ANd I'm surprised to see anybody touting a learn-by-doing system. They never work in a crpg. They are impossible to balance. In a game like XCOM, sure, but not a crpg.

Objection!

 

It worked quite nicely in JA2, even if it wasn't a purestrain crpg

 

 

Overruled!

 

I didn't like it. It was very unbalanced in that some skills and stats were far easier to raise then others, so all characters ended up developing the same way. Every patch that sir-tech issued (except the last one) rebalanced the leveling system and tried to get rid of loopholes in the game. If you play version 1.01 of Jag 2 you play an entirely different game as far as skills and leveling than if you play the 1.07 version. All you had to do was get rid of the learn by doing system and you wouldn't have to spend patch time addressing the fact that players are punching cows almost to death, leaving the sector, coming back, repumching the now-healthy cow back almost to the brink of death, wash rinse repeat. Bleah. If I could change ONE thing in Jag 2, it would be redoing the leveling system to an XP/point allotment system. As a compromise I would accept keeping the learn-by doing aspect intact for skill usage, but raise stats by spending a few points you gain when you make a level.

Probably by giving a greater (or even infinite) supply of the relevent items, and more chances to use them in levels (prefrably giving the player mutiple venues to objectives which would make use of such skills). You can resupply your guys with ammo back at base, but the low levels of items such as TNT and other 'non essential' engineer items meant that you were never encoraged to really use them (as opposed to, for example an AT grenade from your HW guy, the game had very destructable terrain), and as such, had very little oppotunity to make use of the skill.

 

I must have opened every lock/trap the 'correct' way with my Engineer, but by the end of the game, there were still items unusable due to the lack of skill level. Really this is a balance issue though.

 

The other main use of the Engineer was Panzerkligns (power armour, basically), in which they get a lot of skills, at high levels, but the Panzerkligns themselves (again, late game only) screw up the balance of the game so much that i'm not even going to go there.

I guess specific special abilities for the under-valued classes might help to address the issue, too ... though it seems the developers screwed the pooch when they tried that with the Panzerkilgn manifestation of the Engineer class ...

...addressing the fact that players are punching cows almost to death, leaving the sector, coming back, repumching the now-healthy cow back almost to the brink of death, wash rinse repeat. Bleah

I didn't know you could do that

 

I discovered through playing that some of my mercs got strength increases through wandering around the countryside carrying overweight and that you could improve agility (iirc) was entirely a freak impulse having someone (I think it was Dimitri) throwing knives at the carrion crows.

 

I should try a walkthrough someday.

 

Btw, I don't have any of the older releases. My original game cd died on me and I bought the gold pack (1.12) which I have been playing since. On a completely unrelated note, has anyone ever gotten the home made "scanner" to work? I assembled it (after 5 years of trying to figure out what the Lameboy and Fumblepack were good for) and included batteries. No idea what I am supposed to do with it.

 

I still think the game (JA2) had some interesting mechanisms that could be used in other games. Without having classes, you had characters with starting "traits/perks", which made it more natural to let them (vanilla humans) specialise in certain areas, night fighters, snipers, combat medics, combat engineers etc.

Edited July 20, 200718 yr by Gorth