Jebediah

Hi there, allow myself to introduce myself. I am a gun nut. Let me help you out here. This is the M-72 LAW, the perfect item to replace the RPG you're using as a 'disposable' one-shot rocket launcher. In my opinion, it would make far more sense to 1. Implement the M-72 LAW as such, a lightweight, single-shot...light anti-armor weapon. 2. Swap the LAW and the in-game rocket launcher (known as the SMAW, or perhaps it is its earlier Israeli counterpart the B300) in your Improved Ballistics research...the LAW was standard issue for the US military ever since 1963, and was still in use at the time for the role the SMAW is being used for here. However, the SMAW was not issued until 1984, five years after the game's setting. Therefore, it would not appear in-game except as a prototype, which would be justified if you moved it to the Improved Ballistics section. Next, the carbine. This is the CAR-15, an extremely short version of the M-16 which was issued to men like Navy SEALs during special operations missions in Vietnam. It was the forerunner to the M4, which was actually not invented until 1994. While the existence of the M4 could perhaps be justified as a prototype, there's no point in doing so while the CAR-15, XM-177, and Colt Commando all exist in the period. Also, it is less accurate than the M4, which would justify its low performance at long range, a problem the M4 doesn't really have. Finally, the MP5: Just do what others are suggesting and use the Uzi. It was invented in 1949 by Israeli Uziel Gal, as a weapon to be issued to tank crews in the event of being forced out of their vehicles. It is remarkable in that it was designed with the ability to be operated one-handed in mind, which, while not an intended purpose as Hollywood says, was made possible and even plausible by the recoil characteristics of its telescoping bolt, it's pistol grip magazine placement, and many other factors. If you wish, you can even give players the option of issuing the Mini-Uzi, an even more compact version of the Uzi created in 1980 for special operations personnel specifically. You know, like us. One more suggestion I'd like to make: I say add in the M14 as a "Battle Rifle", as an alternative to the M16. It would be 1kg heavier, take 5 more AP per each type of shot, but have range halfway between the rifle and precision rifle, do damage halfway between the two, have accuracy halfway between the two (except for burst, which would be awful, maybe 11 as opposed to the rifle's 15), and so on. Just another chance for us to make calls on how we want our guys to be equipped.

Ahh, coding.

Hey, as a note to those talking about the difficulty in reconciling the differences between ground combat images and equipment images for the lower tier armors, it might be possible to use the non-Xenonaut NPC soldier skins for the ground combat. While it may result in some confusion on terror missions, the Western soldiers use a basically reskinned image of the Jackal armor with more of an olive drab military theme to it. All I think about when I see our troops in battle in the early game is that they certainly look more like SWAT than anything else. EDIT: And please, GOD, change the basic helmet. I don't mean any ill will to the graphics department of the game, everything else looks really nice, but that one helmet really bothers me, and I mention it whenever it comes up. It really looks much more like a construction worker's hard hat than a soldier's helmet. Just go for a good old fashioned M1 helmet with the chromed non-camouflage treatment, like so.

Have you considered redoing the basic helmet alongside your faces? I'm not trying to insult the artist(s) involved in Xenonauts, everything else looks pretty great, but that one thing always kind of bothered me...it just looks like a construction worker's hard hat more than a military steel helmet. And now that you've got these high-resolution, absolutely gorgeous faces right below it, it kinda accentuates the weirdness a bit more.

Hello all, From what I can extrapolate, this is a somewhat common bug, but I've been working on defining the exact characteristics of it. The basic summary of the glitch is that the 'equip soldier' screen shows there are eight icons under the dropship, but lists only six names under the soldier info screen. Switch to the 'placement in dropship' screen, and there are eight icons. I cross-referenced the names on board to my roster...they had both died in the recent base defense operation. Spooky. Anyway, deploying the dropship with the 'ghost troopers' works, with the exception of there only being six (tangible) troops on the battlefield. I guess the other two's spirits deploy, but the aethereal doesn't exactly help. For a more specific breakdown of the glitch's parameters: The glitch seemingly only occurs following base defense operations when wounded or dead units are on that craft's roster. Attempting to move the 'ghost' icons in the dropship screen crashes to desktop; there is no way to remove them from the dropship. This leads me to the conclusion (keep in mind I have about one semester's worth of high school programming training, and I was bad at it operating on that level) that there is an item in the game's code that removes casualties from the roster that operates based on dropship deployment; completely registering casualties only on missions that occur outside the base. Since there is no dropship involved in base defense operations, the script only does half its job, removing them from the soldier roster, but not the dropship roster. This dissonance causes a crash when I point it out to the game. It's very annoying, and is one of the reasons I've restarted the game about three dozen times (my attention span notwithstanding). EDIT: A quick (and painful) fix to this issue is to scrap and replace the dropship, tossing the lingering spirits of the fallen soldiers into the junk heap; evidently they cling to the dropship in death as they do in life. But $100,000 hurts.

