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Favorite Aspect of 1.13 Ja2 Mod

Khor1255

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For me the best part - by far - about the 1.13 was the new abilities it gave to people creating mods for that great game. In the early days of the 1.13 there was about as much focus on things related to mod making as there was gun porn and player exploits.
The work they did on the map code was very interesting and just starting to yeild results around the time I stopped modding myself.

What thoughts have you on the issue?
 

Althorion

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The ability to customize almost everything. You want to always have money problems, counting every bullet? You can have that. You want to mow down hundreds of enemies? You can have that too. Or mix-and-match both. Or go the other way completely.
 

Stavrophore

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I would love if someone combine all the guns from other mods based on 1.13 and bring it in to the newest version of 1.13. There's bigger maps project thats super cool, and there's a guy that make better ai for 1.13, but its for older versions only unfortunately. The latest version has some super cool things like ballistic shields, humvees and more. The problem is that the game doesnt simulate the warfare very well -you are always outnumbered, and enemies are dumb like piece of wood, charging at you. Guerilla is all about force concentration in a point attack, with higher numbers than the enemy. I would love a mod, where mercs die easily but you fight enemies on even ground -they have 20 soldiers, you have 20 mercs. Its only possible in later parts of the game when you attack with 2 squads of 10 people. And a complete rework of resources -deidranna has resources just like us, and from these resources she forms the new squads that come after our little insurgency.
 

Althorion

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I would love if someone combine all the guns from other mods based on 1.13 and bring it in to the newest version of 1.13.
I’ve seen something like that recently: https://jagged-alliance.pl/plik625/ (use translator, the page is in Polish; the mod itself in English). Never tried that; while I love JA2 I think I had enough of it (somewhere north of 2000 hours), plus I don’t really have a PC on which it would properly run (I use Linux + Win10 VM on my gaming desktop) without spending hours on tweaking.

I would love to see a remake though.
 

zool

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If by "aspect" you mean "feature", then for me it's the ability to use autofire, which was among the first things added in 1.13 IIRC. It's actually the only feature I consider completely indispensable. There are other features I really like (bigger resolutions, NIV, etc) and others I appreciate as well (mercs from JA1, etc) but autofire by itself is the sole reason I will never go back to vanillla JA2.

The ability to customize everything like Althorion said is really nice too ofc, even though it is far too easy to completely unbalance/break your game.
 

Norfleet

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Guerilla is all about force concentration in a point attack, with higher numbers than the enemy. I would love a mod, where mercs die easily but you fight enemies on even ground -they have 20 soldiers, you have 20 mercs. Its only possible in later parts of the game when you attack with 2 squads of 10 people. And a complete rework of resources -deidranna has resources just like us, and from these resources she forms the new squads that come after our little insurgency.
But the thing is, you're not playing as the guerillas, unless you're playing with the ability to use your trained militias to attack. You're playing as the foreign consultants who function as trainers of said guerillas, and commandos.

I think this would be an entirely different game if more emphasis was placed on the guerilla warfare and less on the commando action by mid to late game.
 

KazikluBey

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I really liked vanilla JA2, but with 1.13 I have yet to finish a playthrough. It's nice that you can customize everything, but that puts the onus on you to sort through and tune everything to create a fun game out of the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to features and items. A lot of the features are either poorly documented or have very outdated documentation, and some of the handy tools don't even work anymore because they changed the data formats (added/removed fields in the XML files, primarily).

Development of 1.13 is still quite active with new new install-packages twice monthly, but they stopped doing "stable builds" in 2014 thinking it was too much of a hassle so there's no stable target for mod authors, unless they want a very outdated 1.13 version.

I started a new playthrough recently though, guess we'll see how far I get.
 
Last edited:

Khor1255

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This was the main problem from about 2008 onward. Even the versions they called 'stable builds' were often frought with very annoying glitches that hurt gameplay and totally ruined mod making.

It's hard enough as a mod maker to track bugs you may have introduced with your own tweaks but maddening when you find out it's there becauseof a new player exploit some moron wanted to bake into the mod.
I understand the nature of any mod is to have a good possibility of glitches but it got pretty bad with the 1.13 and when you found out the feature that caused the glitch it was often something unwanted by modmakers.

I'm sorry to hear it doesn't seem to have changed. I remember uploading several older builds of the 1.13 to a guy who archived them for distribution on the internet. The last really good one I remember was the 783.
 

KazikluBey

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On the plus side, I think one of the reasons they stopped with the designated stable builds was also that they thought the normal nightlies were stable enough. Don't think I've run into any bugs at all the times I've played 1.13 in the last couple of years.
 

Norfleet

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I would love if someone combine all the guns from other mods based on 1.13 and bring it in to the newest version of 1.13
I've always thought the gun porn aspects of 1.13 have gone a little too far. I mean, why does this one micro-nation have ALL OF THESE DIFFERENT GUNS IN IT? The great majority of the guns we acquire in the game are those taken from the guys we kill, who are the military forces of said micronation. Why then, do they have a platoon of soldiers where every soldier has an entirely different gun? Do soldiers in Arulco enlist on a bring-your-own-guns-and-ammo basis? Realistically, you'd expect most of these guys would have the same kinds of guns, with some amount of variation by role, and maybe a second-string conscripts armed with older generation weapons that are in the process of being phased out. Instead, we can gun down an enemy platoon and find an utterly chaotic mishmash of weapons on them, all different types and calibers. The logistics of thus must be hell!

