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Vehicles

Arulco is a big country, and walking everywhere costs time, energy and shoe leather. Vanilla JA2 gave you three usable vehicles — a Hummer, an ice cream truck and Skyrider's helicopter — and 1.13 builds a lot on top of them: vehicles have their own cargo inventory, can be driven around the battlefield in tactical view, and almost everything about them (seats, movement types, helicopter fuel and repair costs) is externalized to data files you can edit.

This page covers how vehicles work day to day. For where to find each vehicle and the quests around them, follow the walkthrough links — they contain spoilers, this page keeps them to a minimum.

Getting the three vehicles

Vehicle How you get it Walkthrough
Hummer Bought for $10,000 from Dave's gas station in L10, west of Balime The Hummer
Ice cream truck Comes with Hamous, who drives it along a random road sector; hire him and the truck is yours Hamous and the ice cream truck
Helicopter Take Drassen airport (B13), then find and escort its pilot, Skyrider Find the helicopter pilot

1.13 caps how many vehicles you can own at a time: MAX_NUMBER_PLAYER_VEHICLES in Ja2_Options.INI defaults to 2 (valid values 2–6). The helicopter does not count — it stays Skyrider's, you only rent it.

A fourth vehicle? (spoiler)

The Jagged Alliance wiki describes a 1.13-only way to acquire a tank: when your militia in Meduna brings a tank into a sector you hold, you can assign a merc to it from the map screen's vehicle list, subject to the two-vehicle limit. It drives like the Hummer (fuel, off-road capable) but you cannot fire its cannon — its main use is as a bullet magnet. For fighting enemy tanks and combat jeeps, see Know your enemy.

How ground vehicles work

Boarding and leaving

Assign mercs to a vehicle from the map screen the same way you assign them to a squad — the vehicle appears as an assignment option when merc and vehicle are in the same sector. A vehicle needs an awake driver to move; the other passengers can sleep during the trip. Two quality-of-life switches in Ja2_Options.INI control what happens when mercs pile out:

Setting Default Effect
ADD_PASSENGER_TO_ANY_SQUAD TRUE Mercs leaving a vehicle join any squad with a free slot instead of each founding a new squad (vanilla: FALSE)
PASSENGER_LEAVING_SWITCH_TO_NEW_SQUAD FALSE Automatically select the squad a merc joins on leaving (vanilla: TRUE)

Strategic travel

The Hummer and the ice cream truck cross a sector in about 30 minutes — much faster than walking, and the passengers don't tire. The truck is road-bound; the Hummer nominally "needs roads" too, but with HUMVEE_OFFROAD = TRUE (the shipped default in Ja2_Options.INI) it may enter off-road terrain such as plains and light forest, and in practice it crosses most land sectors.

If you march your squad out of a sector on foot, the vehicle stays behind — you have to drive it or come back for it.

Fuel

Ground vehicles burn fuel as they travel and stop dead when the tank runs dry. The tank holds two full gas cans' worth: in the game code a gas can at 100% status refills exactly half the tank. To refuel, have a merc with a filled gas can in hand use it on the vehicle in tactical view.

Where to get gas:

  • Dave's gas station (L10) — after you buy the Hummer, Dave tops it up for free whenever it visits and he has fuel in stock (he sometimes doesn't).
  • Estoni (I6) — after the Rescue Shank quest, Jake sells gas cans from his junkyard shop. See Estoni in the walkthrough.
  • Loose gas cans found around the countryside.

Cargo: the vehicle inventory

With VEHICLE_INVENTORY = TRUE (default), your vehicles have their own inventory with the same layout as a merc's — a rolling loot locker for battlefield salvage. Open it like a merc's inventory in the sector view (Enter or ~ toggles the merc/vehicle inventory pane — see the hotkey reference). According to the Jagged Alliance wiki this applies to the ground vehicles, not the helicopter.

Vehicles in combat

Damage and repair

Vehicles can be shot and blown up. A damaged vehicle is repaired by a merc with a decent Mechanical skill and a toolkit (the Repair assignment); a vehicle reduced to 0 condition is wrecked for good — it can no longer be driven or repaired. In 1.13, Estoni's junkyard is a strategic facility that speeds up vehicle repair, which makes it a natural motor pool.

Driving in tactical view

Since 2014 (a feature by modder anv), vehicles are driveable on the tactical map when ALLOW_DRIVING_VEHICLES_IN_TACTICAL = TRUE (the shipped default):

  • Take control of a vehicle by clicking it, or by clicking the steering-wheel icon in the team panel under the driver's portrait.
  • Vehicles have two gears — slow and fast drive — switched exactly like walking and running (S, R or double-click). They can reverse, but not sidestep or sneak.
  • Passengers can be selected and fire from inside the vehicle; they count as sitting for hit calculations. Enemies shoot back at the vehicle.
  • Entering or exiting costs action points (30 AP in the original implementation). When the driver bails out, the next passenger takes the wheel automatically.
  • With ALLOW_CARS_DRIVING_OVER_PEOPLE = TRUE (default) you can run people over, and holding Shift lets cars ram through light structures — CARS_RAMMING_MAX_STRUCTURE_ARMOUR = 30 by default, enough for wooden furniture and trees but not sandbags or stone walls.

