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I noticed a trend among all of my games of XCOM that, with my first four soldiers promoted to Squaddie, I always had:
If I assume that they are assigned randomly, then the exact probability of this occurring in any given game would be 4!/44, or about 10%. So I was wondering if this is actually hardcoded into the game, or just plain luck.
Am I correct in my assertion here? Is there a larger pattern that I'm missing?
This is a known feature in XCOM games with classes. First, the game checks if there's any classes you've never had a soldier of, and if so it picks between them with an even chance. Since it rolls them one by one, your first 4 rookies that survive a mission will be different classes. Second, it compares the numbers of each class in your barracks to make a roll. If there are classes with 0 living soldiers, they will be much more likely than those with 2 living soldiers, and ones with a single soldier alive are more likely than those with 4.
They changed it a little bit in XCOM: Enemy Within. The first step is the same, but the second roll is replaced with a draw from a deck of 16 cards, 4 from each class, with the top 3 cards discarded. This means that if you promote 17 soldiers (including the first 4 from step one), you'll get at least 2 of each, and quite likely 3, but never 6 of one class.
Source: ufopaedia.org
