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Do you allow casualties?
Mon, 26 August 2002 20:09
:bunny: peace & love
Title says all : do you reload everytime one merc is dead, or do some of your mercs end up buried in Arulco?
I barley allow deaths, but, in epic & violent combat, I sometimes allow one Merc to have an honourable death.
The A.I.M. Library |
148 comments
Stealth/knifing
Tue, 26 September 2006 04:39
Hello all
Am getting really frustrated with this game trying to play a stealth player with knife and silenced gun yet seem to be constantly caught out by the enemy at the crucial moment.Will the stealth work better as i gain more experience or is it an AI flaw that the enemy spots you like this.
Some tips for stealthy knife killing would be appreciated.
My charecter has stealth and knifing as skills
max dex,max agility max strength was wondering if strength might be the problem as it could make the charecter more heavy?
Thanks
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13 comments
Debugging the Mines
Sun, 10 September 2006 01:45
Introduction
Having recently cleared Drassen Mine of the Crepitus Queen and her brood, and collected enough bullet-proof royal jelly to armor a platoon of mercenaries, I thought it might be fun to write a little guide on how to do so. The following all refers to vanilla Jagged Alliance 2, not mods. This is a long post so you might want to skip to the part that interests you if you've done this quest a few times... Maybe you will learn something new.
If you chose to play in "Sci-Fi Mode", the "bughunt" quest is a rewarding, difficult operation that provides an exciting change of pace from the normal city-taking and patrol-killing fights of Jagged Alliance 2. This is the only effect of the "Sci-Fi Mode" option and disabling it will merely remove this quest: the Crepitus will never appear. If you have enabled it, Enrico will expect you to clear the bugs out in addition to your main mission.
The Crepitus quest usually triggers when you take Tixa prison and go into the sub-basement (lowest) level. There you will find a Crepitus or two to kill, and each mercenary will have a usually entertaining reaction the first time he or she sees one.
Defense
The first aspect you must focus on is defense. The bugs will randomly have one mine controlled by you (for me it's always been Drassen but Grumm is also a possibility) as their main nest, and they will launch nightly attacks from there on the city. It's important for you to have a force of properly-equipped mercenaries there prepared to repel them.
Fortunately, provided you set up right, you can repel each Crepitus invasion within the first couple of turns without loss of life. Most mines have a foreman's building right next to the mine entrance. The roof of that building provides a safe, strategic location from which a squad can make short work of any bugs. The ideal tactic is to place a squad of 4-6 mercenaries on the roof, looking at the mine (this affects whether you get interrupts) and properly armed with automatic weapons and hollow-point ammunition as I will detail in the next section. A brave and tough merc on the ground can also take down stragglers, and heal wounded militia.
Your defenders should be equipped with night vision (since they're above ground), possibly breaklights, grenades, and any automatic weapons: AKM, FA-MAS, AK-47, and C-7 assault rifles provide more than sufficient range and firepower for these engagements.
The bugs will invade the sector in a large, bunched-together group. This is perfect for explosives, grenades, and indiscriminate bursts of bullets. Try to kill as many as you can in the first turn you have, to make the most of your stray bullets and prevent needless militia casualties. Aim for the healthiest ones in the center or back, so that bullets that miss the target will still hit something. Since perfect accuracy is not required, defending against bug attacks is a great way to train up your weaker soldiers.
Since you know exactly where they will exit the mine, you can actually plant land mines, RDX, and remotely triggered explosives there to give the bugs a surprise as soon as they show up. Just clear up any bug body parts and other things that you don't want destroyed from the area, between battles.
Occasionally, the bugs will be able to sneak past your mine guards and attack another sector of the town. This seems to happen when your guards are inattentive (e.g., all asleep.) In that case you'd have to rely on the militia in other parts of the town, or reload if you prefer. Losing a battle to the bugs will cause a decrease in the town's loyalty proportionate to how many bugs survive to eat civilians.
Until you are prepared to attack, it is important to stockpile hollow point ammo, medical supplies, and glass jars at the infested mine. (See "Collecting the Loot" for what you do with the jars.) Defending for a long time, I nearly ran out of first aid kits and munitions. Since hollow-point ammunition and glass jars are hardly useful for anything else, it makes sense to stockpile them where the bugs make their nest.
Combat and Weapons Basics
The general method of approaching Crepitus is not dissimilar to Bloodcats. That is: keep your distance, shoot the nearest enemies first, and use bursts of hollow point rounds. Grizzly wonders whether anyone could go one-on-one with one of those things and live; well he can under the right circumstances, but it should be avoided. They do tremendously higher damage in claw-to-hand than their weak range attacks.
Crepitus have a lot of health, and armor piercing ammunition is all but useless against them. Always use hollow point rounds in your normal weapons! These rounds will easily penetrate their carapace and do sufficient damage to take them down efficiently.
