Obviously I can't be the only person who is still playing this - a dozen plus years after release no less. I've recently started another game with 1.13 and was just using a M.E.R.C. team of Biff, Flo, Larry, Gumpy, Gasket, and Ira. Sadly I forgot to turn off the Drassen counterattack in the .ini file and had to restart. That said my next try with genuine AIM mercenaries is going much better. Using Wolf, Shadow, Spider, Blood, Ira, and Grunty as a primary squad. The real problem - since I put drop all on - is that I'm absolutely compulsive in trying to create the best load outs for all of my mercenaries. In practice this means.... 1 x Pistol (+pistol ammo) 1 x AR/Shotgun/SMG (+extra ammo) 1 x Sniper Rifle for the two best shots (+ammo) 1 x Med-Kit (lots more with Ira and Spider) 2 x Breaklight 2-4 x Grenades (this includes regular grenades/mini-nads/stun/smoke/tear gas) 1 x Canteen 2-4 x Throwing Knives for Blood 1 x Knife 1 x NVG's 1 x Gas Mask 1 x Wirecutters (2 per squad) 2 x Energy/Regen Boosters for Medics 1 x Helmet (with attached NVG's and sunglasses!) 1 x Body Armor (with attached inserts if possible) 1 x Leg Armor 1 x Combat vest/LBE (for storing all that ammo/grenades/assorted odds and ends) 2 x Holsters/Double Mag holders (more ammo is better!) 1 x Backpack/Three Day Kits (for even more ammo/repair kits/medikits/extra weapons!) And that is even before all the extra stuff involving just the weapons. Probably my favorite and also least favorite thing about 1.13 is the amount of guns there are. Sure the base game hit all the normal points. I could have an M-16, AK-47, M-14, Colt 1911, Glock 17, or a SPAS-12. Fuck that though. I've rather have my mercs prowling around with obscure European firearms like a MAB PA-15 pistol as a sidearm with the main gun being a Chilean FAMAE SAF. The various small differences between guns make every post-battle result all the more harrowing. Do I take an overpowered revolver or a Russian pistol with a 20-round magazine?
While I enjoyed the game a lot, the problem I had was that the range modifier was insanely, overwhelmingly important, thus: -anything with a range of less than the typical combat range (about 20-25 spaces) was essentially useless -because scopes reduce the range penalty (by a lot), anything that can't mount a scope was essentially useless -because automatic fire prevents you from spending AP on aiming and thus from using the scope, it was essentially useless (even at fairly short range you would usually be sacrificing the ability to score headshots, which negates the damage output advantage of multiple shots) Did they change this in one of the patches? Because otherwise the fighting still just devolves into headshots with scoped ARs (since sniper rifles have high AP costs, they can only get one aimed shot off per turn, which usually isn't enough to kill an enemy with a good helmet).
It boggles the mind that it still defaults to On. You can run into it early and it's the hardest part of the game. Beat that and you may as well stop playing since you're clearly going to win.
Was it really that hard? My recollection of it was more being extremely annoyed that I had to wait 5 minutes for all the militia to move every turn.
The counter attack is dumb, even though I like playing with it on. Part of it stems from the fact that there are some black shirt enemies that come along, and by killing them, it makes the game ridiculously easy for a while. Plus having drop all enabled means no shortage of ammunition and other possible high powered guns. Furthermore, considering it is within the township, there isn't much of a disadvantage given the copious amounts of building cover available, so handguns retain their effectiveness. Also, Cambria Mine would have to be one of the hardest sectors in the game, along with the SAM site. If you go full auto and spray the enemy with bullets, from the whole team, you may be able to drop their AP down enough that they can not react next turn.
Last time I played, it was 1.13 with "drop all" turned on, but with tweaked weapons files so that the Arulco military was standardized on 7.62x39mm guns/ammo. Basically, enemies drop lots of AKs and not much else. I also enabled "MERC on day-1" and "Bobby Ray's is fully stocked" which allowed me to do a solo run with Flo. This is hilarious because she hits level 10 and becomes this pro-level marksman who apologizes whenever she kills someone, which is to say all the time. The drawback with a solo run is that you can't realistically ever hold any territory, and you're constantly relocating to avoid being overrun. It ends up being about taking the Drassen airport long enough to have a silenced P-90 and night-vision goggles delivered, and then going on a stealth assassination mission to infiltrate the palace. If you enter the palace through the bunker, her bodyguard normally gets a scripted interrupt. However, this is overridden by your interrupt if someone else stumbles into the room during the conversation. If that someone else turns out to be Deidranna, then you're just a couple of three-round bursts from the end credits. Still, that's kind of boring; the true hilarity is trying to storm the palace from the outside.
This is a game that absolutely refuses to just quit giving. I have poured so many hours in to this, but shockingly I have never killed Deidranna.
I never have either. Nor did I get the end on the JA game that came out last year. I think its because the fun is the challenge of building up your guys, hoping for the good weapon drops, etc. Once you get to the point where you have tons of money and gear and have mostly cleared the world map, it just feels like a grind to finish things off against tanks and rocket rifles and other stuff like that.
The thought that someone, somewhere had Ira as a co-worker and had to listen to that voice EVERY FRIGGEN DAY is depressing Did you send her like waaaay out the back and get her train all the interns non stop, all on her own for about three months straight? Cos that actually worked really well for me as a strategy. Amazingly, despite the fond place this game holds for me, I've never played the 1.13 version, only "vanilla"
I played JA2 off and on for years, although last year's game supplanted it for a while. I did actually sit down and power through that one, which shocks me; it has it's flaws and isn't as good of a game as JA2, but I'm very proud to have killed Deidranna in a very anticlimactic way. I had my 18 guys (!) surrounding the room she was in, getting ready for a massive assault. There were maybe 10 soldiers in the room with her. One of them, oddly enough, made the decision to attack while I was futzing with bringing some other people up. I panicked, scrolled over to that area, and saw the soldier go down incredibly fast. That's when the game congratulated me for killing Deidranna - she truly is evil, a driven bitch. Driven to abandon her bodyguards and run straight into a wall of incoming fire.
