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Prisoners of war

Vanilla JA2 only ever let you shoot your way through Arulco. 1.13 adds a full prisoners-of-war system, written by Flugente: you can handcuff downed enemies, demand that outnumbered squads surrender, ship your captives off to real prison facilities, and then interrogate them for militia recruits, intel and ransom money. The feature entered the SVN trunk in r5709 (December 2012) and has grown considerably since; it is enabled by default in current GitHub releases.

Enabling and tuning it

Everything lives in the [Strategic Gameplay Settings] section of Ja2_Options.INI, under the ; Prisoner system header. The master switch is ALLOW_TAKE_PRISONERS. Defaults below are from the current GitHub Data-1.13\Ja2_Options.INI; see the options tour for how to edit safely.

Setting Default What it does (from the INI comments)
ALLOW_TAKE_PRISONERS TRUE "can you capture enemy soldiers?"
ENEMY_CAN_SURRENDER TRUE "can you offer enemies a surrender option?"
DISPLAY_SURRENDER_VALUES TRUE Show the surrender numbers when you demand surrender — "helpful if you wonder why the enemy does not surrender at overwhelming odds."
SURRENDER_MULTIPLIER 5.0 "the higher this value, the more superiority you need over the enemy for them to surrender. Range: 2.0 - 10.0"
PLAYER_CAN_ASK_TO_SURRENDER TRUE Lets you offer your own surrender to the enemy.
PRISONER_RETURN_TO_ARMY_CHANCE 50 Chance that released soldiers rejoin the Queen's army.
PRISONER_DEFECT_CHANCE 25 Chance that interrogated soldiers join you — "they will be turned into militia of same or lower quality".
PRISONER_INTEL_CHANCE 25 Chance that interrogated soldiers give you intel.
PRISONER_RANSOM_CHANCE 25 Chance that interrogated soldiers get you ransom money.
PRISONER_INTERROGATION_POINTS_* 25–250 Points needed to fully interrogate each prisoner class (see Interrogation).

Capturing enemies in tactical

Handcuffs, binders and tasers

To capture an enemy you physically restrain him:

  1. Put Handcuffs (item 1625) or a Stack of Binders (item 1632) in your merc's main hand. Both carry the Handcuffs item flag in Items.xml; mods can add more such items.
  2. Click on the target. A special handcuff cursor shows whether a capture attempt is possible at all.
  3. Unconscious enemies are always captured successfully. Conscious enemies resist, and the attempt may fail.

The attempt costs action points (AP_HANDCUFF = 50 and BP_HANDCUFF = 100 in APBPConstants.ini). The default quick-item shortcuts in Ja2_Options.INI help here: Alt+4 readies handcuffs and Alt+3 a taser (QUICK_ITEM_4 = -4, QUICK_ITEM_3 = -3).

The two restraint types differ:

  • Handcuffs are reusable — you can steal them back from the prisoner — and other enemies cannot un-cuff a handcuffed comrade.
  • Binders are a cheap consumable kit that degrades with every capture and is not recovered. Enemies who reach a bound comrade can free him (since r6248: an enemy who spots a captured comrade raises the alarm and tries to release him).

Since capturing works automatically on unconscious targets, less-than-lethal tools are the natural partner of this feature — stun guns were added alongside it specifically to make capturing enemies alive easier.

Handcuffing is loud

The AI is alerted when you handcuff someone, so quietly cuffing an entire sector one guard at a time will not work easily. Failed handcuff attempts also blow a covert merc's disguise (since r6241).

A handcuffed enemy is effectively out of the fight — he no longer acts in combat. The battle ends when every remaining enemy is dying or handcuffed. You can bandage your own prisoners if you want them alive (possible since r6028).

Who cannot be captured

  • Profile-based NPCs — anyone with a "talking face" portrait (Conrad, Mike, the Alma General and so on). Attempting it is simply blocked.
  • Tanks. In Flugente's words, "our handcuffs are too small". As long as a tank is present the AI will also never surrender.
  • Non-hostile civilians. Hostile civilians can be captured (since r7763) if their faction has <fCanBeCaptured>1</fCanBeCaptured> in CivGroupNames.xml — in the stock game that is set for the Kingpin, Hicks and Warden factions.

