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To Hawkeye, Permission to RIP

Tue, 21 June 2022 01:41

Hello !

Thank you for this wonderful mod, I'm making a new campaign from scratch that will basically combine tilesets and guns from Urban Chaos and Vengeance Reloaded.

I don't care about credit and stuff like that, I'm just making a cool campaign for myself and will be sharing it with anyone that wants it.

May I have your permission to rip certain aspects of your mod ? I'm not sure what yet, I'm just building a pallete of tilesets and weapons etc first

I saw you're using AIM though so not sure if that's where the additionnal weapons are coming from in which obviously I should just attach AIM.

If you're uncomfortable don't be shy, I'm grabbing what I can to setup a base and then going to figure out what I'm using. So you're not holding anything back if you say no.

In reality I'm just looking for a good urban tileset, although there will be a ghetto area for the muddy/mudhut tilesets I want something with buildings and pavement and the tilesets you're using seem to fit the bill.
Just trying to cut down staging time so I can jump into production.

Feel free to DM me, just didn't want to bug.

Thanks and see you around

Vengeance 1.13 Reloaded | 2 comments

Creating campaign from scratch

Mon, 20 June 2022 15:26

Hi everyone,

I'm creating a new campaign from scratch, except I'll probably be using tilesets and guns from vengeance reloaded and UC113 to cut down on dev time but I'll probably add some items of my own too I'm sure.
No I'm not planning to sell or take all the credit blahblahblah just wanna make a cool overhaul campaign that is actually playable from START to FINISH without some game ending bug.

If it's ok I just have some basic questions that probably can't be answered by the docs I've been sifting and I should be well on my way from this point.

1. Is there some general consensus of what everyone is integrating into their mods ? ie is the 'hip' thing to do to integrate AIMNAS etc or am I on the right track

2. This brings me to my next point, looking ahead am I better off using the latest build or the 7609 ? Keep in mind The tilesets etc I'll be importing from other mods I don't mind editing them so they can be compatible
I'm expecting this.

3. Want to make a few nuke incidents in the campaign. I need the screen to go fade all white SNES RPG style lol How can I simulate this ? I guess I can force a temporary weather event just for that purpose ?
Can you trigger weather events on the instant ? ie merc steps on square, trigger weather event. Also to simulate destruction of the town, can I make the game 'switch maps' for that sector ? Or am I better off just setting off actual explosions ?

4. Beginning of the map is going to be an amphibious assault. Now technically I can just you know, model the left side of the map or whatever to look like they're coming out of boats, but is there a vehicle mod or something
that already has zodiacs and stuff like that ? There isn't enough water stuff in ja I want to give the player more of a reason to swim and use those toys.

5. When I mod, one of the key focuses is to give the player a reason to use the features. Is there anything any of you feel has no purpose in this game ? ie why would I do this when I can just do that ?
Eliminating that question is always one of my priorities. I like to force the player to use the features.

6. Is there a BLANK campaign map ? Or do I really have to delete everything in every sector ugh
- This was answered on discord, make a sector blank manually then copy over the other sectors in your maps directory (Thanks sun_alf)

I'm making this because I love playing this game and well when I do eventually manage to finish modding all this would be a shame not to share it right ?
This won't be abandoned until release, I'm persistent bastard and I've modded a lot of games in the past so you won't be wasting your time pointing me in the right direction I'll make good use of it happy

Thanks very much

v1.13 Modding, Customising, Editing | 5 comments

Large feedback on 1.13 mod

Just finished the game on experienced; Mon, 20 June 2022 02:32

Hi everyone,

after a long while I wanted to revisit JA2, because I remembered it as one of the most tactical games I have ever played. So I found out about 1.13 and gave it a try.
Before becoming more critical, I want to praise the developers for all the hard work they have put into this mod. It really shines in complexity, and plays overall better than vanilla imho. But there are also some downsides.
I will divide this feedback into technical and gameplay.

PREFACE:
I played 1.13, latest build (available May 2022),experienced game mode, realistic, more weapons, all else set to default settings. Also no changes to the ini-file. I needed ~ 43 days to finish with all towns and quests completed (except terrorists). I didn't use an IMP merc, because in my opinion that is against the idea of hiring mercenaries only to complete a job. And if you commanded the operation by doing that, you would probably not fight by yourself. So I went the more "realistic" route.

