It's been on my bucket list for quite a while. A few years ago, before I built my first retro computer, I attempted it using the Gold Edition I'd bought on Steam. It ended very swiftly in disaster. I hired nothing but the cheapest mercenaries, believing I'd be saving money, and they would eventually grow into their roles. I'd raise them to be the perfect warriors, like Pokemon.
Instead most of them were dead or dying after a brief encounter with the enemy in the first sector on the first day. I realized I didn't have the time to commit to learning how to get started in this game, and shelved it.
In late 2019, I started building retro computers, and Jagged Alliance went back on my bucket list. But it wasn't until this month I finally committed to it. Remembering the absolute shellacking I got my first time around, I just started a session on Easy, with quicksaves available all the time. I found an old issue of Computer Gaming World online which gave me a good quick start guide. Turns out hiring Ice and Ivan off the bat gives you a pretty good core of marksman to build the rest of your team around.
I had a few major hurdles early on. The water that supplied my base was poisoned. The game is pretty shy about exposing the intimate details of it's mechanics with you, but after a few days of struggling to take back all the sectors of the water reservoir, my mercs were so debilitated they could barely hit the broad side of a barn. A day or two after I took the last bit of my water supply back, I found I could actually reliably hit enemies again! All the shots that got dumped into trees and bushes came dangerously close to depleting my ammo.
After this I found myself running my economy dangerously close to bankruptcy. I had to hustle to take another processing plant, and expand my capacity to exploit the natural resources of the island. Because mercs need to be paid, and they aren't cheap. I'd filled out my team with some affordable, if very mediocre mercs like Bud, Grunty and Gary. Also brought on Dr Eli to patch people up, as I was constantly coming back half dead. Much later than I probably should have, I brought on Specks to keep my equipment in good repair. He started off with quite the backlog of broken gear to work on. Oops.
My employer's daughter got captured, and I decided to revert to an earlier save to prevent it, since I had no clue how to rescue her. Instead I lead an amphibious assault on the sector her kidnappers came from, pre-emptively wiping them out. After that I never had another issue.
I began struggling heavily in the mid game. I was taking so much damage, even having equipped my entire squad with at least Kevlar, and often Spectra Shields or Treated Spectra Shields, that I was rapidly running out of medical supplies. When Grunty bled out on the field after spending an entire day barely taking a single sector, I thought I was in serious trouble.
Turned out losing a merc was exactly what my playthrough needed. I hired Magic to take his place, who was way better than Grunty, but demanded about the same pay. Because Grunty, along with all my mercs, continually demanded raises out of pace with whatever meager improvements to their abilities occurred. After that I began swiftly cruising through the mid game, replacing Gary with Kelly, and eventually Bud with Mike before the final fight in Sector 1.
I'd tried to avoid spoilers for Jagged Alliance, but I had seen that the final sector contains "infinite" enemy respawns. Then I saw that actually they aren't infinite, but the final boss will continually call in whatever mercs he has in reserve, and it can take a few days of attrition to wear them down, if you don't go in for the kill. I only encountered 7 mercs, and I didn't particularly notice any reinforcements. But I was playing on easy, and took my sweet time getting there. Almost 40 days.
Having now finished the game, I wish it had been a bit more open about it's mechanics. It never tells you what your chances of success are in any task. Much less why the chance may be higher or lower. So I found myself getting rather superstitious about reasons why I may have missed what should have been an easy shot, when it could have just been a bad string of RNG. But then again, having the game not spill it's guts so openly made it feel a bit more "real" and less overtly gamey.
I took me a month to complete a play through on easy, and I enjoyed it enough that I'd be tempted to start another on medium, having a better grasp of the mechanics. But the time commitment puts me off that, with so many other games I want to get to. If this had been a game I found as a kid in the 90's though, I'd have probably binged through it several times over a summer. Really glad I got to experience it, if a bit late.
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