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Playing 1.13: what is different

1.13 is still Jagged Alliance 2: the same Arulco, the same maps, the same quests, the same mercs. What changes is the depth of almost every system around them. This page is a guided tour of the differences you will actually notice at the keyboard, from your first firefight to your first paycheck from a captured mine. Each section links to a page that covers the topic in full.

Almost everything is optional

Most 1.13 features can be tuned or switched off. Big choices live on the New Game screen; hundreds more live in Ja2_Options.INI. If a mechanic described here is not to your taste, there is probably a switch for it — see Configuration.

Combat

Suppression fire that works

The original game had suppression code, but it was broken and players never saw it. In 1.13 it is a core mechanic: bullets and explosions that land near a character generate suppression points, and once they exceed that character's tolerance (based on experience level, morale, and personality), the target starts losing Action Points — even into the next turn. Suppressed characters automatically drop stance, can be pinned down (starting a turn with 0 AP), and can accumulate shock until they cower, becoming even more vulnerable. It works on you exactly as it works on the enemy, and friendly fire suppresses too.

This changes tactics fundamentally: a machine gun burst that hits nothing can still win a turn. Suppression intensity can be adjusted or disabled in Ja2_Options.INI.

Read more: the suppression guide for the full mechanics, and starter tips for using it effectively.

Autofire you control

In vanilla JA2, autofire was just a longer burst with a fixed number of rounds. 1.13 lets you choose how many rounds to fire, at an extra AP cost per round determined by the weapon's "autofire shots per 5 AP" stat. You can also spread fire: in burst or autofire mode, click a target and then click and drag to walk the bullets evenly across an area — a line of dots shows where the fire will land.

Read more: fire-mode and targeting keys are in the hotkey reference.

More interrupts

Vanilla gave you at most one interrupt opportunity. In 1.13, multiple interrupts per turn are possible, for your mercs and for the enemy — if you pass on the first chance, you may get another. A merc who ends the turn with leftover AP has a better chance of triggering an interrupt, which makes overwatch positioning a deliberate tactic. Current releases also ship an optional Improved Interrupt System, toggled with IMPROVED_INTERRUPT_SYSTEM in Ja2_Options.INI (on by default).

The improved system (originally by Sandro, in SVN builds since r4903) replaces the old spot-checks with an interrupt counter: every Action Point an enemy spends inside your merc's line of sight — or hearing — has a chance of being counted, and when the counter fills, your merc reacts. The chance per AP depends on experience level, distance, and traits; how much the counter must fill depends on agility, remaining APs, and injuries. Mercs close together can also trigger collective interrupts for one another, so a squad leader who holds his APs and watches the battlefield genuinely helps the mercs around him.

Read more: Ja2_Options.INI tour.

Aiming: improved OCTH, optional NCTH

1.13 keeps the original chance-to-hit system (OCTH) as the default, with improvements: the chance-to-hit bars are now approximate rather than exact (your merc's marksmanship, wisdom, and experience determine how precise the estimate is), and burst and autofire cursors show separate bars for the first and later rounds — each additional round in a burst is markedly less accurate than the one before.

The optional NCTH (New Chance to Hit) system replaces percentages entirely. It draws a circle around your target; the bullet can land anywhere inside it, and the circle shrinks as you spend AP aiming. It rewards scopes, stances, and patience, and plays very differently. On current releases you pick the system with the NCTH setting in Ja2_Options.INI (off by default); on the old r7609 release it was a New Game screen option.

Read more: NCTH explained.

Reading the battlefield: stances, cover, and tile info

1.13 gives you far more information about who can see and hit what:

  • Press F on a tile to display its chance to hit, range, and lighting level.
  • Hold End (or toggle with Shift+V) to see which tiles your selected merc can see — and hold Del (toggle Shift+C) for the reverse: how well the enemy sees each tile, so you can pick real cover instead of guessing.
  • Hold Alt while hovering over an enemy to see a soldier tooltip describing their armor and weapon. How much it reveals (from a vague silhouette to an exact loadout) is configurable in Ja2_Options.INI.

Stances matter more than ever: lower stances make your merc harder to see and hit, and a merc who is prone or crouched next to cover rests their weapon on it for better accuracy. Cycle stances with Page Up / Page Down. Pressing L lets a merc look in a direction and, pressed again, raise their weapon — some bonuses, like a scope's vision range bonus, only apply with the weapon raised.

1.13 also adds optional support roles: a spotter with binoculars can help nearby snipers, an assistant can feed an adjacent machine gunner, and a radio operator can call militia reinforcements or jam enemy communications.

Read more: hotkey reference and support roles.

