Darth Roxor said:
Most important stat is 'level', you gotta be shitting me.
It is. Level is used in a ton of hidden calculations (like how much AP you get for example) and it's the single most important stat by far barring the people with like 20 marksmanship that can't spam headshots (talking about vanilla).
And yes, JA2 is in many ways superior to x-com.
I don't really think X-Com is unambiguously better, but Porka Morka stated as fact that JA2>X-Com so I wanted to do a Hegelian dialectic thing.
How about a functional line of sight/weapon range, that disallows supersnipers hitting an alien across the whole map with a plasma pistol? How about actual grenade variety, with frag, smoke, mustard, tear and stun grenades, as opposed to just frag + (useless) smoke? Or does that only count as 'gunporn'? Not to mention actual grenade launchers to hurl them farther than 5 metres.
Smoke grenades aren't just useful in X-com, they're extremely powerful and key. They cut sight range, and just like in JA2 manipulating sight range is the most powerful thing in the game - JA2 just has easier tools to do it and you can get a hard advantage in sight range over the AI with binoculars, scopes, NVG, etc. In X-Com you have equal sight range at best, half or so at worst.
I don't much use mustard and tear in JA2 but I haven't played vanilla in forever. In the last 1.13 I played they mostly just slow down the "wait out the mad rush of 50 enemies and reinforcements you mow down with your tweaked out guns" phase of a map, and most of the elites have masks. Explosive grenades I only use when the AI packs ten dudes in tight.
How about actually working cover mechanisms? Place a merc behind a chest-high wall, and unless he gets fired upon with explosives, his chances of survival are raised dramatically. Place an x-com trooper behind a tree, and you might as well just place him in open field because it doesn't mean shit. The lack of IDDQD-mode superweapons of x-com (blaster launcher, psi) is also to JA2's benefit, as the big guns are faulty and unreliable (LAW, mortar) or rare as shit (rocket rifle).
Mortar is just as retarded as blaster bombs, and they both come in the silly lame endgame mechanics phase of either game. And alien blaster bombers are horribly dangerous in X-Com as a bonus, I think the AI in JA2 (again I can't remember vanilla too well) just seems not to use them more than 1/20 opportunities even when they could easily throw one from the other end of the map.
How about superior AI that knows how to use suppressive fire, hurl grenades when they are the most needed, hide behind cover and not waste turns psi-attacking the same weapon-less soldier over and over again? How about actual map exploration to find new mercs, gear, vehicles and other stuff?
Superior AI that knows how to use suppressive fire and hurl grenades usefully huh? Suppression was broken in vanilla, the HAM suppression thing makes them use it much better though. And at least in the last version of 1.13 I played they still love to throw a normal smoke grenade on your dude they have dead to rights to accidentally save him.
No idea what are those 'quasi-emergent situations' are, and quoting 'meaningful terrain destruction' as x-com's obvious superiority, confirms you've never made any use of explosives in JA2 (but who needs those when all you need is level, amirite).
Emergent situations like having one of the map tiles in a terror mission be a three-level building that cuts the lines of sight/fire in the level for example, or hills in jungle maps etc. Or base design. JA2 hardly even does stuff that sophisticated with premade maps, just the same 1-floor shacks and flat ground everywhere. And that's a lot of the reason why terrain destruction doesn't matter in JA2 - I mostly just use it to "beat" ambushes that I memorized from previous games, like the last dude that's always waiting to machine gun the first person that comes through a door in the Cambria hospital or the central AAA spot.
MikeJahn said:
Actually in JA2 on maps with good camping spots the AI does camp and it is a bitch to smoke them out.
The worst one in the entire game is that triangle of trees in some farmland on the road west of Cambria, that guy is very hidden and his LOS is pretty short so he only reacts when you step right in front of him. Then he always gets first turn and unloads all his AP in a full auto burst to hamburgerize one dude. I might be able to name the ten or so deadly ass camping spots in the game if I thought about it.