The liberation of Alma continues. Clearing each sector of baddies is almost routine; the stiffest resistance is offered by the staff of this chemical weapons testing plant, who prove so recalcitrant I have Jim give them a taste of their own medicine by blanketing the courtyard in mustard gas. The enemy makes a couple of half-hearted attempts to take advantage of my combat squad being tied up by attacking Drassen and Chitzena, but the huge militia armies I’ve built up have no problem squashing them flat.

Eventually Alma is completely purged of bad guys and I take over the mine, but what’s this on the horizon?

Balls. The counterattack comes before I’ve had any time to train up a decent militia force in Alma, so the mercs are forced to fall back to the south to regroup, ceding the northwest quarter of Alma to the queen while they rest and heal up. Then they counter-counter attack. At first this works wonderfully as the first platoon of soldiers blunders straight into the scopes of my two snipers, Cate and Jen!, and they are dispatched with little fuss. I start to worry at this point that I might have broken the back of the game a little too early and that the remainder of the tactical battles are going to be one-sided routs. Turned out I needn’t have bothered. Reinforcements turn up to bolster the second attacking platoon, and even worse…

…they have the good sense to attack during a rainstorm that cuts visibility down to nothing. That’s my biggest advantage – long-range sniper support – completely gone, which means the enemy soldiers can get right up close where the sheer weight of automatic fire they can bring to bear will start to become a real problem.

The ensuing firefight is incredibly close and nasty; the mercs can’t see the bad guys so they have to shoot at where I think the bullets are coming from, but this doesn’t stop the enemy from closing and inflicting some very heavy damage. C-Dave takes bad hits and Jim gets wounded trying to drag him out of the fray. Still, I seem to be holding my own, and it looks like I might get through this fight okay.

And then some prick with a silenced SMG manages to sneak through the forest to the south and kills Janek stone cold dead with a single short burst of accurate fire. Bugger. (That bloody scrap of blue behind the tree is Janek’s corpse.)

The remainder of the battle doesn’t go much better; both sides start throwing around breaklights to try and get some goddamn visibility and I have to get the invalid Josh to pitch in before they overwhelm my backline. Everyone on the front line gets banged up horribly, with my only combat-effective troops being the ones who would usually provide fire support: Cate and Jen! on the sniper rifles and Jen with a heavy machine gun. They can’t possibly fight on their own, so it looks like I’m not going anywhere for a couple of days.

Alas, poor Janek. May choirs of angels sing thee to thy rest. At least I won’t have to pay your extortionate wages any more, I guess, and it at least reminds me to invest in some better armour so that this sort of thing is less likely to happen in the future.

It doesn’t look like the Queen’s forces have any intention of giving me time to recuperate; barely twelve hours after the first fiasco they send in another force of soldiers and attack the mine. Fortunately for me, I can call on every single militia soldier currently in Alma to defend it.

Unfortunately for me, this doesn’t seem to matter a damn. The mine goes down, and support for my cause in Alma collapses to nothing meaning I can no longer train militia there. Swift action is called for; since only seven badly-wounded enemy soldiers survived that disaster I figure that by sending in everyone who can both walk and carry a gun I have a pretty good chance of taking it back, but this plan hits a tiny snag.

My intelligence estimate on likely enemy strength turns out to be way off. I decide that discretion is the better part of valour, pop smoke, and scamper off the edge of the map before that huge red juggernaut flattens my strike team.

 A few days later the mercs have recovered enough to crush all remaining enemy forces and Alma is once again under their control, but the population have lost faith in them and refuse to provide any cannon fodd- I mean, brave volunteers for the militia ranks, which means I’m going to lose it again as soon as the merc squad moves on to a location. I need some victories, and I need them quickly.

Which means I’m going to Cambria far sooner than I anticipated. Hey ho.

The post Jagged Alliance Diary: The Alma Debacle. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

A brief update this week, summarising some filler content between the desperate battle for Chitzena and… well, you’ll see.