1) TECHNICAL
Let's keep this short. I was using Windows, and Steam, to install the game. It was horrible. The whole process took me about 3h. After searching for a long time on the net how to fix the install, I found out I had to copy and replace files manually. And even after I did, and the game eventually ran, it still had some issues. Sometimes I had errors like a certain file cannot be found. Luckily, it was not detrimental to the gameplay. But the install did not feel in line with Steam. If the game is to be played by a larger audience, however, it has to run smoothly on Win 10/11 and future versions...this should be given the largest priority imho. If possible, without extra programs and manually replacing files etc. The install just should work.
Related to this, I was never able to minimize (ALT TAB) the game up to this day. I could run it in Window-mode by changing the ini-file settings, but overall it did not work like a real window-mode game. That is, sometimes you had to click several times to get out of the game, or get back into it. In the end what I wanted to accomplish was "fullscreen-window mode", but I never did; so I went with fullscreen instead (and never minimized while playing). This also means I could not look up issues as much as I would have liked to (sadge)

2) GAMEPLAY
Now the more interesting part, the gameplay. I will divide my feedback into bullet points:

- A large variety of weapons was added. This is overall great, however, I feel that many weapons are only marginally different from each other. This can be confusing for newer players, as they don't know what to use. There should be some difference pop up menu, which will explain the difference in range/dmg/AP of a new weapon to an older one
- Weapons add-ons like laser pointers, scopes etc. are overall to rare. I finished the game, and I found overall only 3 laser pointers. I bought 2 more in bobby rays. The effect seems also too weak. In vanilla, I remember, once you got a laser pointer and the most basic scope, your merc basically could not miss anymore. With the new aiming system in 1.13 (NCTH), this is completely different. From distance, and sometimes even from close, you never hit the head. But on the other hand, you always hit the torso, no matter how far you are away. Even if the enemy is out of sight - once you have a spotter, like Ira who you meet at the beginning of the game, you will hit enemies far away. But never in the head. It seems kind of weird to me, that for balance reasons laser pointers and scopes have been nerfed a bit, but having a spotter trivializes everything even more.
- Some weapon add-ons only work with certain weapons. This is definitely different from Vanilla, and was super confusing to me. I found a sniper scope (10 x), and could not use it with some sniper rifles. After a long while I realized that the Russian type of weapons have different scopes. But it is really just trial & error, which makes it confusing to find out what fits together. There should be some kind of marking or alignment. It could also be fixed via a global search (more on that below). If you search for "sniper scope Famas", a sector where you have found it could be highlighted, for example.
- Some items like tripwire made no sense to me. There has to be a clear explanation how to use it properly. Some kind of manual which describes all of them clearly
- Overall game balance seems a bit off. At the beginning you need to do a lot of night missions to be successful, but later on, it is kind of the opposite. Have your spotter and long range rifles is the way to go. You cannot go fully stealth later on, because the AI tends to flank you from whereever you are not looking. And if you fight against > 20 enemies, good luck with your stealth mission. But honestly, if you want the game to be finished at some point, there will always be ways to accomplish that (overpowered strategies). Vanilla was all about only one laser pointer and one scope required, whereas 1.13 seems to be about one spotter (Ira, lol). I know you can accomplish a lot with night ops during much of the earlier game as well. But I think it would be nice if anything was viable, and the game dictated less what you would have to do to be successful
- Suppresssion fire: I am sorry, but this mechanic was terrible to deal with. In the second half of the game when you have multiple mercs, it does not matter at all, but man, when I was in Drassen on the roof, I had to wait 10 turns until the enemies wasted all of their ammo (and did not hit even once), while all my AP was basically almost negative every turn. I realize this mechanic was added to make the game more realistic, but I think it should work in a way that it maybe reduces AP only once (the time you are first in a certain area and shot at), and then not anymore. This is also more realistic - someone who is shot at in the heat of a battle will usually try to get away, even if there is little chance to survive. Or take any other action to survive, but not do nothing because some guys shoot at you from 1000 meters distance with no chance to hit
- Ammo types: this needs a complete rework. You never get the ammo you need. When you start, you soon want that 5.56 ammo type, but you only find AK-ammo. Once you can buy 5.56 ammo from Bobby rays, you want to have the next better ammo (for example nato ammo for Famas rifle). The only time I had enough nato ammo for all my mercs was basically at the very end of the game, when I was at Meduna. But even then I also found some strong sniper rifles, for which I literally never found any ammo through the whole game. They had like 5 shots left, and that's it. I am not sure if Bobby rays had any ammo of that type, but man... I remember vanialla was better in this regard. 5.56 was rare for a while, but soon you had enough, and it carried you through the whole game. In 1.13, you need to use all tools you can get to survive, but then they also have to be available. Otherwise there is no reason to include them
