Jagged Alliance 2

Remove all ads!

Picked this up on GOG. Having a blast. It's one of those games where I keep dying, yet somehow I find myself drawn to it again and again. I guess since I liked Wiz 8, this is a natural extension.

I do have a question, though. My Mercs are constantly in fairly low health and Medical Kits keep running out; not to mention healing seems to take forever (days) ... should I hire another Doctor? Or will things improve once I take over the Cambria hospital?

Also, I'd like to fly in some additional Mercenaries, but what can I do with ones that I already have? Militia training? What does that even do?

 

Militia training means that that you can have militia in the urban areas and SAM sites, that you 've conquered, in order to push back army's counterattacks.

As far as healing is concerned, one of your mercs must have high medical skill because that speeds up the whole process. Healing kits are not that rare, and in addition you can buy them (along with other equipment) through your laptop and have them delivered at one of the airports that you control. In Cumbria hospital you'll find just a good stash of healing kits and one of the doctors might join you if

Spoiler

you don't loot this stash.

After a battle, normally you stop to rest and lick your wounds. During this time a variety of tasks can be assigned to mercs and one of these is the rising of the health skill.

 

The best thing is of course to not get hit too much, but that can be very difficult, especially at the beginning when your weapons don't have a lot of range. Barring that, you'll want to lure them around a corner so you can (hopefully) interupt them and get the drop on them.

Another tactic I like to use is to wait until it's dark, then attack an area. This works best if you have a merc or your own character (the one you can create in the beginning) with the Stealthy and Night ops specialisations, because the Night ops allows you to see further in the dark - this allows you to spot the enemies before they spot you. Silenced weapons help here too, because if you manage to make a silent take down (which will usually require you to kill each enemy before he can shoot at you), none of his buddies will be alerted and they won't start swarming you.

The problem with fighting during the day is that the enemy can spot you a long way off, and even with good gear, your chances of hitting them without getting hit much yourself are not so good.

As BOC mentions, you can buy medkits once you occupy any area with a landing strip and it helps if the guy doing the healing has a high medical skill. You can fly in more mercs to help you out too, but you have to keep a financial balance there.

Training militia does precisely what it says - you can train guys to occupy urban areas and SAM sites to make sure that they remain under your control and they won't be retaken by the first roving band of enemy soldiers. Training militia has an initial cost, but doesn't cost anything beyond that. Each time you train militia in an area, you train 10 guys (if I recall correctly). In each area you can train up to 20 militia (if the 10 number is correct), and after that you can continue training these guys so they become stronger - they go from green shirts to blue shirts. Do this twice again, and you'll have trained these militia all you can. They can actually go up to dark blue shirts after that, but only through battle experience.

Having guys with high leadership increases the training speed at which militia are trained.

One thing to remember is that a merc's wisdom governs how quickly he or she will learn. All your stats can increase with use, but wisdom governs how quickly this happens. Wisdom normally doesn't increase easily, but disarming explosives will increase your wisdom - slowly. The best way to do this is to arm explosives, then disarm them yourself again. It trains both your explosives skill and your wisdom, but remember that you need to have at least one point in explosives to be able to do this because otherwise you won't be able handle explosives at all.

If you create your own merc through the character creation thingie, you'll want to give him or her high wisdom. The traits your merc gets are dependent on how you answer your questions in the questionaire, but the results may vary, so I usually reload until my guy gets Stealthy and Night ops, which are my favorite traits.

There's a very good strategy guide out there on the internet, written by Patusco. Should be pretty easy to find and can be considered the definitive strategy guide for JA2.