Durrr, Jagged Alliance 2 combat is HARD

[Zomg]

There's something in the ini. I think it's a good idea once you get used to it because it makes scouting really important. If you use the HAM mod reinforcements come in with 0 AP, meaning if you have people infiltrated to the edge they'll come in from you can hamburgerize them.

Edit - It's the ALLOW_REINFORCEMENTS variable, it says militia in the .ini but it applies to enemies too.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Yup, that happens while conquering towns - they get reinforcements from neighbouring sectors. You can tweak it in the .ini - between none/little/lots. Also, you can tweak how many goons Deidranna gets, which can significantly alter the game - will her troops be aggressively patrolling the countryside or not?

 

[DreadMessiah]

It is similiar to real life combat guyz!!1!

 

[Burning Bridges]

I am not so sure that this is a useful feature. Reinforcements appear out of no where on the edge of a sector, directly next to my mercs? wtf? The result: I got pwned on my second battle, the one on the San Mona / Cambria / Drassen crossroad.

Another thing I noticed was that the game crashed two times during that battle.

Sure, next time I will disable ALLOW_REINFORCEMENTS and see how it goes.

 

[denizsi]

Is there a way to use the latest HAM 3.5 with the latest 1.13 found in the single-click installer? It comes with only HAM 2.8 and several good features seems to have been made with HAM 3.5.

 

[Zomg]

I am not so sure that this is a useful feature. Reinforcements appear out of no where on the edge of a sector, directly next to my mercs? wtf? The result: I got pwned on my second battle, the one on the San Mona / Cambria / Drassen crossroad.

Yeah, with reinforcements on I just sneak through enemy tiles without fighting until I've scouted out a patch of fog-of-war around them so I can see whether they'll get reinforced. In cities you just have to be prepared for them and not have guys dawdling on the wrong map edge.

@deniszi: This thread made me want to reinstall. I used the one-click 1165 then manually installed HAM 3.5, it works.

 

[denizsi]

I'm sure the game does fire up and run but can you tell it's working properly as meant to be?

 

[Zomg]

Think so, I played through the Arulco landing bit before I had to stop and someone got the "cower in fear" HAM suppression effect when a redshirt sprayed at him with a machine pistol.

 

[GarfunkeL]

The SVN auto-installer/updater is fairly easy to use and allows you to stay abreast of any changes.

 

[Zomg]

Ugh whenever you start a new game it's so frustrating to piss around until you get the buckets of attachments and tracer ammo that let you completely outgun 40 retarded AI enemies with 6 guys.

 

[Burning Bridges]

What's so special about tracer ammo? I must admit I hardly ever use it.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Traces gives your long bursts a small bonus. Match is best, giving assault rifles pretty much the same range that sniper rifles have or alternately, put it into the mini-SMG's of the ambidexterous one. John Woo kills from extended range, awesome.

HP and Taser rounds against Wildcats, normal or AP against humans. Don't remember what was best against the sci-fi monsters.

 

[circ]

Tracer and match are retarded picks. Stick to cold ammo when possible. Little less range but dead silent. This is especially important in the higher difficulty levels where staying silent is the difference between LIFE AND DEATH as Wolf would put it. Ideally you'll want cold AP ammo, but that's only available for pistols and SMG's. (edit: ignore what I said about cold AP ammo. That's available for most weapons, not 6.8 though. Pistols and SMG's have the added bonus of getting cold HP/AP ammo. The maroon stuff.)

Of course, this is down to play style. I'm a nightops stealth guy, if you're Rambo well hey, grab LMG's and blast the fuck out of everything.

 

[spectre]

Tracers can be customized in recent versions. You can set every each bullet the tracer effect (temporary skill bump) occurs and how high is it. Depending on this setting tracer effect may be negligible to quite formidable (especially in long bursts... which is where it should br used anyway).

As for the other "retarded" choice, match is great in the beginning when the range on your weapons isn't spectacular and every little bit helps. It's also nice for low marksmanship mercs who need that every little bit of %to hit (and I like to play with the underdogs every once in a while).
Another thing, last time I checked match ammo besides increasing range also has the same effect as AP, so when you get the chance no reason not to use it over standard penetrators.

Subsonic, as circs says, rules for stealth. Unless the weapon comes with an integral silencer, it's really hard to supress it to tolerable levels without it.

As for the ammo for monsters, I usually don't play Sci-Fi, but last time I checked, HP ammo was good. AP worked only for the small critters.

 

[Zomg]

For stealth I usually use Bobby Ray'd AET ammo for that 9mm submachinegun with the amazing integral silencer or later on either AET or double AP ammo for a silenced P90. I rarely try to clean out an entire map with stealth, though, I just use it to get into good position for the big LMG deathspray. I also don't use the Russian stealth assault rifles/sniper rifles, they seem kinda broken with so much double AP ammo for them dropping.

One note about tracer is that you shouldn't use it at night unless your guy is like level 8-9, because otherwise the muzzle flash will give the other guys a lot of interrupts. But a high-level merc like Len with an attachment-twinked Minimi or Shrike full of tracer can kill 3-4 blackshirts in their best endgame armor every turn at night-fighting ranges.

 

[circ]

Oh yeah russian stealth rifles. Those 3 VALs are fucking sweet.

 

[Jasede]

FINE I WILL TRY THAT GODDAMN FAN PATCH

 

[Zomg]

I recommend turning off some of the minor realism annoyances Headrock has added in HAM, like all of his militia stuff and the ammo counting and shot difficulty estimation. Just the suppression is enough to change the basic dynamics of the game.

 

[hal900x]

Taser

Glaser. Extremely frangible (3.00x) but will not penetrate a cotton t-shirt. Utter horror against unarmored opponents like the Rednecks.