- Selling stuff is cumbersome. Each time I have to travel across half the map with an ice cream truck, just to sell stuff at Tony.... Please add more merchants. At least one arms dealer in every town
- There is way too many different backpacks. I mean the average player just wants the backpack with the largest space available, but going through all the stuff in Bobby rays and comparing backpacks, it's just not fun
- Related to the previous point, there should be a general search bar included into the game. To search for items in the map, for example, which does highlighting for you. Also in Bobby Rays, if you need to search something (for instance, ammo), it should directly show that item. It's terrible currently, as you have to browse through items for such a long time, when there are so many different types of each
- Bobby rays...I swear this shit shop is bugged. Several of my orders got lost without notification that anything is missing. At some point I was hitting the sneaky guy at the airport every single time, just to make sure he had not stolen anything. Because I think if he has stolen your previous order, and you dont notice, but make a new order, then it does not go through. A search on Google also revealed that other people had the same problem. I really think that the priority setting here should be that orders get NEVER lost. Difficulty should not be based on randomness and unreliability of Bobby rays. It wasn't as important in vanilla, because vanilla is just so much easier to play
- There should be more airports or at least airplane drop off sectors, so you cannot get the stuff from Bobby rays only at Drassen. I mean it's easy with Skyrider, but such a pain after a while to travel just to gather items
- I am not sure about this feature that mercenaries are not avilable sometimes for such a long time. I realize you want the player to be flexible, and usually there is a replacement. But man, I wanted to play with Magic. He is just the coolest guy. But he wasn't available for a long time when I finally had the cash
- Increase helicopter/hummer/ice cream truck capactiy each to 8. It's not much fun to split your squads and reunite them every single time only because of capacity
- Prevent mercs from blocking/hindering other mercs. For example, make them technically transparent, so one can walk past the other, or set up a mortar without the menu that says "there is no space to shoot". This becomes most problematic when you have 3 squads (lets say in Meduna). I think the original game was not designed to have that many merc, but 1.13 certainly is
- Some early fights need a rework. For me, by far, the hardest fight in the game was Grumm mine. I had to fight against ~ 15 elites and 20 regular soldiers. Needed to retreat and re-attack to finish that. It's weird that this mine was more heavily defended than any Meduna sector. I heard similar things about Drassen fights, but the counter-attack was not active in my game
- Deidranna was really weird. When I found her in the bunker, she was just mumbling something like I was not expected here and should get away...lol. I mean she did not even initiate a fight. So you can imagine how that ended up when Raven stood next to her (Bummer!)
- More generally: on youtube I saw a playthrough by someone who played with all weapon drops from defeated enemies. That of course makes the game 10 x easier, because not only your mercenaries become stronger, but also you get ~ 15,000$ day just by selling stuff at Tony early on, so you can afford the best mecenaries. I am not sure if 1.13 was designed with that choice in mind, but I think that some options (like insane difficulty) are not even possible without other options, like all weapons drop. So by leaving the player so many 1.13 options, that can be changed during the game, I think you risk that some of them are just incompatible with each other. The game becomes way too hard, or way too easy. It would be nice if the default game setting is balanced to a high degree, and only marginal changes can be done during the game. But currently, most people who play this game change the ini file beforehand (at least I got that impression from reading several how to install-threads), which somewhat indicates that the default setting is not very good in terms of balance
- The latter point is also important for speedrunning - the game has to be balanced well in its default setting, then possibly more speedrunners would be interested to try it out
- Technical issue: infinite loop (turn does not end, cursor is in waiting mode). I don't know why, but this happens every now and then. Sometimes when enemy interrupts, or sometimes when it's your normal turn and you do a certain action. In some cases it resolves itself if you are diligent, but usually not. Reloading sometimes helps; but usually you need to restart the game

That being said, the experience was great, so thanks for all the work you put into this. I gave that feedback, because I think JA2 is far from dead. There will be JA3, and maybe at some point a graphical remake of JA2. It is by far the best tactical simulation I have ever seen. "So long, snapper head!". Until next time I guess (might update this thead if more comes to my mind in the following days). Cheers happy

v1.13 General Gameplay Talk | 5 comments

Cannot locate mapeditor.exe [FIXED]

Fri, 17 June 2022 17:07

Hi everyone,

Where can I find the map editor ? I'm making a new campaign from scratch-ish. UC113 is simply too bugged I can't get through 1 playthrough without a bug ending it. So I'm going to make a new campaign that resembles it somewhat.