I've seen it as well, I thought it was just a placeholder until the artist got to them. But there is a skin for them, you say?

Honestly, I say that since the map edges are an arbitrary gameplay restriction (a totally realistic game would have the entire planet or whatever), the mouse-stop feature is just fine in my opinion, seeing as how it's an arbitrary counter to an arbitrary video-game problem. In the real world, your cursor wouldn't stop at the edge, because there wouldn't be an edge. Or a cursor. But still, the point remains. It's not an exploit, it's a benefit.

I'll vote aye.

Due to the advanced nature of the YF-17 prototype, it was referred to as both the YF-17 and F-17 in official US military publications; the F/A-18 is a completely different line of aircraft inspired by the design of the F-17. This is the reason why there is no other F-17 in the US Air Force's naming parlance; the title was reserved for the YF-17 Cobra.

So, there was an incident in which, due to horribly perfect timing, I was prompted with the "ordered items arrived at base" and "strike force arrived at crash site" popups on the geoscape, one immediately after the other. I clicked on the ordered items one, hoping to make a few changes to my base before the troops went into battle so I wouldn't forget what it was I wanted to do, but the timing was so perfect that I couldn't interact with my base due to the initiate ground combat popup coming up instantly. When I did initiate ground combat, the screen somehow glitched to where this happened. The ground combat mechanics seemed to be working fully, I didn't have the presence of mind at the time to see if I could interact with my base when those screens were visible off the edge of the map though. I figured I should come here and pass along the images, though. I eventually just abandoned the mission, but there were still some slight oddities with the interfaces that made me have to restart the game.

The Cold War part I'll concede to you, it's definitely something that could be either dev-done or fan-done. Weaponry, I'll choose to agree to disagree, I like the idea, you don't, and I suppose it really just boils down to that, eh? The one thing I realize kinda got buried in there, but I want to bring up again out of having just verbally asked the game in frustration why it doesn't exist: regular body armor at the beginning of the game. To cite the Xenopedia: "We know little about extraterrestrial weapons at this point in time, so there is little point in weighing our troops down with protective equipment that may well have no effect at all." Sure, we don't know anything about extraterrestrial weapons, I agree. But we sure as hell know a few things about our own damn weapons. Given the amount of friendly fire incidents in this game, I would appreciate the option to give my men regular old flak jackets that, even with zero bonus for alien weaponry, reduce the damage caused by ill-advised reaction shots and impossibly off-target sniper rifle rounds.

I was originally going to post about how the lines of sight are way too short in daytime missions, and need to be expanded, but I realize now that this is likely something the dev team is trying to refine on account of this being beta. I'll just leave it at pointing out the balance is a bit too far on the low side and should be scaled up in the future. The real reason for this thread is that in a combat situation, there's more ways to find out what's fifty yards that way than just sending a dude running twenty yards that way. The first thing could be an actual binoculars equipment piece in-game, that uses 40 or so TUs like a sniper rifle, and requires the unit remain stationary, but doubles the unit's line of sight when used. It always seems so strange to me that snipers have very long ranges in-game, but can never acquire targets on their own that are far enough away to justify having such a long-range weapon itself. Giving a sniper a spotter who can see out far enough to make the sniper useful would be a nice, easy way to remedy this. In addition, perhaps another thing could be to give the player the option of setting down the helicopter immediately upon arriving at the mission site, or having it do one or two recon passes over the area before touching down. It would be a tradeoff between gaining advance knowledge about certain things on the battlefield, like perhaps having the entire map visible for the first turn, or at least a more-or-less accurate list of enemy assets, but at the cost of increased interception risk, something every player has already experienced at least once and absolutely loathes risking. It just seems odd to me that our troopers get essentially a bird's eye view of the entire battlefield since they reach it in a helicopter, but then don't necessarily even know which general direction the UFO crash is in judging by the sheer blackness of the map. Another possibility might be along the lines of the AN/PVS-2 starlight scope of the Vietnam era, the historically accurate forerunner to modern night-vision optics. Notice just how freaking huge the thing is. Also, it weighs about the same, sometimes slightly more than, the rifle it's mounted on. It's difficult to use, gives terrible resolution images, affects the accuracy of any weapon tremendously by putting the weight equivalent of another rifle on top of the rifle, and has many other drawbacks that could and would be implemented as balancing measures. Its one advantage: You can see in the dark. It would take, say, four TUs to even raise the damn thing to your face, but once a unit was looking through it, it would be almost comparable to daytime ops in terms of view distance. All just suggestions...my personal development philosophy is to imagine a game with 1000% of its finished content and eliminate stuff from there, as reflected in pretty much all my suggestions. Take 'em as you will, but if at the end of the day one of them makes it in there I suppose the 1000% system worked.

