Slowtrain

You guys get to choose the mercs! I hope you will anyway. If not, I'll pick some. I'll put you a screenie of available mercs in a bit. SOme basic house rules (just to keep things interesting): We will be playing using the 1.13 mod on expert level (no, we are NOT doing INSANE). The Queen has been given unlimited forces and set to agressive mode. We will be playing NO RELOADS. Except in the event of a crash or other major bug. If a merc dies they are gone for good. Lost battles will have to be dealt with as neccessary. IF we run out of money and can't pay the mercs, we probably lose. (Although not neccessarily). We will have one lead merc who is user created and in charge of the operation in the field. IF that merc dies, the war is over. Because of these difficulty enhancing factors, we will be starting with considerably more cash and better weapons then is normal. However, once our starting funds run out we will be dependent as always on acquiring sufficient capital through our operations in country. We will begin looking at our budget and considering our initial mercenaries hires shortly.

"Le me think about it, my good man" ???? What, is the pc some sort of uppercrust British dandy?

And away we go!

I will be posting screenies in a mix of thumbnails and photobucket images. The photobucket images are a bit easier to see and read but I only have so much bandwidth and storage space. So. If some image messes up the thread plz let me know.

These are the excerpts from the recon report providing background on the country we will be "visiting". Please review for your own safety and awareness.

******I've decided to ahead and START. Yay! Please feel free to play along as you see fit.********* OK. SO here's the deal. We are a small highly trained and professional mercenary team that has been hired by a deposed ruler of a small third world country called Arulco. He wants us to go in and remove the current dictator, Queen Deidranna, from power so he can return as the rightful ruler. All the funding he can provide wil be given to us up front. ANy other money we need will have to be acquired while we are in country. Most likely through the mining operations scattered through the country. Our starting cash will be needed to hire an initial team of professional mercenaries to go in and secure our first toehold in the country. Please review the following recon report excerpts on Arulco carefully. They will be uploaded shortly

Sure. I meant to play that one myself but never got around to it. I'd be interested in seeing what it is like.

Tons of guns = tons of funs! test option 2.

testing 1024*768

I would give more background and stuff before we start so everyone has a sense of what si going on and what is it stake! The first screenie was just for example and testing purposes.

awesome.

For example: Day 1: We have $30,000. The following mercs are available. If you want more info on a particular merc let me know and I will post their personal screenie. edit: I might have to figure out how to do the screenies better. Although our version will be in 8*6 or 1024*768. This one is 640*480.

So in light of our recent thread on Let's Play threads, I was thinking of starting a new game of Jagged Alliance 2, but letting you guys play it with me. The idea would be that you guys would make all the strategic decisions, what mercs to hire, how to equip the teams, what sectors to take, what weapons to buy, how many militia to train, which sectors to defend etc and so forth. ALso maybe the larger tactical decisions when attacking sectors. I'll post screenies showing what options are available and the state of the world and so forth and wait for you guys to make the call on what to do next. Obviously, I'll have to handle all the battles on my own and post screenies and give you results afterwards. You'll just have to trust that I know what I am doing. I'll set some basic ground rules to make the game interesting and use the current 1.13 mod. But before I do all that I just want to see if at least some of you would be interested in playing along. I'll explain things as we go so no previous experience of Jag 2 would be required or expected. The basic gameplay is pretty straight forward anyway. These threada are a lot of work and Jag 2 can be a long game, but I promise I will do my best to finish it. So would you be interested?

I can't help but chuckle when I read this now. In a good way. truth be told, I like Three Dog and the GNR concept a lot. Probably my fave part of the game. I think it would have been cool to center the main story around it.

You raise some good points, none of which I really disagree with. I guess we are just looking at the game in two different ways. I am already sold on the game and not too worried about detailed animations. Whereas you seem to be looking at it from the point of view of an potential player who is not yet sold in the game, or even knows much about it. I am curious. Are you a practicing martial artist of some sort? Your use of the phrase tournment-style fighting (vs I'm guessing, street style fighting or military style fighting like Krav Maga) where the emphasis is on looking good and scoring points vs killing somebody, is not a distinction most people (other than fighters/soldiers/martial artists) would even be aware of. SO it is possible that your awareness and criticism in this area might not be something that most potential gamers would think to notice.

