There were indeed rules for throwing the dagger, though it was not listed as a "throwing dagger" per se.

~J

Well, I've started using NightOps more and it's amazingly powerful, IMO. Using Shadow with nightvision all by his lonesome with a suppressed Mac 10 loaded with FMJ .45 ACP I can kill like five to ten guys. The heaps and heaps of broken dead mercenaries from the beginning of my game seem all the more ridiculous now considering how uber a single NightOps guy can be. Now I can see why there are a lot of guides floating on the internet on how to fill out the IMP survey to give you a NightOps main merc.

I've actually almost finished the game now, I think. I've captured every city except for Meduna, Balime, and that one on the bottom left side whose name I forgot. On the other hand, I can't get any more mercs from AIM because of my record involving bulldozer heaps of broken dead mercs. So we'll see if I finish the game successfully or not.

Either way, I'm really looking forward to the next time around.

The moderate level of crash to desktop bugginess actually destroyed my JA2 campaign in the very last stages. This is how it happened: I didn't have enough LAWs and mortars to destroy all of the armor in all of the final Meduna sectors of the game. Thinking that since most of the opposition was destroyed anyway I could simply sneak a team in past the sector with armor and into the final sector to assassinate Deidranna I slipped a nightops team through a still active sector to the Deidranna's palace sector.

It turned out that I needed a LAW or some dynamite to get in through the front gate. I had neither. It was pretty frustrating to be stopped by a locked gate but that's exactly what happened.

I then decided to slip my team back out of the sector past the active sector and into a cold sector again so they could pick up the heap of LAWs I'd ordered from Bobby Ray's. The game won't let you do time compression while you have personnel in an active sector so I had to do this to continue with the game.

So, guess what happened.

The game kept crashing to desktop whenever my team crossed into the airport sector. Each and every time. And all of my save slots ended up being in the two active sectors. There was now literally no way to win.

This would have really made me unhappy, except for two things.

1.) Actually, towards the end of the game I wasn't able to win without restoring save games anyway, since casualties were really shooting through the roof. I decided to start restoring saved games just to see the ending while acknowledging to myself that I'd "lost" in the sense that had I just played it as it went I would not have succeeded in finishing the game. This made me a bit philosophical about it. Sure, I couldn't see the ending, but then again I wasn't winning in the sense that I orignally set out to try and win the game in (without restoring a save whenever something bad happened), so my not seeing the ending anyway was sort of justified on a philosophical level.

2.) I had managed to download a large mod for JA2 with expanded realism and a greatly expanded array of all kinds of weapons to choose from. It's the so called 1.13 mod and I found it on that mod database website. I was actually really itching to install the mod and try it so after my original JA2 game messed up I immediately installed the mod and began playing it. The mod has been wonderful and I urge everyone to download and play it. This mod brings a lot of things into play that JA2 vanilla really needed, like actual 200 round external magazines for light machineguns, more logically consistient representation of various calibers, submachineguns being faster to aim and fire than rifles, bomb disposal armor, flash suppressors, Bobby Ray's actually having a credible military inventory from the beginning of the game, and a whole lot of other loving detail.

It still has that great JA sense of humor, too. A lot of the new items have really funny product descriptions when you see them at Bobby Ray's. For example, the mustard gas entry says something to the effect of, "Military use of mustard gas is illegal under the Geneva Convention. Sold for pest control use only!", when it's a 40mm grenade. It gave me a mental image of the Orkin man showing up with a M79 and giggling madly as he bombards your house from 2 blocks away with 40mm mustard gas grenades.

I am playing JA2 again, largely because of this thread, and I like the JA 1.13 a lot.

I recommend it to anyone who liked the original.

Unless they've fixed it, you can take care of the tanks by beating them to unconsciousness and then stealing their guns. Just crawl up next to then, stand up, and go all kung-fu on them. After they are KO'ed, just use the 'grab' action like you would use to take the gun of an unconscious enemy. Trying to fire the tank cannon casues a crash though.