Honestly, I think the LZ should be located within an "Alamo stand" position established by the local forces. The two things that bother me in the terror missions is that the local forces seem to behave more like Call of Duty players than any form of tactically cohesive unit and appear in ones and twos scattered across the map rather than a concerted defense, and that (as mentioned before) the pilot likes landing within pistol range of the enemy. Maybe because he usually never gets to see an alien from the cockpit on the normal crash site runs and he decides terror missions are the perfect opportunity to get a peek at one by landing IN THEIR STAGING AREA. Anyway, it wouldn't be an overpowered stronghold by any means; half a dozen indigenous friendly forces, with wounded, resorting to handguns in some cases, against an equally concerted enemy force that's going to wipe them out in four turns anyway, but at least their last conscious act was to secure the LZ for the Cavalry to arrive. Honestly, I rather LIKE the idea of two-thirds of the terror mission being fighting your way out of the LZ. You having to repulse the counterattack before being able to do anything seems realistic to me, since the last thing the aliens are going to want to do is let the Chinook full of special forces dudes get a single moment of initiative. The first terror mission you do is a great contrast with the Light Scout crash sites where the crew runs the hell away and 90% of the operation is chasing them down...it really shows you that the "easy part" is over. But yeah, the thing I was actually wanting to come and complain about was the eyesight part. It's not so much that theirs is too good, it's that ours is too bad. I can't imagine why my sniper can't SEE targets that are easily hit when somebody actually takes the time to walk down the impossibly dark NOON-DAY STREET to find them.

I thought that may be it, but wouldn't the issue still arise from mentioning it as being an F-16 in the backstory?

You guys will hate me for this one, but being the jackass I am, I'm gonna point it out. Here goes. The F-17 was not a modified version of the F-16. The F-17 was this. Note that the F-17 lost out on the Air Force contract to the F-16. Why not just refer to it as the F-16X, if the first thing in its Xenopedia entry is that it's an F-16 tweaked to Xenonaut standards?

Shhhh. That thought makes me happier than the more boring explanation.

It's probably because we apparently make the grunts and scientists pull double-duty as missile battery operators, fighter pilots, radar analysts, janitors...I'm assuming that's what happens anyway, because we don't hire those guys.

The main thing that bothers me is the way the manufacturing gets budgeted out. When I was just starting, I screwed myself more than once because I didn't understand how it worked, queued up interceptors, and bankrupted myself when that third interceptor hit the end of my money. If that could be added in, how the manufacturing system takes out money over time to do its work, that would be great.

