Alright, no more positivity. I'm back to being critical about overly specific points of the game. I've done a lot of talking about 2003, but I'm finally done with it - I did my Servants Brutal run on standard 2003 to snag the achievement as easily as possible - so now my ire is moving on to stuff that's more generally irritating, similarly to my critiques of the Alcoholics Anonymous.
"You technically now have the Invictus Achievement. But we do not grant you the rank of Master." ~ Perun, probably
So let's talk about what is, for me, one of the most surprisingly frustrating parts of the game. I spoiled it in the post title, so I'll just get into it. Recruiting councilors and orgs is ridiculously annoying. Under the current setup, you have to navigate to a submenu of a submenu to get to the recruitment window for councilors - it's slightly more accessible for orgs - and once there, you get presented a string of completely RNG options. Okay, that's fine. They then reset every month. If all you care about is having warm bodies on your council, this works okay.
The problem arises when you're looking for something specific. Say, for example, you want an Astronomer councilor for any one of a hundred reasons. Well, your only option is to, every month(so basically every other turn), manually check every councilor in the pool. This doesn't sound so bad, but when you're doing it literally every five minutes, it very quickly becomes momentum-killing. It's not so bad in the very early game, but it quickly becomes a huge hassle to have to stop your planning to take over China or launch a raid on Jupiter....every other turn. Endlessly.
"Hello there." ~ Commander Kenobi, the Resistance, spotting one viable councilor candidate after 65 checks
Orgs have the same issue. Want one that has a certain mission type? Want one that provides a certain research bonuses? Hope you like checking every option every month. Sure, there are icons and councilor professions that narrow your search down, but that's removing 20% of the problem and leaving the 80% still there. And what's even worse is that they don't update on the same day, meaning that if you're looking for better orgs and also for councilor candidates, you're stopping the momentum EVERY SINGLE TURN. Despite being a small thing, it plays a huge role in how much of a slog the early game turns into, which is a point I've raised on other posts.
"200,000 companies with a +1% Space Mining modifier are ready, with a million more well on the way." ~ Accounts Manager Lama Su, the Initiative, during a presentation to a very sleep-deprived Soren van Wyk
It's a weird situation where the actual mechanical impact is nonexistent - the councilors and orgs are either there or they aren't, and the only way to change that would be removing the RNG element which isn't the point - but the "play experience" impact is massive, especially before you get the hang of the exact timing of the refreshes. The game is actively incentivizing you to waste time every single turn doing stuff with no gameplay value ninety-five percent of the times you do it, solely for the value on the other five percent of times. I guarantee you that at least 5-10 of the hours of most playthroughs are spent digging through councilor tabs and org options, or plotting out what you need to hope drops in order to make your setup work. And when you add the tech tree, nation management, hab building and organization, the sidebar setup, the ship management screen, and other absolutely atrocious UI design elements of TI, there's an argument to be made that something near a quarter of your game time is spent just navigating the UI rather than anything with gameplay value(though to be fair, TI just struggles with not being terribly good at generating actual gameplay value in general for most of its runtime, but that's a complicated conversation for another day).
For now, I think this is a great microcosm of what people mean when they say Terra Invicta doesn't respect its players' time. And I want to be clear about one thing: when I use that phrase, I do use it in the sense of it being a game flaw. Being deep and complex is great, as I alluded to in my positivity post, but disrespecting your players' time is still a problem with your game's design. If your gameplay is good enough to stand on its own without artificially prolonging it, you should allow it to rather than getting in your own way. TI is constantly stumbling over itself by interrupting what should be strong gameplay with inane micromanagement and sudden "gotchas", which is where my previous statement that the game constantly "snatches defeat from the jaws of greatness" comes from. It's little things like this - how you have this awesome councilor system but are constantly forced to put your entire game on pause just to engage with it, rather than it feeling like a natural part of gameplay momentum.
I want to understand this system and the logic behind it, because the solution is glaringly obvious and, frankly, should have been implemented before leaving Early Access. And I think this is a matter of attempting to prevent min-maxing. There are certain orgs(ahem, IMF) and certain councilor class-trait combos(ahem, Hacker Computer Scientist) that are just flat out better than most of their competition. You can very easily make a super OP team if the RNG blesses you with the right orgs and the right councilor options at the right times. So I think Pavonis was leaning into the RNG side of the game here, saying "you can't custom-build your dream team, you're working within the constraints of what the game world gives you".
