Jagged Alliance 3 from Haemimont Games

[Khor1255]

Sooo, does the nickname Buns refer to the hairstyle or the bread? From her bio in JA2 I would assume it refers to the hairstyle.

I always thought it was the nice wiggle in the gray pants when she's walking away from you.

 

[Jacob]

Now that I think about it, it just makes sense someone described as "prim and proper" would ironically get a nickname like "Buns" from her male-dominated mercenary peers. Of course they mean it to refer to her butt but she doesn't know that and wear the nickname with pride.

Just my headcanon.

 

[razvedchiki]

postpone your visit in the refugee camp until you are ready. gather armor pearcing rounds and any gas masks you can find. then do an ambush of your won by placing your team in good firing positions around the colonel. sent one guy with heavy armor if possible to speak with him.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Finally got around to playing this, and I'm glad I did. Sure, it's not as good as JA2, but frankly nothing likely ever will be. This though? This is worthy of being a sequel even if it isn't as good. My complaints so far are mostly minor, maps feel small and some of the mercs I would have liked from the last game are gone. Oh, and you can't actually place explosives. Come on, let me place C4 isn't of throwing it around like an idiot.

I'm really digging the whole "characters automatically move out of cover to fire, then back in when they're done". Overwatch seems like a system designed to ensure everyone can get an interrupt even if they wouldn't in the past. I haven't actually used any of the character's active special abilities yet. This particular bit is blasphemy, but I like the dialog system more than in the last game. Minus the whole "THIS ACTION WILL HAVE MAJOR CONSEQUENCES!" I'm loving these machine gun encampments, which I'm sure I will until the enemy gets one and cuts down my team in one turn.

Currently, I have a team of my custom character, Igor, Ivan, The Fox and Kalyna. (Whatever the Ukrainian chick's name is) The opening island went pretty well, outside of making some assumptions about red barrels that turned out to be incorrect. Currently ended up at The Good Place after getting on the boat, it's going...well, we're there at night at least. Feeling out the enemy isn't going well, I do not have enough knives to take out these guys stealthily, and something tells me going loud is going to end badly.

 

[deuxhero]

Took IMP (I agree: Super boring. I only took for the no salary Leadership that's used to train militia in background while everyone else actually gets played), Fox, Mouse (Yes, I know she takes a moral penalty when paired with Fox, but her dialog for it is hilarious), Livewire, and Ukranian chick (Will need explosives expert). Cleared tutorial island (good mix of objectives and enviroments), then took first mine (south) and docks with just Mouse sneak killing. I appreciate that you have at least two viable first targets after the tutorial, since JA2 really funneled you Drassen>Alma>Cambria (You could go Cambria before Alma, but it's blatantly exposed).

Mechanics wise, there's a few quibbles . I have a few small quibbles: Sneak attack kill and hit rate really should be boosted out of combat, and pausing out of combat really should let you queue up shots to be executed simultaneously instead of forcing an unpause since you can do it with movement (etc.). Perks looks super unbalanced between them.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned much but I actually like are the environment graphics. I don't want to use a word like "pretty" or "beautiful", but it captures the atmosphere of an exotic impoverished Africa nicely with the clutter and texture work. As far as I can tell there's no cheap crap trying too hard filters doing any lifting, and there's a good amount of internal variety so far (a real danger of games with a strong focus on a setting like "Western" or "Mars" is everything looks very samey quickly). In a related thing, the use of African French accents for natives was probably not easy to implement (I doubt there's many actors who can pull it off in English), but it's such a nice boost to atmosphere. Contrast this with Arulco, where the local have little consistency in accent despite the game loving funny accents for mercs: You'd never guess Maddog, Dynamo, and Miguel are supposed to be from the same small country by hearing mercs speak. A few are vaguely Hispanic but at best it comes off as US/Canada who may know some Spanish than local of obscure South African country. Character graphics by contrast are... OK. Aside from how all the girls seem to have the same nose, they do their job and your characters can be distinguished at a glance. A lot of the generic Legion members having repeated models are super noticeable.

Minor issues with Proton that requires I alt tab twice to get the window recognized and properly aligned with the cursor, but I can't really fault the devs for that. Overall I'd actually look forward to a Jagged Alliance 4. The flaws are all fixable.

Overall a tentative so far. On its own it's not an all time classic must play, but it's a worthy and respectful sequel, and that alone is rare enough in the current era.

 

[Cpt. Dallas]

Can't waste

Spoiler

"Santiago"

?! What in the actual fuck. I wanted payback for my two dead mercs goddammit.

Ivan is MIA, can't hire.

And who keeps giving the camp followers weapons and tools? Even so, the weekly prices aren't bad but they won't STFU.

Nazis. Always with the fuckin nazis. Give it a rest already.

 

[razvedchiki]

no.

 

[Dwarvophile]

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

 

[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.

 

[Dwarvophile]

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.

 

[Cpt. Dallas]

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

And too many near identical weapons.

 

[Hellraiser]

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.

 

[razvedchiki]

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.

 

[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?