Original URL: http://www.ja-galaxy-forum.com/board/ubbth...ge=0#Post167644
=========================
I have to say that my favorite part of playing 1.13 is the Drassen counter attack. It's intense, challenging, and thrilling; I am only one of many people who post about how amazing it is.
After playing the Drassen counter attack the rest of the game can seem a bit dull by comparison, especially if Deidrianna has cleaned out her entire troop pool in that one scenario. (Obviously I'm not talking about Insane mode
). The reason has to do mostly with the way that most of the maps are set up in JA2, which involves having your squad creep along exterminating redshirts who are often hiding in strategic places. I feel like this is something of a throwback to the old paradigm of fantasy RPGs (Sir Tech, of course, was responsible for the most excellent Wizardry series, which I remember playing as a 4th grader back on my old Apple IIC) where the brave adventurers have to creep through the cave and fight monsters who may be guarding treasure while being arranged in strategic patterns. This is also apparent in a few other aspects of how JA2 was designed. For example, SirTech probably expected players to progress gradually through Arulco and take over mines as opposed to rushing the capital, since rushing the capital results in pistol-wielding palace guards. There's also the classical dungeon crawl award mechanic where the player gradually uncovers the best weapons primarily by exploring the maps and opening chests that may be trapped or picking them off of slain enemies.However, a lot of these pillars of fantasy RPG design are really at odds with a modern military setting. A band of 18 mercenaries probably wouldn't try to take and hold a vast amount of territory from an army of thousands. Highly-paid mercenaries would be likely to bring their own excellent equipment whenver possible instead of relying mostly on luck to find good weapons in-country once fighting has already started; see the Blackwater mercs in Iraq, for example. And why must the mercenaries start all the way up at the northern border and work their way south instead of inserting at the palace by Zodiac craft, whacking the Queen before she knows that an enemy is present, and then extracting? Now, I'm not saying that these kinds of elements would necessarily be good for a game, but rather just that in many ways the gaming conventions of the RPG genre don't really make sense taken as a whole in a modern military context.
I think that part of the reason that I enjoy the Drassen counter attack is because it makes sense in a modern military context. If a group of guerilla fighters took over a key mining town and airport, it's more realistic that the national army would respond with overwhelming force than the national army mostly ignoring the incursion, staying in their strategic hidey holes in other towns, and occasionally feeding the odd platoon of infantry to a situation where they're completely outgunned and not supporting that platoon at all.
If somebody wanted to use the JA2 1.13 engine to create a game with more verisimilitude regarding modern-day conflicts what would the key differences between the modder's project and the original JA2 be? Without completely throwing out the engine or the underlying concepts, how could JA2 be re-designed to make more sense as a whole in the context of modern day conflict?
In the first place, the emphasis would be off gradual exploration of the sectors. If the characters take over a sector they would be able to briefly access the goods and services contained therein before the computer army launches a massive Drassen-like counter-attack. Hand in hand with this could be a more realistic handling of the Arulcan army. The Arulcan army could start with a certain strength in terms of combat-ready infantry, let's say hypothetically 5,000 infantrymen, and there's also a pool of reservists (yellow shirts, the crappiest grade of soldier) who may be used for combat, let's hypothetically say 2,500. At the beginning of the game a large proportion of those infantry, perhaps half or one quarter, are elites, and the elites spearhead and make up the bulk of all the attacks. When the player characters take over a sector thousands of blackshirts and redshirts descend on the sector in a Drassen-like counterattack until either the player is defeated or retreats, or all the attackers are dead. This would make strategic diversions on the part of the player, such as taking over 2 seperate sectors instead of 1, more important in terms of drawing troops away from the player's real objective, and would thus improve the strategic aspect of gameplay.
The Arulcan army could also respond in more interesting ways to casualties rather than it just taking a certain amount of time to respawn losses, and the way in which it responds to casualties could have more to do with some of the theory behind guerilla war. In the first place, as blackshirts are killed, redshirts could be trained to replace them and be promoted after a certain amount of time. At the same time, both redshirts and yellowshirts (the yellowshirts would now be the reservists, remember) could be slowly replenished through conscription, and the yellowshirts would re-appear slightly faster due to lower training demands. However, as time passes, Arulcan army casualties mount, and recruiters become more aggressive, the morale of the army goes down, and less fit candidates for recruitment get conscripted. So based on a mathematical formula involving the number of casualties inflicted by the player, the amount of time the war has been continuing, and the number of player characters killed by the Arulcan army, each enemy infantry man could get a slowly growing penalty to his Morale.
Taking a cue from the under-rated strategic classic Midwinter, the Arulcan army's statistics might also be affected if the player raids certain key sectors and blows up facilities which are of use to the enemy. For example, if the player were to go and blow up the military academy, the rate at which losses are replaced by the enemy could go down. If the player were go and destroy the factories in Grumm, the Arulcan army's equipment would be downgraded and maybe each enemy would carry less ammunition. Perhaps the enemy could, with passage of time, rebuild the facilities, but this would cost money. The game could keep track of money expenditure versus mine income and if the expenditure were too great compared to mine income maybe the Arulcan government can't afford to send out any more airstrikes, or maybe the amount of ammunition each enemy carries is reduced even further. What comes to mind is the scarcity experienced by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II when they were down to making grenades out of ceramic and telling their fighter pilots that if they could not shoot down the American bombers with the very scarce supply of ammunition they were issued that they needed to commit suicide by ramming the bombers. Destroying certain facilities might hurt the player, as well. For example, if the player decides to blow up the hospital, maybe all wounded enemies who run off the map are considered to die, and maybe Arulcan Army morale drops a lot, but then all the townspeople who provide goods and services really hate the player characters and don't help them, or something.
The way that equipment, both for the player characters, and the Arulcan Army could be handled in very different ways as well. It would no longer be a stepladder from crappy equipment to good equipment. Instead, the player characters would start with good equipment, and would have a chance to shop from a well-stocked Bobby Ray's before arriving in-country. The Arulcan Army would start at full strength with DMRs and RPGs and all that good stuff. With time, though, there would be pressure put on that equipment in terms of the mercenaries' stuff getting worn out, and in terms of the Arulcan Army's equipment degrading as described above.
Ideally, there would be under this style of game a perfectly logical and reasonable reason that the player couldn't just assault the capital on day 1...with the Army thousands strong, with the best equipment, high morale, and heaps of ammunition, it should be highly unlikely that even the best player can succeed in the attack. However, given time, as Army morale drops, as possibly all the troops are killed by the player and the recruitment stream is barely generating a platoon at a time to deal with the player characters, as Army equipment falls into the toilet, that's when the player has the chance to strike and take the capital with reasonable chance of success.
Finally, there could be a carnage lovers' Fallout 2 style narrative ending. If the player has destroyed a lot of Arulco's infrastructure by blowing up key buildings it talks about how the economy was devastated. If the player has killed off the entire army and lots of recruits it talks about how the countryside was stripped of able-bodied men and the demographic problems this entailed. If the player did lots of things to hurt Loyalty such as inflicting collateral damage or blowing up too many buildings it talks about how the people really hate Enrico now. Maybe if the net damage done by the player really takes the cake Arulco makes the international news as the humanitarian crisis of the century, or something. I feel like that would be a pretty satisfying ending, plus it would also reward those skilled players who are able to re-take Arulco while minimizing the amount of damage done with a better ending.