I apologize to you, the reader, in advance. In lieu of breaking this into separate threads, I've made a single long one, which I'll do my best to roadmap and signpost for your sake. I've also bolded tangential suggestions and off-handed things that might be missed, but are suggestions nonetheless. Here goes. --Recruitment Expansion and Impacts-- The one thing that has bothered me in both XCOM and Xenonauts is the sheer...pointlessness of the soldiers' backstories. Whether the fresh meat is Spetsnaz Alfa Group or a New York taxi driver, they both suck equally badly in their first operation. I know that's because the soldiers' backstories are (at the moment, anyway) just flavor text, something to make the soldier management screen more interesting. My question: why is that so? Why don't combat experience and current occupation have an actual effect on the quality of the troops we're bringing in? The first and most obvious answer is balancing: given the choice between a regular old infantryman and a Navy SEAL, what would make me ever want a grunt over a professional badass like a SEAL? My response: their current bosses are saying the same thing, ya know. At the moment, everyone on your roster is ex-special forces. We're in the middle of the First Inter-World War here, who in the human resources department of the Pentagon is letting all these commandos seek better employment opportunities elsewhere right now? Given how many black-ops types were recalled into active service following 9/11, you can better believe everyone who doesn't have great-grandkids will be brought back into service when the alien armada shows up. Therefore, every distinguished recruit should be a fight to get. The national reputation thing, at the moment, only goes for funding and membership...but obviously a nation that thinks you don't care about it will be less enthusiastic with its employee roster than a nation whose capital you just saved from a terror attack. The better you treat a country, the more likely it is to offer up its best and brightest, plain and simple. Plus, it should go without saying that hiring better troops would cost more than hiring mediocre ones. You wanna save money? Go for the dishonorable discharges and the conscripts. You wanna save lives? Go for the Delta Force and the SAS. At the moment, because I roleplay this game, hiring is actually more dependent on the person's name than any other factor...I try as hard as I can to only let Warsaw Pact troops into my USSR facility (damn West Germans, having the same-sounding names as their Commie brethren on the other side of the Wall). Plus, the biggest thing of all...combat experience. I haven't noticed it having any effect on troops' behavior, maybe there's a slight correlational/causational thing in terms of their stats, but I feel like any combat experience would make a world of difference. Even if aliens are fundamentally different fighters than humans, the US Army is a fundamentally different enemy than rival warlords, but that type of prior experience gave our guerilla rivals the basic skills to fight against us. No amount of training or prestigious postings can completely substitute for the feelings of being in combat. It's all psychological; you can't train a person to function at 100% when the bullets...lasers...plasma...deadly things are flying. It comes with exposure to all those elements. If you've faced death like that before, you know how better to do it again, regardless of whether you're up against the Viet Cong again or lizard people. (Plus, I always have my Soviet troops who served in Afghanistan mow down the mujahideen in the Middle East as a matter of principle. Negative PR be damned.) (Also, I think it would be an interesting little touch to have some of these super-secretive organizations, like Delta Force, SEALs, and Alfa Group, list combat experience as [REDACTED]. Just a small suggestion.) --The Cold War-- Speaking of which, let's discuss the Cold War. Right now its only implications are in the Iceland write-up (good work on that, by the way, XCOM sure doesn't have much backstory other than a bunch of world leaders sitting around saying 'hey what if there are are aliens guys!' and then spending billions on the off chance Battle: Los Angeles just so happens to come true...that's probably why they never show their faces, so you don't find out who's enough of a crackpotvisionary to have set this up beforehand). Anyway, it's the Cold War. If one looks back at UFO sightings from 1960 to 1990, the go-to rationalization for what was seen is "experimental enemy aircraft". Now there ARE aliens, to be fair, but the element of blame towards the other side seems to vanish remarkably fast. Even if it becomes clear rather fast that the lizard people in the flying saucers aren't just KGB operatives in funny costumes (never thought I'd say that sentence until now), the lingering suspicion that the other side is involved would remain, especially for the conspiracy theorists who were already speculating that one or both sides were colluding with extraterrestrials. It wouldn't take much to make one side of the Iron Curtain suspect you of being overly partial to the other. I always make my first base the real-world Soviet testing site (and the Russkie Roswell) Kapustin Yar. Responding to breaches of Soviet airspace exclusively from a state airbase using mostly WarPac troops (again, I recruit in-universe) would piss off NATO to no end, and this is somewhat reflected in the funding. But it could go further. Check the "Fickle World Leaders" box, and get ready to deal with politics while you try to save the world and unite humanity. Save Moscow and neglect the UFO over NORAD? Commie. Down the UFO and let Moscow burn? Pig-dog imperialist swine. You'd have to appease both sides if you wanted to keep them working together, and there would still be the crazies on both sides who claimed this alien invasion was all part of some diabolical plan. If you