XCOM Hire Soldiers BUG – How to avoid and what causes it SOLVED! (XCOM Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within)

Avoid a bug when recruiting soldiers

In XCOM 1 Enemy Unknown or the Expansion DLC Enemy Within, if you go to the hire or recruit soldiers screen, it is possible experience a glitch where you spend money to recruit, but end up with no new soldiers.

The Disappearing Recruits Bug is Reproducible

To reproduce this bug, it seems you only need to hire a soldier or soldiers. Click the button to recruit and pay the money. Then try hiring soldiers again before doing anything else. The credits will be deducted, but those soldiers will never arrive and the “soldier arrival” will not be added to the event list.

To Avoid the Hire Soldiers Glitch:

To avoid this, make sure you only use the recruit soldiers screen once at a time. After using the hire soldiers option, you will need to Scan for Activity, go on a mission, etc to reset this “glitch” before you try to hire soldiers again. To be sure you may also want to wait for the first batch of soldiers to arrive (3 days) before hiring a new batch.

This bug seems to be repeatable and common, since I ran into it several times already in a new playthrough, with a fully updated X-Com Enemy Within game. It is unlikely this bug will ever be officially fixed now (December 2016, over 2 years after the game was last patched).

The Disappearing Soldier Recruits Bug Likely Won’t Be Patched

I have also seen several other users post that they have experienced this exact bug so its surprising to me it was never fixed. I do not know for sure if this applies to the base game, XCOM Enemy Unknown (I don’t remember experiencing it there), but it definitely occurs commonly in XCOM Enemy Within.

Have you experienced this or similar bugs? Please post what your experience was in the comments below.

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