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Why are there only American, Russian and Japanese? Here's a tool to help.


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I don't get this. Every soldier in this game is either American, Russian or Japanese. Names often repeat themselves, and they all involve anglo-saxon, soviet or japanese ascendances. Why is that?

What about the rest of the nations, do they have no troops to offer? I find this not only inconvenient for emotional involvement, but slightly xenophobic. As a Brazilian, I feel - I don't know - excluded, I guess.

Here's a great tool for generating names: http://www.behindthename.com/random/

Do you guys think you could fetch a couple of each country and throw it in the mix? It's a bit silly, but there's a very deep, irrational urge for people outside those three countries to see themselves represented.

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Modding the chances of what percentage of what nationality you get is actually pretty easy. In earlier versions I thought I was getting too few Americans and Russians so I increased the chances of me getting more. I did look at Pinetree's mod though as a reference to see what to change. If I wasn't so specific in what ratios I wanted I'd just use his mod.

As Max says I too think Pinetree's mod should make it into the vanilla game, at least in part as far as adding more names.

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Pinetree's mod, as has been mentioned, does add a whole bunch of people. Mainly NATO and Warsaw Pact countries though, so no countrymen of mine there. Not sure where Brazil stood at the time, to be honest.

I did find it a tad funny when you'd end up with three Japanese soldiers who all had the same name.

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Pinetree's mod, as has been mentioned, does add a whole bunch of people. Mainly NATO and Warsaw Pact countries though, so no countrymen of mine there. Not sure where Brazil stood at the time, to be honest.

I did find it a tad funny when you'd end up with three Japanese soldiers who all had the same name.

You obviously haven't checked out my latest update, I added North Korea, South Korea, Rhodesia, South Africa, Israel, Egypt, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Brazil, China, and Iceland to the nations already there. :)

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Pinetree's mod seems quite good, really. I feel that representing the countries sends a message of unison, so the more nations are included and the more they are highlighted, the more "Humanity as One" messages the game conveys.

This needs to be added the to vanilla package ASAP, so that clueless dummies like me can enjoy the benefits of it too.

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You obviously haven't checked out my latest update, I added North Korea, South Korea, Rhodesia, South Africa, Israel, Egypt, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Brazil, China, and Iceland to the nations already there.

Yay! Iceland! I'll need to look to see if "Guarding alien crater" gets into the experience.

Oh, and Sweden for the Racoons obviously.

North Korea is actually doing something USEFUL?! What would the Xenos think of such a thing?

Said in jest, but considering their humanoid hierarchical structure, perhaps they would find a cold war political/ cultural system that they felt some affinity for. That would vastly increase the chances of alien pacts and loss of xenonaut pennies. It's something that I toyed with when I nosed around cold war geopolitics, but how to add it without causing offence?

Cpn Racoon: I can't believe you're a Zoroastrian thothkins.

Sgt thothkins: What's that got to do with the price of mops after Pancake's weapons testing?

Cpn Racoon: Well, rumour has it that the Caesians are escaping the chaos collapse of Angra Mainyu in their own galaxy.

Sgt thothkins: What? Why I must reach out to my space brothers...

>Bang<

Cpn Racoon: Traitor. You didn't have to shoot him though commissar.

Commissar Pancakes: I'm not shooting traitors. I'm, ah, calibrating the gun. That's right, calibrating the gun...

Cpn Racoon: Well, clean it up for a change. Right, I'm off to a meeting with rest of the world's cults, sorry churches, to find out what the thetans are really up to. It has to be the thetans...

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>BANG<

Commissar Pancakes: A mere Corporal has no business giving commands to the higher ranks. Particularly when the one he is giving the command to lies outside said chain-of-command. And currently has a large caliber pistol. Now to find someone to clean up this mess...

...at least I've gotten this damned Plasma rifle back...

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  • 3 weeks later...

Heh, you know it.

Most of it's going for a more realistic take on it; not saying the Russians and all those crappy little satellite nations couldn't pose a threat in a conventional war, but the capability they possessed and the threat they posed was nuclear projection and quantity of war materiel, not a matter of quality of ground troops or technology. It's just kind of hard to accept that you'd be looking for the best and brightest of humanity's light infantry in random-ass elements from Japan and the Ukraine.

A lot of people don't really get the fact that despite the massive amount of internet hype and wanking over the Spetsnaz, a great deal of the mystique boils down to a long-running, well-known tendency for the Soviets to vastly exaggerate the capability of various aspects of their capabilities at the time, relating to tanks, personnel, aircraft, etc. The USSR never exactly had top-notch personnel filling the ranks, and their warfighting and training doctrine has been terrible throughout history, a characteristic that continues with the Russian Federation. But most of that's neither here nor there.