To stop the obvious exploit of driving into the middle of the enemy with the vehicle's own AP while every passenger keeps a full turn, AP_SHARED_AMONG_PASSENGERS_AND_VEHICLE_MODE (default 3) deducts APs spent by the vehicle from its passengers as well, up to a threshold; AP_SHARED_AMONG_PASSENGERS_AND_VEHICLE_SCALE (default 100) scales the deduction. Mode 0 restores the old free-riding behavior.

Entering battle inside a vehicle

In vanilla, driving into a hostile sector simply dismounted your mercs. In 1.13 a long-standing crash can occur if combat starts while mercs are aboard and your squad-size limit is smaller than the vehicle's seating capacity. If you raise vehicle capacity, raise the maximum squad size to match — see recommended settings.

The helicopter

Skyrider's helicopter is the fastest transport in the game — about 10 minutes per sector, over any terrain — and doubles as a scout: Skyrider reports enemy activity in sectors he overflies. It is also the most configurable vehicle in 1.13. The prices and percentages below are the shipped defaults from Ja2_Options.INI and Data-1.13\Helicopter_Settings.INI.

Costs

Skyrider charges per sector flown: HELICOPTER_BASE_COST_PER_GREEN_TILE = 100 dollars in safe airspace and HELICOPTER_BASE_COST_PER_RED_TILE = 1000 in sectors covered by a hostile SAM site. Hovering over a drop-off sector costs extra ($50 safe / $500 covered). With HELICOPTER_PAY_SKYRIDER_IN_BASE = TRUE (default) he bills you after landing safely at base instead of up front, and HELICOPTER_RETURN_TO_BASE_IS_NOT_FREE (default FALSE) decides whether automatic returns cost money. Skyrider's willingness to fly is also tied to his home town's loyalty unless you disable HELICOPTER_TOWN_LOYALTY_CHECK in Helicopter_Settings.INI.

SAM sites, damage and repair

Flying through SAM-covered airspace is a gamble: each hostile sector gives the SAM a HELICOPTER_SAM_SITE_ACCURACY = 33% chance to hit. In 1.13, a hit can also wound the people inside (HELICOPTER_PASSENGERS_CAN_GET_HIT = TRUE; 30% chance per passenger, 1–10 damage). Capturing the SAM sites opens the skies — see the mid-game walkthrough for the SAM campaign.

Damage comes in two stages, and repairs are Waldo's business (WALDO_CAN_REPAIR_HELICOPTER = TRUE): a basic repair costs $2,500 and takes about 8 hours, a serious one $7,500 and about 24 hours, and every repair makes the next one more expensive (capped at $10,000 / $25,000). A seriously damaged helicopter is grounded until fixed (SERIOUSLY_DAMAGED_SKYRIDER_WONT_FLY = TRUE).

Fuel and landing sites

With ALTERNATIVE_HELICOPTER_FUEL_SYSTEM = TRUE (default) the helicopter has a real fuel tank: HELICOPTER_DISTANCE_WITHOUT_REFUEL = 25 sectors on a full tank (for scale, Drassen airport to Estoni is 14 sectors), hovering burns one fuel unit per 10 minutes, and a full refill takes 30 minutes at base. When fuel runs low, Skyrider asks before dumping your mercs out (HELICOPTER_ASK_BEFORE_KICKING_PASSENGERS_OUT = TRUE).

The helicopter can only land and refuel at Drassen airport (B13) and, after the Rescue Shank quest, Estoni (I6) — everywhere else it just hovers while mercs rope out. The list of refuel sites is externalized in the source, which is how mods add their own landing pads.

Hot LZ drops

Vanilla Skyrider refused to drop mercs into enemy-held sectors. 1.13 externalizes this as ALLOW_SKYRIDER_HOT_LZ in Ja2_Options.INI:

Value Behavior
0 Vanilla — no drops in hot sectors
1 Drops mercs at the center of the map
2 Drops mercs at the map edge he entered from (shipped default)
3 You pick the landing spot

The Queen flies too

Late in a 1.13 campaign the enemy can field its own transport helicopters, which your SAM sites and MANPADS-armed mercs can shoot down. That system is covered in Know your enemy.

Editing and modding vehicles

Vehicle definitions live in Data-1.13\TableData\Vehicles.xml. Each <VEHICLE> entry carries the display names, a movement type (MvtTypes: 0 foot, 1 car, 2 truck, 3 tracked, 4 air), SeatingCapacities, VehicleArmourType (an item index from Items.xml), Neutral, VehicleEnabled and Pilot (used only by the helicopter, which is bound to Skyrider's profile). Individual <SEAT> blocks place each passenger in the vehicle for tactical view — seat name, driver flag, facing, position offsets, and a Compartment tag (seats in different compartments can't be swapped in combat).

The entries you care about: uiIndex 160 is the Hummer, 162 the ice cream truck, 163 the helicopter. The file also defines an Eldorado (161) and a tank (164, disabled). Raising <SeatingCapacities> beyond the default 6 is the classic tweak — the ground vehicles define ten seat positions, and recommended settings walks through the edit and its crash caveat.

For adding entirely new vehicles (the SVN-era Externalized Vehicles Example mod), see Externalized content; for general XML editing practice, see XML files. The helicopter economy is tuned in Data-1.13\Helicopter_Settings.INI, and the rest of the vehicle switches on this page live in Ja2_Options.INI — see the options tour.

Undocumented corners

Whether Skyrider will fly at night is not covered by any of the sources used here. If you know, the Bear's Pit forum is the place to confirm and share it.

Sources