Taken Chitzena has given me some options. The way weapon progression works in Jagged Alliance is that the game tracks how many towns you’ve liberated and shovels more guns into Bobby Ray’s shop according to your rate of progress. Seizing the Chitzena mine has given me both new weapon types and the cash with which to buy them, so I immediately buy three Colt Commandos along with 2x scopes for each one. The Commando is an excellent workhorse gun for this stage of the game; not great at long range but I’m not going to be engaging targets that far away until I have some higher power scopes, and it has a ridiculously small readying cost (bringing the gun up to the merc’s shoulder) of just 3AP, as compared to 10-15AP for a regular assault rifle.

While I’m trekking back across to Drassen to collect my shiny new toys, Kenti announces that the time has come for him to leave me forever. I’ll never forgive him. NEVER. Although I at least get his medical deposit back. There’s also another one of these comic interludes, which are starting to get a little bit old.

Anyway, this presents me with a little personnel problem that I solve by hiring two new mercs: sniper Jenny, and stealth specialist Jen. Once they actually arrive in Arulco they’ll be equipped with some cast-off weapons from the more experienced mercs and sent into the fray. Meanwhile the team resumes combing the swamps for this fabled pilot, and after another two days of searching…

Oh. Good. It’s you.

I know this is going to be a bad idea, but what the hell.

Long story short, Sinny can helidrop my team anywhere on the map for a fee but only so long as it’s not covered by a SAM site. Which makes it slightly irritating that the Queen’s forces retook the one I liberated earlier. Next order of business is to un-retake it, and this is an absolutely trivial fight with the new guns; the enemy soldiers have yet to tech up to long-range assault rifles and sniper rifles so I’m alright for the time being.

Ah, that’s much better. While I was doing that a patrol attacked Drassen airport for the umpteenth time, but after the previous skirmishes there David went a little overboard with militia training and there’s now a small army cooling their heels on the tarmac; the patrol is quickly slaughtered.

With the airspace in the north-east of the country now free, I chopper the combat team directly to my next target: Alma, south of Drassen. Clearing the first sector of baddies is easy enough, but this is just the game’s way of suckering me in. After weathering such a brutal start the string of recent victories has made me overconfident. Jagged Alliance is about to make me pay dearly by putting the boot in. Hard.

The post Jagged Alliance Diary: Housekeeping. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Oh for crying out loud, they just won’t leave Drassen alone.

It’s been a quiet couple of days since the cataclysmic battle for the Drassen mine. C-Dave is halfway through healing the wounded invalids that comprise my current mercenary team when two enemy squads show up and bypass the heavily-defended mine completely to hit the airport instead. Fortunately there’s still only one gate, and it’s still got the reassuringly solid copse of trees sitting right next to it, so the ensuing skirmishes are a one-sided massacre. Cate’s rifle still hasn’t been repaired and kind of sucks right now, so I’m kind of thankful one of the soldiers brought her this Star Wars blaster, which I have difficulty believing is a real gun.

David is packed off up north to recruit another non-combat support specialist from the rebels, while the combat team starts combing the sectors surrounding Drassen for a helicopter pilot that, I am reliably informed, lives nearby. They do a lot of combing, spending two days slogging their way through the stinking swamps and running into a couple of enemy patrols on the way with nothing to show for it. Then, in the early hours of Day 8, they discover this bijou little modern art installation.

Oh no wait, that’s a SAM site. We should probably take that out while we’re here. The presence of blackshirts makes this fight inordinately tricky; everyone gets wounded again and Cate is reduced to bleeding out on the ground by the time the last enemy soldier is exploded by a frangible round. I start training up some militia to hold the site from the inevitable counterattack, but just as I sign off on the expenditure this happens.

