@Gidaka the names removed in 1.5 were added in a previous version of the mod, that note is not referring to the names in the original version of the game.

More Nations and Names WotC, the successor mod to this, has a more complex naming structure for the Russia namelist including some Ukranian, Mongolian, Tatar, Caucasian and Finnish names, among others. Those were not included in this mod because this mod hasn't been maintained since MNAN came out (this was last updated in 2017) and doesn't have the source namelists for most of those ethnicities anyway (the other mod has Finland, Mongolia, Armenia, etc.; the only namelist I had to add was Tatar).

The naming conventions are unfortunately not customizable by mod, you can have a gendered random first name and an optionally-gendered random last name, and that's it. That's actually worse for East Asian and Arabic naming traditions FWIW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_national_football_team#Current_squad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_national_football_team#Current_squad

In the official list, there are no russian non-ethnic names. Can you give an example? In general, russians have not only European appearance but also Mongolian, Tatar, Caucasian, Finnish... But Ukrainian surnames and naming rules in the game are presented incorrectly. They are simply replaced by Russian ones. I can only call Zinchenko a Ukrainian surname in the game

Dagga, Thank you! The randomness on names is extremely frustrating for me! I have kept renaming toons myself. And I love how you included minority populations into countries. We are ethnically diverse in the US.

Amazing. Fantastic. I love it!

There are a LOT of Vietnamese folks in the Seattle area; I can attest to that personally. I've noticed more pho restaurants in Seattle proper than McDonalds.

Vietnamese-Americans exist. Adding racial minorities in accurate proportions to country namelists is the primary point of the mod. If you don't like it, please unsub

PHUNG NGUYEN=VIETNAM NAME
FLAG SHOWN=AMERICAN
IMMERSION LEVEL=RUINED

Would this conflict with XCom Flag on Back Only WotC?

thank you both

@.O. Yep, More Nations and Names includes everything in this mod, and if you have both active you might get some buggy behavior. So you should choose one and unsub the other.

@.O.:
Yeah, that's my understanding too.

can I assume that if I have the "More Nations and Names WotC" I don't need this one?

@James.h.tanner Trust me, we need that option. There was a mod that had the option but it required a DLC to install it :/

@francis_a51 Unfortunately no. This mod only affects the name and country of the soldier at the moment it's created. No edits you make will re-trigger the naming system, so yeah you'll have to rename them yourself.

But that gives me a good idea - time permitting, I'll add a name randomizer button in a future update, and make it use the current sex/race/nationality of the character when pressed.

@James.h.tanner

Question, let's say I'm recruiting a new soldier, and this one is a female but I wanna change to a man, does this mod randomize the names of the soldiers based on their gender? Or do I have to rename them myself?

@veikko Actually, when developing the mod I first used civilian guns as a factor. The end result was nearly identical - in most places around the world, private gun ownership is high where army participation rates are high, so the latter is a fine proxy for the former. But the US and Canada weights became almost obscenely large, even when I used log scaling.

I'll grant that considering civilian guns produces the "correct" result if I'm aiming for a genuine projection; I don't doubt there's lots of Americans with a private arsenal who'd be the first to load out during an alien apocalypse. But I also wanted the user to experience a diverse array of countries, and Americans were drowning out other countries in those early builds, so I switched it up.

And thank you for the kind comments! Glad you enjoy using it.

Thanks for the detailed explanation! I agree with your reasoning, those things would likely heavily affect the "elite soldier" count of the country. One extra thing I'd consider taking into account in some slight alterations I'm making for myself is the number of civilian firearms per country/capita.

By the way, I really appreciate your nations&names mods and all the work you've put into them. I consider them absolutely essential in any playthrough.

@veikko But there's lots of exceptions. Israel, Colombia, Turkey, Greece, Egypt all have big armies relative to country size so they got a boost. Mexico, South Africa, and Ireland have virtually non-existent armies so they're less common draws than in the unmodded game. However, it should be noted that the global weights only affect certain character draws, like your initial soldier pool and the recruit draw. Most of the characters you encounter over the course of the game are regionally drawn and within each region the weights of those draws are equal. So if you rescue soldiers in South Africa, expect those soldiers to be South African or maybe Nigerian, even though those countries have had their global draw chances lowered.

@veikko Initially I used the same final scale as the default files - where the US was a score of 40 and everyone else rounded to the nearest integer - but when I started combining this mod with More Nations (search "More Nations and Names") it made sense to scale that up a bit so the smaller countries could have noticeable representation but not overwhelm the game. So I scaled everything up by a factor of four: the US is now 160.So if you look in the files, the countries with more representation relative to the US have had their weights increase by more than four. China went from 8 to 80, for example, and India went from 2 to 50. The biggest losers of this method, generally speaking, are the Euro countries, and the winners are the BRIC-type large developing countries. 2/

@veikko The weights I've added are ultimately subjective, but there's a process behind it. The idea was to answer the basic question "how likely is it that this country would produce elite soldiers?" I started with four factors - country population, country GDP per capita, number of military soldiers, amount of military spending. I converted each to a scale from 0 to 100 (using a logarithmic scale for the financial factors), added them together to create a composite score, then re-scaled them. 1/

I see you changed the UnitWeights for the vanilla countries, did you use the population of the country or some other criteria for calculating the weights? Not that there's anything wrong with them, just curious how you came up with values.

I know that some names are from the Turkic ethics, but the names come up from the Turkish name pool.

@PapaSoma A small percentage of Russian nationals come off the Turkish namelist, but it shouldn't be a large number - something like one-in-20. This is because roughly that percentage of Russian nationals are from Turkic ethnic groups - e.g., Tatars, Kazakhs, Chuvash, Azerbaijanis, etc. - and the closest namelist I have for them is the Turkish one. I realize this is a deeply imperfect way of representing those people, who've been intermingling with Russians for centuries; time willing I'll include some minor fixes in a future update.