can't quite grasp it, here's a thought exercise...you're watching Glenn Beck on FOX News, and the headline is "Foreign Troops With Alien Technology Spotted on US Soil...Hours After Alien Attack. Combatants or Collaborators?" Not to mention just how awkward it would be in the barracks if all but three of your guys are East German, Soviet, Czech, or Polish. Especially if that barracks happens to be in the heart of the Russian steppes. How to implement this well is rather beyond me at the moment; the one game I've seen try to do something in this vein is Zafehouse: Diaries, and in my opinion the prejudice system went a bit too far and became a gimmick rather than a mechanic. But the fact remains that even if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it takes more than the Greys showing up to break down the barriers of ideology, race, class, gender, and languages and make all the soldiers of the world suspiciously homogenous and interchangeable on the battlefield. --National Militaries and Expanded Roles for Them-- Another point is that if one cooperates with the national governments, they might be willing to chip in more than just a quarter million dollars every month. The BIGGEST thing that I HATE about the XCOM setting is that we are the ONLY people competent enough to do ANYTHING. It seems like, even though at the beginning of the game we have essentially the same stuff as anyone else, nobody can even touch the aliens but us. Other than the "local forces have shot down a UFO and are requesting Xenonaut assistance in securing it" event (speaking of which, I thought they said "assist", not "go take over that UFO while we wait off-map". I've seen ONE soldier in-game, and he ran away faster than a redneck with a shotgun did. We are the unified command against the alien menace. Why can't we propose joint operations with the host nation? The F-17 is, after all, the F-16 with some modifications. Why can't we call up the USAF and ask for two F-16s to support our three fighters against the huge alien space ship, when it's obvious that those two could make a world of difference? Sure, it could break the game if it isn't balanced right. Doubling your squadron size for free is a dangerous line for this game to toe, but it's breaking the realism to expect me to believe my planes are the only ones on the continent. Maybe in addition the the "autoresolve" feature, one could be made to pass on the radar contact to the nation's air force, who would have a lower chance of success than either manual or automatic combat resolution by your specialized jets. And if too many are lost, the air force would be understandably hesitant to cover for you. Not to mention the fact that if their airbases are attacked and destroyed those jets would be off the table, so you'd have to fight an uphill battle in order to defend those assets from a concentrated and high-powered enemy air and ground offensive. Plus, I think the Army Special Forces model of warfare could come into play here as well. We can send our new recruits to train for ten days to get better at fighting aliens, why can't we send our seasoned veterans to train the local military in what they've learned? You'd lose those troops/pilots for an extended period of time, even longer than the crash-course rookie training, but at the end of those two or three weeks you'd have more competent locals who could down enemy UFOs more often, appear more often and fight more effectively on the ground, improve your reputation with their nation's government, and overall make your life easier. Again, this all ties back to the exceptionalism issue endemic to XCOM-style games; your combat troops and interceptor jets number in the double-digits, but somehow YOUR soldiers alone are all that stands between the world and its invaders. You know, not those huge militaries sitting on both sides of the Wall ready to steamroll each other. They're magically incompetent. --Expanded Equipment Options-- --Weaponry-- Before I begin, I know, the suggestion has been made before. But I believe there is further merit to the idea than our friend Cold brought up, which I'll discuss here. I understand the purpose of the unified human arsenal, since the Xenonaut organization (I get the soldiers are called xenonauts, but is the agency called "Xenonauts"? I don't know what the proper term is...just putting it out there, if someone could help me out here) is supposed to be a multinational group that brings together all the soldiers of the world (minus representatives of Central America, South America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Australia, I might point out), but since all the soldiers we hire are trained with different weapons, there would and should be impacts in combat based on what they are using at the moment. I can't quite go with the idea that a former VDV air landing trooper based in the USSR is using an M16A1 as his first choice of weapon, and I also can't imagine any reason he shouldn't get his first choice. Sure, it's practical reasons and nothing in-universe, but I think it would add more to the game than it would take in terms of work. First off, it wouldn't take too much; as noted before, the only serious changes that would need to happen would be reskinning. At present, you have six human weapons; M16A1 assault rifle, Beretta M9 pistol, Mossberg 500 shotgun, G3SG1 precision rifle, M240 machine gun, and SMAW/B300 rocket launcher (which hadn't been produced in 1979, but I'm not going to explode on y'all about it, just make that bad pun about it and move on). You also have all the files necessary for the AKM (except the weapon panel pic, by the way, which I assume you guys know about and are fixing, but I mention it on the off-chance it hasn't been caught yet) carried by the mujahideen in Middle East operations, and not magically transmogrified into an M16 when picked up by Xenonauts like I expected. This can go as far as you wish. You have seven and need