Yet another enemy squad attacks the airport and wipes out the militia force stationed there. They’ve made sustained attacks on the mine several times but the militia dealt with them quite handily, causing me to overestimate their ability somewhat. So it’s time to drop everything and head back to Drassen to retake the airport, and while I’m doing that the Queen’s forces retake the SAM site. I’m starting to feel like I’m not getting anywhere here, and to make matters worse my finances are starting to become a serious issue. Every time the enemy takes a sector of Drassen my income from the mine gets cut by a third, and at this rate I’m not going to have enough money to pay all my mercenaries, especially at the inflated rate that gouging bastard Janek is asking for his services. I need a second source of income, and I’m in no shape to take on the defences at Alma or Cambria so my viable options are reduced to one: a trek across the desert to Chitzena. This is risky since I’ll be fighting a very long way from my base of supply, and if I run out of medical supplies there’s bugger all chance of getting any more before somebody bleeds to death. But it has to be done.

It doesn’t start well. Despite coming in from a map edge the team manages to get surrounded almost immediately and starts taking fire from all directions at once. Everyone gets wounded; it’s almost becoming a rite of passage that this happen in every single battle. Hand-to-hand specialist Jim suffers an embarrassing episode during the fight for the northern half of Chitzena when he engages an enemy recruit in the purity of unarmed combat and somehow manages to lose, forcing Janek to pull him out of the frying pan. I’m going to have to find something else for him to do; at the rate that the baddies are arming up (these guys had assault rifles against my SMGs) it’s just too risky to send him haring in with nothing more than a knife and some happy thoughts.

After the mine is secured, it’s time to heal up (David is sent over from Drassen bearing yet more medical supplies; Bobby Ray’s is now sold out so I really hope nobody else gets hurt) and prepare for the inevitable counterattack. This, when it comes, is an absolute doozy, consisting of a small squad of nine elite troops that make short work of the militia and come damn close to killing everyone else. If I didn’t have a copious amount of stun grenades on hand I’d have been completely screwed; as it is the potentially dangerous cluster of the four remaining elites is knocked to the ground by a grenade from Jim so that everyone else who isn’t crippled can run in and beat the shit out of them with whatever is available. They take an absolutely astonishing amount of punishment; I’m going to have to invest in the higher-calibre weapons which have just become available on Bobby Ray’s. First, though, it’s time to pay off the last remaining mercenary contra-

Oh you traitorous bastard. You clothe them, you feed them, you arm them with automatic weapons, and where does it get you? Leave, then! See if I care! YOU ARE DEAD TO ME.

The post Jagged Alliance Diary: Betrayal. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I just realised I forgot to do something.

I forgot to turn off the Drassen counterattack.

Playing Jagged Alliance with the 1.13 fan patch makes things so much better than they would be otherwise. Aside from the general UI, AI and gameplay improvement, aside from the zillion new guns the patch adds, it comes packaged with an ini. editor the lets you change just about anything in the game. For example, I turned off that thieving bastard Pablo at the airport as well as lowering the possibility of my arms shipments randomly getting lost in transit to zero. That sort of thing is just unfun. However, what I didn’t do was turn off the Drassen counterattack.

What is the Drassen counterattack? The story goes something like this: the people who made the Jagged Alliance 1.13 patch — being the obsessive fan type – found the beginning of Jagged Alliance 2 a little bit too easy, facing as you do yellowshirt conscripts armed with awful pistols and nothing else which made it trivial to take over and fortify Drassen, from which point it was very very difficult to lose the game outright. Their solution was to add the Drassen counterattack; this is a hardcoded assault by sixty-odd soldiers – about half of whom are elite blackshirts, tougher and better armed than the typical soldier – that occurs once the player has taken all three areas of Drassen.

Now, in vanilla Jagged Alliance this might not have been too bad. It might have been possible to cope with the Drassen counterattack if I were facing dumb baddies with crappy weapons. With the AI improvements in 1.13, however, trying to face down the counterattack with a bunch of pistols is tantamount to suicide. The baddies are smart, tough, well-armoured and very accurate and there are, as mentioned, about sixty of them. 1.13 is a game where being outnumbered two to one in a firefight makes a battle very difficult unless you have long range rifles. Being outnumbered ten to one with pistols is completely unwinnable.