Demanding surrender

With ENEMY_CAN_SURRENDER = TRUE you can skip the handcuffs and ask whole squads to give up. Talk to any enemy soldier (the same way you would talk to an NPC); a dialog box offers the choice to demand their surrender, offer your own, or just exchange pleasantries. If they accept, all remaining enemies who are not dying become prisoners and the battle ends immediately.

Whether they accept depends on a comparison of both sides' surrender strength:

  • Every conscious soldier contributes a value based on experience level, strength, marksmanship and leadership. Unconscious, collapsed or dying soldiers contribute nothing; wounds and fatigue reduce the value.
  • Elite soldiers count 1.5×, administrators (and green militia on your side) 0.75×.
  • Your mercs count double compared to your militia.
  • Enemy officers give their whole team a surrender-strength bonus (ENEMY_OFFICERS_SURRENDERSTRENGTHBONUS, 10% per lieutenant, doubled for captains), which is part of what makes officers hard to capture.
  • Your own covert mercs disguised as enemy soldiers are counted on their side — spies in the sector make a surrender less likely (since r5757).

Your side's total must exceed the enemy's by a wide margin, scaled by SURRENDER_MULTIPLIER (default 5.0). Turn on DISPLAY_SURRENDER_VALUES (default) to see the actual numbers when you ask — very useful for judging why that last elite refuses to drop his rifle. Enemy groups that include profile-based NPC members (Mike, Kingpin's people, the Hicks brothers...) will never surrender — "these evil leaders simply won't allow it", so remove the leaders first.

Surrendering yourself

With PLAYER_CAN_ASK_TO_SURRENDER = TRUE (default) you can offer your own surrender through the same talk dialog (added in r5793). It works the same way as when the enemy demands your surrender — your mercs are taken captive. It is refused while certain prison-related quests are active, or if the enemy already asked you to surrender in this battle and you said no.

After the battle: release or imprison

Once a battle ends with captured enemies on the map, a dialog pops up. You can:

  • Let them go. Each released prisoner has a PRISONER_RETURN_TO_ARMY_CHANCE (default 50%) chance of rejoining the Queen's army; the rest decide they have had enough of the war.
  • Send them to a prison. The dialog lists the prison sectors under your control (up to 7); pick one and the prisoners are transferred there. If the sector you are in has a prison — say you just took Tixa — you can lock them up on the spot.

Either way, the captives first drop their equipment according to the usual enemy item-drop rules, so you lose no loot by taking prisoners.

If you control no prison at all (or just do not feel like the paperwork), prisoners are field-interrogated on the spot (since r8522): the interrogation resolves instantly, but the chances of getting anything out of it — defectors, intel, money — are halved. Slower prison interrogation is more effective, but a lucky field interrogation can hand you your first militia very early.

The prisons of Arulco

Prisons are facilities (see TableData\Map\FacilityTypes.xml, facility types 3, 21 and 22, placed on the map in Facilities.xml). The stock map has six of them:

Sector Town Facility Base capacity Interrogator slots
J9 Tixa Prison Complex 60 4
I13 Alma Military Prison 20 3
N7 near Meduna Military Prison 20 3
B2 Chitzena Town Prison 5 1
G9 Cambria Town Prison 5 1
D5 San Mona Town Prison 5 1

"Base capacity" is the <usPrisonBaseLimit> tag: the number of inmates the prison is built for. You can stuff more prisoners in, but past this limit riots become possible even when the prison is guarded. Each prison also caps how many mercs can work as interrogators there, and its <usPerformance> value makes interrogators more or less efficient (120% at Tixa's complex, 90% at a town jail). The prison shows up in the sector info panel once you have explored the sector, with the inmate count, the capacity and a compact per-class breakdown — the letters A/R/E/O/G stand for admins, regulars, elites, officers and generals.

Prisoners are not just numbers: since r5896 they physically appear in the prison cells when you visit the sector, wearing prisoner garb, and they mock you, plead for mercy or offer bribes when talked to. They are defenseless — you took their guns, remember — and harming them costs you town loyalty as the population learns that Arulco's so-called liberators are as brutal as the army. Killing a prisoner of course removes him from your prisoner pool. Modders can define their own prisons anywhere: any sector can get a prison facility, and the exact cells used are set with prison-room entries in Map\SectorNames.xml.

