This morning while I was drinking coffee and feeling groggy the best idea evar came to me for a combination squad level strategy and business management game. The basic idea would be that the mafia or terrorists or someone come to a small US city without a lot of resources and initially the SWAT team is under-funded, under-equipped, and staffed by mediocre operators. Until the bad guys came to town the SWAT team never had any missions for the most part and existed mostly as a formality.

The squad level strategy aspect would be obvious; defeat the bad guys in various scenarios using the SWAT operators in a turn-based or real-time format such that you can have operators cover various fields or clear rooms and so forth in a coordinated manner. The more unusual aspect would be the business aspect; the player needs to manage the SWAT team, purchase better equipment, hire more operators, and so on.

However, there would be more complexity in terms of expenses. If a SWAT operator is killed or injured the player must cover the medical bills or death benefits from the available budget. If a civilian is injured there's a certain random chance the civilian would sue, which would cost money for legal defense, lawsuit insurance, and so on. Even if bad guys are killed as opposed to arrested maybe there's a random chance the ACLU will get pissed off and try to sue your SWAT organization as well. Each SWAT operator would have a "charisma" score that would affect how likely lawsuits or criminal charges concerning that officer could "stick" in court. So for example, maybe one of the crappy operators you start the game with is a petite blonde white woman with mediocre skills and attributes. However, because of her nonthreatening appearance and her being pretty everyone gives her the benefit of the doubt in the courtroom so her one redeeming quality is she'd have a high "charisma" score. As a counterexample, maybe one of the potential operators is a massively overweight Texan who wears a cowboy hat and uses lots of politically incorrect language. He's tough as hell and has terrific firearms skills but in the coutroom everyone thinks he's racist and trigger happy so he has a poor "charisma" score.

The way I see it, the game could be like a more complex, less retarded version of Deadline: http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/deadline_

That Deadline sucked because it was extremely unrealistic and the controls were probably the worst I've seen ever in a RTS game. But it had the idea of combining a little bit of administration and politics with RTS squad level combat.

I'm imagining something with a more simulationistic RTS aspect but also some humor, and a well developed business administration and legal/political angle.

Ever played Syndicate?

I played the original Syndicate. There were no lawsuits and strategy boiled down to waiting around a corner with a flamer for the enemy. Supposedly you could level up the skills of your agents but I ended up going through the whole game with the first four agents who would always run out with the exact same loadouts: 2 miniguns, a flamer or two, a persuadertron, and maybe a guass rifle.

"Jagged Alliance" might be another game to look at,instead of managing a SWAT team you're managing Mercs. Right now Good old games is selling the whole series for $24.95 this weekend.

Well, I've already gone one better than that. I play the "1.13" mod, which brings the micro management to a whole new and more realistic level. Now in that game you get to equip your mercs with real-world LBE, backpacks, tac vests, etc., and direct which pocket they should put their magazines in, and so forth. They also added hundreds of real world rifles and other weapons.

cool,if I buy the game I'll have to add that mod to it.

Get the game for ultra cheap used off amazon.com. Then the mod is free and asskickingly awesome.

Here's the forum for the mod: http://www.ja-galaxy-forum.com/board/ubbth...b=cfrm&c=11

Cheaper then a $9.99 dwonload?

It was half that price on Strategy First website a few weeks ago. I don't know if that's still the case.

Okay, Wounded Ronin & Fabe. I hate you guys.

I grabbed Jagged Alliance 2 Gold (it includes Unfinished Business) off of Steam, and I was up until 5 AM this morning putting bullets into 3rd world hooligans. That game is awesome.

Definitely gonna grab Jagged Alliance 1 when it comes out for the DS, in keeping with my policy of never buying any games for the DS but tactical ones.

Seriously, see if it's possible to modify the Steam download with the 1.13 mod. If nothing else 1.13 contains various bugfixes that were never even suspected by the original Sir Tech team.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=s...gged+alliance+2

I see prices as low as $2.50 for used.

And probably easier to patch and mod files if it's not the download.

Well the one from good old games is DRM free so it should be just as easy to mod and patch as if it came on disk. All you do after buying the game is download every thing in a zip file.

Good enough. I was more thinking about Steam, which is ultimately all about DRM.

should be just as easy on steam since I got few HL mods my self,hell steam even list a few mods now.

Steam only seems to really care about Steam-specific games - I.E. any Valve games and any games that come packaged with DRM normally, such as Bioshock or Farcry 2. I can load up JA2 without using the steam launcher, so I'm pretty sure I can mod it with 1.13.

Over on the forum some people had said they were having trouble patching the Steam version of JA2, but the issue could have been resolved by now. I hadn't been following it since I didn't use the Steam version.