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[V5 General] Rank Structure


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Hannibal Smith is a fictional character, from the A-team I believe, who should have been charged with wasting ammunition, I don't think they actually hit any think that they were shooting at.

That's the point, with Infantry minor tactics you need junior NCO's to set fire arks, coordinate fire control and motivate the members of your squad to name a few. Higher leadership would control larger groups of personal. You need these ranks to ensure that all members are doing as required in a fire fight!!

As your troops increase in their stats, you should be the one to promote, and not leave it to the game.  

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5 hours ago, Ruggerman said:

Hannibal Smith is a fictional character, from the A-team I believe, who should have been charged with wasting ammunition, I don't think they actually hit any think that they were shooting at.

That's the point, with Infantry minor tactics you need junior NCO's to set fire arks, coordinate fire control and motivate the members of your squad to name a few. Higher leadership would control larger groups of personal. You need these ranks to ensure that all members are doing as required in a fire fight!!

As your troops increase in their stats, you should be the one to promote, and not leave it to the game.  

Whilst I understand where you are coming from here I believe there would have to be a fairly major re write of large portions of the game to make any changes to the rank anything more than cosmetic, at this point I doubt highly that there is the time or money to do a major overhaul and creation of a completely new way of dealing with the way soldiers work, I could be wrong but based on past posts I cannot see it happening.

 

Edit: To put it another way, currently the Rank system and its names are like painting a wall of your house, completely cosmetic, what you are talking about is rebuilding all the walls while the roof is still on, major engineering.

Edited by Kaiphus_Kain
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21 hours ago, Kaiphus_Kain said:

There is also no good reason to mess with them since they are essentially meaningless, it's an aesthetics point only. You could just change it to something like Operative and Specialist etc, it still wouldn't make any real difference.

 

Edit2: To Clarify, changing the ranks serves no purpose unless you change a hell of a lot more to make it do something other than be a basic visual aid to a units experience/progression.

If something doesn't have a mechanical purpose, then the only purpose it can have is aesthetics/clarity and worldbuilding/sense.

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45 minutes ago, Kaiphus_Kain said:

Whilst I understand where you are coming from here I believe there would have to be a fairly major re write of large portions of the game to make any changes to the rank anything more than cosmetic, at this point I doubt highly that there is the time or money to do a major overhaul and creation of a completely new way of dealing with the way soldiers work, I could be wrong but based on past posts I cannot see it happening.

 

Edit: To put it another way, currently the Rank system and its names are like painting a wall of your house, completely cosmetic, what you are talking about is rebuilding all the walls while the roof is still on, major engineering.

Given that rank is not tied mechanically to anything, re-writing it should be simple. As well as adding promotions.

The mechanics behind it are simple enough. A promotion bottun that appears on eligible xenonauts (level being the measure) that changes their rank. SHOULD be a quick and simple job. But every hour of work time is precious, so the eternal question of allocation of time and resources and worth rears it's ugly head.

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2 hours ago, TrashMan said:

Given that rank is not tied mechanically to anything, re-writing it should be simple. As well as adding promotions.

The mechanics behind it are simple enough. A promotion bottun that appears on eligible xenonauts (level being the measure) that changes their rank. SHOULD be a quick and simple job. But every hour of work time is precious, so the eternal question of allocation of time and resources and worth rears it's ugly head.

I disagree with you here, unless you know programming well, specifically the medium Chris and the team are using and how or what would need to be done then you can't suggest it is simple enough, it could be fairly minor or it could mean creating a massive amount of work in all layers of the game to add a system that effects both ground combat and the geoscape etc. What sounds simple enough may in effect be stupidly complicated or time consuming, only Chris and the team can know that one.

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21 hours ago, Ruggerman said:

Hannibal Smith is a fictional character, from the A-team I believe, who should have been charged with wasting ammunition, I don't think they actually hit any think that they were shooting at.

That's the point, with Infantry minor tactics you need junior NCO's to set fire arks, coordinate fire control and motivate the members of your squad to name a few. Higher leadership would control larger groups of personal. You need these ranks to ensure that all members are doing as required in a fire fight!!

As your troops increase in their stats, you should be the one to promote, and not leave it to the game.  

Pointing out that a work of fiction is fictional doesn't apply to discussions about the verisimilitude of a work of fiction. And the A-Team had rock-solid accuracy when trying to shoot out tires.

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I raised this subject, because the ranks structure in the present builds don't reflect any para or no military organisation, and was hoping that it might be addressed. It was not started to discus the virtues and failing of a fictional character.

If it can't be worked to the present game, then maybe in it's next iteration, I HOPE.  

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2 minutes ago, Keflin said:

Like Colonel Jack O'Neal and Colonel Amanda Carter?

And Carol Danvers (1968), Nick Fury, Hawk, Robert Hogan, Hans Landa, and O-6 CAPT Harmon Rabb.

Put the eight of them on a mission and the antagonist that opposes them has to be something on the power level of a xenomorph queen.

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On ‎5‎/‎31‎/‎2019 at 2:13 PM, Kaiphus_Kain said:

I disagree with you here, unless you know programming well, specifically the medium Chris and the team are using and how or what would need to be done then you can't suggest it is simple enough, it could be fairly minor or it could mean creating a massive amount of work in all layers of the game to add a system that effects both ground combat and the geoscape etc. What sounds simple enough may in effect be stupidly complicated or time consuming, only Chris and the team can know that one.

I do know programming, which is why I'm saying it. If altering this require massive work on multiple layers, then that would speak very poorly on the initial implementation of the system. There shouldn't BE multiple layers to a simple string display.