But you shouldn't be seeing more than 5%. If it's more, let me know.

Thanks ! Perfect.

Um, dunno if it has been updated or I am plane dumb, but for me, Russian names end up being Turkish.

Gotcha, thank you for the answer.

@Nasarog Nope, More Natiions and Names is standalone. So if you use that, you don't need this, and vice versa. And while it's not completely gamebreaking I wouldn't try enabling both, it'll mess with the likelihood of countries appearing. Just pick one and disable/uninstall the other. I manage both so my feelings won't be hurt :)

So, this mod is needed in conjunction with More Nations and More Names mods?

This was exactly what i was looking for! Sweden shared namelist with Norway before, this totally fixed this. Great work indeed, i am very pleased. THANKS!

@risiti100500 This mod is literally a part of More Nations and Names (I maintain both).

If you just want the 36 vanilla countries, use this mod. If you want ALL the countries, use that one.

What are the odds this mod will conflict with More Nations and Names?

@Astery - this is already built into the game, to some extent. Some characters are created from a global draw and others are created from a regional draw. It becomes more obvious in vanilla XCOM 2 using the Long War 2 mod, because each contacted territory can have large numbers of haven personnel created only from the regional draw. But the two draws exist in the base game.

So in other words, if there's any particular scenario in which the base WotC game is using a global draw instead of a regional one for characters who should be drawn regionally, that should be fixable, at least in theory. So far I haven't been playing with an eye toward fixing those situations but I'll keep an eye out for it. If I find something fixable, I'll include it in a future patch.

@james.h.tanner I really enjoy this mod for the game gets more immersive and less of seeing the same names over and over again. However I'm wondering if it's possible to have the game generate recruits that place consideration of the geography of nations and put in weight ratios, eg. I have Africa liberated/ under my control, thus there's a 3:1 ratio of the game generating African nationality soldiers for recruits (and optionally NPCs with Race 2 in terror missions happening within Africa)?

Thanks! Time to practice all my regex.

@mrprotagonist - Sure. I didn't compile raw data unfortunately but feel free to download the zip file from the Nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/xcom2/mods/667/

I'll be making some structural updates to the mod soon so the location of the names is going to change. Just look for any file that's about 3.7MB called XGCharacterGeneratorFix or ImmersiveNames.

You'll have to tool around with it in order to make it useful for anything other than XCOM. Having some regex or Excel chops will come in handy. XComGameBoard.ini sets the racial balance in each country, and X2StrategyElement_DefaultCountriesFix.uc sets the namelist balance for each racial group.

For more countries, check out More Nations and Names. It's a combo of this mod and More Nations, which includes all the non-vanilla countries, many with their own smaller namelists. I can't vouch directly for the More Nations namelists, but they pass my eyeball test. It's also on the Nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/xcom2/mods/668/?

@james.h.tanner - nice. I'm doing a research project and have been looking for an international first & last names database. Is there anyway you'd be willing to share yours with me?

@mrprotagonist - depends on the country. Wherever possible I've tried to use official government sources. Fortunately, curiosity about baby names and family names are high in every country around the world so usually it's possible to find some government agency that publishes something annually.

When I don't have access to that, then I do a little more research to see what's the best way to treat that. In Venezuela I could find a list of popular names, but the long tail of the Venezuelan name distribution is famously insane. A fifth of Venezuelan babies are given totally unique first names. So I created a "crazy name sampler" of sorts, which 20% of Venezuelan characters use.

What sources are you using for these names? Just curious.

@RobCoxxy - You're ragging on "Magdalene Cahill"? Really? For the country that produced "Benedict Cumberbatch"?

"Magdalene Cahill" is a somewhat-rare name but *absolutely* a name you'd find in the UK. "Magdalene" is a name given to about 1-in-800 girls in England. "Cahill" is in the top 500 surnames. In this mod, if you're drawing a UK female name, you'd have to draw another million English females before you'd get another "Magdalene Cahill". But there's a million rare name combinations like that and you're bound to get one in every ten name draw.

And yes, that's "immersive". In real life you run into people with somewhat-rare names **all the time**. You're just not likely to run into TWO people with the same rare name very often.

If all you want are the twenty most popular and stereotypically bland UK names, unsub and use the vanilla names. That's exactly what they are.

@Fidelfc - it's just the default setting, you can change it.

As it stands the default behavior of the game is that if a character is from a country that doesn't primarily speak one of the five languages that ships with the game, the voice defaults to American English. With a mod like this, following that pattern results in 80+% of your characters using the same ten male and ten female voices in every game. This, when there's a couple hundred voices that ship with the game.

The changes I made aren't to assert that Brazilians speak Spanish (or Swedes speak German, or Greeks speak Italian, etc.). I'm just trying to lower the amount of micromanagement the player has to do if they don't want to hear the same twenty voices all the damn time.

If you don't like it, sorry. This is how I like it and it's my mod. Just set the languages yourself to whatever you like.

@Rex705 - it shouldn't "get into a fight", i.e., break the game. But depending on how they're structured you might get some unexpected behavior.

"Immersive Names"

British - "Magdalene Cahill"

What? :D

"Both Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries will now all default to Spanish. "

As a Brazilian, I can't agree with this. Let it in English, it really sucks when people think that we can understand this spanish.

Does this play well with other expanded name mods or will they get into a fight?

Thanks for mod. Cheers

"leaking" Thanks for the boner

The "immersive" thing is leaking into other games now..