Tripwire and trap networks

Explosives get an engineering discipline of their own (in trunk builds after r5217). Tripwire can be planted like a mine and wired to explosives: one careless step activates adjacent wires in a chain reaction and detonates every connected charge. Wires can belong to four different networks with hierarchy levels, so you can build layered defenses that go off differently depending on where the enemy walks in — and grenades and flares can be converted into makeshift tripwire mines. Alt+Shift+V cycles a display of your own trap networks, and a merc holding a metal detector reveals nearby mines and tripwire with Alt+Shift+C.

Read more: the trap display modes are in the hotkey reference.

Items and inventory

Hundreds of guns

1.13 raised the engine's item limit from 350 to 5,000 and used the room: a few hundred new firearms, including everything from JA2: Unfinished Business, with all weapon stats re-engineered from the ground up. New armor includes ghillie suits and four generations of night-vision goggles, plus urban and desert camouflage alongside the original jungle type. If that sounds like too much, the Available Arsenal option on the New Game screen has a Reduced setting close to the original selection, while Tons of Guns enables the full arsenal — shops, enemies, and mercs all draw from whichever pool you choose.

Item descriptions were enhanced to match: at resolutions above 640x480, the description box shows detailed stats — AP costs, damage, loudness, armor coverage — and how the currently fitted attachments change them.

Read more: New Game options.

New ammunition types

Beyond the vanilla ball, AP, and hollow point, 1.13 adds specialty ammunition. Not every type exists for every caliber:

Type Effect
Tracer Helps score hits with burst and autofire; lights up the night
Match High-quality ammo that boosts effective range
Cold-loaded Reduced powder for quieter shots (pairs with suppressors), at the cost of damage
Glaser Twice as effective against soft tissue, twice as useless against armor
AET Armor-piercing and hollow-point effects in one, but wears your weapon out fast
Depleted uranium Rare, massive damage, degrades the target's armor
Lock-buster Shotgun ammo for blowing off locks

There are also new grenades, reloadable RPG-family rocket launchers, and grenade launchers that can fire in bursts.

Read more: starter tips for what to buy early.

Load-bearing equipment and the new inventory

With the New Inventory System (the default), your mercs no longer have a fixed grid of magic pockets. Instead they carry LBE — Load Bearing Equipment: harnesses, holsters, packs, pouches, and backpacks that each add their own pockets. Most mercs arrive with a basic harness, better gear appears as the campaign progresses, and enemies can drop theirs. Backpacks cost AP to lug around in combat — Shift+B drops every backpack in the squad before a fight, and Ctrl+Shift+F picks them all back up afterwards.

Read more: the new inventory system and LBE.

Attachments that go where they belong

The New Attachment System replaces the four generic attachment slots of vanilla with up to nine typed slots arranged around the weapon's picture — scope, muzzle, stock, underbarrel, and so on. Each slot only accepts matching attachments, and what a weapon can mount depends on the weapon: a sniper rifle takes a 10x scope, a pistol might manage a 2x at best. Reflex sights, suppressors, folding stocks, foregrips, trigger groups, and laser modules all trade off speed, stealth, and accuracy in different ways.

Read more: attachments from the player's side.

The strategic layer

Militia that actually help

Militia in 1.13 are a real part of your army:

  • You can order militia around on the tactical map — send them to cover or call them to your position. A merc must be near the militiaman to give orders, or can command every militia unit on the map with an extended ear equipped.
  • Militia squads can roam the countryside, engaging enemy patrols before they reach your towns, and nearby militia can reinforce your mercs when you attack a sector.
  • Veteran militia can be trained in city and SAM-site sectors.

All of this is configurable in Ja2_Options.INI.

Read more: militia training and command.

Enemies that move and hit back

The strategic AI no longer waits for you. Capture a town sector and enemies in neighboring sectors may come to investigate, forcing a follow-up battle; an INI option extends this behavior to every sector, or disables it for the vanilla experience. The Queen's forces reinforce each other between adjacent sectors during battles. And when you take all of Drassen, the cutscene threat is now real: the Queen launches a massive counterattack. A new difficulty above Expert, INSANE, adds more and better enemies with unlimited reinforcements.

The Drassen counterattack

Taking Drassen early without preparation can end a 1.13 campaign fast. You can disable the counterattack by setting TRIGGER_MASSIVE_ENEMY_COUNTERATTACK_AT_DRASSEN to FALSE in Ja2_Options.INI — no shame in it.

Read more: starter tips on surviving the early war.

Mine income you can see and tune

Mines are still your main income, and 1.13 makes them easier to manage: on the strategic map, M toggles a map filter showing mines, their names, and their income. In Ja2_Options.INI, MINE_INCOME_PERCENTAGE scales how much cash mines produce, and WHICH_MINE_SHUTS_DOWN controls which mine runs out of ore during the campaign.

