Hiring/firing
General Information
- You can only have a maximum of 250 soldiers. This includes new recruits (not yet shown up) and soldiers in transit between bases.
- New soldiers cost $40,000, while their monthly salary is half that price, or $20,000. If you have the full 250 soldiers, they're costing you $5M/month.
- Sacking a soldier costs nothing. To do so, make sure the soldiers name is listed in the Sell/Sack screen. If it is not there, the soldier is probably loaded on a transport ship.
- It takes 72 hours (3 days) for new recruits to show up. Once at a base, it takes anywhere from 6 to 16 hours to transfer between bases, dependent entirely on distance. The minimum transfer time is guaranteed even if both of your bases are stacked right on top of each other. The cost to transfer soldiers is free, regardless if they are wearing armor. Coming soon: an analysis of transfer time to distance.--Zombie 22:52, 13 Oct 2005 (PDT)
- Statistics and names of new recruits are always randomly generated. See recruit statistics for more info, including the probability of getting the perfect soldier.
- A soldier's armor stays with them, including if they are transferred or fired. So it is LOST if you fire them when they have on armor. This is the only item that stays with a soldier. Armor can be seen/changed on the Soldier tab, or under Equip Craft.
- Only 100 items can be in transit (transferred between bases) in total at any given time. "Items" here means line items; one transfer of 200 Elerium counts as one line item. Soldiers (including new recruits) each count as one item. So, in the endgame, if you want to hire a ton of new recruits for high-psi screening at the beginning of a month, you can only have 100 on the way at a time. This leads to a theoretical max of 1,000 soldiers per month if you're doing high-volume screening (3 days for 100 soldiers; 30 days per month). Do routine inter-base transfers before hiring huge batches, because they will hog your transfer queue for 3 days.
Aircraft
--Spike 19:22, 3 June 2006 (PDT)
- Sacking aircraft - loss of craft weapons
- I'm pretty sure that when you sack a leased aircraft (Skyranger or Interceptor), you lose the craft weapons (and ammo) it is armed with. So you have to remove the weapons before sacking the aircraft.
- Unfortunately you don't seem to be able to totally remove weapons - you have to switch (rearm) to another weapon type. Therefore, before you sack an aircraft, make sure you have 2 spare cheap weapons in that base. Switch to the cheap weapons that you would rather lose, and keep your Plasma Beams or whatever was on the aircraft.
- Also, if you sell the aircraft right away after you have begun to rearm, there will be little or no ammunition lost when it flies back home to the leasing company.
- In theory the cheapest 'sacrifice' weapon is a Stingray Launcher, $16K each. In practice an Avalanche Launcher, $17K each, is a much more useful thing to have laying around spare.
- So far from being 'free' to sack an aircraft, it is likely to cost you $16K-$34K to sack an armed aircraft, even if you are careful. If you are careless it could cost you half a million dollars cash, plus lost manufacturing time.
- Sacking aircraft - no loss of troops and squad weapons (?)
- I'm pretty sure that when you sack an aircraft, the soldiers and equipment get off first. So you wouldn't need to worry about removing them first. But don't take my word for it as I haven't checked 100%.
Costs
Personnel Recruit Salary --------- ------- ------ Soldier $40,000 $20,000 Engineer $50,000 $25,000 Scientist $60,000 $30,000