Been trying an ironman run while testing some mods. After a few dead starts I got a good campaign going, captured a few mines and got a full party of dudes. Then it all went wrong when we tried to assault the Good Place. Those prison dudes are quite a bit tougher and more accurate than the regular mooks, and we had a horrible start as I forgot there are moving searchlights and let everyone get spotted before we'd even breached the outer wall. That made getting up to the main building very tricky, with dudes overwatching out of every window in the place. We made it over there with only minor injuries thanks to liberal use of smoke grenades, but then got pincered by dudes coming down off the roof. Some cleverly set machine gun overwatches from the prison guards and we were done for. No one made it out alive.
But, this being a Jagged Alliance game, the death of every single hired soldier doesn't mean the end of a campaign. I put together the best B-team I could with what little cash I had in reserve, and they managed to mop up the few enemies that remained using only shitty pistols and a couple of grenades. Not sure if I'll continue given that most of the cool mercs I had yet to try are now deceased, but we'll see. At least they were avenged.
Some notes on a few of the mods I tried:
- Pinned Down: Adds proper suppression, with a tiered system of AP-decreasing status effects that get more severe the more bullets whizz past you in a turn. Works on proximity, so shooting near a cluster of enemies applies suppression on all of them. It even forces pose changes on heavily suppressed units. Very cool, but it feels like the effect triggers per attack instead of per bullet. In any case, great mod, highly recommended.
- Bleeding Mod: Adds bleeding effects to all bullets in the game, simulating the old systems of open wounds. More incoming damage means more bleed stacks means more bleeding damage per turn, and every stack of bleed decreases AP as well. Good stuff. Makes heavily wounded units a lot less effective, more in line with the old games. Also makes bandaging very important which makes the action economy more interesting. It was almost never a good use of a turn in the base game, but with this mod it is.
- Revised Wound Effects: Adds AP loss on hits. A good companion to the bleeding mod. Combine those two and getting shot is a big deal, which is great.
- Revised Autofire: Makes automatic fire work like it should, i.e. with progressively worse chance to hit for each bullet. Also sets auto damage to 100% instead of 50% like in the base game. I honestly can't tell how well it works, but it seems to make auto fire less accurate in general, which keeps the full bullet damage from being OP. It also makes enemies more dangerous, as they love to shoot bursts. Overall an improvement over the base game.
- Revised Mags: Adds magazines for guns, for mercs to keep in their personal inventories. Doesn't remove ammo from the shared stash, but makes it so that reloading directly from the stash takes triple the AP of reloading from a magazine. It's a great idea, but the implementation isn't quite there. You can't remove a magazine from a gun without scrapping it, which makes magazines very hard to come by, and some guns don't have magazines at all. In the end I enjoyed it just for making reloading cost more AP, which makes things a bit more challenging. Hopefully there's some further development on this that makes mags easier to come by.
