2922

But for God’s sake, if you use 1.13 with JA2 (and if you don’t you’re mad) read up on how to disable the big counter-attack.

2923

Who what now?

2924

In the original, after you take the airport there’s a cutscene where Deidranna rages and demands that the airport be reconquered. Her flunkey says “it shall be done”, but then there never is any concerted effort to retake it. So in one of the mods, they put in a real counterattack. Given that you tend to only have a couple of grunts with handguns at that point, it’s a bit OTT for most players.

2925

V1.13 and the assorted mods are fine for enthusiasts but overkill for a newbie. I don’t think the base game has enough flaws to justify the contortions that the mods entail. For example, Hamrock’s suppression fixes: great for an experienced player, completely changes the tactical game, and I would never play without it. However, the mod scene isn’t into newbie polish. To ‘get’ suppression, you need to ‘get’ the core game completely, and then you need to read an exhaustive FAQ.

Also, as CL_flushentityhero mentioned, the mod scene is pretty balkanized. They’re all grinding away on their personal cheese projects, adding new (sometimes gamebreaking) bugs all the while. AFAIK there is no stable release. JA2 campaigns can take a long time to resolve, and it would suck if your campaign ends up crippled because of a fan-made bug.

All of this imo, of course.

2926

Thing is, 1.13 adds in a windowed mode, which is a feature I really don’t want to do without. What settings or options should I pay attention to to have the best newbie-friendly experience within 1.13? (already turned off the Drassen counterattack).

2927

1.13 adds high resolution support and dramatically improves the tooltips. I had almost no JA2 experience but it made obvious improvements to the game. Plus, it does make the gun variety much more interesting.

It also makes it harder.

Note that the mod doesn’t add the counter-attack, it’s an in-game event that was disabled at release. The mod re-enables it. The problem is that if you beat it you’ve pretty much won the game at a very early stage, so it’s either too hard, victory too early, or forces you to choose a different path thus eliminating some of the variety of the game.

2928

So would you advise a complete JA 2 newbie to simply get the newest official patch?

2929

I think the reasons he lists are all the more reason to play with 1.13 out of the box. It improves the game and either way you need to learn the game concepts, so you’re learning these ones too.

2930

Or just have some understanding of infantry tactics. It didn’t take me more than a map or two to grok the basic idea of “bullets whizzing overhead = lost AP.”

AFAIK there is no stable release. JA2 campaigns can take a long time to resolve, and it would suck if your campaign ends up crippled because of a fan-made bug.

All of this imo, of course.

Don’t be anti-fun, Adam :-) I’ve never experienced such a bug, and I’ve played a lot of these same mods back when they were in a less-polished state. There will be a wave of glitchiness when Headrock implements the new CTH calculator, but that’s in closed beta right now.

2931

Yeah don’t wait for the stable release, last time I checked it was two years since they checked something into stable.

2932

I am aiming my comments at new players who want to pick up and play. I can see how firefights in the first couple of towns would be extremely frustrating without an under-the-hood knowledge of suppression. The CTH hit on suppressed targets isn’t accounted for in-game IIRC. A completely new player could just burn their starting ammo on a couple of prone, cowering targets without landing a hit, crippling them for the next fight. Of course it’s easy to compensate for if you know what’s happening, but vanilla JA2 doesn’t require absorbing that additional layer of rules through documentation.

Re: bugs. The first revamp of CTH broke the AI for a couple of years. IIRC it was always overestimating the amount of AP required for shooting, and instead it would just move in weird little loops. It wasn’t until a few months ago that someone (I believe Hamrock) noticed his own mistake and corrected it. Until the correction, 1.13 was giving a measurably inferior experience to the original product with respect to AI.

Anyways, I had forgotten that 1.13 bumped the resolution. I guess that pretty much makes it mandatory, but I advise new players to be fearless with turning off new features.

2933

Never completed Syberia but I’ll get around to it when it snows. Just feel like winter is the right time for adventure gaming.

Found my copy of HoMM 3 Complete, thinking of Necropolis with a Hero specializing in Necromancy.
Doubt I’ll complete the map but I’ll set it on huge just for kicks.

2934

No, get 1.13, then look for the Drassen counterattack in the ini editor. Disable it and you’re good to go.

2935

If that’s all I need to do then I’m buying this game. Seeing some punk list half a dozen fucking modifications I’d need to use to make the game playable, by whatever standard, left me feeling like it would be more hassle than it was worth. I’m glad I can still get in and have fun by doing as little as possible.

2936

I’m sorry you saw my post (and, apparently, my character) that way. I don’t recall insinuating that the game was unplayable without mods at any point. Moreover, the process for installing “half a dozen fucking modifications” is equivalent to installing two - 1.13 plus whatever additional features you want packaged into a single-click installer.

2937

I never saw your post.

2938

Considering he’s the one that originally linked to the mods a page ago, I bet he thought you were addressing him. Crazy, eh?

Yea, I’ve been playing this game for 5+ years with just 1.13 (or something close to that, who knows). I had no idea they were still developing patches actually. I’m going to have to check out some of this new stuff too.

2939

Anyone have an opinion on Real Myst vs Myst?

2940

Real Myst is a big improvement over Myst. All of the same content in a format that is a lot more accessible to a modern audience, and some new content that, while brief, is really well done.

2941

Guh-bluh?

New content? I didn’t know that. Maybe I’ll pick it up during a sale.