Stuurminator

Eh...I still remember Vicki's bright purple shirt (unique among named characters, I believe). Grizzly had a red tank top, which isn't exactly camouflage (though it was good enough for Arulco's army, I suppose). Some of the colour schemes in JA2 were comparable to Hitman's pink shirt and white slacks, and may have implied similar attire.

I'm going to wait until I play JA3 so I can see what option 1 is like in practice. My kneejerk response is to prefer option 2, but if I take the time to look back on my time playing not just this but any tactical combat game, I can't remember a time that ammo or medical supply distribution has had a meaningful effect on my game. Maybe it's just been busywork all along and I never realized it.

They weren't one-dimensional. Maybe they weren't three-dimensional either, but they had more going on than a single gag. Steroid was a big dumb meathead, but he had other things going on, too. Dynamo had things to say besides "I want revenge on the Queen." Even Razor didn't talk about knives all the time. I'm not completely convinced of this. Your mercenaries' clothes could come in a rainbow of colours, and while everyone shared the same three sprites, some of them may have worn things as eccentric as JA3's mercenaries. I suppose the abstraction left it all up to interpretation.

This holds true for everyone (or almost everyone) in AIM. A lot of MERC and some RPCs weren't really professional at all. But even the crazies weren't just their quirk. Razor was a dangerous psychopath, but you could still believe him as a human being. That's not true for JA3's Steroid. It reminds me of JA1 and Deadly Games, where some mercenaries were one-dimensional walking quirks (mostly the ones that didn't make it to JA2). That's not a deal-breaker; I played Deadly Games before JA2. But it does feel like a step backward, and it certainly doesn't feel good to see my favourites from JA2 get that treatment. That's why I'll be using the original characters, because I can take them on their own terms. And the goofier mercs like Igor or Tex are pretty hard to screw up, so maybe they'll come out okay, too. It's not like there's no hope.

I don't mind the colours of the game in general. JA1 was very colourful and JA2 was more drab, but that was just following the trends of the time. Now the visual standard - not just in video games, but media in general - has swung back to bright colours, and that's fine. It doesn't turn JA3 into Fortnite or whatever. The portraits are also fine, taken in isolation. When I look at new characters like Livewire or Fauda, I think they look absolutely fine. The problem is that many of the returning characters' portraits don't line up with their previous portrayal. Vicki's portrait (and model) is bad, not because it's poorly made, but because the Vicki from JA1 and JA2 is a professional who takes her job seriously and would not go into battle wearing denim overalls and rasta beads. This speaks to a bigger problem in JA3 that I've been sitting on for a while: the devs don't understand the characters they're writing. MD has become a less cowardly, but equally unconfident Biff (right down to considering CPR on his kills). Grizzly is completely unrecognizable in appearance, voice, and personality - if you hid his name, no JA2 player would be able to tell who he's supposed to be. And Steroid? Find me a single instance in JA2 where Steroid talks about oiling his chest. Hell, were there even any where he talked about his biceps? This is why I've mentioned my first team will be new characters. I just can't stand seeing my old favourites bastardized like this. This has stuck in my craw since I first time I saw gameplay footage and I have no idea why more people aren't complaining about this.

Okay, but I guarantee XCOM 2 has sold at least an order of magnitude more than JA3 ever will. You can't pretend these appeals to a wider audience are inherently self-defeating.

Jagged Alliance isn't XCOM. It's messier by design and doesn't allow combatants to capitalize as heavily on an opportunity. it's just not the JA style for being caught in the open (or flanked) to be a death sentence.

Why complicate it? Just throw a mustard gas grenade or two around the corner (or over the corner, as I believe was possible - perhaps collision was not coded correctly for those tiles). It's not like she can run away.

I looked through the trailer and didn't spot Scope's model. Did you pick her out of the group shot? Are you sure you're not confusing her with Buns?

I love that you've been ragging on this game as if the announcement trailer killed your dog, but you're still obviously going to buy it. 🙃

Damn, throwing shade on Deadly Games? I wasn't it's biggest fan either, but still, that's a bold move.

I think I read they were concerned that players would be confused if they "missed" and hit another part of the enemy anyway. When I read that, I thought, "Surely Jagged Alliance players are smarter than that," but that was before I registered on this forum.

X-COM Apocalypse is definitely underappreciated, though not unjustifiably. It was highly ambitious (a lot of Julian Gollop's plans for Phoenix Point had its roots in his plans for Apocalypse), but had to ship before they could realize it. This resulted in a game that has a surprising amount of depth, but that depth is almost invisible and largely irrelevant to the player experience. I honestly feel a little guilty for being as lukewarm about Apocalypse as I am, since my biggest problem with it is a very superficial one: the graphics. I don't consider myself a graphics snob; dated graphics are fine, so long as the art direction is solid. Apocalypse's art direction is just hideous. Your units are ugly. Your enemies are ugly. The items are ugly. The environments are ugly. The colours clash. The animations wish they could be as good as kids trying to pose action figures. The font is fucking Arial! - which actually was entirely acceptable at the time, but looks amateurish in retrospect. Now, let's balance that negativity out with a suggestion of my own. Here's one I think much of this forum would overlook based on its art, but I implore you to give it a chance: Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children. https://store.steampowered.com/app/470310/TROUBLESHOOTER_Abandoned_Children/ Yes, I know it looks like a JRPG, but looks can be deceiving. It's actually a KRPG! It's also a tactical combat game that mixes ranged, melee, and various other effects. The meat of the game is in its character building system, which has more depth than the Mariana Trench. It's a bit slow to get started - the game has a lot to teach you and it eases you in gradually - but eventually you're going into battle against dozens and dozens of enemies with a half-dozen of your own units, each of which you've painstakingly hand-crafted to optimize their own abilities or synchronize as a team. It might not fit everyone's taste, but I guarantee you, there's enough meat there to at least sink your teeth into.