Lose the sector, lose everything

If the army retakes a sector where you keep prisoners, all of them are freed, re-arm and join the attacking force. 30 inmates in Tixa means the victorious enemy platoon just grew by 30 soldiers. Guard your prisons well.

Guards and riots

Every hour the game checks each of your prisons for a revolt. A riot happens when:

  • nobody guards the prison, or
  • the prison is overcrowded and the prisoners vastly outnumber the guards. The higher the prisoner-to-guard ratio, the higher the riot chance.

Your "guard value" comes from the number and quality of militia in the sector plus the stats and traits of the mercs there. A riot arms all prisoners in the sector — 50 inmates in Tixa means 50 fresh enemies spawning inside your prison. There is no INI switch to turn riots off; the cure is guards and staying near the base capacity.

Two things help beyond raw numbers:

  • Backgrounds. Mercs with a fitting background — prison guard or law enforcement (think Bull or Raider) — are better suited to prison duty than, say, Flo.
  • Snitches. The prison facilities offer a PRISON_SNITCH assignment: "Masquerade as a prisoner and gain their trust to easily gather information and prevent mutiny attempts."

Interrogation

Locking soldiers up is only the means; the point is getting something out of them. Put a merc on the prison's interrogate prisoners facility assignment in the strategic screen. Every hour the merc generates interrogation points — how many depends on his stats, experience level, personality, background and even gear (in Flugente's words, "waving a shotgun under their tongues might get some people to speak their mind more clearly"), multiplied by the prison's performance value. The running total is shown on the merc's portrait in the strategic screen: 145/7 means 145 points accumulated and 7 prisoners processed so far.

When the total reaches the cost for a prisoner class, one prisoner of that class is "processed". The costs (current Ja2_Options.INI defaults):

Prisoner class Points needed
Civilian 25
Administrator 30
Regular trooper 50
Elite 80
Officer 150
General 250

You can order an interrogator to target a specific class first (since r7327) — useful to squeeze that one officer without chewing through a hundred admins beforehand.

A processed prisoner can produce:

  • A defector (PRISONER_DEFECT_CHANCE, default 25%): he joins your cause and becomes militia of the same or lower quality in that sector. With individual militia enabled these show up as the "army defector" origin, and with militia resources enabled, equipping them costs resources. If the volunteer pool is on, interrogation is also one of the ways to gain volunteers. Captured civilians cannot join as militia directly — they join your volunteer pool instead.
  • Intel (PRISONER_INTEL_CHANCE, default 25%): the prisoner talks, feeding the 1.13 intel resource; the amount depends on the prisoner type. In older SVN builds this was a set of PRISONER_INFO_* chances that revealed enemy patrols, numbers and movement directions directly; current builds route it through the [Intel Settings] system (RESOURCE_INTEL) instead.
  • Ransom (PRISONER_RANSOM_CHANCE, default 25%): his family — or is it the Queen? — pays for his release.

Prisoners that do not defect are eventually released, with the usual 50% chance of turning up in the army again.

Class matters beyond the point cost. Officers are rare (they boost their team's surrender strength, so they seldom give up) and hard to break, but with the ENEMY_GENERALS feature enabled (off by default) elite and officer prisoners are your main way to learn where the enemy's generals hide. Captured generals themselves never defect, but they command a substantial ransom and have a high chance of betraying the locations of their colleagues. And if you use the enemy helicopter feature: captured downed pilots count as officers for interrogation purposes.

Strategic considerations

  • Tixa is the prize. With a base capacity of 60 and four interrogator slots at 120% performance, the Tixa prison complex is by far the best place to run your POW operation.
  • Prisoners are a militia pipeline. A steady flow of captives plus a good interrogator converts enemy troops into free(ish) militia and cash — the pacifist's version of farming the Drassen counterattack.
  • Budget guards from the start. A town jail with 5 slots and a lone merc is fine for the odd captive; 20+ prisoners need real militia coverage or they will riot at the worst possible moment.
  • Demand surrender to end fights early. Even with the default 5.0 multiplier, a large militia force plus your squad can talk the last few defenders into giving up — no more chasing that final fleeing admin across the map.

Sources