Question: Character Pool Prioritizing

[Infernalis]

Hello fellow Commanders. I have a question regarding the pool of custom characters and their respective selection behaviour by the system.

Please consider the following scenraio:

Let's assume you have a small pool of custom characters which you would like to use in a new campaign. It is a small pool of - let's say - a handful of custom characters.

Since the pool is clearly not big enough to provide all characters you might and will encounter during a campaign, you will most likely set the respective option to use custom characters and random ones.

Additionally you want those handful of characters to appear within your initial roster of soldiers. It is not necessarily needed to have them in the prime squad which takes on the first mission, but you don't want to have to recruit them first.

Essentially you want the system to prioritize custom characters over random ones. Kind of: "Take all characters from the custom pool until none is left. Once the pool is exhausted, begin spawning random characters."

And now the question:
Is there a setting which would provide this desired behaviour?

Alternatively: Have I accidentally misunderstood the setting "Custom characters only"? I assume it means that with a handful of custom characters you'd get a huge amount of clones running around. Or is the system clever enough to not clone characters and therefore provide the desired behavior described above?

[wolf12kingamer]

The way I see it and the way it appears to me is if you select that character pool you should get those before you get any random gen characters and that is how it has been working for me. If the characters you want aren't in well restart the new play through that's what I did a couple time to get some specific characters.

[orion winterfire]

It starts giving random when there's none left in the pool, if pool only is selected.

[SaintKnave]

The desired behavior is there, but with an unfortunate issue: Before your initial squad is generated, ten characters are pulled from your pool into the "Recruit" list.

So in order to assure your entire starting squad of four are all custom characters, you need at least fourteen in your pool -- ten for the Recruit list and four for your squad. You'll need another four if you want your entire starting roster to be custom.

Alternately, use the mod called "Load from Character Pool." After your first mission, name your soldiers identically to those in your pool, and the mod pulls all their customizations in for you.

[Cahos Rahne Veloza]

For controlling which starting soldiers you get in the start of a campaign use this mod...

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683306035

Then use this one to stop the RNG from assigning random annoying classes to the soldiers you lovingly designed in the Character Pool..

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=684929720

[Infernalis]

Thank you for your anwers and suggestions. I can confirm the behaviour which orion winterfire has explained. It's just what I wanted.

Having them within the initial Squad is not needed for me, neither the assignment of specific classes, as I have designed them to be Recruits anyway.

Nevertheless I'm thankful for the mod suggestions since they might be interesting in the future.

Cheers.

[Zyrrashijn]

Instead of "Use my Class" i would recommend "Commanders Choice", just in case you ever want to use the LWS Perk Pack

[orion winterfire]

Originally posted by Zyrrashijn:

Instead of "Use my Class" i would recommend "Commanders Choice", just in case you ever want to use the LWS Perk Pack

Because there is no setting custom classes in pool?

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by Infernalis:

Alternatively: Have I accidentally misunderstood the setting "Custom characters only"? I assume it means that with a handful of custom characters you'd get a huge amount of clones running around. Or is the system clever enough to not clone characters and therefore provide the desired behavior described above?

You misunderstood. Use custom only uses the customs until you run out. Then you get randoms as normal.

The only time this can potentially cause cloning is if one of your customs dies; a new copy may be pulled in instead of a random.

I typically only have 4 to 8 people in the custom pool; if one or two of them die early I'll get a clone of them that may show up as someone to recruit later in the game.

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by SaintKnave:

The desired behavior is there, but with an unfortunate issue: Before your initial squad is generated, ten characters are pulled from your pool into the "Recruit" list.

So in order to assure your entire starting squad of four are all custom characters, you need at least fourteen in your pool -- ten for the Recruit list and four for your squad. You'll need another four if you want your entire starting roster to be custom.

Alternately, use the mod called "Load from Character Pool." After your first mission, name your soldiers identically to those in your pool, and the mod pulls all their customizations in for you.

I've never seen that happen; if you have "use character pool only" set in the character pool, it will take from the character pool for your initial starting mission first and dump the randoms back at the base

If I only have 4 in the character pool with use character pool it is only ever those 4 in the starting mission (and i ran with only 4 in the character pool for a dozen campaigns before adding a few more ~ with character pool only marked, they were the only 4 I ever started with on first mission)

When I moved up to 5 or 6 I would get 4 from among those, and the others would be in the base with the randoms. I'm at like 8 customs now and those 8 are the only ones I ever see pulled from for the start mission (and this is after dozens of new campaigns now)

It's all dependent on the character pool page setting. If you are getting different behavior its from a mod.

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by orion winterfire:

Originally posted by Zyrrashijn:

Instead of "Use my Class" i would recommend "Commanders Choice", just in case you ever want to use the LWS Perk Pack

Because there is no setting custom classes in pool?

^Yep, changing class in pool is just so you can see what they look like. It has nothing to do with class in game. It helps sometimes if you do plan on choosing their class so you can plan what sleeves/tattoos are shown off best depending on which weapons they will be holding and also to compare poses.

Commanders choice is a great mod to pair with that planning so you can alter their class as its awarded in game to whatever you want

[Zyrrashijn]

And "Use my class" does weird stuff especially with the classes from the perk pack. Totally incompatible.

[SaintKnave]

Originally posted by Kunovega:

I've never seen that happen; if you have "use character pool only" set in the character pool, it will take from the character pool for your initial starting mission first and dump the randoms back at the base

Huh. When I was writing my (one and only) mod, prior to the Alien Hunters patch, it worked the way I described. It looks like they've changed it since, to work the way you describe. They even left a comment to that effect in the source code (XComGameState_HeadquartersResistance.uc, line 113) :

// Used to create the resistance recruits here, moved to XComHQ setup so character pool characters fill staff first