Jagged Alliance 3 from Haemimont Games

[deuxhero]

After finishing the southern city and clearing the mine in the north I left IMP to train militia and sent the main team east to take out some command posts. Met Larry. Found the "haunted" mansion and cleared it (the cutscene really wasn't prepared to handle leaving mercs in front of the basement entrance), getting the medicine needed there. During this I recruited Meltdown, Grizzly and Barry as a second squad. They arrived just in time to help the northern mine defend against an attack (which turned out to be hilariously pathetic with them: GPMG+chokepoint). I'll likely move Fox to squad 2 to get Mouse an AP back (especially since she's got friends in new squad).

The ability to just hire a boat at any port, with a few checkpoints you can't pass, is a welcome improvement to the poorly thought out helicopter of JA2 (by the time you've cleared the SAM sites to let it go anywhere, you're already at where you want to attack. Only useful for reinforcements)

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

for anyone finding the game too easy give ratos weapon overhaul a try, it adds additional ap cost to fire a weapon and burst gives now full damage (and other changes).
ARs become the mainstay weapon, with 1-2 snipers per team the optimum.

Very nice! I was hoping for something like that.

 

[Beowulf]

Damn, the inventory logistics becomes really tedious after a while.

Mods to the rescue - I used the one that allowed stacking all items, so at this point I don't even remember what did I have to juggle.

Oh do you remember the name of this mod ? I saw that some QOL mods like the Crafting Items to Squad Bag mod for instance were abandoned on Nexus.

Yeah, I think it was the Crafting Items to Squad Bag mod. Seems like it's not compatible with 1.5.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

So, since last time, I stopped the raid on The Good Place, that wasn't going well. So I went to liberate Port Cacao. This one was very event driven for a town, sort of like Drassen as originally intended, complete with counter-attack. That was actually pretty cool, but man, so much cover there was a potentially explosive car, really felt like a double-edged sword. So, the counter-attack, you find out about it from a former gangster grandma who uses potty language, and then you gather up a bunch of townsfolk to fight them off. It's at this point that I think, hey, town loyalty is tied into events rather than the more fluid JA2 system. Solve quests, get influence. Or kill a squad, of course. Gotta say, some of these are probably best done after the counter-attack, since some of the recruits are melee fighters and despite the game giving them every advantage, keeping them alive is tricky. One, Kayla the Cutter, actually hurts you when she joins up, rendering her a complete liability, since she stabs whoever talks to her, and her inevitable death loses loyalty.

After exploring around a little bit and actually taking out The Good Place, I've just finished liberating Fleatown. I picked up Barry sometime during this, and I really should have gotten him from the start instead of Ivan. Ivan isn't bad, but everyone is doing well in combat except Fox, who can be excused, which makes him somewhat bad value for money. Kalyna is incredibly useful despite being being dumb, considering how easy it is to gain wisdom in this game. Ironically, strength seems to me to be the hardest stat to increase, since you can't go over carrying capacity unlike last time. Yeah, sure, you can increase it in melee, but a lot of the time you should do that while humming the MASH theme.

Also, I'd dislike the mystery meat woman CEO if it wasn't shaping up that she's going to betray us down the line. Oh, yeah, that hermit who used to be the CEO and those mysterious phone calls, yeah, I'm sure nothing of value will come from that. And while I realize that JA2 had certain things in it which were not entirely gritty and realistic, trying to avoid saying spoilers for that game, the not gritty and realistic things the game are building up, while I'm sure will be fun...I would have liked to be optional. Which is to say...

Spoiler

The zombies. I know they're talking about zombies with this rabies quest. The bugs were optional, I would have liked the option for these zombies to be optional too. I'm sure a mod fixes it, but come on.

 

[Ghulgothas]

One, Kayla the Cutter, actually hurts you when she joins up, rendering her a complete liability, since she stabs whoever talks to her, and her inevitable death loses loyalty.

You can get her to sign on without damage to one of your mercs, I think it's tied to their Agility stat; I had Dr. Q talk to her and he able to dodge her strike.

 

[destinae vomitus]

the not gritty and realistic things the game are building up, while I'm sure will be fun...I would have liked to be optional. Which is to say...

I skipped 99% of that stuff incidentally on my first playthrough, it's definitely optional as long as you don't care about getting "reprimanded" in an amusing ending slide.

 

[Jrpgfan]

So, I've finished the game at launch and haven't touched it since.

How does it compare to launch? Are there good mods to use yet?

 

[Zoo]

Dunno, I found inventory logistics way easier than JA2 since the sector stash/loot can be accessed from the laptop and all item transfers also done directly from the laptop. AFAIK you had to walk mercs to items in JA2 and transfering items between 2 squads was another UI headache, unless I played it WRONG for years and there was some keyboard shortcut or small button for it that I missed.

You mean outside of battle? In JA2 you can manage the discovered and unblocked items from the map menu. Of course, if you want to transfer an item from one merc or from the floor to an another merc, they must be in the same sector.

