I am once again going to remake Hire and Recruit. Third time's a charm, right?
It'll be way f__king better, with the ability to hire anyone without initiating dialog. This will allow you to hire many animals and robots you could not in HAR2. It will also remedy that bug where "I'd like to hire you as a mercenary" would cause issues with human dialogue, because hiring will be in a pop-up box instead of speech.
The hiring ritual will be entirely re-done. Instead of the original mod, where your mercs follow you indefinitely, your recruits will only follow you for a number of days before they ask for a break. If you lead your recruits into battle several times, they will grumble and ask to go home. You can then either allow them to go home, pay them a small fee to keep fighting, or threaten them to stay in your party, which will lose you karma.
Each time your recruit goes home, you can give them training orders! So the next time you hire them, they'll be stronger. This is a more elegant and realistic approach to the original mod's unrealistic training and upgrading mechanic.
Because your recruits will only follow you for a limited time, hiring will be MUCH cheaper. An NPC with a higher level will be more expensive to hire. To mitigate the expense of hiring recruits, you can get good karma, increase your barter (for unfactioned humans), or increase your faction reputation (for factioned humans).
I plan on putting in the quest marker functionality so you can see all your recruits on the minimap.
Naturally, New Vegas is buggy as s***, and NPCs will still probably vanish from your party, so Hire and Recruit 3 will have an in-character explanation for why this happens: NPCs who vanish from your party are deserters / betrayers. This is thematically consistent with why the glitch happens in the first place: the actor's routine is very important to them.
However. I think I can make a fix which will reduce the chance an NPC will vanish from your party.
New features:
- Feed creatures / animals to heal them.
- Repair robots with scrap metal and other parts to heal them.
- Training orders: When your recruit goes home, you can instruct them to train and make them become more skilled.
- Humans will only travel with you for a limited time. I'm thinking that creatures should still follow you indefinitely.
- Could be cool to include a mechanic where you also feed your human buddies, now that I think of it. Let me know your thoughts.
- Like in HAR2, I'll include the ability to make your recruits into "Veterans". This time, you won't have to level up to do it. That's just silly. For this new version, you have to hire them repeatedly and let them go home after several adventures. The idea is that your recruit is growing more capable with each quest they go with you on. But rest is essential for growth, as we all know.
- ROMANCE?!
There are popular requests that I think I probably will NOT add to this new mod, because I like to keep s*** simple, and the less I succumb to feature creep, the less this mod is likely to break or make other mods f__k up. These features are commonly requested, but I may only employ the most popular one.
1) Use Melee / Use Ranged (Not as easy to implement as you might think, and you can already sort of do this by taking all the ammo from an NPC)
2) Wait / Follow (A risky feature to employ in the sh*tty Gamebryo engine. I may replace this with "Follow Close / Follow Far".)
3) "Go Attack X Actor" (My main fear is that this will be too easily exploitable. Enemies will attack your follower, but they won't attack you... so it will make combat riskless.)
4) Recall Mode (The true purpose of this mode was to prevent recruits vanishing. Instead, I'll have actors be perpetually in "Recall Mode", so it won't even be a feature. All recruits will just constantly be getting summoned to the player.)
These features are not off the table, but they are not likely to make the final cut. Please give me your feedback.
You may notice that this version of Hire and Recruit seems to be lightweight. You could even say its features are rather few. Well, this is by design. I like my mods to be lightweight so as to function well with other mods. If you have any ideas for features, do let me know.
Lastly, I'll finally get around to making a Pip-Boy graphic for the recruitment contract. About damn time, right?
