Hmm, well I swore I was going to finish reading that JA2 (Jagged Alliance 2) mega-thread and stop fiddling with the editor at one AM. Now nearly two hours later it would appear my self control is as pathetic as ever. To be honest it was almost more fun setting up JA2 then playing it may turn out to be.
The 1.13 fan patch add’s so many customisable options to the game that it takes a while to tweak it around to a “starter” configuration. I turned some of the harder (and supposedly quite frustrating) options off, such as the “Sci-Fi option” where weird alien bugs spawn on the map, sounds super naff to be honest. I’m not going to bother listing all the little changes and customisation tweaks I made to the ini file, because its pretty boring and rather meaningless unless youre familiar with the game. I basically garnered most of the tweaks from various forum threads on the game, so hopefully it will make things enjoyable enough. In plain english the major tweaks I made are: six as opposed to one custom merc and guns, knives and explosives all do increased damage.
The current fanbase seem divided on the use of custom mercenaries. The game has around one hundred pre-set mercenaries, all of who have unique likes, dislikes, character traits (racism, sexism, code of honour, etc) and so on. They also have custom voice acting and supposedly the interaction between various mercenaries is both complex and entertaining. There’s also the fact that custom mercenaries are better starting off, and make the beginning phase of the game easier (though it all evens out in mid-game). To be honest Im happy to make the start a bit easier and to miss out on custom npc interactions in favour of seeing Adam “Mad-dog” O’Maolagain cut down in a hail of rebel fire after a particularly risky flanking move fails to pay off.
While there are numerous tools out there for fiddling with and cusomising nearly every aspect of the game there are unfortunately a weird lack of solid tutorials on how to do so. Eventually I cobbled together a crude method of replacing in-game custom mercenary portraits with pictures culled from Facbook (people need more fucking profile shots!). They may look a little off and wont have the (super) basic animation of the in-game portraits. But again, I can live with that.
At the moment the custom mercenaries I’ll be going with are:
Michael “Mick” McDonnell – Commander & Night Op’s Specialist
Dave “Dragunov” McCabe – Sniper
Adam “Maddog” O’Maolagain – Psycho character trait & LMG
Sarah “BoomBoom”Bentick – Heavy weapons & Autofire specialist
Simon “C4” McDonnell – Medic (and Demolitions)
Sean “Suicide” McDonnell – Ambidexterous pistol wielder
Though should some other brave souls volunteer their life rights then “press-ganged” members will be bumped.
Why are six poorly armed and trained civilians from 2010 fighting as crack mercenaries in South America in 1988? Find out in our next thrilling installment!
Listening to: amplified - MR RAINDROP