 

[Cpt. Dallas]

There are two mechanical checks in the cryolab that are higher than the 84 Steroid on my team currently has and if that high, probably important. I'm going to have to hire either Livewire or Vicky solely to tackle it. Does anyone remember the check level? I'm assuming 85 or 90.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Is it just me, or are the characters with viable secondary skills (Explosives, mechanical, medical) rather low in number here? It seems like half the doctors from the last game have just vanished, but that isn't quite as bad as how there aren't that many mechanics and explosives experts. Which on occasion requires your character to not be gambling that a 40 skill is high enough to disarm something.

 

[Yosharian]

Is it just me, or are the characters with viable secondary skills (Explosives, mechanical, medical) rather low in number here? It seems like half the doctors from the last game have just vanished, but that isn't quite as bad as how there aren't that many mechanics and explosives experts. Which on occasion requires your character to not be gambling that a 40 skill is high enough to disarm something.

Yeah I agree, in fact it's optimal in my opinion to go for mechanics on your IMP

 

[Papill0n]

Is it just me, or are the characters with viable secondary skills (Explosives, mechanical, medical) rather low in number here? It seems like half the doctors from the last game have just vanished, but that isn't quite as bad as how there aren't that many mechanics and explosives experts. Which on occasion requires your character to not be gambling that a 40 skill is high enough to disarm something.

Yes, that bothers me as well. And because of the importance of these skills, there's practically no way around certain characters, especally if you have many squads in parallel. That's partly the reason why I'm making more characters recruitable via modding, such as Deedee for explosives and Basil for mechanics. Haven't quite found a good Doctor to make recruitabe, though, at least not in early game. Who would be a good pick, the shaman from the refugee camp? Dr. L'enfer maybe has a good selection of punchlines, but he's lategame. Dr. Kronenberg is annoying. Painless Doc Roberts... well not a good pick either. Any other NPC for high level doctoring?

 

[Yosharian]

Is it just me, or are the characters with viable secondary skills (Explosives, mechanical, medical) rather low in number here? It seems like half the doctors from the last game have just vanished, but that isn't quite as bad as how there aren't that many mechanics and explosives experts. Which on occasion requires your character to not be gambling that a 40 skill is high enough to disarm something.

Yes, that bothers me as well. And because of the importance of these skills, there's practically no way around certain characters, especally if you have many squads in parallel. That's partly the reason why I'm making more characters recruitable via modding, such as Deedee for explosives and Basil for mechanics. Haven't quite found a good Doctor to make recruitabe, though, at least not in early game. Who would be a good pick, the shaman from the refugee camp? Dr. L'enfer maybe has a good selection of punchlines, but he's lategame. Dr. Kronenberg is annoying. Painless Doc Roberts... well not a good pick either. Any other NPC for high level doctoring?

We need to be able to customise existing mercs with mods. That would be fantastic.

 

[Papill0n]

Existing mercs? Like change their stats in the mod editor or what?

 

[Yosharian]

Existing mercs? Like change their stats in the mod editor or what?

Yeah exactly, like give an existing Merc a better score in mechanics, change their starting perks, etc

It would really open up the game for me personally because I really dislike a lot of the Merc skill/perk choices

 

[Papill0n]

Existing mercs? Like change their stats in the mod editor or what?

Yeah exactly, like give an existing Merc a better score in mechanics, change their starting perks, etc

It would really open up the game for me personally because I really dislike a lot of the Merc skill/perk choices

Am I missing the irony in your postings? Or what keeps you from changing their stats/perks in the mod editor? (Sorry I'm stumped here, or maybe unaware of any mod editor bug/limitation)

 

[Yosharian]

Existing mercs? Like change their stats in the mod editor or what?

Yeah exactly, like give an existing Merc a better score in mechanics, change their starting perks, etc

It would really open up the game for me personally because I really dislike a lot of the Merc skill/perk choices

Am I missing the irony in your postings? Or what keeps you from changing their stats/perks in the mod editor? (Sorry I'm stumped here, or maybe unaware of any mod editor bug/limitation)

I've never even used mod editor, or even knew it existed before we started this conversation?

 

[deuxhero]

I think the issue is JA3's mercs are almost all either specialists in or utterly incompetent at leadership, explosives and medical. There are very few with those skills in the 50-60s (Mouse and Livewire having 50 for medical, enough for mid-combat bandaging are a notable exception, and Mouse is actually too low for her backstory). The annoying ones is that explosives seems to govern spotting explosives instead of wisdom now. Leadership is the real standout since the first two tiers are full of total incompetents at it and Wisdom isn't as broken so you can't turn someone like Ira or Biff (who have teaching but bad leadership) into good trainers in a few weeks.