Also, there are two entrances to the palace, you can go in the front door, or in a secret entrance in the garden(?), but to open the sercet entrace you need a radio transmitter thingy(?) that you get from the military base(?). Don't remember all the details.

well, it's a 'realistic' mod.

true. it's just that there's a lot of wiggle room in 'realism', y'know? for instance, compared to just about any other game out there (certainly any other squad combat game i'm aware of), JA2 is pretty realistic out of the box.

JA2, like JA, has a weird difficulty curve.

It's damn easy in the beginning, even at the highest difficulty level. After the incredibly easy two first towns (the desert one and the one with the airstrip) it becomes somehwat challenging but not overly so for the rest of the game, whether you are killing bugs underground, cleaning the military town or whatever.

That is, until the last town. Boom, the difficulty shoots through the roof. Same thing with JA. Well, you do have a sense of accomplishment when you finish it!

The Add-on Unfinished Business solved that problem : It's damn tough from beginning to end. There is no difficulty curve whatsoever! That campaign ended brutally with me still hoarding 5 LAWs and various high end items that could have made my life a lot easier if I had used them. I just didn't realize I was reaching the end ; it seemed business as usual!

In JA2 I used the assault team + pack mules and training machines combo like many. A good tactic is to save money early on when the going is easy by hiring subpar merc. The custom merc (who turns into an elite sniper very fast) plus a few cheap but competent merc are enough early on. Preferably mercs with good WIS that might become very good by the end. Then for the last maps you just go nuts and hire all the superstars you can get your hands, you order as much equipment (mostly explosive stuff) and then you start tossing all the grenades, mortar, LAWs, quick healing syringe and such that you have hoarded.

It's not that tough to finish the game if you really break out of the ambush/sniper/sneaky/tactical mind frame and start tossing grenades around every corner before advancing toward the end. But this assume that you have a large stockpile by then, of course.

For easter eggs, there's also the remote controlled robot merc but you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get him.

One thing I'm really liking about 1.13 is how it's actually possible to be totally unharmed when shot if your armor is good enough. I like it because in most games, perhaps to improve gameplay somehow, armor never totally stops a round.

I was playing 1.13 last night and had the experience of a bad guy shooting my custom merc several times at close range with a handgun and having my custom merc take no damage because he was wearing a zylon vest with trauma plates. Likewise, I found that you can shoot an NPC who is wearing a kevlar vest repeatedly in the torso with glaser rounds and nothing bad happens to him at all except he grunts. I love that, I really do.

Generally speaking, it's only in the fan mods where armor actually works like it is supposed to in strategy and FPS games. Games that go from a programming studio to market always want to not make you totally invulnerable to handguns for some reason, or they do something stupid and decide that .357 magnum rounds are "the" specialty armor piercing handgun round.

I still remember the tutorial quote from Soldier of Fortune I: "A shotgun won't do squat against armor, but a magnum will do wonders!"


EDIT: I was a bit frustrated, though, because I couldn't seem to get breaching charges to work. I'd go up to a locked door, press the explosives button, and there'd be a small explosion and a breaching charge would be gone from my inventory. However, the door would stay locked. Wasn't this implemented yet, or do the breaching charges rely on your Explosives skill or something crazy like that?

EDIT 2: By the way, here's the actual formula they use for calculating the effect of your round given the armor that is present on the thing being hit in the 1.13 mod: http://ja2v113.schtuff.com/guide_to_the_ne...pes_of_ja2_1_13

Well, now I pretty much have to try it. I'm changing ammo descriptions, damage ratings, etc. so my head won't explode (no Glasers, thankyouverymuch, and no P90s doing more damage than full-size 5.56x45mm ARs), but on the whole, just from going through the xml's, it seems pretty nice. Final verdict comes when I finally start up the damn thing.

Now i am really tempted to play that game again...

You people are really making me want to try this thing out.

The dude who wrote this needs to get a life. I already fixed the most glaring stuff with the ammo, twiddled a bit with the armor, and now I'm going through the weapons (SMGs in 9x19mm take more AP for semi-auto fire than handguns in the same caliber?!) -- but there are 918 (nine hundred and eighteen!) separate firearms in this game! I even had to check 2 of them with Google, this thing has just too fucking many Russian SMGs that nobody cares about!

Or maybe it's me that needs to get a life...