I got the latest build from here: jenkins.maeyanie.com/job/JA2%20SCI/lastBuild/

Downloaded all the modding_tools

According to the manual the build is supposed to have mapeditor.exe is it done differently now ?

EDIT: I know there's multiple repos, but then the map editor in those repos are not compatible with the latest release correct ?

v1.13 Modding, Customising, Editing | 1 comment

Max militia reinforcements

Mon, 13 June 2022 13:23

Hi all,i recently decided to play again this great game and i'm trying to figure why i can't get more than 20 militia reinforcement.I tried many time and in variuos ways but i can't get more than 20 militia. Only when a milita die i can get another one from nerby sectors.
In the ini file i have 32 max milita per sector and tried to raise that number but i didn't get any changes.I tried in cities and non cities sector.I tried calling reinforcements right before the fight,and during the fight with a radio operator...nothing.

Anyone have the same "issue"?

v1.13 General Gameplay Talk | 0 comments

Auto-Resolve

Sun, 12 June 2022 21:32

Hello JA2 / 1.13 / Bear's Pit Community,

there are alot of files of Merc Stats Spreadsheets out in the web.

And there are some easy-to-read 'How dies it work' (HDIW) @pbwork of 1.13; specially the 'Auto-Resolve'.

Question: Does anyone ever worked-out an EXCEL based Auto-Solver for the Merc Stats Spreadsheets?

Use some DropDown-Lists to select your own Squad Members, the Enemy Squad, Wilderness Terrain 'yes/no' etc.

I'm stuck at the Part of Chose Target.

v1.13 Features How-Tos & Discussions | 0 comments

Militia + AI Frozen in map. still moves in tactical (UC113)

Mon, 06 June 2022 15:27

Hi everyone how's it going ?

I'm hoping this is the right place and could get some help because this one has me really stumped.

It's hard to describe but what's happening is after the last combat finished the Militia + AI are stuck in place.

When you give them an order to move around they stay in place (Shift+$ + Move to). If you send them to another sector they get stuck at the bottom of it and never take their random positions like they usually do. Also they don't walk around anymore they're just frozen in place.

When the enemy attacks, they're also frozen in place they just occupy the edge of the map and wait. Unless of course they make contact then they start fighting.

Is there a way to 'reset the AI' ? I'm not sure what the problem is here.

This is JA2 113 with UC.

This is my distribution, I've uploaded it here:

I've made many many changes and fixes to the code so I can't really give you individual files (fixed weather, allowed you build sandbags in almost all sectors etc)

It's actually really fun and there's massive battles too, I'm thinking of releasing it as a modified version of the original Urban Chaos if I can just get 1 damn successful playthrough without a bug ending it angry

Anyway I appreciate the help in advance, if you load 'COMBAT 5' you'll see what happens at the end it'll make sense right away, (Calisto) and ANY sector you zoom in to, the militia/enemies will behave the same.

If you go to 'STANDARD 2 or 3' and have the fight same thing will happen, there's something happening that's triggering this regardless of what you do unfortunately. Also a few pages down I've saved at midnight of every day in case somehow you can compare the code between when it was fine and when it wasn't.

Thank you very much

PS I have to reach 5 msgs to posts links, so whoever is interested in troubleshooting this with me I'll post the link after a couple responses.

v1.13 Bug Reports | 2 comments

How are enemy/militia profiles used?

Question re: profiles and weapon assignment; Fri, 03 June 2022 13:24

Greetings, bears.

You can assign up to 80 weapons per enemy type and progress level, and also define profiles with specific skills.
Curious how the game uses these two tables to create soldiers.

