Aquiring Mercs and Recruits

Hiring

At the start of the game, all 40 mercs from A.I.M. are accessible. But that doesn’t mean you can afford all of them or even that they will be willing to join you.

Once you have obtained enough money to commission a merc, you will have a few other factors to contend with. Each merc has a distinctive and often comical personality that you will need to work with.

Although their comments and commentary are very amusing, their personal opinions and biases make it a lot harder to form a team. Many mercs will only join you if you have someone they like on the squad, while others will refuse your contract because of the people you have already hired.

You can separate squads and rejoin various mercs but if a soldier is in a squad where they don’t get along, they will complain and lose morale. For a quick overview of each merc's likes and dislikes, check out the chart below.

Recruits

Recruits are locals of Arulco who will offer to join your cause after you have completed a specific quest. Getting a “free” merc sounds too good to be true, but nothing is ever free. First, you must complete their quests. Some are very straightforward, but others are very daunting.

Also, although you won’t have to pay cash for them to join, you may have to pay in another way. Many are untrained and unarmed, which will still have a cost on your resources. It also means you will need to put a lot of time to level them up to the specs of a proper merc.

Not to mention you need to completely equip them from the ground up. Still, even the lower stat recruits can be very useful to form a backup squad or to protect a highly sought-after location from enemy squads. On the opposite end, there are few excellent recruits who are every bit as effective as the mercs from A.I.M. Before you extend a lot of effort to gain a new recruit, check their stats to see if they really going to be an asset to your current situation.