be attempt 10 this morning so far) because the available pool of candidates is literally hopeless - there is nobody I would hire.
This really starts to get tedious after a few restarts.

A simple fix would be along the lines of being presented with a set of CV's to select our opening pair from - are you really telling me that our Shadow Faction, our Deep State organization, is that badly organized that we have to take whoever we are given with absolutely no attention paid to the starting stats? Yes, I understand we can fire & hire new ones but the opening 6 months are kinda critical as this determines the nation you select as your 'Home Nation' as it were, and having to faff about sacking folks & hiring new ones (assuming you have the influence points available, that is) can easily set you back badly.

Everything else I really can live with regarding councillors - but for my opening pair I would like to be able to select my 'founding members' as it were and not get stuck with 2 losers

EDIT.
I am now on my 15th restart this morning and still have not yet got anything close to acceptable.
I am not looking for monster starting stats of 8 persuade, but what I feel should be a bare minimum of missions & abilities. I accept that this will vary from player to player depending on how you see things developing & the faction you are running, but this really serves to emphasize that these first 2 'free' councillors need to be selectable and not just dumped on me.

[johnnylump]

People have asked for this and something like this is on our roadmap. You can mod it a little in TIFactionTemplate by setting what missions are required for the first two councilors.

Obviously the original intent was to have you play the initial hand you're dealt as part of the challenge and to provide variety between starts, not to force you to feel like you have to minmax through repeated restarts. The AI faces the same set of problems.

It may be some weeks until we have campaign start options -- many people expecting many things be in the game yesterday -- in the meantime it's probably quicker to go in your savegame json and increase your councilor stats by hand.

[neilwilkes]

I appreciate the candid reply - really, I do.
The thing is I am a 60 year old sound mixer/Optical disc author who has no clue at all about editing Jasons - to me, JSON was the captain of the Argo in Greek Myth!!

I guess I will just have to wait - modification of files feels like cheating to me.....sorry, but the combination of Ignorance & my own odd ethics is a killer.