'Hard' difficulty isn't really hard, either. The only difference is that you'll get into annoying situations in which one of your mercs is killed immediately (i.e. without you having any chance to do anything right or wrong) more often and that you'll have less money at the beginning.

Part 1 finished. Final team: Ice, Magic, Kelly, Scully, Speck, Elio. I had to do without Lynx - he demanded a double salary becasue I had fired Vinny before.

Altogether it was fairly easy, but right now I'm too lazy to replay it at hard difficulty.

True, the controls aren't really good. Why can you do all the general management (guards, tappers, equipment, hiring new mercs) only at the end/begining of a day?

The whole controls of JA are completely unintuitive if you ask me. Once you know them, it's working quite efficient, but learning them is a pain.

Yeah, that's what I found out approximately at day 4.

Anyway, I had enough funds to pay Ice, Vinny and Hurl without additional money for some days.

Don't know if you remember, but you can get a map of the current sector by holding the right mouse button and dragging the mouse down. On that map, all objects are displayed as flashing pixels.

Just ask if you have any problems with the game.


Yes, but that doesn't work if you have improved your armor with "Compound 18" before. Also, you can sell parts of their corpses to some guy who deals with animal parts, but usually, you have more than enough money anyway.

I just started JA 1, and it's not bad either. Unfortunately, I missed the "Micro Purifier" you have to find at the beginning. Then I went back to the first sectors, and where is it? Behind some tree in the second sector...

If I have the time, I'll check to see if I still can't finish this game, starting (if I'm lucky) sometime next week.

Didn't the alien blood (?) also have some positive effect on armor?

Yes, it is hard, especially if you're too optimistic and go down the mine with only 3 mercs. After the monsters have spotted/smelled you, they will all come to you at once, and you need a lot of fire power per round because of that. But I think with 6 mercs, it's not a big problem.

Training mercs is virtually impossible in the first part. 'Learning by doing' will increase marksmanship by 1 point over the whole game (if at all), and setting people to train for a whole day is just a waste of time since it costs money, you need the people in the battle and it also doesn't result in much.

I remember that part being especially hard...

That has improved in part two, as most battles take place in the towns or other special sectors. However, if you happen to come across an enemy squad in the wilderness, the maps can be quite boring too. But you can avoid that by running away.


Better in part two as well. I've finished the game with completely different mercs, and there are many that are really good. Also, you can train your mercs a lot easier than in part one (if I remeber correctly). Most skills can be improved best when "learning by doing", but there are certain tactics to "boost" them systematically. For example, your strength and agility gets better when you sneak around a tank all the time and hit it with your fists.

That means if you want some challenge, you can hire some bad mercs only, and they will get better from mission to mission. For example, "my" merc had a markmanship skill of 65 at the beginning, and I finished with 100 and an experience level of 10.


That's one of the aspects I like most in JA 2. You can try to finish the game as fast as possible, or you can virtually conquer the whole map before and solve all the mini quests - that's what I tend to do.

One thing sucks though: You can select "Sci-Fi-Mode", which means that one of your mines will get infested with some kind of "monsters". Actually, that's quite funny, but that part of the game is buggy.

Thanks for the hint, I'll remember it next time I try it. Anyway, I finished the first part not so long ago (right before I gave the CD to Tapuak, actually), and it does suffer from uninteresting missions, especially at the beginning. Half of the sectors just contain of randomly placed trees and nothing else. Also, there are too few usable mercs, so you always end up using the same ones (Ivan, Ice, Lynx, Magic,...). Part 1.5 (Deadly Games) improves both points significantly, but in exchange, the linearity of the campaign bothers me, as well as the restrictive turn limits.

Bah, you're just too lazy!

The weapons/ammo stuff is slightly confusing at the beginning because there are so many useless pistols at first, I agree. But once you've acquired the first rifles for your mercs (which normally is after the first 5-10 battles), you will only need two kinds of ammo throughout the game: NATO 5.56 and NATO 7.62.

Yes, JA2 is a little on the 'complex' side of things. How many different kinds of ammo are there? 100?

I have played that game, however, I never could figure out what to do! my mercs were out of ammo in the first screen already.

Just finished this great classic again, and as I couldn't get enough, I was looking for more.

So in case someone here likes JA 2, I recommend the mod "Urban Chaos". It's very professional, including a whole new map/campaign, some new characters, weapons and so on. And moreover, it's even longer than the original game.

The files are available here: http://www.ja-galaxy-forum.com

I guess I'll continue with JA 1 now.