Hrrm, some pretty stupid shit being said here. Ammo should be chosen by role, as should guns. Saying a choice is retarded is...retarded. Match is for added distance, good for all kinds of applications, most common being to temporarily alter the role of a given gun type, such as allowing a distance shot in a night mission when you're only silenced weapon is an SMG. AET is uber, combining the features of frangible and armor piercing ammo. Tracer is for your dedicated suppression merc, allowing accurate automatic bursts that accrure more Supression Shock (and actually hit, occasionally). Cold-loaded ammo does reduced damage and should only be used when stealth is at an absolute premium. As has been said, it is unnecessary in SMG's other low-damage weapons since they are quiet enough with a silencer. Very loud guns such as some assault rifles and sniper rifles can benefit from cold loaded ammo when a silencer fails to reduce the noise rating low enough.

Waiting around until you have uber weapons that can wtfpwn the enemy is boring? If you dislike skill and tactics that much, then just crank up the Bobby Ray's setting in 1.13 and order whatever you want from the start.

It is great that HAM features can be disabled and tweaked, but I like the realism changes. If you are into RPG's, how can you not approve of a feature that makes it harder to check how much ammo is left in the clip, based on relevent stats and level? That's cool as hell IMO...try counting your rounds in RL combat using automatic fire. As is the need to spend additional AP's for aimed shots depending on gun accuracy and magification level of sniper attachments. Headrock documents the reasoning behind every realism mod and for the most part does a great job.

1.13 + HAM 3.5 = some of the best user-created content ever made.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I am still on the fence about the latest HAM. Suppression fire sounds interesting, but having to remember the ammo for each magazine and each merc does not sound like a feature that I needed.

What I would like to see in the future - don't know if this will ever be possible - would be the option to create custom weapons, for example crossbows that fire tranquilizer arrows and break lights over larger distances, and object creation like in Arcanum, with the option to create spiked traps, molotov cocktails, poison, etc.

 

[spectre]

IIRC you can toggle all HAM features on/off in the ini. It's the good thing about 1.13 in general, doesn't force you to like every feature.

Oh, and you CAN create objects, it's just that the number of combinations is limited. But this depends on the mod, Urban Chaos had whole in-game website devoted to such combinations.

 

[Zomg]

What I would like to see in the future - don't know if this will ever be possible - would be the option to create custom weapons, for example crossbows that fire tranquilizer arrows and break lights over larger distances, and object creation like in Arcanum, with the option to create spiked traps, molotov cocktails, poison, etc.

You can probably do most of that shit with the XML editor, and I think they already have molotovs.

Waiting around until you have uber weapons that can wtfpwn the enemy is boring? If you dislike skill and tactics that much, then just crank up the Bobby Ray's setting in 1.13 and order whatever you want from the start.

Eh the AI is too stupid for anything to really feel like tactics. You're always just exploiting the weakness of the AI at using sighting ranges and synergizing their gear and so on. So, the point of play is not doing harrrrd shit and thinking soooo hard about solving this maze on the back of a kid's menu at Chili's. It's like drawing or something, you're just doing shit to see it.

 

[MisterStone]

Well, it takes a while to get the AI and gameplay loopholes figured out. In the meantime it is still a pretty good run.

I finally beat Alma as my second city; apparently like someone already said here, this is about the last city most people take. It was pretty damn hard beating the map with level 3 and 4 mercs, but we did, although I lost one of them. The upside to doing this map first is that there were a ton of awesome rifle drops; I think I have about a dozen rifles, and half of them are tricked out with scopes, plus three laser scopes, a law, a FN-FAL, sniper rifles, lots of Spectra armor, etc. etc.

As for getting the commando out of the room he was held up in, I found that blowing down a wall was not necessary; in fact, as soon as the wall was gone the jackass would initiate combat and kill someone immediately most of the time, as if the exploding wall were about the same as opening a garage door.

What I ended up doing was to use a teargas grenade round that I was lucky enough to find. I didn't think it was working earlier, because I didn't wait long enough in RT mode for the teargas to spread and take effect... realtime is slower than I realized. Another tactic is to put a couple mercs outside the door you are going to storm, but out of the enemy's line of sight. Drop a smoke grenade near the door, and then have someone at some distance spring past the door and the enemy's line of sight; hopefully the combo of smoke and the target running means they won't be shot too badly. Once the enemy has blown his APs on that guy, send the others in to burst fire him into hamburger.

The mods sound kind of fun, although that burst fire sounds a bit ridiculously overpowered at some settings, especially if the AI doesn't know how to use it. One thing the game really needs is better grenade tossing, it is almost impossible to get a grenade into a doorway right now, which rather sucks. I think that the HAM mod has some fixes for this, right?

*Edit* still playing the pre-1.13 version. I figure I should see the game as is was originally made, and it is still quite fun despite some annoying quirks.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Oh yes, you are gonna be so surprised if you roll 1.13 and newest HAM next. It's almost a different game - the mechanics have changed so much.

 

[spectre]

Get the HAM, seriosuly. One of the good things in recent builds is that all the stats are now visible in their glorious complexity.

The mods sound kind of fun, although that burst fire sounds a bit ridiculously overpowered at some settings, especially if the AI doesn't know how to use it. One thing the game really needs is better grenade tossing, it is almost impossible to get a grenade into a doorway right now, which rather sucks. I think that the HAM mod has some fixes for this, right?

I don't do a lot of grenade tossing myself, but there's a toggle in the game menu - high angle grenades which may yield some results.

As for bursting,it seems that suppressive fire isn't just from bursts, but also from regular shots coming near you. So yep, the AI can use it. High level mercs become even more valuable with this.