The exception according to my weapons tests is shotguns: Buckshot, while it does harm, seems to do a poor job of penetrating their carapace. Shotguns should use lead slugs which can rip right through them leaving satisfactory wounds. Normal shotguns do not provide satisfactory fire rate when swarmed by bugs though, so prefer CAWS and stock up on ammunition for them. A three-shot non-buckshot burst from the CAWS shotgun is surprisingly effective at incapacitating the bugs, and a scout so armed can take down a bug at short range within one turn or interrupt. Keep in mind the range limitation of these weapons, when selecting positions and armaments for your team. If you decide to use the CAWS, it may be best suited to a grenadier or a point man with a backup weapon like the FA-MAS.
Even with hollow point ammunition, you will never score one-shot kills against juvenile or older bugs. Since you will often be outnumbered and swarmed, in order to kill them fast enough burst fire is needed. Three-shot bursts on mainstay assault rifles are sometimes inadequate, so all light machine guns are the ideal weapons for bughunting. After repeated tests I selected the HK21 and RPK as my main bug-spray cans, and equipped an offensive team with nothing but those. Ambidextrous MAC-10s also proved effective for a forward scout (even if she was arachnophobic.)
Along with other information on how to judge your foes' gender and age, Gabby advises to get behind the bugs and hit them in the back for easy kills, but I have not noticed a significant difference in kill rate between any sides other than the front. Perhaps in fistfights, there is an advantage in attacking the back.
Stealth and Gabby's Elixir
Gabby, a former employee of the Queen Diedranna who you can find living in the wilderness around the middle longitude of Arulco, can sell you an elixir which will make you "invisible" to the Crepitus - they will only sense you if you are right next to them or attack them, and they will lose you again if you attack and move. One jar of the stuff has a lot of uses in it; you can safely cloak your entire squad for the whole way down with just a couple of jars.
You can exploit this to train your mercenaries to phenomenal levels in their physical stats, by sneaking around near the bugs and punching them to death. Just group a few mercenaries up near a helpless lone bug, and let loose with punches until it falls. Stealth-walk or stealth-run the whole time to train your agility as well. This is how I did it my first game through and got many mercenaries trained up without firing a bullet.
You could also just sneak right past all of the bugs and assassinate the Crepitus Queen as detailed in "Killing the Queen" below.
Using the elixir makes the quest far too easy, so in my last game I didn't use it at all until the very end, and I will not expand on it further. All the rest of my advice assumes you do not use the elixir.
Advanced Weapons and Tactics
My first few forays into the mines were nothing more than weapons tests and tactics proving experiments. The most important results were the weapons selection above. Going deeper into their lair, I also learned about their behavior and what tactics were most effective against them.
The Crepitus' ranged attacks are a biological gas attack: they will do a modest amount of damage but the gas that remains in the area will continue to do more serious damage to mercenaries not equipped with a gas mask. Your offensive team should all be wearing gas masks, unless one of them needs to control Madlab's robot.
The bugs navigate and hunt by smell. They can "see" better than you in the mines (where your light-amplification goggles and camouflage are useless) but they cannot sense the robot, even when it's firing at them. They'll bunch up around the robot if it attacks but since they can't smell or eat it, they will never attack it. This makes the robot an ideal scout, but something of an unfair exploit.
Gas weapons (tear gas and mustard gas) are effective against the bugs. While you can't just flood their nest with enough gas to fumigate them out, they usually bunch up enough that a mustard gas grenade in a strategic location presents a great tactical advantage. They will avoid both kinds of gas, and you can actually erect barriers of tear gas to hide behind that the bugs will hesitate to go through. This can buy you time to throw more grenades as they bunch together on the other side.
The only tools you really need to take into the mine are machine guns, hollow point ammo, explosives (for traps, not demolition), and your favorite grenades: I recommend normal fragmentation grenades and the gas weapons mentioned above. You can take breaklights if you think you really want them, though the enemy will happily come to you. Leave your wire cutters and lockpicks at home, you don't need them. You could, however, take medical supplies like regeneration boosters in case one of your forward mercenaries gets careless.
The Crepitus lair is three levels deep below the mine; there are several sectors to go through and each of them will be crawling with bugs. Take at least four extra magazines of ammunition for every mercenary if you want to make it all the way through.
The terrain of the lair is a network of twisting tunnels with some relatively open caves. This means that the ranges are shorter, but it also means that there are plentiful places to set up ambushes. In some cases, you can set up an ambush at a tunnel mouth or even behind a turn, and still be able to withdraw your wounded back through the tunnel to an open area at your end if you get overwhelmed by numbers.
