Raeven

Yes, I definitely agree that you found a way to play that sucks all fun out of the experience 🤣 That is quite funny to imagine.

It is hard when you don't want to, because you designed the game a certain way, and accept that some people won't like it while others do. Do you know what a "patch" is???

Ammo crafting is better than listening to people whine about ammo shortage problems in the game.

Yeah, because "things you don't like" doesn't qualify as "things that need to be patched" See also the "urgent patch needed" thread which makes this same mistake.

I've never played a better squad based tactical game. Certainly never played a bigger one. 🤷‍♀️

I've been here for awhile and I'll tell you - this place is basically non stop moaning about the game, lol. From hanging around here you'd think they turned JA into candy crush or something. ANYway I find it interesting that you have such issues with ammo that in 17 of 20 playthroughs you ran out and weren't able to continue. That doesn't jive with my experience, where at least so far I'm doing just fine. Could be that I'm lucky, but something tells me there's another explanation. I also can't imagine how you were able to fit that many playthroughs in a little over a week, but that's another point. @Kordanor just released a fascinating video explaining why many of the financial difficulties people are having may be attributed to lack of leadership focused mercs on their squad, however that does not explain issues with ammo, other than maybe being unable to buy ammo from markets due to money problems.

Try playing without CtH shown, I hear it's more of a challenge 🙃

I miss Trevor and Stephen. Trevor from a character perspective, because he's fun to have around, and stephen because he's a top tier merc (and a genius) for a low tier price. Plus he was BFFs with my favorite merc, Meltdown.

They are saying that the music only has one channel. It comes out of both speakers but there is no difference between them. I haven't verified this myself but I have heard many other comment that the music has been mixed down to mono.

I'm happy to hear you're enjoying it with an open mind. For my part, some of the things that I thought wouldn't be a big deal ended up being a letdown, and there's more jankiness in some aspects than I expected. So I guess we're here now , meeting somewhere in the middle compared to where we were during pre-release 🙂 Mostly I'm just happy we have a real JA game after all this time and past missed opportunities. Honestly never thought this would happen, or that it would be this good.

Ok I have to say , after playing last night, some of the maps in this game are *enormous* compared to JA2. When I stumbled into my first large scale one my jaw just about dropped. They're absolutely massive. I know it's not all of them but the big maps are *very* big.

Can you imagine the complaining the first time someone got jumped from behind 🤣

Omfg please please please 😭 this is driving me bonkers YES Sector stash should act like merc inventory for repair ops etc!!

Been following a lot of the conversation about ammo and med scarcity, scarcity of money, enemies feeling overpowered compared to your squad, not having adequate info from the game on CtH, morale changes, tiredness, etc. I just wanna say that I'm a decent chunk into the game on commando difficulty, my very first playthrough. I've captured a second mine and had all my mercs initial 2 week contracts expire and renewed them. While the game is tough, I'm getting by just fine. I've come close to running out of AK ammo, almost couldn't renew my most expensive mercs contract (Vicki), and had to save scum a bit on one particular fight - but I was able to get through by the skin of my teeth, which feels like how it should be. For me, the difficulty curve is pretty much exactly where I want it to be - I'm not having to restart my playthrough in frustration or look into installing mods, but I never feel like I can relax or let up for even a moment, either. I have a lot of quibbles about the game I'll expound upon later - learning that 'vendors' are just characters selling 1-2 items at a time or tables that occasionally rotate stock of a single item was a big letdown. But from a difficulty standpoint, I just want to provide a counter-example to all the conversation I've heard saying that the game balance is broken - I don't think that is the case, I think it is just a difficult and punishing game, particularly on harder difficulty levels, and I'm *really* happy that ammo scarcity, for example, is an actual issue. Too often with these kinds of RPG games you never have to think about that sort of stuff, and here you really do, and that's great, imo - so long as the game remains playable and beatable, which it seems to be thus far. I'm not a fan of soulslikes, but I think JA3 should take a badge from that genre and not apologize for being a hard game that constantly keeps you on your toes. The tools are all there to play and beat the game as designed, you just have to learn what it is teaching you about how it works. Anyway, just my $.02. I'm curious what others experience has been in this regard.

