AI's reluctance to fire at you from afar. In JA2 red shirts tended to open fire as soon as they catched a glimpse of you. Nowadays, they either seek cover or need to get pretty close in order to fire a shot. It's a critical, game-breaking problem imo.
Yeah, I'm getting tired of my current game since all my mercs have weapons that can easily out range the red shirt enemies. I find that they tend to advance, then get to a certain point and waste the rest of their AP on crouching, walking a few steps, etc. Frustrating. The last few battles I won against dozens of enemies without any of them firing a shot. I really wish this could be resolved. It seems like it's been like this for a long time.
I've also found that the counter attacks are very iffy. I have it turned on for all cities and I recall only Chitzena getting counter attacked. I have unlimited enemy supplies turned on. Really sucks.
Yeah, this is one of the main things. I often wondered what the game would be like with 'realistic' gun ranges so early on made a mini weapon mod to test this. I thought the conclusions I reached about why Vanilla Ja2 had such short ranged weapons was the universal conclusion. If fact, I remember some of the 1.13 developers agreeing that extending the ranges was not going to improve gameplay overall so anyone who wanted this should make the rather easy tweaks to weapons themselves.
But they had a guy dedicated to weapons and items and by and large this guy was very knowledgable and made fairly sound decisions concerning excess. My only guess is that at some point he got bored and wanted to play around with the new possibilities the 1.13 weapons offered.
There is a real problem here. Ja2 is a 2d isometric environment that means there are no hills or other obstructions for mappers to use to make tactical situations that don't resemble a turkey shoot on a flat mostly opened plain. Yes, I know there are things like buildings and other things to shield advances but unless you use maps specifically designed to maximize a '3d' type level of cover you are going to find that you can simply climb onto a rooftop and pick off any amount of enemies almost at will.
That's not very exciting gameplay to me. I guess people who like this sort of thing also are fans of movies where the good guys run through hails of bullets and manage to take out multiple targets while doing backflips down flights of stairs.
To each his own I guess. I think the gameplay in vanilla was way better than newer versions of the 1.13 (by newer I mean everything passed the 687) and gameplay in older versions of the 1.13 is absolutely brilliant. Again, I'm not trying to say it is without glitches but neither is the current version and the glitches in these newer versions are meant as intentional features sometimes.
Scopes and their ability to extend your sight. With AI unable to use them properly, they border on cheats. I always set all their vision bonuses to 0 if I play any 1.13 release.
I'm beginning to think that the 10x scopes should be taken out. They basically make it so you can hit anything on the map with a clear line of sight and, as you said, the enemy can't use them. I try to avoid using them, but it even seems like the 7x is too much.
Yeah, the original developers had the ability to make superpowered weapons. I'd bet money they tweaked around with the best ranges to produce fun balanced gameplay. Now in a 3d environment or even in maps where scopes are somewhat limited in tactical superiority these things might be ok but I don't think anyone wants every map to be so cluttered it takes away from other aspects.
Equipment. In comparison to JA2, 1.13 has shit-ton of weapons, which are pretty much no different from themselves apart from names and pictures.
I don't mind this. It's just gun porn. It doesn't seem to break anything as far as I can tell other than by introducing overly powerful weapons the enemy can't utilize properly.
Yeah, lots of weapons (even if they have little or no functional difference) is very cool. I like it a lot. Mugsy setting the limit to 5000 way back was one of the cooler things about the 1.13 because it offered modders a lot of room to get creative. Also, if you really look at some stats like reliability and such that aren't normally considered you might see more of a difference than you previously thought.
On that note, I always wanted them to expand the uses of reliability so we could accurately depict things like zip guns but also so we could make greater functional differences between various weapons. It might really make something like an AK47 shine where it does in reality. But like a lot of ideas they might have implemented this one was seen as less than instant gratifacation so largely ignored or even resisted.
Chance to hit system. I don't understand why 1.13 team keeps tweaking it. It worked fine in JA2. Its newest incarnation is just ugly and disgusting.
Yeah, I've noticed some strange stuff with the new aiming system. Some of it I kind of see making sense, such as the tunnel vision. From what I can tell, I'm making some pretty difficult shots with pistols that used to be hopeless. I mean, shots that are way out of range. Doesn't seem right.
Oh God, what an abomination. They started out screwing it up a little bit, gave players unprecedented advantage by adding the cursor (which I really don't have a problem with but wish they would have even considered how to countermeasure this in the ai because the ai knowing it's chance to hit and you not was one of the few advantages it actually had) and then 'rethought' the whole system into utter retardation. I couldn't believe how shitty the game played the last few times I gave it a go. I can only guess that it has been so long since any of the developers played vanilla that they forgot how fun it was compared to this shit.
New Inventory system. Good in theory, but gameplay-wise it's a cluserfuck. Overly complicated with too many different pocket types. I'd prefer to see standard JA2 inventory enlarged instead.
Heh. I also like this, but again from a porn stand point. I think it makes sense for the most part and there's only a few items that I don't understand why they don't stack well or won't fit in a particular pocket type. Ideally, I'd love to see this sort of inventory in a fantasy RPG. I'm a micro manager at heart.
I absolutely loved the idea and was an ardent supporter of it before it was implemented. I actually was in conversations with the developers during the time they were fleshing this out and I offered critique that ultimately had one or two of them saying 'you aren't providing anything constructive' I wasn't aware of it at the time but now am acutely aware that translated this meant 'you're either for all of our decisions or you are with the terrists'.
I think I'll remain with the terrists.
at all times.