The bugs will go into a frenzy and swarm you one they're alerted to your presence. This can be good and bad: They will have the advantage of numbers, but they will behave in a very predictable fashion. The younger ones tend to try to shoot at you for a bit while the tougher adults will charge in to slash at you, but soon enough they'll all try to charge in to melee. Since you're expecting this, you should set up pairs of your soldiers at key points like niches in the tunnel or the sides of a tunnel mouth to gun them down as they approach.
Avoid getting into a prolonged firefight which will just fill your area with toxic gas. You can use a mercenary as bait: fire a few bursts at them and run back to your main group, they will reliably follow in a raging swarm. In very large and heavily-populated sectors (like the last one with the Queen's chamber, easily recognizable by the eggs) they may reach you in multiple waves, so don't let your guard down until you've cleared the sector. The last few kills will just be harmless larva you have to hunt down.
One of the most enjoyable things in the game (almost as funny as watching Eliot's face get smacked into hamburger meat) is setting up an explosive trap for the bugs: find a place where the tunnel curves and place remotely-detonated C4 (or TNT/HMX and extra RDX if you prefer) on their side of the curve, then get in position on your side and lay the bait: kill a couple of them with your point man, return to a relatively safe scouting position, and wait for them to cram in there. You can pen them with strategically placed tear gas if they are over-eager to rush into your meat grinder of automatic fire. Then, once your scout counts enough massed Crepitus for a tasty bug flamb
The A.I.M. Library |
4 comments
Cat's weapons library
Sat, 29 July 2006 05:01
Where did Cat\'s weapons library go? Is it up somewhere else? It had lots of interesting info. I suppose all the weapons mods used nowadays rendered a lot of that info useless...
PS-I would like to point out that the second graemlin on the 9th row is not an ewok, but a jawa :ewok: . What a travesty!
The A.I.M. Library |
6 comments
Vehicles
Thu, 13 July 2006 07:32
1) Is it true that some locals, like Hans or some bartenders talk about Hamous, when he is near the city? Getting the Ice Cream truck is always a boost to the game, because you need less planning ahead and your mercs are always fresh after movements.
2) Was it a bug or do you still get ambushed when exploring with a vehicle? In some version of 1.13 I started in the middle of the battlefield with the truck, when I entered a sector that was greyed on the strategical map before.
The A.I.M. Library |
7 comments
How do you fight at day?
Thu, 22 June 2006 22:17
I have been a night ops person sending my merc teams only during the night to take them by surprise. (as well as tking good advatnage of break light.) BUt how do you do in day?
With as few as 4-6 mercs, how do you take on the enemy of 20-30 day?
The map/sector is Grumm Mine. No rooftop and the house does not provide much cover when surrounded by 30 soldiers.
I am currently in a situation where I am to be attacked from the north and south by 30 soldiers - I only have 10 militia right now and I cant train more less I want my mercs with less than 30% energy when in battle.
The A.I.M. Library |
15 comments
Martial arts
Thu, 08 June 2006 21:34
Hey I was wondering, I got merc skilled in martial arts (from IMP) and to be honest i don't see the difference in hand to hand combat efficiency between any other mercs save for funny stance...
what i am saying is martial artist should be lethal (neck twisting, bone breaking etc) and not just beat the stamina out of enemy
(currently i am playing UC but i think its rather global JA concern)
whats your opinion?
The A.I.M. Library |
13 comments
Auto Rocket Rifle
Mon, 17 April 2006 05:46
Deidranna drops it if you tranq her - in v1.10, tranqs work the same turn.
Of course, I suppose you'll have to abandon the queen and go to Grumm to fix the gun before you can use it.
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6 comments
Short Rifles vs. SMGs, Assualt Rifles vs. LMGs
Thu, 23 March 2006 20:44
I've just started playing JA2 (AGAIN!) and just picked up a spate of machine guns (3 RPKs 1 Minimi, 1 HK 21) and was wondering how you guys used the machine guns.
Benefits: large burst, lower burst penalty (I think - I may have tweaked the weapons data), long range.
Drawbacks: high draw cost, heavy, have to use rifle magazines in original JA2.
Except for the C7 however, my rifles either don't have the burst capacity (AUG, AK's, FAL, G3 are all 3 round burst) or don't have the range (Commando, AKSU-74, FAMAS).
I'm thinking of replacing long-ranged rifles with the machine guns, and giving a short rifle/SMG for CQB
Which brings us up to the next point - for close-in fighting, do you use pistols, machine pistols, SMGs (MP5k/MAC-10) or short assualt rifles (FAMAS/Commando/MP53/AKSU-74). I'm gradually leaning towards the rifles because their ammo shows up a lot more often than 9mm/.45 - and I need the AP ability that the rifle calibres give me later on.
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40 comments
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