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11 minutes ago, TrashMan said:

I do know programming, which is why I'm saying it. If altering this require massive work on multiple layers, then that would speak very poorly on the initial implementation of the system. There shouldn't BE multiple layers to a simple string display.

I think you missed something in regard to my posts here, I was talking about changing the rank to something more than cosmetic, an actual mechanism behind it that does a lot more than just display a bit of text, what Ruggerman was describing with the ability to do more and make the system more than cosmetic is certainly not a simple string display.

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I have an idea.

Maybe we can assign commissioned officers to one commanding officer slot for global buffs in each mission and 1~2 non-commissioned officers as section leaders for AOE buffs. The rest can be enlisted personnel, just like military IRL. Fluff-wise, officers, NCO's and enlisted can use the real-life rank system to represent their progress. In terms of gameplay, officers and NCO's can either be recruited directly or promoted from the enlisted. The obvious downside of this alternative is an awful lot of work for a minor problem. It is a major boost to immersion to me tho.

BTW, I have seen NCO-only field units in real-life military myself.

Edited by SirHumphreyAppleby
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I probably would rather like to see the rank system follow actual US ranks, or perhaps even actual Soviet ranks.  (Hmm, maybe that would 'improve immersion' a bit if it was even in Cyrillic characters.)  And I suppose for realism's sake I do agree that there should only be one 'officer'... if any.

But I also think that trying to program special stuff for that is almost certainly overkill.  Just use only enlisted and NCO ranks and be done with it.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I like the idea of your troops gaining high rank, as in a military aspect, but that is what is not happening in this present game format.

The player should be the one who select the trooper for high rank, and place them in training, so as to be able to take that rank!!

At the same time the other troopers will still have their stats increased, after a successful mission. 

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Personally I'd just be fine with replacing the current rank system with a level number that represented experience or something like raw recruit, green, seasoned, veteran, etc. Maybe if they wanted to go the extra mile just add in an extra field similar to character name that the player could edit. People could use it for call signs, ranks, squad assignments or whatever other purpose they like,

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  • 3 weeks later...

This is my first post. I hope I'm not...offending anyone by making my first post in a discussion thread about Xeno 2. I also realize that I'm relatively late to the party, and I do apologize.

But it feels to me that the rank is not going to be changed. While it makes little for the system to be changed, as it has been implemented already and also is only an aesthetic issue, I did have a thought. Now, before I say this, I will say that the ranks being redone is not high on my personal list of priorities of what I would redo with all the work that is still being done. However, I did wonder if the easiest and simplest solution is just (as some have alluded to) to rename the ranks? Instead of the old PVT-CPL-SGT-(weird jump to officer ranks)-LT-CAP-MAJ-COL, what if you used some Xenonaut specific rankings? Even something so simple as X-PVT (Xenonaut Private, which is not the exact name I am suggesting so much as it as an example) denotes, rather easily, that the character's rank/rate is somehow different from the standard understanding, while still drawing a correlation with the real world title that tells you where the soldier stands relatively in the chain of command. What's more is that it allows the criteria for achieving rank to be subjective-that is, defined by the devs-which in this case we all know is based on alien killing skills.

It would be rather easy to add a simple line or two to Xenopedia about it, just saying as much or maybe giving the ranking system, e.g., "Though we were conceived originally by NATO states, our military is recruited from around the globe, with support all corners of the world. We fight a new enemy, and thus need new criteria to put our best soldiers on the front lines. To this end, the Xenonauts have done away with the old command structures of past, and implemented our own new, and entirely objective, ranking system where neutralizing our new enemy is the only task that matters for our troops."

Now, I personally like what Emily said earlier about assigning a few command ranks ourselves from a pool of eligible candidates (which not only adds a small interactive element for the player and possibly gameplay implications based on which soldiers deserve those buffs/responsibility, but also is essentially how it works at higher levels of command in real life), but that understandably is not an option. I think renaming the ranks is the easiest way to preserve the old system, which is intuitively based on how good the trooper is at killing aliens, and also removing the disconnect it creates when comparing it to the real life ranks it seeks to emulate. As we all know, conventional military forces are pyramids, essentially, and the current system also creates the minor issue of eliminating several ranks to simplify the order of promotion (e.g. First Sergeant, Staff Sergeant, Second Lieutenant, etc.). Renaming solves both of those issues, allows for increased originality on the part of the game universe, and more accurately describes the criteria for progression, since unlike real ranks, this progression is based on skill and not command. And with the exception of units like the SEALs and other special forces here and there where actual rank is often affected by billeted rank responsibilities because of this issue, having several "captains" forming a squad is somewhat disconcerting to see. Using an original Xenonauts system addresses this issue without change of the mechanic. After all, these "captains" and "lieutenants" and such that are present in the game are really just soldiers, and the ranks they have are only indicative of combat skill. I think it'd work well with the least amount of change to the mechanic. In addition, the usage of small symbols on the portrait (akin to the role symbols we had in Xenonauts 1 where a soldier's combat role was indicated with an icon) can easily indicate the new rank's position in relation to the others. Therefore, even with new or different names, players can easily tell which rank is higher than the others.

Just my thoughts on a minor issue.

Edited by Arabian Knight
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Folks. There's something really obvious being overlooked here. 

I don't know if the base game silently used this system....but in X-Div and possibly CE, your higher units give a hefty morale bonus to underlings within 10 tiles.

It's simple, feels good, and works just fine, since it's just a bonus that trickles down instead of worrying about trying to fit into some military specifics.

P.S. I want to outsmart a computer leading laser monkeys and Rambo Iguanas, not figure out chains of command. Save that for Total War : Space, please. 

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