Read more: recommended settings.

Bobby Ray's, your way

In vanilla, the quality of Bobby Ray's inventory was tied to difficulty. In 1.13 it is two separate New Game options — Bobby Ray Quality and Bobby Ray Quantity, each on a 1–10 scale — and the shop now stocks most items in the game, with grenades and explosives showing up earlier than they used to. Cranking quantity up makes equipping a large force trivial; turning both down makes every gun you loot matter.

Read more: New Game options.

Survival and spycraft

Years of later development — most of it by Flugente, announced feature by feature on the Bear's Pit forum's Flugente's Magika Workshop board — added entire optional subsystems on top of the campaign. The keys named below live in Ja2_Options.INI, and several of these systems can also be toggled from the 1.13 Features screen:

  • Food and water (FOOD, off by default; in the trunk since r5413 — full guide). Mercs grow hungry and thirsty hour by hour; letting either run low caps morale, slows energy and breath recovery, hurts assignment performance, and eventually costs health and strength points. Buy meals from merchants across Arulco, refill canteens in sectors with drinkable water — beware, swamp water is poisonous — and watch the indicators on merc portraits.
  • Covert operations (in the trunk since r5529; needs the new trait system — full guide). Any merc can change into civilian clothes and pass as a local; a merc with the Covert Ops trait can also take a soldier's uniform and walk through enemy positions openly armed. Cover is blown by visible weapons or camouflage, suspicious behavior, or getting too close — and a garotte or neurotoxin dart gives spies quiet ways to kill.
  • Prisoners of war (ALLOW_TAKE_PRISONERS; in the trunk since r5709 — full guide). Handcuff enemies instead of killing them — unconscious ones never resist — then release them after battle or ship them to one of Arulco's prisons (Tixa and Alma have the biggest). Keep prisons guarded to prevent riots; interrogating captives can recruit them into your militia, reveal enemy troop movements, or earn ransom money. You can even offer badly outmatched enemies the chance to surrender.
  • Intel (RESOURCE_INTEL; added in r8522, 2018). A second strategic resource for spycraft: gain it by interrogating prisoners, gathering information in disguise, photographing points of interest with a camera, and interactive actions like hacking computers. Spend it on the Recon Intelligence Services website to reveal enemy positions in a 4x4 block of the strategic map for a limited time, or at a San Mona black market that sells exclusive hardware only for intel.
  • Individual backgrounds (ENABLE_BACKGROUNDS, on by default; in the trunk since r6353). Every merc has a background — a former profession such as SWAT officer or drill sergeant — shown in the laptop, with small stat bonuses and penalties to match. Your IMPs choose theirs during character creation.

Quality of life

  • Resolutions. Vanilla was locked to 640x480; 1.13 runs at higher and custom resolutions, set in Ja2.ini. Some features need the extra space — the enhanced item description box does not fit in 640x480, and the maximum squad size (6, 8, or 10) is tied to resolution.
  • Tooltips everywhere. Skill traits explain themselves on the New Game and IMP screens, hovering over a merc's portrait shows their traits, and the hiring pages can show skills as tooltips.
  • Less busywork. Full mouse wheel support, an option to switch squads with Space, and batch commands: Shift+R reloads the whole squad, Shift+N swaps everyone between sun goggles and night vision, Alt+R reloads one merc's weapons.
  • More feedback. Optional stat progress bars show how close a merc is to a stat gain, unexplored strategic map sectors can render in gray, merc portraits can show equipped face gear, and an auto-save can run every combat turn, alternating between two slots.

Read more: hotkey reference.

Progress and coolness

Two hidden numbers quietly drive a 1.13 campaign, and understanding them explains why the early game feels the way it does:

  • Progress measures how far your campaign has advanced. It grows from what you accomplish, not from time passing.
  • Coolness is a rating every item carries. As progress rises, items of higher coolness become available — in shops (including Bobby Ray's), on enemies, and on your militia.

That is why everyone fights with pistols and SMGs in week one and assault rifles later: the arsenal unlocks in tiers on both sides of the war. The Progress Speed of Item Choices option on the New Game screen controls the pace — Very Slow keeps the early game long and scrappy, Very Fast escalates quickly. Combining a low Bobby Ray quality with a fast progress speed makes the game harder, and vice versa.

Read more: New Game options and the glossary for the community jargon.

And much more

This tour skips plenty: weather effects with rain and lightning, deeply customizable IMP mercs (several of them, with appearance and personality options), the Unfinished Business and Wildfire mercenaries added to the hiring rosters, sector facilities your mercs can work at, selling loot to locals directly from the sector inventory, and a multiplayer mode. For the full picture of what 1.13 is and where it came from, start at What is 1.13.

Sources