But you know what? I’m going to do it anyway.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to fight fairly, though. The plan is to hole up inside this toilet block for the duration. It is cramped and unsanitary but, importantly, it has no windows and only two doors, turning it into a rather smelly Thermopylae. Josh and Cate are hanging out by the urinals on one side. Kenti and Janek lurk in the cubicles on the other side. Jim and C-Dave are stashed in the back rooms to provide fire support. LET’S DO THIS.

The battle starts with M-Dave’s elite forces exterminating the half-dozen militia I’d managed to train up before they attacked. Crouched behind their prepared positions the mercs listen to the screams and gunfire as the poor saps are hunted down and destroyed. Then the enemy pushes up to the toilet block. I’m not going to sully what happened next by trying to describe it in mere words; instead, I’ll let the following sequence of pictures tell the story.

It’s a victory, and all my mercs – incredibly – managed to survive. All but one of them are severely wounded, however, and while C-Dave is able to bandage those wounds temporarily he runs out of medical supplies before he can start surgery to heal them permanently. More are ordered from the handy online arms dealer, but until they arrive the combat force in Drassen is going to be substantially weakened.

Which makes the third wave that shows up at night more than a little bit irritating. C-Dave, Jim and Josh are utterly crippled from the previous fighting and no use whatsoever; however, the weapons I scavenged from the enormous pile of dead bodies in front of the toilets make a world of difference here. They might be WW2-era Finnish machine guns but they ‘re still far more effective than plinking away at the baddies with a pistol and missing fifty times. Cate’s managed to loot a very swish rifle which, once I stick a scope on it and get it repaired so it stops jamming every other shot, should increase her killing effectiveness tenfold.

The battle for Drassen is finally over. I spend what’s left of my petty cash on training up a strong force of milita so that I don’t have to worry about my sole source of income being taken over, as well as ordering in literally all of the medical supplies the online shop has in stock so that C-Dave can do his surgery. With only two mercenaries who are combat-effective, the team is firmly stuck in Drassen for the time being.

The post Jagged Alliance Diary: The Slippery, Piled Dead. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Day 2.

When we left our little band of guns-for-hire they were taking a well earned nap after seizing Drassen airport from the forces of the evil Queen M-Dave. After this I tried to get Cate to train David in Leadership so that he could make himself useful by training up militia detachments, but they didn’t get very far before being rudely interrupted.

The army makes a strong counterattack on Drassen airport. There’s eleven of them, they’re regular army rather than the second-rate conscripts that were guarding the airport in the first place (see the red shirts), and while they’re still only armed with pistols they know how to use them and can easily kill mercs in a single turn if they make it within effective range. This encounter would almost certainly result in at least one casualty if I didn’t have the advantage of

• A chain link fence surrounding the airport; this can be cut by my side if I happen to have a pair of wire cutters (I forgot to pick some up) but the baddies have to go around it and try to enter the airport via the front gate.
• Just inside said front gate is a stand of two trees which makes an excellent defensive position.

 At first it’s looking extremely dicey; pistol fire blazes from every merc who can fire a gun – even C-Dave – but the few hits they manage to score are merely flesh wounds; while the sheer number of bullets whizzing through the air is keeping them suppressed and slowing their advance, the enemy continues to grind inexorably forward inch by painful inch. Their return fire is desultory, only managing to graze Jim, but it gets heavier as the counterattacking forces get closer. It isn’t until they reach the gate itself that the first soldier is taken out by some burst fire from the group’s single automatic weapon — this evidently has an inspiring effect on the Z-Team as they suddenly begin to find their targets. Baddies are dropping left and right; those that aren’t killed are wounded and knocked down so that they can’t return fire. Eventually the two surviving soldiers attempt to retreat, so Cate leaps out of cover and hunts them down like the dogs they are.

Yeah, this isn’t going to look pretty in a couple of days’ time.

