Bovine

Gah, the number of commanders posting in this thread is totally ruining immersion. Seriously though, in X-com, its iterations, and Xenonauts I always thought of the ranks as sort of an honorary award for fighting incredibly dangerous foes for the betterment of humanity. I always had in mind the scenes from Apocalypse now when the brass were going to make Cpt. Willard a Major for taking out Kurtz. Not that Apocalypse now is a particularly accurate depiction of military promotion procedure. Failing that, I think of the military ranks of not a few astronauts. A fair amount of those gentlemen ended their careers as Lt. Colonels and Colonels, with even a few Generals and Admirals. I'm fine with the ranking, as it is. It seems more acceptable on harder difficulties without save-scumming due to a higher turnover rate (nice cleaned up euphemism there). edit: If anything, more immersion ruining for me is the thought of us pitting green privates against aliens. If we were sending elite troops against an imminent alien threat, I would imagine we would pull our best combat troops from across the world to combat it and absolutely none of them would be privates, let alone privates without previous combat experience.