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Starter tips

New to 1.13, or coming back after years of vanilla JA2? This page collects practical advice for your first campaign: who to hire, how to fight, how to actually hit things under the new aiming system, how to keep money coming in, and how to survive (or skip) the infamous Drassen counterattack.

If you want a step-by-step path from installation to holding your first town instead, follow the guided tutorial. For a beginner-paced campaign opening with spoilers, see the walkthrough first steps.

Your first hires

A balanced starting team covers a few key roles. Some example picks from the AIM roster:

  • One or two medics — MD, Fox, or Spider. Someone has to patch up the inevitable bullet wounds, and doctors keep your team in the field between fights.
  • A technician — Vinny or Barry. A repairman keeps your weapons and armor in working order.
  • Several good fighters — Buns, Grizzly, Igor, Grunty, or Meltdown. You need people who can shoot back.

If you prefer a quieter approach, consider mercs who:

  • are stealthy — Mouse, Igor
  • specialize in Night Ops — Spider, Barry

A few hiring tips:

  • Hover over a mercenary's portrait to see their traits. The tooltips explain what each trait does. (Old guides mention a SHOW_SKILLS_IN_HIRING_PAGE setting for this — it only exists on old builds; in current releases the tooltips are always on and the setting is gone from Ja2_Options.INI.)
  • Contract lengths, gear kits, insurance and the discount M.E.R.C. agency have their own guide — see hiring & contracts.
  • Your IMP character (the custom merc you create at the start) has no upkeep cost, so build them to fill whatever role your hired team lacks — see creating IMPs.

Early strategy and tactics

In combat

  • Save AP for interrupts. A merc who ends the turn with leftover action points has a greater chance to trigger an interrupt when an enemy moves into view — under 1.13's improved interrupt system, a merc at full AP reacts up to a third faster than one who is spent. Ending the turn with unspent AP is overwatch, not waste. See interrupts & reflexes.
  • Use lower stances. Crouching and prone mercs are harder to see and harder to hit. Stand up only when you need to move fast.
  • Rest your weapon. A merc standing or crouching behind a crate, rock, low wall or window sill rests their weapon on it and gains part of the prone-position accuracy bonus (on by default). Cover is accuracy, not just protection — see weapons & ballistics.
  • Suppress the enemy. Suppressive fire reduces the target's AP, so even bursts that miss can pin enemies down and stop them from shooting back. It is one of 1.13's most powerful new tools — the suppression guide explains how to use it and how to resist it.
  • Pair snipers with a spotter. Any merc holding binoculars can use the Spotter skill from the skills menu (A): after a couple of turns of watching, teammates near the spotter who fire rifles at distant targets the spotter can see get a large accuracy bonus. See support roles.
  • Ready your weapon to get scope bonuses. Press L to look in a direction, and L again to raise your weapon. Some bonuses — like a scope's vision range bonus — only apply while the weapon is raised.
  • Drop your backpack before a fight. Backpacks slow a merc down and make them easier to spot. Press Shift+B to drop backpacks for every merc in the sector, and press it again after the fight to pick them back up. See the inventory guide for how LBE gear works.

More combat hotkeys worth learning early are on the hotkeys reference.

Between fights

  • Let your mercs sleep. Make sure everyone sleeps every so often — a campaign is a marathon, not a sprint.
  • Reload before moving on. Alt+R reloads the selected merc's weapon; Shift+R reloads the whole squad.
  • Keep your guns clean. With the default advanced repair system, firing fouls weapons — fastest in dusty sectors and bad weather — and dirty, worn guns jam. Buy a few cleaning kits: the Action menu (Ctrl+.) cleans on the spot outside combat, and a merc on Repair duty with a kit cleans every dirty gun in the sector. See weapons & ballistics.
  • Train militia. When you have captured most of a city, train militia to defend it while you are elsewhere. In 1.13 you can give militia direct orders in tactical combat (have a merc talk to a militiaman), and an INI option even lets you move militia groups around the strategic map — see the militia guide.
  • Try the support roles. Spotters, assistant machinegunners, and radio operators are optional systems that can give your squad an edge — see support roles.

