Wanna be a mercenary? Let's Play Jagged Alliance 2!

Hmm...the Battle of Drassen would make for an interesting story, certainly.

Okay, we've got a medic, but now we probably want a backup medic...

• Worst comes to worst, Fox is a decent medic and relatively cheap. Buns hates her, as I recall.

Man, now I'm just waiting a drooling over various weapons. Unfortunately, the VSS Vitorez probably comes near the end of the game. Early on, the Mosin-Nagant is stylish and long ranged, if rather slow and with a rare scope; there's just something funny about using a century+ old rifle.

EDIT: Are you using Mobile Militia? If you do, are you restricting them to their town? I kinda like having mobile milita, but leaving them restricted until I'm ready to assault Meduna.

edited 16th May '10 7:39:19 PM by DrRockopolis

Yeah, if I have time, I'll train some Mobiles. I don't remember if they're restricted, but I don't see them walking all over the map, so maybe they are.

I gave Ivan a Mosin-Nagant in my last game. He kicked ass with it.

Mind if I give a go at explaining the skills?

• Health is, as mentioned, your Hit Points. Having a lot is handy, but not an absolute. Still, like he said, you will want to keep it above 60, and 70 is preferred.
• Dexterity handles pretty much every other hands-on skill. Medical, Mechanical, Marksmanship, and Explosives. As the manual explains, it's hard to do surgery if your hands are jittery. Again, you don't need it high, but keeping it around 65-75 is preferred.
• Agility handles your speed/movement points, and helps a fair bit in hand-to-hand. I believe it does also provide a slight bonus to dodging gunfire, but if you're out in the open, you're going to get shot to hell whether your Agility is 100 or 10. Also provides better reaction time, meaning you have a better chance of catching people by surprise, or not being caught by surprise yourself, though Level is more important for that. EDIT: It also covers how stealthy you are.
• Strength covers carrying capacity and hand-to-hand damage, as mentioned. Like many of the physical skills, you can get by with a decent, but not high, number. Note that a male merc with high strength (I think above 80) will have the Burly character sprite, but this doesn't affect anything else.
• Wisdom is THE stat. While it does cover a bit of awareness, its most important function is making it easier to learn things. Which in this game means to improve your skills. You can put all your other stats pretty low, but with a high Wisdom, you can train everything up. There's even ways to abuse the game and train skills in a matter of hours. Not that I recommend it, though.
• Leadership is Charisma. It's used when talking to special NPCs to either recruit them, or get good intel from them. It's also used to train Militia quicker. (And, indeed, training militia will train your leadership.)
• Marksmanship is obvious, it handles how accurate you are with a gun. Despite what you may think, we can get away with a 70 or so Marksmanship in the early game. Since our mercs will likely be in this for the long haul, they'll still be deadly accurate snipers when we start attacking Meduna.
• Explosive covers, as mentioned, explosives. I've never really had a problem with a low-explosive merc handling grenades, but you DEFINITELY don't want to give TNT to anybody who doesn't have a good EXP skill. It's an annoying skill in that you have to be golden at it, or else don't bother. There's not a lot of room for error when disarming bombs.
• Medical covers using medkits. You can get by with a pretty low skill in the field for just patching wounds, but for long-term care, you really want somebody with a good medical skill.
• Mechanical is used for repairing items, and is also the basis for lockpicking. Note however that without the lockpicking trait, you're practically useless at picking anything but the most basic of locks.

One thing I should mention is that you only really need one person per team with a good Leadership. It also helps if that person has the Teaching trait. It allows them to train Militia super-fast.

Explosives is similar, you only really need one merc whose good with it. (Seems we've got a few experts in this team. Oh, well.) It does say it helps with any explosive device, but like I've said, I've never really had a problem with non-explosive experts using grenades.

Mechanical, while you only again want one person good with it, can be handy to have a bit of skill so they can at least maintain their guns and armour during downtime without waiting on the main repairman.

Ditoo Medical. One person whose got good skill with it, but I think everybody should have the minimum skill with it. That way they can patch their own wounds in the middle of a firefight.

edited 16th May '10 8:15:42 PM by TriggerLoaded

Jeez, now I'm worried and wondering if I should change my skill block...