If we want to use all that gunporn, realistically, we should have to order it from abroad, as it's not going to be found in any significant quantity in the hands of the people we're killing, since they SHOULD be using some kind of standardization or else their logistics would be torturous.
 

zool

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I would love if someone combine all the guns from other mods based on 1.13 and bring it in to the newest version of 1.13
I've always thought the gun porn aspects of 1.13 have gone a little too far. I mean, why does this one micro-nation have ALL OF THESE DIFFERENT GUNS IN IT? The great majority of the guns we acquire in the game are those taken from the guys we kill, who are the military forces of said micronation. Why then, do they have a platoon of soldiers where every soldier has an entirely different gun? Do soldiers in Arulco enlist on a bring-your-own-guns-and-ammo basis? Realistically, you'd expect most of these guys would have the same kinds of guns, with some amount of variation by role, and maybe a second-string conscripts armed with older generation weapons that are in the process of being phased out. Instead, we can gun down an enemy platoon and find an utterly chaotic mishmash of weapons on them, all different types and calibers. The logistics of thus must be hell!

If we want to use all that gunporn, realistically, we should have to order it from abroad, as it's not going to be found in any significant quantity in the hands of the people we're killing, since they SHOULD be using some kind of standardization or else their logistics would be torturous.

You can easily edit the EnemyWeaponsChoice.xml to do that though - that's what I always do.
 

KazikluBey

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Also, you don't need to play with the Tons of Guns option on, it's in the new-game-options-screen. I started my recent playthrough with it off, now it's more like 1.12 with tons of guns on.
 

Stavrophore

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I would love if someone combine all the guns from other mods based on 1.13 and bring it in to the newest version of 1.13
I've always thought the gun porn aspects of 1.13 have gone a little too far. .

Blasphemy! As someone said you can restrict what enemies drop, and then you can purchase the fancy toys from bobby ray's shop. I love when my mercs have some exotic kickass guns, you just feel they are professionals when carrying 20k rifle. Of course the equipment is better than what deidranna soldiers are carrying, even elites. I like this in that way -since we are always outnumbered, i like when my mercs are better even than the elite. Suppressors, foregrip, laser sights, reflex sights, kac masterkey/m203, bipods, scopes etc. etc, 4th gen nightvision. It's a shame JA2 doesnt have sprites for armor, i guess maybe, someone could do that, but it would be a lot of work.
 

zool

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probably the expansion of tactical possibility.

To wit, the change to 100Ap instead of 25. The original is a bit too limiting, but 100 give more room to wriggle.

I was super enthusiastic about that change when it was first introduced. But then I realized I was too used to movement and action costs (crouch, prone, run, walk, etc) with the 25 AP system and had a hard time getting used to the 100 AP system. On the whole, it made quick mental calculations more complicated, so I found myself going back to the 25 AP system.

Same with the STOMP mod, I found that traits giving certain movement bonuses to mercs depending on the terrain or on the type of movement (prone, crouched, standing) made it more complicated to actually anticipate AP costs. In the base game, Agility is there to show how agile your merc is and it gives you the corresponding AP - and that's it, simple and elegant. STOMP does add another layer of complexity which looks good on the surface but does make mercs' management more complicated. I really need to try it again though because I'm sure I would end up appreciating it.

Do you think STOMP would work well with the 25 AP system?
 

Stavrophore

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probably the expansion of tactical possibility.

To wit, the change to 100Ap instead of 25. The original is a bit too limiting, but 100 give more room to wriggle.

I was super enthusiastic about that change when it was first introduced. But then I realized I was too used to movement and action costs (crouch, prone, run, walk, etc) with the 25 AP system and had a hard time getting used to the 100 AP system. On the whole, it made quick mental calculations more complicated, so I found myself going back to the 25 AP system.

Same with the STOMP mod, I found that traits giving certain movement bonuses to mercs depending on the terrain or on the type of movement (prone, crouched, standing) made it more complicated to actually anticipate AP costs. In the base game, Agility is there to show how agile your merc is and it gives you the corresponding AP - and that's it, simple and elegant. STOMP does add another layer of complexity which looks good on the surface but does make mercs' management more complicated. I really need to try it again though because I'm sure I would end up appreciating it.

Do you think STOMP would work well with the 25 AP system?

100 AP system was specifically designed to accomodate broader differences in AP costs between weapons. I think its a good change, and 100 base is easy to understand as its decimal system.
 

Khor1255

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If I remember correctly it was the 100ap system that broke pathing so that you'd get all kind of glitches in the mod.
I didn't mind the general idea but the sacrifice was too much.

Has anyone attempted to make a full blown mod lately?
 

Althorion

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I was super enthusiastic about that change when it was first introduced. But then I realized I was too used to movement and action costs (crouch, prone, run, walk, etc) with the 25 AP system and had a hard time getting used to the 100 AP system. On the whole, it made quick mental calculations more complicated, so I found myself going back to the 25 AP system.
I find 100 AP to be just in the sweet spot. I can still do effortless mental arithmetic and it allows more flexibility—however, any further increase would be too much. And so is STOMP.
 

Khor1255

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I thought it might be ok to add greater diversity to weapon profiles but only really with expanded factors for ap usage like more in detail loading differences, different types of weapon malfunctions etc.

It could have made condition of a firearm and specific details about it's dependability very important and thus created a lot more diversity in gun depictions.
 

Bocian

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Does 1.13 allow to play the campaign in co-op using the multiplayer option?
 

Khor1255

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That's a good question. I've never messed with multiplayer.
 

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