Right, as promised, getting a response out on your feedback! I do agree that a lot of higher stat NPCs are currently too easy to recruit; there's a lot of NPCs that use placeholder dialogue (Primarily, merc dialogue is used in a lot of places where I haven't gotten specific dialogue written up) which isn't too difficulty sensitive. This is pretty much the compromise between leaving a lot of NPCs un-recruitable for a degree of time because I haven't had time to get to their specific stat array and writing up a tailored package for them, or having them recruitable in a way that doesn't exactly fir them or what they'd ask for but is /roughly/ fitting so people can get them in if they want to.

Far as the STRONGER_THAN_ME condition, I've never really liked using it as I don't really understand what calculations go into it, and it could lead to people complaining that characters that should be roughly equal (or even stronger) are being gated behind higher price/inability to recruit because the system sees a couple stats the player character is weaker in. At least, that's what the tests I did were coming out with happening as far as I could tell. I've got a couple characters using them in my indev build, but I'm considering reworking that because I just really don't get it. If there was a condition that specifically checked if one stat (strength, a specific weapon stat, crossbows, etc) was higher than a value, I'd be jumping on that in a heartbeat, but there's no way to do so within FCS.

Summarising: There's a lot of placeholders being used across a wider array of characters than ideal because writing more than 100 full, specific & tailored packages is a lot of work hours.In addition, I agreed to balance it more in line with what would this character ask for in world, rather than pure mechanical balance as that's what Nano initially aimed for. Working on an update that should hopefully offer alternative options for balance, but I don't know when that'll be out.

Cheers for the feedback, and it's defo noted!

I totally agree it should be harder to recruit I was sneaking into skin bandit base, knocked everyone out with my high stealth/assassin character and put one of them into their own peeler machines and instantly could recruit him and even haggle him down to 8000 cats (this was on a 60+ combat skills skin bandit)

is there maybe a way to tie the recruitment to your base? I don't know if the game keeps track but in the dialogue it says something like "you have a lot of nice things" so I'd assume it would be kind of fitting for high level characters more likely to be recruitable if your base has a certain size and tech level maybe or value of items stockpiled?

I really don't know what the game keeps track of but I noticed on the map the initial mark for my outpost changed from X mark to the village and now to a waystation like symbol so I guess there are certain conditions


on a side note really love the mod despite it maybe "too easy" because I have little interest in training every single recruit for 10 hours to reach an acceptable level
kenshi let's you have all freedom on how to play so this mod to me is just a shortcut for lategame grinding which I don't mind

easiest solution to the problem might just be increasing the base recruitment values so every handpicked recruit is going to cost you a huge amount of cats, this way you also have a lategame reason for money

Originally posted by laVal:

Right, as promised, getting a response out on your feedback! I do agree that a lot of higher stat NPCs are currently too easy to recruit; there's a lot of NPCs that use placeholder dialogue (Primarily, merc dialogue is used in a lot of places where I haven't gotten specific dialogue written up) which isn't too difficulty sensitive. This is pretty much the compromise between leaving a lot of NPCs un-recruitable for a degree of time because I haven't had time to get to their specific stat array and writing up a tailored package for them, or having them recruitable in a way that doesn't exactly fir them or what they'd ask for but is /roughly/ fitting so people can get them in if they want to.

Far as the STRONGER_THAN_ME condition, I've never really liked using it as I don't really understand what calculations go into it, and it could lead to people complaining that characters that should be roughly equal (or even stronger) are being gated behind higher price/inability to recruit because the system sees a couple stats the player character is weaker in. At least, that's what the tests I did were coming out with happening as far as I could tell. I've got a couple characters using them in my indev build, but I'm considering reworking that because I just really don't get it. If there was a condition that specifically checked if one stat (strength, a specific weapon stat, crossbows, etc) was higher than a value, I'd be jumping on that in a heartbeat, but there's no way to do so within FCS.

Summarising: There's a lot of placeholders being used across a wider array of characters than ideal because writing more than 100 full, specific & tailored packages is a lot of work hours.In addition, I agreed to balance it more in line with what would this character ask for in world, rather than pure mechanical balance as that's what Nano initially aimed for. Working on an update that should hopefully offer alternative options for balance, but I don't know when that'll be out.

Cheers for the feedback, and it's defo noted!

Could you even do something like... add up the total value of all their stats and just straight up compare the total vs the total to give a relative idea of the "experience" of the units?

That way an industrialist who wanted to hire some muscle wouldn't be seen as "too" weak comparatively. You could even consider adding a preferred stat, so for example:

Warrior respects strength. While he might drop his price for an experienced industrialist, he'd drop it more for a very strong person (say giving 2x or 3x value to that particular stat)

Originally posted by crossmr:

Could you even do something like... add up the total value of all their stats and just straight up compare the total vs the total to give a relative idea of the "experience" of the units?

That way an industrialist who wanted to hire some muscle wouldn't be seen as "too" weak comparatively. You could even consider adding a preferred stat, so for example:

Warrior respects strength. While he might drop his price for an experienced industrialist, he'd drop it more for a very strong person (say giving 2x or 3x value to that particular stat)

Unfortunately, straight up not an option. For reference, here's the ref index I and Rustledjimm started about a year ago now, still a bit incomplete because Jimm does most of the in depth testing, but it's got everything on there. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EkMHtj1N7Sl_9sM43q4jSy32URYZa1uXOzCcfd1g_t8/edit#gid=1672480845 Relevant tabs to look at are "Dialogue Conditions" and "Dialogue Effects".

This is what we have to work with with kenshi modding; there's no scripting potential or modifying the functions, what we see in the mod tools is what we get. We have DC_STRONGER_THAN_ME and DC_WEAKER_THAN_ME which checks and compares the combat stats, but we can't really tell how it's calculating things, and it's a bit unreliable, and pretty hard to test. We can't set a benchmark of one stat to compare, I think it /MIGHT/ add all the stats up and compare but even then, I'm not entirely sure, and I straight up don't like that as a balance factor because while player characters are usually fairly specialised, NPC characters usually have pretty spread and well rounded stat arrays. (Depends, of course, but...) And there's straight no way to compare non-combat stats! If I do that, I've got to use tech level, pretty much, and that limits how I can write the dialogue.

I've been considering using DC_SQUAD_SIZE for a relative check, but whats to stop someone from just recruiting a bunch of weak, easy NPCs and using those to force that check? I could use tech level or town level, and I think I've used it in a place or two, and it's probably the closest I can get to a solid way of doing it basing it on how progressed the player is; but going back and reworking all the old dialogues past pretty basic stuff is fairly labour intensive, and I don't plan to do so for a while. I'm getting some done with the attempt at a difficulty/balance select patch, but I am having to cut corners.

In summary, it's frustrating as hell because my options are severely limited, and while I can wrangle some decent ones by comboing conditions, a lot of these things don't work how you expect it to, or have broken since old patches! (When Nano wrote the dialogues using Screamer to help recruit an NPC, I believe he tested and found it worked. Now, "is character" can ONLY refer to the original speaker/T_ME, which is always the NPC you recruit! So I've got to nix the Screamer recruitment route and figure a way to rework that, and pray that maybe they make is character and has package applicable to T_INTERJECTOR and T_TARGET)