With the airport now extra-special double super safety secure, the combat squad pushes southwards into the second part of Drassen. Resistance here is a little bit stiffer; the main part of the battle takes place in a wood just north of the built-up area, and Josh takes a bad hit to the head during an exchange of fire with two yellow shirts. I send him to the rear to be bandaged by C-Dave while Kenti and Janek sweep around in pincer movements to exact some revenge; soon all the yellowshirts are dead and Jim is sent into the town proper to knife the stragglers. He manages to get shot again while he’s doing this; he must really like the sensation of hot lead entering his body at high velocity.

The third and final sector of Drassen is the most important one since it contains the mine that’s going to be the sole source of cash for this little venture for the next fortnight at the very least. Other mines exist in nearby Alma and Cambria but they’re much more heavily defended; the Drassen mine is the Jagged Alliance equivalent of a freebie.

Not that this is going to be a cakewalk. This part of Drassen is very heavily built up allowing plenty of opportunities for ambush and counter ambushes. At long range pistols can’t hit the broad side of a barn, but at the sort of engagement ranges we’re looking at here they’re incredibly accurate and deadly, especially right now when several of the mercenary team are unarmoured except for fetching metal hats.

The incursion begins; Cate and Jim flank right while Kenti and a still-injured Josh flank left. C-Dave lurks in the rear, ready to spring into action if anyone gets hit. Janek gets the plum job of running straight down the middle across an open area completely devoid of any cover, so I have him use this cowering civilian as a human shield to improve his chances of survival in this vulnerable position. The ploy succeeds in getting him to a prime location for ambushing the enemy forces at point-blank range, but he is forced to pull back after getting swarmed by pretty much the entire remaining Drassen garrison. They’re gradually whittled down with Jim being sent after the fleeing survivors as part of my now-standard terror tactic; Kenti suffers a shot to the leg from the very last half-dead, cowering bad guy, and responds by finishing him off in a particularly brutal fashion.

All of Drassen is now under Cate’s control. There was a slight cock-up during the battle when I realised that Cate’s MP5 used 10mm bullets instead of 9x19mm calibre ammunition like every other MP5 variant in the game, and so the spare mags I’d had her loot from the corpses of the enemy were completely useless. Casting around for a temporary replacement she finds this relic on the battlefield. If it was good enough for the Nazis, it’s good enough for Cate. Father John Walker (who will henceforth be referred to as Father John Walker) is threa- I mean, persuaded by Kenti into sending supplies to the rebels in Omerta, while Cate has a word with the mine foreman and convinces him that it’d be better to give her all the ore he mines lest he wake up one morning to find that he has not, in fact, woken up one morning.

It’s all going rather swimmingly: Day 2 is not yet over and already Cate has prised an airport, a mine and an entire city from the clammy grasp of Queen M-Dave. Now the mercenaries must rest again; Josh and Kenti need to be operated on by C-Dave before they’ll get back to full fighting fettle, while the other mercs start the tedious business of training up some conscript militia to hold Drassen while they push further south to Alma. Meanwhile…

Oh, it’s you again.

The post Jagged Alliance Diary: I Prefer The Term “Condotierri”. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

And I bet you thought I was kidding about the third-world country.

Day 1.

Say you’re just coming down from a medically-prescribed high that caused you to hallucinate you were having a grand adventure in a fantasy realm for three days straight. Blearily surfacing from the half remembered murk of poor motor control and the hellish cacophony of a thousand thousand voices constantly screaming for food, you awaken to discover a small briefcase sitting on your front doorstep. Inside the briefcase is thirty-five thousand dollars in cash and a small note stipulating that it may only be used to take over the war-torn third-world country of your choice. Your previous military experience is zero, so you’re probably going to need some help with this. Where do you start?

Why, the internet of course! You can find anything on the internet. Florists. Insurance companies. International mercenary organisations with one-click hiring and free helicopter delivery. Let’s look at what’s available.

Aha, a rogue’s gallery if ever there was one. Cate hires the five cheapest, most expendable mercenaries she can find, although even this budget option stretches her finances to breaking point. Operating under her able leadership, these five men will leave a bloody trail of death and destruction across northern Arulco until such time as Cate manages to secure a stable means of ongoing funding and hires some mercenaries that are actually good. Let’s meet the Z-Team.