AHHH, fuck you CSL - I just reinstalled this after a failed attempt at playing it for the first time a few years ago. I was completely shut down by the Drassen counter attack, and now you tell me I can turn it off!?! So, are there any good beginners guides? I feel like I have the basics down, but am missing some advanced play options, I only just figured out how to toggle fire modes for example, and I'm pretty lost navigating the inventory - and I don't really know what it is I'm supposed to be doing.
Hire some mercs, take a mine, train some militia, hold the mine, then expand. Don't be afraid to lose. Don't feel that East is your only opening move, but it is the easiest.
You can use the .ini editor in the game directory to turn off the counter attack, as well as tweak a whole bunch of other stuff, but you'll have to restart the game. Drassen isn't going to un-invade itself.
Thor Kaufman's voice annoyed me almost as much as Ira's, which is why I rarely used him. Danny and Fox were great, though. Also, this is pretty cool.
I am at work and actually have my JA2 disc in my laptop bag.....this thread is calling to it and it is in turn calling to me.
You can also use the .ini to increase your amount of starting funds and change whether or not M.E.R.C. is available right at the start of the game.
Or set what weapons the enemy will typically carry. I always liked Alan Au's idea making Deidranna's troops carry all WP weapons and tried to emulate it a while ago. Trouble I found is it takes a tonne of work, especially with balancing when the weapons are to be made available to her troops. Alan, did you have any particular method when you did it? Casting my mind back, I'm thinking I should have limited the troops to a much smaller selection of guns rather than trying to focus on the whole pool. It did make a nice addition to the game.
More importantly, after hiring him send him to San Mona to continuously participate in blood sports! I quite liked Thor! Amazing stats, coupled with in sane wisdom means he quite quickly got good at absolutely everything. He didn't end up too expensive either. My favourites (in no particulate order) tend to be - Stephen (always turns into a brilliant marksman), Raven (night ops + Auto), Wolf, Blood and Thor. I'd like to try and get a same going where I use some others like Fox more regularly. I never really found a satisfactory mercenary to fill the explosives role either - guys like Trevor start expensive and then get even more expensive. Barry just takes too damn long to actual get decent at ANYTHING else. I'd also one day like the M.E.R.C. people to actually have some have decent mercs appear other than Bubba. Gasket and Razor though are very useful for repair and pack muling.
I'd like a Deadly Games-style random scenario generator with the JA2 tactical engine. I never was any good at the strategic overworld stuff in this game.
Yeah, there's a bit of work involved. 1. I wrote a PERL script to process the Weapons.xml file, extracting the uiIndex, WeaponName, and Calibre into a tab-delimited file, which I imported into Excel. (easy) 2. I sorted by Calibre and deleted all of the entries that didn't use appropriate ammo types. (easy) 3. I manually looked at the remaining entries and kept or removed stuff based on the name. This includes stuff like the shotguns where I wanted some but not all of them. I kept most of the melee weapons. (difficult, but fun) 4. I assigned each weapon a category based on its type and quality, e.g. "shotgun 2" or "SMG 3." I used these to manually reorder all of the weapons by quality. (difficult) 5. I split the list into roughly equal-sized groupings. I then padded some categories with duplicate weapons so that they would show up more often. In particular, I wanted some weapons to show up more consistently regardless of enemy "level." The default list has the problem that elite squads are carrying disproportionate numbers of sniper rifles/LMGs, and I wanted to try and fix that. (difficult) 6. I generated a new version of EnemyGunChoices.xml which only contained the uiIndex values that I wanted. I may have missed a couple of weapons here and there, but I can justify it by claiming that those guns weren't intended for export. (easy, but tedious) Note: I got rid of the rocket rifles. They still exist in the game, but Deidranna's troops aren't carrying them randomly. Note 2: I can't remember the specifics anymore, but there's a small chance I may have seeded the highest tier (elite troops) with some high-quality non-WP weapons, presumably purchased from the black market.
Could someone explain to me how you judge the chance to hit? Activating the option with 1.13 gives me this huge circle thing, but I'm unable to see what indicates the actual chance to hit estimate. There are pages over pages of explanations of the 560 factors that influence it and that it is an inaccurate estimate based in skills/experience but no explanation on how to read the huge circle thing.
Ok, so I found out how it works. By activating the "show chance to hit" option you enable a completely different hit calculation. With the new system the circles indicate where the bullet can actually land. By spending AP you can reduce the size of the circle and thus the possible impact area. This is in contrast to random die rolls JA2 originally used. In effect this greatly reduces those "stupid" shots and streaks of good/bad shots that are overwhelmingly based on random rolls. This makes shooting more predictable/reliable (in that luck is less of a factor and all the circumstances matter more. A bad shot stays a bad shot with a small chance of a lucky hit, but a good shot early-mid game is much more reliable on average). The early game gets somewhat easier because of this. No longer will enemies hit four times in a row with a stupid .38 revolver from 35 tiles away. Oddly, you can play with the old chance to hit system, but due to the poor way the option is implemented you can't actually display the chance to hit if you do...
Yeah... Well, I think we just wanted special weapons for the elite soldiers near the end of the game. Mark Carter, one of the programmers, was (and still is) a gun nut (he's the one who got me into firearms) and I wouldn't be surprised if he had suggested the real life Gyrojet firearms to Ian to have them as the special weapons for the elite soldiers.
When we were working on the demo I hated playtesting it because it was very unnerving to have my own face stare back at me while I played...
