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INTRODUCTION Hello everyone. Let my first briefly introduce myself since this is my first post on these forums. I’m nearing my mid-forties, I live in Slovenia, and I like to play strategy (and other) games. I have played X-COM and UFO Enemy Unknown over and over as a kid and discovered it again some 4-5 years ago. I have just completed my first and only vanilla X:CE playthrough on normal difficulty without ironman. From the outset I planned to play Xenonauts with X-Division mod since I like modded games and reading about X-Division mod I’m led to expect much higher difficulty and much deeper gameplay. I thought it would be a good idea to get myself somewhat acquainted with vanilla gameplay first – hence one vanilla playthrough. This will be my first attempt at writing an AAR of any kind. It will also be my very first attempt at X-Division playthrough apart from a short sniff of 3-4 in-game days of gameplay. For this new game I have chosen NG (standard?) difficulty with Ironman, and I think all options as set by X-Division installer. X:CE version is 1.65/0.35.1 and X-Division 1.00.11c New Dawn. What about your motivation for writing an AAR, you might ask? Well, when I played another game a couple of years ago read some AARs from various players and it was great fun reading them, especially when the player/writer had an interesting story to tell. IMHO what makes a good are somewhat developed characters and story plots, so I will try (and probably fail) to write up something in that vein. I don’t know if this kind of a written AAR thing is even interesting to anyone anymore because of YT, but it doesn’t hurt anyone so why not... I have an excuse to learn something new and write in English. Regarding the additional lore, research, weapons and new mechanics of X-Division mod I have absolutely zero prior knowledge of it apart from reading some of the spoilers in mod descriptions. No videos about X-Division were viewed, so anything I write will be my fresh view of the game developments as they occur. Finally, I’ve taken the liberty to name some characters that will be “contributing” to the story. The names might or might not resemble actual national/ethnical naming conventions and I apologise to anyone that might find my made-up names inappropriate in that regard. As final disclaimers, English is not my primary language, and I could be using some other language expressions wrong, so please bear with me on this… Without further ado, lets dive in. We start with... THE CHARACTERS Military non-combat personnel: General Hugh-Trevor Rhys-Martins 59, British General, X-Division Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) calm, sophisticated and charmless with a rare spark of charisma Yevgeny Klimentovich Voroshilov 51, Russian Senior Officer, Executive officer to C-in-C and Chief of Operations (X-O/C-Ops) son of a retired Soviet Union marshal; temperamental and loud Kurt Reynalds 54, american Senior Officer, Air Detachment Commander (ADC) WW2 pilot (4 kills) and cereer officer; an Air Force man through and through Luciano (Loukianos) “Lucky” Corelli 39, Italo-Greek Junior Officer, Quick Reaction Force Commander (C-QRF) believes in his soldiers, can get emotional (inherited this from his papa) Andy MacGuinnes 36, Irish NCO, Recruitment & Drill Officer recruits tremble when he is around, but otherwise he is a fine fella' Petra Horachkova 33, Chech NCO, Communications Liaison Officer (CLO) new face in X-Division, brought in to ease communications with outside world Knut Mathiessen 47, Danish NCO, Quartermaster seldom seen outside stores and never without a cigarette (he makes certain nobody sees what he hides in his desk drawer) Pedro de Gini 48, Spanish NCO, senior radar operator reliable and experienced Anatoly Arkadyevich Shvetsov 33, Russian NCO, Interceptor pilot distrusts all western equipment Junichi Akamatsu 34, Japanese NCO, Interceptor pilot son of a WW2 Japanese fighter ace Horatio Gisbergh 23, American enlisted, junior communications operator off-duty he is seen around wearing headphones, listening to casettes on his brand new Walkman, or writing something in his notebook. Combat personnel - soldiers: Civilian personnel: Dr. Amalric Dreyfuss 41, French Lead X-Division Scientist brilliant scientist and a pain to work with Diego Vasco da Silva Magan 35, Brasilian Junior Scientist Silent, keeps to himself Vitaly Kaganov 38, Ukrainian Lead engineer dislikes intellectuals Veronika “Verka” Burszinska 47, Polish Officer’s mess & kitchen assistant a loving mother and wife, loves a good gossip

Well, I've been playing Xenonauts on and off and one day I simply went 'huh, the end of the game is the perfect thing to start a setting with' so I jot down some notes, played with the idea for fanfiction, even started creating a few fanfics that worked with the concept. That and creating a 'Physics + Starship Builder' So, let's start with how things are likely going to go: At the end of the game, it's raining Praetorian tech, meaning everyone and their brother is likely to reverse engineer it sooner or later which is going to do horrible things to world stability By the time you get plasma, the local forces have started getting lasers out the wazoo, and likely alienium grenades/missiles too It's the Cold War, so... yeah... things are going to be interesting there on out A common theme of my walkthroughs is that at least a few hundred million die on Earth, even on easy. Partially because of how quickly things ramp up compared to X-COM/XCOM (at most, you've got two years to defeat the invaders, even on easy)... so yeah we've got to get through the fallout of that. The entire invasion looks half-cocked from the getgo, meaning that it is likely that something got the Praetorians scared enough to go in hard and without preparation in the first place and I don't mean having their scout self-destruct either. Some of what Chief Scientist Condescending said was based on an incomplete picture... particularly to alienium and the elements needed to produce alien/Praetorian alloys with a handful of others being part of the deal due to cracking the Praetorian language and encryption (as well as reading how the Praetorians exploited their thrawls gene pool for their own ends) Praetorians always need two things: genes and resources. Humans provided the genes, and it would be discovered that the outer solar system would have the latter. Initially, it looked like the head Praetorian of the invasion ended the threat of the Praetorians and their thrawls... but apparently the Praetorians aren't as cohesive nor good losers as once thought, so on Earth (and in the outer planets) humanity still has to fight Praetorians and their thrawls, upping the casualty count Well, that's the basic idea that went into this... leading to the Xenonauts into a GDI style organization. You guys are free to discuss as much as possible because I think that this might be an interesting topic as a whole...