• Josh, night operations and heavy weapons specialist.
• Janek, the go-to man for bombs and explosives.
• Jim, a burly, brawny slab of meat with a stabby stabby knife.
• Kenti, a Russian.
• And finally C-Dave, team doctor and terrible marksman.

The team is inserted by helicopter in the bombed-out ruin of Omerta, Arulco’s northernmost city and what used to be the rebel stronghold. Cate is slightly annoyed to discover that she was the only one who thought conquering a country would require slightly more than a pistol and a couple of dozen bullets, but despite being the only merc on the ground with an actual weapon she hangs back to see how the team does in their first combat encounter.

Which touches off roughly two seconds after the team hits the ground. C-Dave manages to nail the first enemy soldier with his crappy .38 Special. This will likely be the only kill he manages to get for a long, long time. Jim uses his oversized Desert Eagle to fill a second enemy full of holes while Josh and Kenti flank around to the right to flush out any enemy hiding there. They don’t find any, but Kenti is called upon to save Jim’s hide when a third soldier pops up in front of him and hoses him with SMG fire, winding him despite his Kevlar vest. Kenti responds with three ambitious pistol shots from extreme range (to the point where the bullets are actually starting to drop by the time they reach their target), the third of which amazingly manages to hit Jim’s assailant in the head, spinning him round and knocking him senseless. Jim is quick to capitalise and finish him off, and then rounds a corner to encounter a final enemy who has unwisely ventured within stabbing range.

The dust settles to reveal a disgusting urchin standing in the middle of the road. A blood-drenched Jim moves to question him but for some reason this unsettles the sprog to the point where he takes off running back to his mother. Who insults the team to start with, but agrees to take them to the rebel headquarters after Cate slips her a couple of twenties.

Said rebellion turns out to consist of about a dozen guys in a basement. But wait, who’s that leading this little insurrection?

Well well. Smurf promptly pawns off the least-wanted member of his little band on Cate — who will be useful as an ammunition carrier if nothing else – but regrets that he can offer no more assistance until he gets “food” and “medicine” for his people. This is to be found in Drassen, a city to the east which also has one of Arulco’s two functioning airports and one of its five gold mines. Sounds like the perfect place for a base of operations. To Drassen!

The team sets out with David trailing along at a respectful distance, but they run into trouble on the road in the form of six yellow-shirted soldiers. The dictatorship currently running Arulco must have spent all their money on colourful uniforms because they clearly didn’t invest any money in, for example, weapons for their soldiers more sophisticated than World War II vintage armament. Overcoming the patrol is therefore a trivial business which allows me to showcase my stock strategy of “Hiding behind the heaviest thing you can find while firing as many bullets at the enemy as possible.” That should change later, but while we’re stuck with pistols and SMGs ourselves that’s what I have to do to compensate for their woeful accuracy and range.

The guards at Drassen airport fare little better. Kenti is proving to be a rather good marksman, scoring several improbable medium-range hits with his crappy Soviet army surplus sidearm. The naughty step is reserved for Jim, who loaded his gun with anti-personnel hollowpoint rounds (see the blue number under the weapon) in anticipation of the lightly-armoured yellowshirts (Arulco’s equivalent of reserve forces) but who only managed to score a single kill despite firing fifteen shots. With the airport firmly under mercenary control, we can now fly in some heavier armament.

Or at least we could a) if the online store were selling anything heavier than a Magnum right now and b) if buying said Magnum wouldn’t wipe out a full half of the group’s remaining cash. The next step is getting some more money, but that’ll have to wait. After a busy day of slaughtering poorly armed & trained army conscripts, the mercenaries settle down for some well-earned rest.

That night, Cate has a strange dream about the evil Queen currently holding Arulco in her iron grip.

And you were there, and you, and you….

The post Jagged Alliance Diary: Mercenaries Are The Good Guys, Right? appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.