Does it randomly select a weapon and try to pick a relevant profile?
Does it randomly pick a profile and try to assign a relevant weapon?
Does it pick both completely at random, giving pistols to snipers and DMRs to machine gunners?
Something more sophisticated I didn't think of?

If anybody knows how things work under the hood, it'd be helpful for my attempt at 'regularising' the army.

Thanks!

v1.13 General Development Talk | 0 comments

Petrinska Kavarna

The scene of the first meeting .... sort of.; Mon, 30 May 2022 20:43

Hey all,

Has anyone searched around for this picture/scene? Just a whimsical interest to see if there really was one:
Petřínská kavárna.
Image size (for me) is 0 MB.
Petřínská kavárna

Enjoy.

Off Topic Discussions | 0 comments

Is speed running v1.13 already a thing?

Mon, 30 May 2022 15:33

First of all, a huge thank you to everyone involved in v1.13 mod.
You absolutely made my days brighter during pandemic.

I had a wild ride since an LGR tweet of the Big Box JA2 sent me back the memory lane. First thing i discovered was the Wildfire Mod which i was totally unaware of and dug the hell out of for 2 month or so in full savescum fashion. Trying iron man at some point however showed that this was a much too steep learning curve in wildfire. The enemy placement is just evil in some parts.
Next was the vanilla JA2 gold which i found much easier to master but obviously the much lower detail in gameplay left much to wish for compared to Wildfire. Which was the point when i finally started lurking here and become aware of all your fine Mods.
New chance to hit, special forces with vehicles, mobile militia, all those settings via xml. Feels like its all i ever dreamed of without knowing.
Even grinded down some scummed insane difficulty games which took weeks in real time. Before going full expert iron man.
That being said, i appreciate both styles of the game, iron man for its planning, cautiousness and bitter sweet losses aspects. Save-scumming for the perfection in execution, recklessness and sheer impossible tactics and moves you can achieve when abusing foreknowledge.

General consensus when reading here seems to be "You have not really achieved anything when it did not happen in iron man". (Pardon me when i am simplifying things) And i concur, this is true for a regular game. The difficulty levels of save scumming a regular game and achieving that win in iron man require a magnitude different skill levels. The extensive XML settings however, do make a different approach possible imo. There are possible settings that are obviously hugely over powered in a regular game, like drop-all, multiple IMPs and recruit-all-rebels early. You can obviously tune a regular-game to be easier using these OP settings. But thinking speedrun, how about enabling all OP settings and try to beat the game as fast as possible? Which includes the skill to identify OP settings at all and tune and combine those into speedrun advantages.
There are speedruns for wildfire and vanilla JAs, which all exploit glitches to some extend and are mostly measured in realtime. But do i figure correctly that all of those glitches have been ironed out in v1.13? And until new glitches are found, moving a squad on shortest path to meduna, fight the tanks using the laws from the secret facility, thus fighting your way through meduna and kill deidranna in the palace/shelter is the minimum needed to be done to beat v1.13 currently?
I did some attempts with the first notable coming down to 5 days. Wasting much time with doing regular-game stuff like getting skyrider, waiting for bobby delivery, getting conrad from alma, freeing tixa, visiting estoni with shank and recruiting a huge staff.
[Missing screenshot 1]

Yesterday i finished a 2 in-game days (33 hours) attempt with 4 IMPs + Grizzley + 4 rebels, making their way directly to cambria, wasting some time in the hospital and to clean weapons. Then going straight down to N7 for the laws.
[Missing screenshot 2]

Its huge fun. Even tho drop-all supplies you with plenty of gear. Cleaning and repairing has a huge impact on final time. Part of the fun is to utilize whatever the RNG bestows on to you to best extend. The game progression is hilarious. G3A3 on on day one from MoM, AWM found in the gardens only to be ever used to shoot through the palace gate. P90s early but only one mag ammunition for loong time. Robots become a huge pita if you are low on 9x21mm ammo. The character progression is very slow compared to the item progression. Dimitri still was lvl 2, when lvl4 Ira killed deidranna.
[Missing screenshot 3]

Obviously, when it comes to rating a speedrun, the amount of save-scumms should be taken into consideration. Is there a way to reliably count them? Are "game saved" messages stored in the log/savegame files?
[Wanted to attach savegames and screenshots. But no links allowed until i posted 5 messages]

v1.13 General Gameplay Talk | 15 comments

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