"Liberated" the poacher camp with B team. IMP baited enemy in, Meltdown mows down any who take the obvious approach, and Barry hid behind a rock chucking explosives at those who didn't take bait (last guy was guarding Meltdown from flanking attacks that never came). The trick was finding an angle for Meltdown where she didn't aggro the entire camp by hitting a bystander. I think after getting Flay, Pantagruel and the B12 mine will be my next objective, taking the combined team that way. Realized B team has no medic, so I absolutely do need to move Fox over to them and find a replacement for A team (Larry's medical seems high, doesn't seem to be any JA2 style wasting medical kits to get the painkillers going on from a quick search).

 

[3 others]

I kind of like that explosives is a three-tiered skill now where you have the incompetents who need to be kept away from anything flammable, the mid-level grunts in the 20-40 range who aren't really suited for bomb defusal but are more proficient with thrown explosives and mortars, and then you have the specialists who can craft stuff, disable boobytraps and so on. That way there is a tangible difference between EXP 3 and EXP 28 whereas anything below the Repair Items operation mechanical threshold might as well be zero.

Agreed that there is a dearth of suitable mercenaries for the specialist roles. I think there are quite a few medical skill checks where even Thor's (third-highest) initial rating isn't high enough. And the threshold for many bomb defusals is so high that even Scully with his ~65 EXP skill seems to be getting his face blown off more often than not. And if you want to have most of the Negotiator/Scoundrel/Psycho personalities represented in your squad(s), the selection gets very limited.

 

[Papill0n]

Agreed that there is a dearth of suitable mercenaries for the specialist roles. I think there are quite a few medical skill checks where even Thor's (third-highest) initial rating isn't high enough. And the threshold for many bomb defusals is so high that even Scully with his ~65 EXP skill seems to be getting his face blown off more often than not. And if you want to have most of the Negotiator/Scoundrel/Psycho personalities represented in your squad(s), the selection gets very limited.

This.
Also the arbtrary thresholds for various operations mean you can't improve low skilled mercs by field experience but you have to train them. How do you train somebody in mechanics without actually touching and repairing stuff? Grand Chien Distance University or what? Ja2 had the better design. Anybody could usually start any operation but if their stats sucked, they may have failed or take a very long time.

Yosharian
Sorry, then. I wouldn't mind trying out a mod with a different vision of the Merc's stats and perks, if you want to have a go at editing them

 

[Yosharian]

Agreed that there is a dearth of suitable mercenaries for the specialist roles. I think there are quite a few medical skill checks where even Thor's (third-highest) initial rating isn't high enough. And the threshold for many bomb defusals is so high that even Scully with his ~65 EXP skill seems to be getting his face blown off more often than not. And if you want to have most of the Negotiator/Scoundrel/Psycho personalities represented in your squad(s), the selection gets very limited.

This.
Also the arbtrary thresholds for various operations mean you can't improve low skilled mercs by field experience but you have to train them. How do you train somebody in mechanics without actually touching and repairing stuff? Grand Chien Distance University or what? Ja2 had the better design. Anybody could usually start any operation but if their stats sucked, they may have failed or take a very long time.

Yosharian
Sorry, then. I wouldn't mind trying out a mod with a different vision of the Merc's stats and perks, if you want to have a go at editing them

So are we talking about an official mod of some sort, or something else? I had a brief look online, couldn't see anything..been a while since I touched the game

 

[deuxhero]

I think the way to (or, at least, a good start to) fix the "too low to learn" problem would be to make magazines inversely scale how many points they give, providing more benefit if given to lower skill mercs. 1-24 gains 2 points off a magazine (too advanced), 25-40 gains 5 points, 41-59 gains 2 points, 50-60 gains 3 points, 60-75 gains 2 points and 75+ gains 1 point. Would also solve the problem of all skill mags (except maybe marksman) going to highest in squad by default (attributes have some justification to spread out with perk qualifications and derived attributes).

 

[deuxhero]

Liberated Fleatown and its tiny mine. Hired Raider because I want militia trained quick, and Wolf because he's the only mechanical merc that won't clash with my B team's members or be super expensive. A team discovered a subway system at total random. First fight was hard because the enemies were all in line of sight (no clearing with stealth kills alone), and heavily armored. Cleared it by having Larry throw some TNT and provoking everyone to run into that area. Subsequent areas were easier since stealth kills were possible (Mouse is really good at these), and they could be divided by using the narrow tunnels and using Larry's shotgun in the CQC.

 

[Cpt. Dallas]

Finished the game.

Spoiler

The intended boss path is probably Major, Colonel, Santiago given the difficulty curve of those fights and assuming you've gone north early to at least try to save Biff. Entering Brigand's camp with a full team with gas masks and a lot of explosives is a win button. Not being able to execute Santiago sucks. Not being able to revive and recruit a Gestapo merc also sucks. That cryochamber check I mentioned above reveals a clue that is locked behind a combined mech and med check (possibly the only double skill check in the game) that must be passed by a single merc. Gus is the only one in my roster that could pass it. I probably missed a lot of dialogue options not having the negotiator/psycho/scoundrel perk mix together on my main team.

 

[Yosharian]

Explosives in general are an I-win button tbh