Yeah, that's how stealth melee kills work.

Those have been cut from the game. In JA3 your mercs can see in all directions at once. Same with sidestep.

The weird thing is that the way it's worded it's supposed to only let you move after kills, not attack. So that does seem like it might be a bug.

Ambidextrous got nerfed *hard* in this game compared to JA2, which is funny because it was always one of the weaker traits to begin with. Before, ambidextrous gave you 2x the shot for the same AP (I believe, anyway - can anyone confirm that it doesn't cost more than a single handgun?) In JA3, ambidextrous dual shot only costs one less AP than two single shots. It's preeeetttty much useless, even more so than before 😕 another nerf, though unintentional, is throwing - again one of the weaker traits in previous games. This one is arguable, but basically what it comes down to is that in JA3, if your Merc doesn't have decent explosives skill, you don't want them to be throwing grenades. So if you have mercs with this trait that lack explosive skill, it's pretty useless. I'm not sure if the team is interested in balancing this sort of stuff, but imo it could use some tweaking. Maybe throwing skill lowers your mishap chance with grenades in addition to its other benefits.

Ok, I've been having a ton of fun with the game overall, I'm going to share more in depth thoughts about that, but this really stood out to me - how is there no auto-sort for sector inventory? I mean having item categories would be awesome, sure, or something to auto-stack everything together... but at the very least, put the stuff in order automatically! Especially with the very small number of items on the screen at once (something that would also be nice to change, actually), it's *really* critical to have this happen by default.

same thing with EXP. Did not anticipate being crappy at grenades for the whole game 😬

Looks like what is causing the slowdowns is when my CPU throttles. This is the first game that has pushed it to that point consistently. I'm planning on buying a new CPU cooler next year. The weird thing is that when the CPU throttles and the game FPS tanks (for me it goes from 60+ to like 15), it doesn't recover even when the CPU bounces back. I have to restart the game to get the performance to return to normal.

weapon jams

Oh, I don't want to cheat. I'm just saying that I did the classic JA2 IMP move of sliding those to zero but I'm regretting it more than I thought I would.

I actually mostly concur with this 'edited' version of the list. Pause during real time would be nice. Button to enter turn based might be nice, BUT - it might also throw off the balance. I'm guessing that the lack of pause in real time is to make it more difficult overall, to prevent the stealth mechanics from being too easy to exploit. Not sure about this though. I agree that as it stands, it feels a bit fiddly to do properly. THAT SAID: I have also found that when things go sideways due to aforementioned fiddlyness - I'm able to change my plan, deal with the consequences and have it all work out in the end pretty well. Camo kits would be pretty sweet, tbh, even if the look of the character in-game isn't changed. Camera angle, I agree that it would be cool to have. Are you aware that you can press the 'o' key for an overhead view though? That does help somewhat. Grenade knockback as a mechanic would be kinda nice. As it is, they have special animations if the enemy is killed, but if not, they don't change position. Been a lot of talk about this. I think it is an intentional choice, but I do like the knockback element of JA2. That said - from a damage perspective, grenades were weak as hell in JA2. If you were to add knockback to grenades in JA3 as it is right now, they would be even more broken than they already are. Grenades are saving my ass right now in early game but they are borderline broken. Map size... Big maps are good, but for some reason, these maps don't "feel" all that small to me. I think from a number of tiles perspective they are smaller than JA2, but when playing the game, it doesn't really feel that way. Anyone else have this experience? As for the UI.... it does feel like it needs some polish somehow, but I can't put my finger on why. I think it will get better as I get used to it. One annoying aspect of it is the flood of tooltips everywhere. Sometimes its like half my screen is various tooltips. I can probably tune that down in the options, not sure, but then I'm worried I will miss something. I think this games UI makes a strong case for the thick game manuals of old 🙂 Not that anyone would read them in this day and age, but.... they had their advantages.

soooo is anyone else feeling like maybe 0 mechanical was not a super wise choice 😆