Jaywalker

Obviously, having to wait for 4 people to finish their turn will absolutely extend the playthrough by at least double the time. 🤣

Co-op in turn-based is pointless to begin with: I can take my turn quicker and more precisely when I control all of my own units.

All of this repositioning nonsense would also be meaningfully eliminated by having individual initiative... or, you know, interruptions... like in JA2; where a surprised enemy is not completely defenseless, since they have the AP to defend themselves if their skill and experience permits it.

All action in JA2 was by necessity scaled down: guns with an accurate range of a few dozen meters, to say nothing of the effective one, could barely be accurately fired across the street and that was also about as far as the sound they made carried... but when you alerted an enemy sector to your presence, the only times they wouldn't all come running was when they were setting up an indoor ambush.

They have previously stated that the relationships are more robust and more dynamic, especially the number of mercs that "Learn" to like/dislike someone. The only limitation for relationships with new mercs in mods/expansions from JA2 was the availability of voice assets (which AI might soon make obsolete anyway) so there is no reason why they would stay strictly as they were in JA2, especially that they have evolved from JA1 to JA2 already.

Wasteland 2 and 3. So far from what is shown, this game is beat for beat a Wasteland 3. Their target audience is the people who never played JA1 or JA2 but want to jump onto the hipster bandwagon of "appreciating a cult classic"; just like Wasteland 2 did for people who never even heard of the original Wasteland. They are hoping to be a success like Wasteland 2 was and springboard that into a better/bigger game (like Wasteland 3 was to Wasteland 2).

None of this is untrue for individual turns; you just have to, and I know it's a difficult process, think a little bit harder on who does what and when. In real combat, your entire team does not magically synchronize to go uninterrupted all at once, you have to find openings to execute a plan despite enemy interference.

Honestly, I think the game should have went with individual turns over whole-team. Interrupts in JA2 were a great compromise to account for the sheer scale of the encounters and the unwieldy 1999 UI, but we have the tools and experience now to properly compute and visualize things like an initiative timeline or even have certain actions persist or take place during enemy turns (closes I see of this concept is snipers having a telegraphed "aimed shot").

The problem here is that your hands are two squares. It quite literally comes down to that: the design language for maintaining clarity is that one-handed weapons are 1 tile (they fit in the 1 tile area of a single hand), and two-handed ones are 2 tiles (they take up both of the tiles representing your hands).

You most likely can't, because this is an RPG and not a sim, and suppression is a status applied by a specific attack and not by bullets flying nearby. I'd love to be wrong on this, but this is probably not going to work like 1.13.

It's still very much possible to see triple digit damage numbers in JA2, HP ammo exists, as do LMG's that can fire at 5+ rounds at a time. Most enemies having around 50-70 HP makes this kind of firepower redundant (and armor makes some of it unreliable to deploy), but there is absolutely no need in JA2 for there to be higher damage numbers to achieve OHKO's. Your mercs survive more because the enemy generally only shoots center mass with basic ammo, once the elites start rolling in those hits of 50 with AP to the chest do start hurting just as much as you were accustomed to hurting the enemy, but by then you hopefully learned to play the game. The name of the game here isn't realism, it's "authenticity": if I can get the enemy in range to still land all of my burst accurately, I deserve to see them obliterated, that's what an automatic weapon does at close range. Firing a burst from an AR shouldn't be a "3 for 2 discount" on paying for my ammo with HP.

The reason it can't is because 2 tiles fit in your merc's 2 hands (each of which is also a tile).

On the contrary, no JA game is complete without some level of science-fiction, be it magic sap in the first one, or the prototype weapons of the second. The only thing that should be avoided is removing the "science" part.

While I understand that this is an RPG title and some exemptions from realism are a practical necessity, it pains me to see "conservation of ninjutsu" being applied to guns an ammo. Firing more bullets does not make them weaker, at an absolute worse it means the shooter is going to be less accurate. If there is one thing 1.13 did right, was their addition of a simulated bullet trajectory and accuracy: in actual combat, a large volume of ammo is expended just to suppress the enemy and get into position to push them away. The U.S. Army can expend as much as 250,000 rounds of live ammunition fired in combat conditions to actually kill a single person. We don't need that kind of numbers, but part of the charm of even the baseline JA2 titles was that for every hit you scored, several shots would miss and the only advantage of precision weapons was that in optimal conditions (prone, enemy in range, spent the AP to aim) they would cut that ratio (as far to always hit in the late game).

