Citizen

Citizens are humans living under Combine rule, after the Seven Hour War and subsequent Combine occupation. The term Citizen refers to a human living under the Combine's rule in a city, as opposed to a rebel or refugee.

Background
Having conquered the Earth, the Combine established their rule on Earth, creating Overwatch Soldiers from human soldiers captured during the Seven Hour War. The remaining population was rounded up into the surviving cities, which were re designated with numbers instead of names (14, 17, etc.). These new "Citizens" of the Combine's empire are provided with accommodation, rations and protection from the Xen aliens that infest much of the world. The Combine also erected a Suppression Field, to prevent Citizens from breeding.

The Combine also established the Civil Protection force. Staffed by humans, as opposed to the trans human Overwatch, Civil Protection acts as the Combine's police force and handles the affairs of policing and monitoring the populace in the cities. Civil Protection officers are feared for their brutality, as they often bully Citizens and administer beatings at the slightest provocation. As seen in Half-Life 2's first chapter, Point Insertion, Civil Protection officers sometimes stage raids on residential buildings to arrest and imprison alleged rebels and sympathizers. Comments made by Citizen onlookers seem to suggest this is a regular occurrence. Citizens are encouraged to join Civil Protection by promises of better rations, accommodation and breeding rights. Civil Protection officers themselves are encouraged to undergo trans human surgery to join the ranks of the Overwatch.

In an attempt to prevent tightly knit communities and organizations of any kind from forming, the Civil Protection authorities transfer Citizens from one city to another as many as three times a year. Citizens are also apparently forced to wear identical blue denim boiler suits.

The penalty for Citizens who choose to disobey the Combine (or are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time) is summary execution, forced conscription into the Overwatch or Stalker transformation, conducted at Nova Prospekt.

Under Combine rule
Citizens are granted the minimum of what they need to survive, such as a standardized diet and home. They are also transferred from city to city frequently.

Citizens constantly complain about the quality of their meals, which they get in packages dispensed by machines found in public places, such as the City 17 train station. For drinking, Citizens have access to free water, dispensed through vending machines, among other ways. Some Citizens believe, however, that the Combine put something in the water that wipes memories, suggesting that the Combine use the water itself as yet another method to brainwash Citizens. Civil Protection officers are given far better meals, which becomes yet another incentive for the Citizens to become one.

Citizens are assigned to simple flats in apartment buildings which are all categorized into blocks. They are kept under constant surveillance by Civil Protection officers through the medium of City Scanners and Security Cameras. Raids and arrests are frequent occurrences throughout the apartments.

Most Citizens live in rather poor living conditions. In the apartment block in Point Insertion it can be observed that most apartments lack doors (from the constant CP raids), are littered with old furniture and debris, and are just generally dirty and cramped living quarters. Most homes have a small TV, which is always shown displaying Wallace Breen's Breencasts.

Citizens are able to apply to be part of Civil Protection. Those who do have generally better lives, and work on shifts patrolling areas all around the city where they then take place in raids and crackdowns or just beat up and arrest other Citizens for many different reasons, or even without any reason at all.

The Resistance
Among the oppressed inhabitants of City 17 there is a significant underground movement; even Citizens who are not actively involved in the resistance are usually sympathetic. As survivors' accounts of Gordon Freeman's heroic feats during the Black Mesa Incident reached a wider audience, Freeman came to be considered a legendary figure in the minds of many people, being one of the few that fought both the Xen aliens and the military and survived.

In the cities, the Resistance operates underground networks (such as the Underground Railroad in City 17) to escape the attention of the Civil Protection. Citizens seeking to escape the oppressive atmosphere in the cities use these networks to escape and join the Resistance forces.

After Gordon Freeman's return and subsequent feats against the Combine, which eventually culminated in his leading a swarm of Antlions into Nova Prospekt and destroying it, an all-out rebellion sparked in City 17 in which many Citizens joined the Resistance and formed armed militias, dramatically boosting the Resistance numbers.

Behind the scenes
Originally, Citizens were to be dressed in green with an apron and gas masks, since the Air Exchange was replacing the air with toxic gases at this point of the game development. Early "Consulcast" also refers to this by "The true Citizen conserves valuable oxygen." In the end, the gas mask concept was only kept for the Combine humanoid units.

''We designed the Citizens of Half-Life 2 to look oppressed and downtrodden. Their costumes reflected the location and environment they lived in using standard issued clothing to give it a prison-like atmosphere. Half-Life 2 spans three days, and we wanted the Citizens to correspond with the time and location of events throughout the game. Citizens appear in almost every map of the game, but couldn’t overpower the player visually. We wanted them to compliment the world and not stand out.'' - Moby Francke