only four at the moment...you have: M16A1 AKM M9 Mossberg 500 M240 SMAW G3SG1 Now, all you would need is: Makarov PM PKM RPG-7 SVD Notably missing from that is a shotgun; the USSR did not field shotguns with its military forces, and the only issued Russian military shotgun today, the Saiga-12, was not developed until 1995. Therefore, the Mossberg 500 would be acceptable instead of going out of one's way to find an obscure Soviet counterpart that would in reality be more inaccurate than just giving them common Western shotguns. The reason this is so important, in my opinion, comes down to your troops in the field. They are elite soldiers who have field stripped their issued weapon more times than you've opened your microwave. They've been trained day in and day out on the weapons their lives will depend on more times than they're officially authorized to say. Why, in the moment of crisis where every advantage humanity can get counts, would you make them switch out? There would obviously be a penalty for a Czech paratrooper used to the PKM using an M240 for the first time in his life. Likewise, an American paratrooper used to an M16A1 would take a while to adapt to an AK. Issuing your troops what they're best with is an obvious bit of management of the type this game seeks to encourage; we read over accuracy and strength stats to determine whether or not this soldier should have a precision rifle or a machine gun; it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to give the RIGHT KIND of weapon too. Base location would determine avaliabilty, as well. My base at Kapustin Yar would have endless AKs, but to have M16s they'd have to be sent for from my base over at Cheyenne Mountain, and vice versa. Bonuses are derived from familiar guns, detriments from foreign ones, and those detriments stay until proper battle experience or training is obtained (needless to say alien guns are foreign). --Uniforms-- One final thing that bothers me; uniforms. The Xenopedia provides a pretty reasonable justification, to be fair; stuff like "we didn't use camouflage because we don't know if the aliens see like us" and "we left out bulletproof vests because aliens don't use bullets." Two things: 1) Aliens don't use bullets, but we certainly do. At the beginning of the campaign, easily 30% of my casualties came from friendly fire (bolded for contrast: On a tangentially related note, can we please have more detailed reaction-fire tools? Like, I don't know, "Don't endanger our own troops" like Fallout 2's follower settings? I've lost civilians, teammates, and subdued alien POWs each at least once because some dumbass with an MG got twitchy with it, and I only accept 80% or so of the blame for that, devs. Also, to go on a tangent from that tangent, currently the armed locals fire on stunned aliens like they're still threats. I've had to beat down a farmer with a riot baton so he would stop shooting at a specimen, if he hadn't been such a useless fighter I would have lost it. I doubt that's intentional on your part, so could we fix that, please? ) Anyway, to come back from that tangent and its sub-tangent, I don't think the game should tell me I can't give my soldiers regular body armor if it DOESN'T tell me I CAN'T equip them with exclusively riot batons and C4 like they're some kind of hobo-camp-demolition task force. Sure, it won't stop alien projectiles, but it might cut down on the deaths from friendly fire. Yeah, cue the comments on "you have friendly fire issues, you noob? Play the game better!" But if you ask me, I'd much rather have the opportunity to give my soldiers body armor to better protect them from one another than lose so much as a single lieutenant to an improbably inaccurate sniper shot. Also, on the camouflage issue, this is the bottom of my wish list for a reason...it's a lot of work for mostly just cosmetic and AI behavior purposes, and I understand prioritizing will likely cut it from the list. But even IF the aliens don't see color and shapes like we do, we still see them the same. And social psychology means that soldiers dressed to look the part will boost the morale of local forces better than guys dressed like half-cop half-construction-workers (I don't mean any offense, but at present the artwork for the basic steel helmet looks more like a hard hat than anything else. Could you touch it up to look more along the lines of the American M1 steel helmet, the Soviet SSH68, or something else that looks more military?) The blue implies police. Camo, or even just olive drab, implies military. Another slight pet peeve of mine, which you will likely not have thought of until I mention it (because I'm a detail asshole), is that Xenonauts fight in the same uniforms regardless of whether they're in the desert or the Arctic. Somebody's going to die of hypothermia or sunstroke in that situation. I'm not saying we have to go and pick "SUMMER UNIFORM" or "COLD WEATHER UNIFORM" or our troops get -5 to TU from slowly freezing to death, but it would be a nice touch in a game that is all about the little things if our troops wore heavy clothes like the Arctic civvies and light ones like the farmland civvies when appropriate. We could have national military uniforms for greater immersion, pick Soviet ones to have Soviet local troops follow you and US ones for NATO ones to follow you, and using the wrong one could precipitate WWIII out of paranoia or greater cooperation out of appreciation, but that might be a bit too hard, and I'll acknowledge it. But, like all suggestions, it falls down to an issue of cool new features versus workload. So, if any of these appeal to you the reader, do me a favor and say so. If you disagree, say why. I wrote an ass-load of stuff, and TL;DR is pretty much excusable, but I think some of the stuff I said are valid ideas. EDIT: Just noticed the Solidarnosc poster in the personnel management screen. Gee, that must be awkward for my Soviet base commander. Nice touch, though.