Really helpful advice thank you

And one more thing to know. Personality of potential recruit has the meaning. If he is traitorous, he'll never join you, NEVER. You can recognise them by their replics while freeing them (unlocking cage best stage), they will hurry you, NOT thanking you and so on. And its only example, there more personalities.

Its not the wrong AI, this is how it should work and as intended by the game.

You can exploit quick save/quick load on each step (before unlocking shackles, after him following you) and NPC may choose other option (if he didnt folowed you, or joined), but it complicated, can damage you save data and destroys the immersiveness, so better will be just to install some mod like "recruit anyone", in my opinion.

This is how you can recruit hostiles:

Unlock his cage (dont touch shackles), grab him and flee to safe distance, then put him down and he starts going somewhere (to his cage, retreating fast etc.), or atack you. You should unlock his shackles and then he'll either be shocked by this (cause you are enemies) and run off, or say "we should get out" or something and continue atack you, you should just go away and he will start follow you, but still will be your enemy (dont forget to put your character on block mode). He will follow you endlessly, so go away to safe distant from slave camp or whatever this place was, then quick save\quick load and his AI will be fixed. Then he will randomly choose to run off by his own, or join you.

A little comlicated but this is how it works in short. You can adupt it to other situations (only shackles, or only cage etc).

Apologies, didn't mean to imply that your mod caused the issue, just was looking for advice. I was thinking last in load order was better to ensure overwriting any conflict, I'll move yours up then. On further thought my most likely suspect is the slave AI fix mod. I started here cuz I have nothing else that touches recruitment, but seeing that it waits for her to take an action, it's gotta be the AI mod.

First, put my mod ABOVE other mods, NOT last.

Second, my mod dont add replics to poles, and dont add anything to recruit someone, its all vanilla,or added by other mods. My mod only removes VALIDITY CHECK for joining.

Third, if you put someone in a cage, he'll never be recruitable after his "rescuing", because YOU PUT HIM in the cage (by vanilla game, not modded by recruit prisoners mod for example)

Testing with auotsaves indicates this CTD happens as soon as she decides to free herself from the unlocked pole and her AI bugging out when I first unlocked her is the only thing that allowed me to progress past that point.

Tried putting her back on the pole, she turned normal white on mouseover, I picked the lock, she immediately was freed, turned hostile, and ran for a weapon, so my character shot her. Improvement of sorts I suppose.

Problem is almost certainly a conflict with some other one of my legion of mods, but putting yours last didn't resolve the issue on load. The character I'm trying to recruit disappears on import. It's a starving bandit shackled to a fogmen pole. I healed her, she got the talk icon, I talked to her to her, she said she wasn't an animal and turned allied but didn't join. I reloaded, picked her lock before talking to her, and now I don't get the talk icon, she shows as allied yellow on mouse over, and as soon as she's free and conscious I get a CTD. Set her free off the pole, pick her up drop her wait for her to come to, pick her up and put her in a bed, all the same, soon as she can act, CTD. Thoughts?

No. But in case, put prisoner mod lower then mine

Will this conflict with any recruit prisoner mods?

Hell ya, thank you bubba

@Bulutus_Pescatore
Sum of combat skills: strength or dexterity (which higher) + atack or martial art (which higher) + defense or dodge (which higher), its ingame check.

I didnt adjust anything, I removed the check only. But what about probability, its depends on dialogue packages of the character you want to recruit.

Example:
One character have 2 dialogues for refuse and 1 dialogue for join
Second character have 1 dialogue for refuse and 2 for join

Just divide 100% by the number of this dialogue lines and get the probability for each of them, answer: its random between dialogue lines but the more positive lines the higher the probability for join.

Do you know if the sum of skills include every skill (like cooking etc. as well) or just specific combat focused ones? Also if you don't mind me asking, how exactly did you adjust the probability of better skilled characters joining? Like 75-100 have x% chance to trigger the join dialogue and 100-150 have y% to trigger?