I had a hard time and was using all female pcs for a while for just this reason. But I tried the Hispanic male faces and found they looked pretty good with only a minimum of alteration. The coloration is much better: they don't have that yellow OMG liver problems look to them. They look better in game tham they do in the character window. I have to put the rough beard on all the male pcs though. Without that, I think all the male faces look too weak.

With that logic, Rapelay is perfectly, okay! Infact it's not even offensive... Is Henti not pornographic? Is blowing off heads with a shotgun OK? *SIGH* YES! I've opened a big can of worms and poured them all over the table haven't I. lol. Yes, you have. And honestly, I don't really want to go there. Even with you. I'm not nearly smart enough to handle a conversation of this complexity.

With that logic, Rapelay is perfectly, okay! Infact it's not even offensive... Is Henti not pornographic? Is blowing off heads with a shotgun OK?

The violence isn't real though. Its just physics calculations and polygons and textures and what not. It doesn't exist as anything more real than 1's and 0's on a drive. It disturbs me sometimes that people (not referring specifically to you Will, just people in general) assign such a degree of "reality" to video games.

I said that implementing an unrealistic fight strategy just to "look cool" was a slippery slope, and now they've released enough footage that perhaps people who were on the fence are starting to agree. I mean, Is anybody honestly wowed by the pummeling animations? Do people really think that having to button mash to pummel people adds significant depth to the gameplay? I would just wonder if maybe you (and others) are being a bit harsh on the game? Look at FO3: It had a lot of very poor animations. The crosshairs don't even match up with where many of the weapons are pointing in some cases! Yet, most people really enjoyed FO3 and don't concern themselves overly with the animations. And even those like Nightshape who can't stand the animations still enjoy the game. My point being that once you start playing the game a lot of the "problems" disappear since you are now actually playing the game rather than watching it, and no longer notice those things. Its one of the risks I think in overanalyzing pre-release gameplay footage and screenies.

I imagine that it's at least partially related to discouraging players from save-reload gaming the dialogue system (as well as the hacking/lockpicking/whatever minigames). That makes some sense: it could minimize some aspects of metagaming that maybe the devs don't want people to do. Also, I am not completely against the idea that controlling save points raises the level of suspense for a player in an action game. But if you have a ton of checkpoints anyway, that kind of defeats the idea of leaving the player with more on the line if the character dies. Save anywhere just seems a simpler option, rather than trying to balance save points.

I'm not a big fan of checkpoint saves. Mostly because I hate replaying stuff, and when I want to quit and do something else I don't like having to play on until I finally reach a checkpoint. However, as long as the checkpoints are very common its not really a problem. Of course, if checkpoints are extremely common why not just allow the player to save anywhere to begin with? Is this a limitation of the console or something? Or a game design decision?

lol. Letting an npc companion carry a fatman? That is a remarkable lack of good judgement right there. It makes Ian and his SMG bursts to the back seem like nothing.

Do you play many video games? Because I'd say the writing is right at the industry standard. That's not a compliment, but I'm just surprised it bothers you so much. For a crpg, I'd say the writing is pretty poor. Even some shooters like Far Cry 2 are better in that department, though the amount of writing is certainly less. The voice acting is also pretty bad. It's possible that the writing in FO3 would seem less bad if I just read it silently to myself rather than hearing somebody read it for me poorly. Otoh, most of the response dialouge lines are terible so maybe not. More on voice acting: Generally speaking, I think voice acting does more to hurt games than to help them. It's to bad that VA is considered a pretty standard in many game genres these days. Not to mention that it vastly limits the amount of dialouge that can be in a game, if full VA is required. Also. yeah, Jae plays a lot of video games. A n00b he ain't.

I dunno about that. There's game with bugs. True. Like all games. To some degree. As you say. And there are seriously BUGGY games. Thet former is OK. The latter is not ok if I am coughing up $50 USD for your professionally created product.