The Download Munkey : Tracking the Treasure Down …

The third and possibly final part of a series of posts on Jagged Alliance 2 Mod 1.13. Part 1 and Part 2 here.

With the increased number of weapons and armour types in this mod, each merc’s equipment seems more in line with their bio, e.g Raider, an ex-SWAT team leader arrives in full SWAT body armour and a MP5SD5 SMG when hired. Plus the different mercs seem less like the generic mercs with almost similiar weapons in the original game because the glut of weapons available.

Weapons & Items
After liberating the second town Cambria, Bobby Ray’s shop starts selling assault rifles and the odd sniper rifle. Time for a shopping spree

AKs galore.

Some items I found useful:

Binoculars – equip them and you can see enemies outside their sight range. Makes the longer ranged sniper rifles more useful than the original game since a spotter can now spot targets at extreme ranges (~50 tiles which roughly translates to 500m in real life) for the sniper to take them out. Of course you can depend on the sniper to find targets with his/her scope but the binoculars have a wider field of view.

A common sight when using a sniper-spotter team – these troops have yet to see my spotter or sniper yet

Armour – There’s a large variety of armor as stated before in the previous post. There’s upgradable Kelvar, Twaron and Dynemma and Spectra armour, camouflaged Zylon combat vests as well as SWAT-style body armour. Of course, each armour has its pros and cons like Zylon vests having camouflage bonuses at the expense of durability and SWAT armour being more durable and less bulky than Kevlar but not upgradable with armour kits. As mentioned before, sniper mercs can opt to forego body armour and go for a complete ghillie suit which makes them very well camouflaged in exchange for zero protection.

Upgrade Kits for Armour – So far I have seen kits for mechanic, medic, recon and field ops to upgrade certain types of armoured vests with increased protection and camouflage ratings. You’ll have to find out the benefits of each type of upgrade kits yourself though

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Melee Weapons – A expanded selection of knives and other melee weapons are available for purchase. Furthermore, some knives can be used as wirecutters or lockpicks. Others are just too cool to not have them, like this totally impractical cavalry sabre below.

Once you can purchase rifles in Bobby Ray’s, scopes become available in larger quantities. Different types of scopes provide different increase in sight ranges e.g a M24 with a high-powered sniper scope and a M16 with a battle scope provides a great difference in the minimum distance required to spot an enemy and the weapons must be readied in a specific direction to give a vision bonus for that direction. Also when a scoped weapon is readied, that particular merc will have a reduced field of view, so an unprotected sniper can be easily outflanked and killed by enemy forces.

Press End to check the line of sight for each merc to ensure that there are no blind spots around your sniper (The + and - keys increase the area to check for LOS). Read more about the new line of sight system at the official site here.

Outfitting the Mercs
The addition of other sniper-related equipment like ghillie suits, large calibre sound suppressors and cold-loaded ammo with lower muzzle velocity provide a lot more ways to outfit those mercs with high marksmanship than the equip-a-scope-on-every-assault-rifle strategy in the original game.

Assess the threat level of enemy forces with the Alt key

I equipped my more stealthy mercs with ghillie suits and armed them with powerful but slow-firing bolt action rifles e.g the M24 (below) with a sniper scope to pick off high-priority enemies (press the Alt key and mouse over enemy soldiers to view their equipment – the level of detail available can be adjusted in the configuration .ini file) like those armed with machineguns and sniper rifles.

Since a lone sniper with a bolt action rifle can be easily overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers so I equipped some mercs with more accurate semi-automatic rifles like the Colt Canada C7CT (below) to protect them as well as assist in spotting targets and finish off enemies wounded by the snipers.

I outfitted some of my other mercs with heavy Spectra or Dyneema armor with assault rifles with reflex sights as in the recon/CQB role. The inclusion of binoculars makes reconnaissance and infilitration a much less risky affair than the original game. Flashbangs have been included in this mod but I haven’t used them yet (should be useful when enemy soldiers insist on waiting out sieges in rooms).

Heavily armoured recon/CQB fighters

The other mercs just have to make do with whatever assault rifles I can salvage with battle scopes where possible.

Most of the new features in this mod have been covered in the last few posts so this should be the end of the series on Jagged Alliance 2 Mod 1.13.

There’s more light machineguns in this mod (not all can fire single shots) as well as a greater variety LAWs/RPGs (reloadable RPG-7/16s provide an alternative to the one shot LAWs) and large-calibre sniper rifles in .338 Lapua, .50 BMG and 12.7mm awaiting those who play the game till the end

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
First Look @ JA2 Mod 1.13
Second Look @ JA2 Mod 1.13