Thanks for that. I didn't understand some of the stats as well as you did before. Don't worry, Rock, it'll be fine. I won't let your merc suck. :P

edited 16th May '10 7:48:35 PM by Nimitz

Ooooh. Well, if mechanical is useless without the lockpicking bonus, set my expertise in that field to leadership instead.

Also, are there rifle-grenade launchers like the M203, or just standalone grenade launchers?

edited 16th May '10 7:50:40 PM by Charlatan

There are, but I hadn't found any in my last game. Then again, I never completed JA 2.

Ooooh. Well, if mechanical is useless without the lockpicking bonus, set my expertise to leadership instead.

Incorrect. Mechanical is still very handy for fixing items.

Though for a mechanic, the two best traits to have are lockpicking and electronics.

Actually, I'll cover the traits next post, as well.

EDIT: You can get underslung grenade launching mounts for your rifles.

edited 16th May '10 7:51:36 PM by TriggerLoaded

Oh, okay.

Ummmm, keep Mechanical and trade out some of his Speed for Teaching, then. I want him to be The Smart Guy.

Make his favored weapon an assault rifle/GL combo. If possible, get him an M 4 A 1 SOPMOD if those exist ingame.

You don't get rifles until later in the month. Until then, you're stuck with pistols and SM Gs.

Oh, okay.

Revolver and Uzi, then?

That's doable. You'll get your rifle, Charlatan. :) Now, we just need two more...

Should I go back and edit my original character post to show my updated preferences?

If you want.

Okay!

Oh, and when I said Speed I meant Agility. Oops!

Oh well. It will not matter once I change my profile.

Profile changed!

edited 16th May '10 8:07:58 PM by Charlatan

So many posts, and we haven't even started yet. :P

TRAITS:

I will note that things MAY have changed with the patches, but I'm pretty sure the info I have is accurate:

• LOCK PICKING: As noted, this makes it easier possible to pick locks. It's based on Mechanical skill, but even a guy with good mechanics will have trouble picking a lock without this skill. Very handy, but you only need one guy with this skill.
• HAND TO HAND COMBAT: This gives you bonuses to damage when using melee attacks. It doesn't apply to knives, but it does apply to other weapons, like a crowbar. Slight bonus to dodge as well. However, melee combat is almost useless in this game. You may knock out maybe a handful of guys the entire game, and it's VERY situational, and dangerous to use.
• ELECTRONICS: Without this skill, you suffer penalties trying to fix electronic equipment. I mentioned that a good combo for the team fixer is Electronics and Lock Picking, as both are based on the Mechanical skill.
• NIGHT OPS: The Killer skill. Night Ops lets you see one square farther in the dark. Expert Night Ops lets you see two squares. And attacking in the dark is the way to play the early game when your team has pistols and the opponents have rifles.
• THROWING: This gives bonuses when throwing. Handy for grenades and what-not, but the best use is with Throwing Knives. If you can sneak up on an opponent, a throwing knife is a silent instant kill.
• TEACHING: This gives bonuses when training. While mercs can train other mercs on their skills, like Marksmanship or Agility, the most common use of this trait is to train militia quicker.
• HEAVY WEAPONS: This gives bonuses with heavy weapons. I'm not sure what all qualifies as heavy weapons in this game. It's not the actual weight of the weapon. It applies more to stuff like mortars, LAWs, and rocket rifles. Perhaps the heavy machine guns as well, but I'm not certain.
• AUTO WEAPONS: Bonus when firing on full auto mode. Sounds handy, but I find that auto-firing is only good at close-range. And even then, you tend to want to aim and make every shot count. It's usually much more effective. Not a bad skill, though.
• STEALTH: Self-explanitory. Easier to sneak around and not be heard or seen. (I forgot to mention, stealth is based on agility.) Also quite handy, especially if combined with Night Ops.
• AMBIDEXTROUS: This reduces the penalties for using a gun in each hand. Personally, I'd rate this skill right around there with the CQC skills. Ambidextrous is useful early-game when you're just tooling around with pistols, but when you get rifles, it drops in usefulness a LOT! Some people do like it, but range is what matters in this game. Range and the power of a rifle.
• KNIFING: Bonus when attacking with a knife. Like the other CQC skills, it's very situational, dangerous, and not all that effective. Better to shoot them and duck behind cover.
• SNIPER: I could be wrong, but I believe this skill gives a bonus when firing from a roof. Not as handy as it sounds, as climbing on roofs can be quite risky. Still a good skill.
• CAMOUFLAGE: A very interesting skill. Camouflage doesn't provide a bonus to using camouflage, but instead your character is always wearing camouflage. I don't know what "expert" camouflage does.
• MARTIAL ARTS: Another CQC skill. Martial Arts only applies to hand-to-hand, without any weapons. Not as good damage, but higher dodge bonuses. You also get a special roundhouse kick attack that can kill a person if they're weak enough, but like the rest of CQC, it's way too situational to be really useful. I also read a number breakdown that Hand To Hand gives better bonuses overall instead of Martial Arts.