They will probably follow the precedent established in JA2 and only allow one IMP. Mods allowed players to create more than one IMP in JA2, but most of those players will probably attest how overpowered such gameplay could be, not to mention removing all the interactions different mercenaries have with each other.

Has it occurred to you that new posters are more likely to be reading old threads? They haven't read them before and this forum doesn't move fast enough to bury them.

From what I've seen, the maps seem considerably smaller than in JA2. You can't increase the detection range by much without effectively making you detected as soon as you enter the map. It also looks they're trying to make melee more practical, as it was basically useless in previous JA games.

I'm not unsympathetic to the developers' viewpoint here. Sid Meier describes gameplay as "a series of interesting decisions", and one could argue that adding ammunition to a merc's inventory is not an interesting decision. Every merc needs ammo, so there's no deciding whether to bring it or not, but they probably don't need enough to fill up multiple slots (unless each slot only holds one magazine or something, which would just be irritating). Everyone be honest, when was the last time you ran out of ammo during a battle in a (unmodified) Jagged Alliance game? When was the last time that you actually had to think over how many magazines to carry? The same goes for first aid supplies: in JA2, I had everyone carry two small first aid kits in one stack and never had reason to think further about it. One can argue that actually adding ammo or first aid supplies to a merc's inventory is pointless busywork. But. I'm willing to do that busywork for the sake of verisimilitude. Mercenaries just pulling ammo and first aid supplies out of a shared pocket dimension doesn't feel right. And yes, I know it's a abstraction, and that in-universe they're probably just carrying all the ammo and bandages they need from the group supply and restock ones the fighting is over...but it still doesn't feel right. Maybe I'll get used to it. Maybe, after I've played for a few hours, I won't even notice the difference, and maybe I'll benefit from not having to waste precious seconds mindlessly dragging-and-dropping ammo into the same inventory slot I've devoted for hours already. I'm approaching JA3 with an open mind. But from my position here, before playing the game, it still just doesn't feel right.

I'm probably wasting my time, but fine, here's one. Combat in the Jagged Alliance series, as a whole, simulates firefights. Firefights are chaotic and unpredictable, because you never know for sure if a shot is going to land. Jagged Alliance ups the unpredictability by making bullets less lethal than in real life, so even if you land a shot, you almost never kill your target unless they're already wounded. The result of this is that you never know how a round is going to go. Games with visible CtH, like the new XCOMs, aren't trying to capture that unpredictability. In fact, they may deliberately work against it. I've got a hot take that most of this forum will disagree with: the new XCOMs are more punishing than Jagged Alliance. I don't mean they're harder or more hardcore, I mean punishing - screwing up your shots and leaving your soldiers open to counterattack has a very good chance of getting them killed. Losing more than one unit this way can doom an entire mission or even your entire campaign. That's because XCOM doesn't simulate messy, chaotic firefights; XCOM is a puzzle game where a missed shot is the result of bad planning and bad tactics and should be punished. In Jagged Alliance, a missed shot or an entire round of missed shots is not the result of bad tactics. It's an expected part of the gameplay loop, and the game is designed to benefit from that being part of the experience. Part of this design is that the player is not punished as severely for these misses. Now, do you hate messy fights where you don't have perfect control? Do you not like that gameplay? That's totally fine, it's a matter of taste. But it means you don't like Jagged Alliance. Maybe you like a fanmade mod that fundamentally changes the gameplay design principles, but you don't like Jagged Alliance games themselves, and you're only banging your head against the wall expecting Jagged Alliance to become something it's never been in order to fulfill your unfounded expectations.

You don't "remove" something that wasn't there to begin with.

Not a fan.

The irony is that a lot of people (including me) are unhappy about missed body part shots not hitting other parts of the body, but the odds of such an event are so slim it might never occur in a given game even if it's enabled. 🫠

I need this explained to me, because I haven't gotten a clear impression from the beta videos. Can mercs pull from a shared inventory during combat? Or is the shared inventory only an out-of-combat thing?

No, you don't get it. JA1 and JA2 aren't Jagged Alliance! Only 1.13 is Jagged Alliance. Literally every Jagged Alliance player agrees!

The fact that you say this indicates that you don't understand what effect an explicit CtH% has on gameplay or why it was removed. In fact, I don't think you can tell me why the devs decided to hide CtH%. Can you, in your own words?

Not quite right! Everyone else has the same opinion, they're just pretending not to. 🫠