Even with all the other inconsistencies and logical fallacies of the story, it's a lot easier to swallow them drawing from guys like the Brits' SAS/SBS, the Aussies' SASR, the United States' Force Recon/SEALs/Delta Force/SF, etc. I mean, they're looking for the best of the best.

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Well, canonically, as in, "these are the armies that are in strings.xml written by Chris and I bet Chris picked a random sample to be seen to properly later without realising just how much attention people would pay to it", Xenonauts seems to recruit quite widely. For example, from the US, Canada and England we have:

America: Rangers, Airborne, Navy SEALs, Army

England: SAS, Parachute Regiment, Royal Marines

Canada: Canadian Airborne Regiment, Royal Canadian Regiment

Now, you have your "best of the best" there, but you also have your elite regiments from which the "best of the best" are picked for further training to become the "best of the best". And quite tellingly, there are also much larger and vaguer formations. For example, the "Parachute Regiment" could mean 1 Para, the Elite Special Forces Support Group.. It could also mean 2 Para, 3 Para, the Pathfinder Group of the 16th Air Assault Brigade... the evidence would suggest that Xenonauts trawls a wide net, looking for soliders with certain undefined qualities.

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Most of it's going for a more realistic take on it; not saying the Russians and all those crappy little satellite nations couldn't pose a threat in a conventional war, but the capability they possessed and the threat they posed was nuclear projection and quantity of war materiel, not a matter of quality of ground troops or technology... USSR never exactly had top-notch personnel filling the ranks...

Well, there is still a lot of BS and propaganda around every major event when USSR and USA were involved. Like aircraft loses during Korean war according to USAF is 792 MiG-15s and 108 other aircraft shot down by Sabres, and 78 Sabres lost to enemy fire. While The Soviet Air Force reported some 1,100 air-to-air victories and 335 MiG combat losses. So go figure who is right. But anyway for example in Korean/Vietnam war USA with "high quality troops or technology" was carpet bombing with incendiary bombs just everything. Or overall UN troops in Vietnam according to wiki were about 1,830,000 and just about 461,000 Soviet, Korean, Chinese and North Vietnam troops. So according to you not only quality was on UN side, but also quantity. And they manage to lose anyway.

I don't want to start this "us vs them" all over again (there are too much of it on teh internet anyway). Just don't be so opinionated. Also i don't believe that NATO and USSR were able to cooperate at that time against some unknown force (because who knows that this is real aliens not some new superweapon of opposite faction).

As for regiments representing Russia/Ukraine: 2 out of 5 are fictional, one air army (only pilots/technicians serve in it so i can't even imagine why it's there), one anti-air defence unit (not exactly ones you expect to see in CQC), one regiment of marines.

Edited by Newfr
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I'm not going to call out your poor understanding of the actual participants of the conflict, casualty ratios, or the complete failure to even mention Vietcong (separate from the NVA), or the failure to consider the increased conscription and massive swells of number of North Vietnamese troops and such, because that's neither here nor there. This is, also, ignoring the fact that none of this exactly has a *lot* to do with the technology or troops from the USSR that I was talking about. Vietnam was a proxy war against them waged by us, the same way they were fighting US-backed proxies in Afghanistan. Neither succeeded, not because of tech or troops, but because fighting an enemy that isn't there isn't a fight that can be won.

We're not talking about fighting Vietnamese and a handful of Chinese or Russian advisors. I was talking about special forces selection.

That said... yeah, a lot of these story details were probably chosen out of ignorance; not malicious ignorance, just simple not-knowing.

Edited by EchoFourDelta
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I might just change the story so the Xenonauts can only hire the soldiers that failed their entrance exams everywhere else. It'd stop all the complaints about them being such bad shots.

Also, I will be looking at Pinetrees' mod. I intended to add a lot more nations to the soldier lists but then got caught up in some other stuff, so duplicating his work seems a bit silly.

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I'm not going to call out your poor understanding of the actual participants of the conflict, casualty ratios, or the complete failure to even mention Vietcong
As for casualty ratios or amount of troops that took part in conflict - that was taken directly from Wiki. They maybe wrong but at least they name their sources. As for forces that took part that actually doesn't matter because as you said there were only proxy wars. So it always basically was "our team vs their team" and never pure USSR vs USA.

As for special forces selection i don't believe there is someone on this forum that knows for sure (and i mean really experienced or at least overlooked that process) how that were on both sides in late 70's. So everything else is empty speculations. Because you know, "Spetsnaz" actually means nothing. It's short russian version of "Special Task Force". And that terms apply to everything beginning from not so close analogue of SWAT (OMON) and ends up with independent Special Forces Brigades under GRU command (till 2009).

Edited by Newfr
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I might just change the story so the Xenonauts can only hire the soldiers that failed their entrance exams everywhere else. It'd stop all the complaints about them being such bad shots.

Well it would explain why my new hires shoot like a bunch of drunken hillbillies after a gallon of moonshine.

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