This is an accurate summary of what it all boils down to. Base JA2 is not a hard enough game for logistics to matter in moment to moment gameplay, unless you're deliberately avoiding any possible source of ammo or specifically do some sort of speedrun strategy that relies on you getting a gun way above your current "coolness" level via 1-day recruitment or rushing a guaranteed spawn. At an absolute best, you might not have enough grenades of a particular type on a specific person to throw them, and that aspect is still very much present.

It's not unrealistic, it's what you recruited a "packmule" merc for, or why you carried a large pack in 1.13: there is no penalty to lugging all that stuff beyond having to click a button to drop it all at the start of combat. Shared inventory gets rid of the pointless busywork of having to do those trivial things and ultimately: this is an RPG game, not a survival simulation. Some level of abstraction, like the local carrying your luggage, does not need to be visually represented to anyone with an ounce of imagination. This is the middle ground, the next step is to do what XCOM remakes did and only worry about what your soldiers have equipped and remove the logistics aspect entirely (even going as far as to have gear unlocked rather than making it piece by piece for everyone, though they kept it as a mechanic for specialty items and mod support).

It's an excellent QoL system. 1.13 LBE pornography is just that, it had no gameplay value beyond adding busywork between you and the combat. As far as what we know from the streams available, most of the complaints about it are based entirely on ignorance: It is only shared within a squad, if you split teams you need to supply each of them independently. During combat, you can only access what the merc has in their personal inventory.

This is the same exact model from Wasteland 3, with the exception of Wasteland also allowing you to find the attachment directly and make it craftable as a separate unlock. The problem here is as follows: To make looting enemies more fun (for a modern audience), they must drop more and better loot, i.e.: their guns. To make that loot valuable without permanent access to merchants (you can only use 6 guns per squad at a time and don't need siedarms at all), it needs to be recyclable in some capacity i.e.: dissolve into a usable currency "parts". To keep the "parts" economy from massive inflation, you need to make it "sink" somewhere, hence: the attachments are a one-way upgrade and not a permanent conversion/investment. All of this is increasing "abstraction" for the sake of gameplay at the expense of authenticity ("rod and spring" made of junk wasn't realistic, but it was "authentic" in that a skilled mechanic could potentially fashion a makeshift upgrade for a weapon).

So far the only "grey" ladies with guns were the "coffee beans" 🤣

I would expect it to work the same as the previous games, you do not get a refund on your poor leadership. The only thing you could ever get returned was the medical deposit, provided the mercenary was in good health when the contract ended, and death insurance (which was an optional service that you had to pay, and only got back when the mercenary actually died).

I'll miss my neat little spreadsheet of who's where and what they're doing, but all things considered it's looking promising with the dynamic activities.

Flanderization is the name of the process. JA3 writing, from all we've seen so far, suffers from extensive "flanderization". Traits that in the previous game were minor details of the mercenaries private life are now being made front and center of their entire personality. To a person with any amount of intelligence, this is exhausting and insulting. To someone that remembers them fondly from the previous games, JA2 especially, this is a desecration of sorts. The only kind of people who would find it "endearing" are the types that intend to spend no more than 10-20 hours with the game, "streamers" and "butterflies", who'll pop the game for a few evenings while it's new and then never again, lest the joke wears thin.

Sadly, a lot of the times it does: A co-op title needs to perform when the game is essentially being streamed to other players by the host, which means things need to be simplified in terms of logic and physics simulation. Networking programmers are usually just doing that most of the time, which means a team member that needs to be paid and coordinated with that isn't contributing to another branch. Much like the above, having co-op also requires having co-op oriented QA, which in turn takes more time and money that could've been put elsewhere. So yeah, while not a 1:1 translation, having Co-op will somewhat diminish what the game can achieve for a solo player on the same budget/dev-time.

Are you sure you played the same XCOM everyone else did? Do you even remember JA2 gameplay at all? JA1 and 2 were never about the depth of gameplay, you could sneak about at night, but as far as advanced strategy or tactics there really wasn't all that much to it, for the most part you shot your guns while crouched next to cover. XCOM remakes automate the boring parts of moving places and changing stances, it removes the math of counting your AP's, but in terms of variety of what you can actually do with your two actions per turn (which later become so much more thanks to action-economy perks) it is miles ahead of what JA2 offers (especially once you get to the point where the winning move is to dump all AP into a single sniper shot or using the mortar). "Complexity" is not valuable for its own sake. Even the "generic" no name characters of XCOM can have plenty of personality if you give them one using your own imagination or make you care for them if they've been with you for a long enough time (or you name them after a friend, favorite hero, etc.).

I played a few hours of Wasteland 3 as a refresher recently, and it is remarkable how close to what we've seen of JA3 so far is to that game. Anyone curious should probably check it out to get a feel for what we're getting (except maybe the part where you have a tank with you).