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[Geen]

How viable is melee in game? The martial arts and whatnot seems to have nice perks to it.

[Blaze]

Honestly, you NEED to play stealthy in order to use melee. Otherwise when you try to sneak up behind some guy he'll turn around and blow you away. Maybe MA (Melee weaponry only serves to waste valuable AP from what I've seen and you definitely want that extra hit chance) with Camouflage, high agility, and a smoke grenade/tear gas w/ gas mask might turn out well.

Apparently you can steal equipment off KO'd soldiers, but that's moot if you have the "enemies drop all equipment" option on.

I also turned on the "All units have armor" option, which makes melee much more viable in the early game, but when the elites and extended ears start becoming commonplace...

[Moogie]

I've tried night fighting with NVG vII on my mercs, it rarely seems to make a difference. This is probably just a PEBKAC issue. By the time the enemy is within my field of vision, they're close enough to pop everyone's heads open with those adowable little pistols. I've tried both long/short range weapons in these situations, and unless I hide around the corners of buildings the whole time, I just get swamped with 4-5 guys who I can't kill off in a single round... and then it's their turn. We get AP drained into a cycle of immobile death. I reload from my last save.

Regarding my mercs, I couldn't afford anyone better in the beginning. I actually had to restart the whole game once already, because I noticed my expensive merc (I think it was Lynx?) was getting ready to leave and my income from Chitzena still didn't cover a single week of re-hiring them. Email informed me that Blood died on assignment elsewhere, so hiring him was never an option.

After restarting (ironically, this is when I bumped up the difficulty level for some reason) I took Barry for his wis/mech and took the advice of a forum post, that basically said to go through San Mona first (because no enemies), do the quests there for a bit of money (I think it ended up being around 30k) and then take Chitzena. Then I holed up there, training militia until they were numerous/experienced enough to ward off attacks without my mercs. Then I went and took out N/S Drassen and did the same thing, leaving the central tile to last.

I think, with two mines, I'm finally ready to hire a decent Merc and keep them around. But damn that took a long time and a lot of very long, very savescummy fights. Enemies would attack in frequent waves of 10-20 and call reinforcements from adjacent sectors, meaning fights would often involve 30 or more enemies against IMP, Ira, and Barry. Eesh... It's even worse when I get militia involved. I auto-resolve as many fights as I can, but those victories don't drop equipment. The bigger battles look impressive, but NPC turns tend to drag on a very long time (I watch QI in between my turns). The plus side to this is that militia seem to have the same NPC Pistol Magic that the enemy does, having uncanny accuracy and the ability to headshot at mind-boggling distances.

Having said all that, it's still a very small frustration when compared to how much enjoyment the rest of the game delivers. And the reward of picking through pages of loot after a successful defense sure is worth all that hassle! Getting everyone properly equipped doesn't seem to make much difference to my success, but it's nice to play dress-up and pretend we're all badass killers, even if we suck.

[Bdthemag]

I typically don't have issues with money early-game, but that's only because I usually hire Barry, MD, and Igor pretty much every game so my Merc fees are pretty low. Playing on Experienced without the Drassen counter-attack and whenever I capture a sector, I immediately work on using all of my excess cash to train as many milita members I can to attack the next part of the city with.

[Angel Of Death]

How do I efficiently deal with snipers? They almost always seem to get 3 or 4 shots in before I can counter attack.

[Stworca]

How do I efficiently deal with snipers? They almost always seem to get 3 or 4 shots in before I can counter attack.

Don't be seen by anyone, and once you know the general direction - cover. It sounds like trash, i know, but that's about the only way to do it.
Just you wait till mortar teams start showing up 

[BlindKitty]

Actually, regarding the difficulty levels - game does warn you whenever you choose anything above the Novice. And it is serious about it. The high difficulties are good for people who finished the game at least a few times already...

As for spending time prizefighting for money, it is a very serious glitch abuse, as far as I know - the intended behaviour was to let you have three fights, period. It is buggy from the get-go, though, even in the non-modded versions, but in the modded it gets even worse. And the bug is still here since the code governing the fights is pretty deep in the game files, not in any luas. I might be somewhat mistaken here, since I haven't really dug deep into he issue, though.

Snipers - you need to get close without them seeing you. And then shoot them. Right in da face. Smoke grenades come in handy in situations like this. Also night and camo.