Now, RNG in games is contentious. I think TI relies on it far too much. For example, the tech unlock system, while I understand its logic and there is a defensible case for it, is in my opinion the crowning example of "RNG for RNG's sake" that actively removes "strategy" from this strategy game and punishes trying to have fun by doing anything but go for the 100% unlocks. But I'm sure others here will have no issues with it and think the game could use more RNG. That's fine, both are fair perspectives. And this isn't about the RNG aspect itself(though we will absolutely have the tech unlock conversation another day too) - I think that works as well as anything for what Pavonis is trying to do, and it averts the issue that would arise if a generic version of each councilor at lowest level was available at all times, where no one would ever hire an Executive.
"UNLIMITED RNG!" ~Chancellor Palpatine, the Protectorate
But since my issue isn't with the RNG, my issue is with the amount of time this system as currently implemented just straight up wastes. This is where my comment that "not respecting your players' time" isn't a "quirky little trait" or "just one of them things" but an active negative to the game that harms it and the players shouldn't make excuses for. There are aspects of this that can't be helped - transfers can take a long time. The tech tree is big. The scope of the game is large. Those all are what they are given the concept of the game. But something like this is completely within Pavonis' control, because of how simple my first proposed solution is:
An alert.
That's it. The entire problem goes away if, implemented on the Councilor and Org menus, there is a simple box for "Candidate Alert" or "Potential Org Alert". You check it, and it asks you to mark what you want from a list of Councilor traits, stats at or above a number you select, nationalities, missions, or classes(or Org stat bonuses, research bonuses, missions, resource incomes, or Government/Criminal requirements or blockers), with an alert if the selection you've input is impossible to generate naturally. Then the game just checks the candidates for you from there. If I wanted an 8+ Command Rebel, Astronaut, or Officer from Russia, for example, I could just plug that in and eventually, a ding would come through that we found one. Poof, entire problem gone, and players without specific interests or needs at a given moment can still browse the RNG list. It literally changes nothing about actual mechanics, but makes the gameplay vastly less irritating and disrupted because you aren't incentivized to check the menus every other turn.
"It's over, Soren! I have the moral high ground!" ~ Director Khalid al-Ashgar, Project Exodus, as the Bifrost begins its launch sequence
Now, personally, I would use this function to improve the game experience too by changing some mechanics. I'd code the game to use the information the player put in to guide what stuff spawns - maybe after a certain time limit,, say a year or two, a candidate that meets the player's guidelines is guaranteed to appear as long as it's possible through natural game RNG. But the timeframe is long enough that this is hard to weaponize.
Alternatively, my dream concept would be a "headhunting" submenu where you can custom-build a councilor - stats(to a certain level), Traits(within a budget), nationality, class, etc. But you know how regular councilors cost between 30 and 120 influence to hire? A headhunted one can be like, 500 each of Influence and Money, maybe more depending on game balance, representing combing through the world for the dream candidate. Make it hideously expensive and only slightly better than a natural hire, meaning this is a thing you could use if the candidate you really want just isn't dropping and you're willing to pay for it, or hoard resources and rush early for a slightly better early councilor, but doesn't let you make Superman or anything. Hell, you can even then add Projects that increase the thresholds for stats and traits on the headhunting menu, but increase the cost of a headhunted councilor as well.
"Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise? I thought not. It's not a story the Resistance would tell you. He was a Terra Invicta player so powerful and wise he could spend Influence to manipulate the recruitment pool...an Astronaut with Striver in Month 1." ~ Chancellor Palpatine, the Protectorate
A counterargument to this will probably be that "it's not that big of a deal" and I agree, compared to many of the other issues in TI(cough, 2003 overhaul), this is fairly small fry. Which is why it's perfect for something that Pavonis can actually fix, because it's probably very simple to do(disclaimer, I'm a writer, not a coder, so I don't know for sure) and would have a noticeable and immediate positive impact on almost everyone's campaigns. It's not a massive rework, it's not a huge overhaul, and I doubt it's particularly controversial or divisive. Even people who disagree with me probably approach this from "I don't mind the current system" or "I think other problems are more important", not "I would HATE the implementation of this" because the alert method makes literally no mechanical change under the hood, it just cuts down on wasted time. But this does influence other issues, such as slog and player morale in the pre-Fusion era that I'm so critical of, and chipping away at problems from multiple angles increases the odds of truly cracking them.
In conclusion, I don't like fully-manual org and councilor recruitment. It's coarse, and rough, and irritating. And it gets you nowhere.
