Also, I was going to ask about interolgations. I understand you need good psychology and adequate secondary social skills. The ancient wiki also claims heart is really vital, but I haven't found that to be true. Any tips on setting up an easy mode for turning people that isn't 15 versions out of date?
I know you're going for a nonviolent run, but I wouldn't neglect beatings: they're one of the easier-to-abuse mechanics in the game. Tips on beatings:
1) Strength is cumulative. If you have six Athletes, each with 20 Strength, they'll be six times more effective at beating the Wisdom out of the Automaton's head than just one Athlete.
2) The maximum amount of Wisdom you can detract per beating is forceroll/10, where forceroll is the sum of random rolls between 1 and each interrogator's Strength. For six aforementioned Athletes, forceroll will vary from 6 to 120, which means up to 12 Wisdom lost.
3) Beating is only succesful when forceroll is higher than the captive's (Health+Wisdom+Heart)*3.
Anyway, onwards to talking. The success of an interrogation is governed by a variable called 'attack'.
1) Attack is first calculated as the sum of highest Heart-Wisdom+Psychology*2 amongst all of the interrogators. It is not cumulative.
2) Then, attack is influenced by a lot of things:
attack+=temppool.size();
attack+=cr->joindays;
attack+=business-cr->get_skill(SKILL_BUSINESS);
attack+=religion-cr->get_skill(SKILL_RELIGION);
attack+=science-cr->get_skill(SKILL_SCIENCE);
attack+=a->skill_roll(SKILL_PSYCHOLOGY)-cr->skill_roll(SKILL_PSYCHOLOGY);
attack+=cr->attribute_roll(ATTRIBUTE_HEART);
attack-=cr->attribute_roll(ATTRIBUTE_WISDOM)*2;
Where 'cr' is the Conservative Automaton, 'temppool' is the array of all interrogators, 'joindays' is the amount of days passed since kidnapping, 'business', 'religion' and 'science' are the highest values of correlating skills amongst the whole group, 'a' is(if I'm not mistaken) the character with the highest 'attack' score.
After that, attack gets +10 from drugs, +10 from props, +rapport*3.
If the Automaton hates you (rapport<-1) and you use drugs, attack has a good chance to automatically become 0; that sort of thing is marked by nightmarish hallucinations.
3) If the Automaton loses a check of Wisdom against the interrogators' attack/6, then the interrogation is succesful. The Automaton's juice is decreased by 'attack', their Heart increases by 1(up to 10), their rapport increases by 1.5.
4) Whenever an interrogation succeeds, the game checks for two conditions of recruitment: if the Automaton's Heart is higher than their Wisdom+4, or if their rapport is higher than 4. In both cases they are instantly recruited.
For more information, check
interrogation.cpp.