Mark's Gripes with the Game

[Steroid Gontarski]

Hi all

I'm an old fart / old time veteran of JA2 and just about finished this 3rd installment of the game.
I want to share my gripes with the game:

In general, it's not too bad. Miles better than the bug pile of game "XCom" in terms of combat engine.

Unfortunately JA3 is a lot less realistic and pays a lot less attention to realism in regards to combat.
Combat is less fun. Combat is shorter, less difficult and less mentally / intellectually challenging. A sharpened machete just does too much damage against armored opponents. Armor helps nothing against melee attacks and that's extremely unrealistic. Why did people invent armor in the middle ages? Because it was effective against guns and laser beams? Nope. Melee weapons.

Anyway, that's just the flavoring. The real problems are:

Worthless modding ability:
The abilities to modify the game are utterly worthless, I feel.
If you modify the game, you do it to make it more fun. To maximize its potential. But that's exactly what the abilities to modify the game do not allow. The biggest improvement to game fun would be to fix the difficulty of the game as that is the game's biggest impediment.
Let me explain:
Up to the World Flip at about half the game, combats are only mildly challenging. Not worthless, but certainly on the easy side.
Then, at world-flip in the middle of the game, difficulty goes up a lot. For the first time in the game you're really challenged and have to think about using armor and how to beat those guys.
Then, once you beat them, all challenge in the game is gone.
Combat become ridiculously easy. After you beat the official army, essentially, the rest of the game is just a walk-through to marvel at it's "wonderful" story, which this author here really doesn't give a crap for. I want challenging tactical combat, that's why Jagged Alliance.
You get no more of that after you beat the army in the middle of the game.

So... That's what modding needs to allow to change.
Modders must be able to move the world flip event back in the game to the very end.
Then the rest of the difficulty should also be adjustable.
All weapons, especially melee weapons against (heavily) armed targets should do a lot less damage.
Then I also want to adjust when you get the full-blown weapons.
Namely, more gradually and a bit later in the game.
I want to play the game forced to use simpler, weaker weapons for a longer time.
That's the next thing MODDING must be able to change. The gun progression.
Then you should not get the best guns by simply finding or buying them.
New entries of more powerful guns should ALWAYS be by winning a really tough fight with opponents who use said gun against you. Just like magic weapons in D&D. No buying, no finding at random. - Until a weapon type has become normal and standard issue of all opponents.

In summary, MODDING must, if it is to be taken seriously, in my opinion allow:
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- Moving the World Flip to any other time in the game and adjust its triggers as wanted.
- Reducing damage of various weapons when wearing various armor (machete is not affected by any armor, which is absolutely not realistic).
   --> This allows making individual combats last longer and have more turns, like JA2 combat.
- Adjust the weapon progression timeline in the game, so players can actually select at what stage what weapons appear for the first time.
  --> I don't want the only difficulty to be the lack of money to be able to take my time.
      I want to take damn well as much time as I like to explore the game and fight my fights.
      What I want is to be able to make combat more challenging by restricting more what weapons are available to me and the computer.
- Make new weapons available for the first time only from really tough combat where they are used against the player.

Cheers,
Mark