I edited my profile one last time. Took the lockpicking AND electronics traits.

I think he'll still have enough points leftover to still be a good fighter, yes?

He will. I'll make sure of it. Come on, 2 more...

edited 16th May '10 8:20:41 PM by Nimitz

Name: Roger Kismet
Nickname: Korgmeister

Gender: Dude.

Appearance: Big, bald white dude.

Traits: Pessimistic
Disabilities: Heat Intolerant

Specialty: Night Operations, Auto Weapons.

Skillz: Focus on Wisdom, Dexterity and Marksmanship.

Let's see how long I survive.

edited 16th May '10 8:24:44 PM by Korgmeister

Korg! :D So glad you decided to show. He's in. No bald portraits, though. :/

I have invited English Ivy.

After his XCOM liveblog I figured he'd be interested.

TRAINING:

Aside from character creation, you don't allocate points to a character when they level up. Rather, skills go up with training or use.

Mercs have the option to practice a skill (Which is a slow, painful, and otherwise fairly useless way to gain skill points) or train under a more skilled merc, which is much more effective, especially as one merc can teach many students.

By far, though, the easiest way to train a skill is to use that skill in the field. This is why you can get by with a low marksmanship. Your marksmanship goes up by shooting, and you're going to throw a lot of lead at the enemy over the course of the game. Though, technically, the way to train marksmanship is to shoot beyond the effective range of a weapon.

Strength goes up when you attack in hand-to-hand. I believe it can also be trained if a merc carries more than their max load and walks around. I believe Hit Points are trained the same way. Load a guy up with all the team's gear, and send him to run all around the country.

Agility goes up if you can sneak up on opponents. Set your movement to stealth and crawl up behind people. You'll likely gain a point of stealth if successful.

Dexterity... I forget how you train this. Ditto Wisdom.

Most other skills are obvious. You train them by using them. There are tricks to really abuse the game to rapidly shoot up mechanical and medical. Notably by burying and digging up a landmine again and again to train Explosives. But really, constant use is what works for training.

Notably by burying and digging up a landmine again and again to train Explosives.

DIG A HOLE DIG A HOLE DIG A HOLE.

Dexterity and Wisdom are mostly raised with Explosives, I believe.

Grenade Launchers...they eat up one or two of four mod slots on your weapon, and they're expensive; I've never gotten the chance to use them, though. Hand grenades can be quite handy, though.

As for Lockpicking...1.13 actually has lockbuster rounds for the shotgun, and they're usually effective, if rather noisy.

• I like shotguns, but I haven't tried them much in this game; they're a bit of niche weapon, I believe, though the Baikal Double Barrel Hunting Shotgun was recommended as an decent early weapon.

Hah, Charlatan, if you want a...unique sidearm, go for the Thompson Contender; single shot pistol in .454 Casull. You'll die, but it'll be funny.

• Though, I've been meaning to try a character with four Contenders, or four SawedOffShotguns, and see how far they get.