[sluissa]

I think most people just consider it a "feature" rather than a bug. JA2 has had it's source code released for a good long time now, one of the reasons 1.13 has been able to do as much as it has. If they'd wanted to fix the fighting, they could have.

[Funk]

Sniper can be A)Counter snipered b) Taken out up close C) blown up with mortar D) hosed down with mass of full auto fire

A) is hard to pull off and need a good shot with a sniper rifle.
B) is the hardist as the rest of the squad is in the way.
C) Easy but shells are rare and heavy and placing the hell in the right place is a skill in it self.
D) often falls to work and need a good MG, most of the time you don't kill them and only suppress them.

I like to mix B and C by using a full automatic 40mm grenade launcher, over kill for the win

[Burnt Pies]

I usually go with 2 snipers in my team as soon as I can get a few scopes and rifles. Hole up in a corner somewhere, fire off a gun to make some noise and wait for them to come to you. Your snipers should be able to spot the enemy before they can see you, and their snipers will be too busy running towards you to snipe. Anyone who gets closer can be taken care of by a few guys with ARs or MGs.

Scopes are one of the greatest accessories ever. a 4x scope is mandatory on an assault rifle, a 7x on a rifle and a 10x on a sniper rifle. Beware of Russian guns, they usually can't mount all the handy stuff.

Raven's a mid-priced merc with skills for both sniping and machine guns. Worth her fee as soon as you get enough income.

[Sharp]

Ahh I forgot how much fun Fidel is And explosives are fun as well.

For newbie's don't be afraid to hire a good merc on a one-day contract, especially at the start. One good merc can take out lots of the early enemies quite easily with their equipment and skills. Sometimes you have to think if it's worth spending lots of money to take an objective (like SAM site or a town), an extra expensive merc just hired for the day can win objectives easily.

[sluissa]

Wow, straight out of nowhere with a completely unexpected ninja...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Okay, I went ahead and tried something new... something I'd never tried before in this game. Typically my pattern is to just get a bunch of cheap, low rank AIM mercs plus IMP and just working with them, and slowly taking my time training them up. Basically I never looked at AIM again until I could either afford a second squad or lost more than a couple of soldiers from the initial team.

This time however. I grabbed my IMP, Buns for a week, and Scope... for a whole day. In the first 6 hours I had Drassen completely cleared out. IMP helped with the airport and the encounters on the way there, but after the airport I tasked him with militia training duty and Charlie's Angels, Scope, the skilled one, Buns, the Pretty one, and Ira, the one nobody likes, managed to take down the rest of Drassen on their own. Although Buns did get an unlucky shot to the head, killing her right at the end of the South Drassen Fight. She wasn't doing much except being a bullet magnet though.

I lost one Merc, but I've managed to get myself that initial income stream which lets me be self-supporting. I'd never be able to do this well, this quickly without Scope's expertise or equipment. So those expensive mercs, very much worth the money to hire them on short term contracts for hard pushes and then use the cheaper ones to consolidate, organize and guard your new territory.

This all may be obvious to some people, but It's just a path I'd never explored before. I tended to get really attached to the mercs I hired and rather than temporarily hiring above my income, I'd only hire a few I could keep on full time and work with them almost exclusively.

[a1s]

Personally I always went for the expensive (well, upper middle- people like Scope or Lynx, not Gus) mercs. It just seemed that if you want a job done right, you hired experienced people. I'm branching out into cheaper mercs this time, and I've found that they aren't all that bad. Better then Ira anyway, and I've always dragged her along.

I have a question though: the game (1.13) periodically tells me that it saved something (Autosaving?), but I don't see the save in the Load menu. Am I missing a place where it saves, or misreading the situation entirely?

[gimlet]

There are 2 autosaves that don't show up on the restore list.  The way I remember it working:  From the main menu screen ALT-A restores the last autosave, ALT-B restores the one before that.

[Fikes]

Honestly, the whole game isn't really about the best mercs, it is about the gear. Having a single gun that can fire 2/3rds of your sight range for the first battle makes such an absurd difference. That is why I go for a Merc with at least an MP5 or some such.

You don't want to get into a gun fight where the enemy is out of your "effective weapon range" because even if you are out of theirs there are lots more of them than there are of you. I finally realized that your mercs will have to take 4 sectors today, while the enemy only has to defend one. Winning the battle isn't good enough, you have to dodge all the bullets.

Anyways, again, shameless plug for my 1.13 LP which died a sad HDD crashy death .