You should contact them about the errors you've found. I've seen a small handful of weird things, myself (folding stocks making your weapon ready faster but les accurate? wtf?), but mostly, it's ridiculously detailed. I think they'd welcome your advice.

And hell, I'd welcome your finished .xmls.

One more realism related thought, as long as we're making the mod more realistic.

I think that grenades need to be a lot more powerful. As the game is written right now grenades are highly unlikely to kill anyone even if they land right next to them. Furthermore, it seems like if you throw a grenade and it directly hits a character it dosen't detonate, which is extremely strange. AE, would you consider beefing up the damage caused by grenades?

Hand in hand with that, I think that whatever the threshold is for showing bloody dismemberment needs to be lowered. I'm pretty sure that if a grenade lands at a person's feet and explodes they should be ripped in half. But as it is in game right now only dead bodies explode into gore if you grenade them, which of course dosen't make sense.

The same goes for decapitation. I haven't figured out what causes decapitation in game but very rarely if you shoot someone in the head their head explodes. However, shouldn't head exploding be a pretty consistient thing once you start headshotting with lapua magnum rounds and larger? Would it be possible to change the decapitation parameters to make it more likely, or is that data not in an external file?

Just for flavor, another quote from that memoir:

Cyanogen chloride or hydrogen cyanide would probably be better than mustard gas or clorine, depending on the effects of the weapon. Chlorine is most deadly in enclosed spaces and in low-lying areas due to it being heavity than air.

But, if one wants to go with military leetness rather than realism, mustard gas does sound cooler than the alternatives.

As far as "cool sounding" goes, I always thought phosgene had the best name.

I just remembered the feat in Fallout which let enemies die in a more horrible fashion .

BTW, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel has a similar combat system. Equipment management sucks, though, and the game is at times ridiculously difficult.

When I am at it, Syndicate from Bullfrog was a real cyberpunk game .

Seriously, go to their boards, tell them what you're doing and why it should be that way. This belongs in the next release.

X-Com 2 is reportedly ridiculously hard.

See, it went like this: X-Com 1 had this bug that would reset your game difficulty to the easiest setting after you finished your first mission. This bug went undetected.

X-Com 2 was made, and part of the thinking behind it was "let's make it harder than X-Com 1, because we've got all these players saying "Uh, guys... this game is really not that hard, even on the highest level of difficultly."

Later on, the bug in 1 was discovered and patched... but 2 had already been made, and is pretty brutal.

X-Com: Apocalypse (X-Com 3) is a game I could never get into, for which I blame the UI and the level of micromanagement involved. My brother loved it, though. Try playing it in realtime... the game changes noticeably in terms of how it plays (including the ability to use two guns at once, and being able to airburst grenades if you want).

Any opinions on whether body armor should be repairable, and if so how difficult should it be? For realism, of course, I'd rather make all of it non-repairable, but that might make Bobby Ray's business a bit too profitable...

Well, you can repair some ceramic trauma plates by shoving a couple of new ceramic balls in and covering up the hole. I wouldn't trust one if I had a choice, but it is better than nothing, certainly.

Any particular designs, or did you see this mentioned not directly linked to specific types? The only impact photos I've seen do not suggest easy repair -- either they look like this, or they're fractured, or the front part is completely frayed out and the back is dented as in that image.

Is there a way to set it to non reparable on Realistic but leave it reparable on Sci Fi?

Umm, I don't think so. I think that only switches between a few strategic things, ie. the bugs (and something else?). All the basic data is the same.

In the meanwhile, 5.56x45mm and 7.62x51mm Glasers became Mk 262 Mod 1s and Sierra MatchKings (as opposed to generic, low-quality HPs), respectively, while the cold-loaded Glasers for the same became M995s and M993s, and ammo weights were changed to be as accurate as I could manage without going full-out Google on all cartridge, magazine and belt clip weights.

I'll hold on doing anything to the armor until I've (or someone else has) thought it through.

[Maybe this should be moved to General Gaming?]

hyzmarca: Ah, ok. Well, I don't know. If all the parts for the repair have to come from a Tool Kit, the repair still couldn't be done. But that is a pretty good excuse for keeping the degrade rate of the ceramic plates quite low (certain not at 100% as it is in the 1.13 files).