Hitting things under NCTH

If you enabled the New Chance to Hit system, aiming works very differently from vanilla — read the NCTH guide for how it actually calculates your shots. Practical advice:

  • Optics make a huge difference. Once you secure Drassen airport and Bobby Ray's opens up, consider ordering 2x scopes for your rifles. Reflex sights make weapons faster to aim, and are great on close-quarters guns.
  • Before you have optics, fight at night. Darkness levels the playing field, and Night Ops mercs excel here — see camouflage & stealth for the whole night-fighting toolbox. Press Shift+N to smart-swap goggles for every merc in the sector: night-vision goggles at night, sun goggles by day.
  • Check the numbers. Put the cursor on a tile and press F to display useful information about it, including chance to hit, range, and lighting level.
  • Autofire is very effective — and by extension, so is suppression. 1.13 lets you choose how many rounds to fire in a burst. A foregrip attachment improves autofire accuracy.
  • Lasers help up close. Laser aiming modules improve chance to hit within a certain range, but they also make your merc more visible to enemies.
  • Match the scope to the fight. High-magnification scopes give bigger vision bonuses but more tunnel vision — cover your sniper's back. See the attachments guide for what each attachment class does.

NCTH not for you?

Plenty of veterans prefer the old chance-to-hit system (OCTH) because it is more consistent and easier to read. It's a legitimate choice, not a beginner crutch — see NCTH vs OCTH and the new game options page.

Economy basics

  • Mines are your income. Capturing towns with mines (Drassen is the classic first target) provides the steady cash flow that pays your mercs' salaries — but a mine pays nothing until you have talked to its head miner, and income scales with town loyalty. Note that one mine will eventually run out of ore — the WHICH_MINE_SHUTS_DOWN setting in Ja2_Options.INI controls which one, and MINE_INCOME_PERCENTAGE scales how much mines pay out. The full picture is in the economy guide.
  • Militia are a running cost. Unlike vanilla, 1.13 militia cost money to keep: $750 per training session, then daily upkeep of $10/$20/$30 per green/regular/elite militiaman. If you cannot pay at midnight, militia desert — don't drain your account to zero the night upkeep is due.
  • Sell your loot. Battles leave behind piles of enemy weapons. With SELL_ITEMS_WITH_ALT_LMB enabled in Ja2_Options.INI (the default), Alt + left-click sells items directly from the sector inventory screen — for roughly 10% of their value; hauling the good pieces to a dealer such as Tony in San Mona pays far better. If you want enemies to drop everything they carry, look at the DROP_ALL setting — both are covered on the recommended settings page, and selling in general in the economy guide.
  • Bobby Ray's is your gun shop. The online store becomes available once you seize Drassen airport. The Bobby Ray quality and quantity settings you picked on the new game screen control what it stocks — see Bobby Ray & item progression. Shipments can occasionally be lost or stolen — the CHANCE_OF_SHIPMENT_LOSS and STEALING_FROM_SHIPMENTS_DISABLED settings control this.
  • Buy ammo by the box. Bobby Ray's sells cardboard boxes and crates of loose ammo as well as magazines. You can't load those directly — but outside combat, drop a box or crate onto a gun of matching caliber and ammo type and it converts into ready magazines sized for that gun. See weapons & ballistics.
  • Better gear comes with progress. As your campaign advances, a "progress" value rises (check it any time with V), and items of higher "coolness" appear in shops and in enemy hands. The Progress Speed of Item Choices new-game setting controls how fast this happens — don't expect top-tier rifles in week one. How progress and coolness work is explained on the item progression page.
  • Short on starting cash? The starting money per difficulty can be changed in Data-1.13\TableData\DifficultySettings.xml — see recommended settings.

Surviving the Drassen counterattack

Shortly after you take Drassen, the Queen sends a massive counterattack force to retake it. In 1.13 this attack is infamous for being very difficult to handle so early in the campaign. Its size scales with difficulty — four attack groups totalling 24 soldiers on Novice, 40 on Experienced, 60 on Expert and 96 on Insane, converging on the mine sector (see difficulty levels compared).

You can turn it off

In Data-1.13\Ja2_Options.INI, set TRIGGER_MASSIVE_ENEMY_COUNTERATTACK_AT_DRASSEN to FALSE to disable the counterattack entirely. This is the recommended choice for a first campaign — see recommended settings for this and other new-player tweaks.

If you want to face it anyway:

  • Build militia early. You can train or buy militia before you have captured the entire city — save up some cash for it.
  • Position your militia deliberately. On the strategic map, keep militia in the mine sector and the sector next to it, so they can be called in as reinforcements when the attack lands.
  • Dig in before accelerating time. Get your mercs into cover in the tactical screen before you compress time to wait for the attack.
  • Respect your weapon ranges. Do not expose your mercs to danger until they can get a good shot — let the enemy walk into your effective range, not the other way around.

A more detailed treatment of the battle is in the early game walkthrough.

Sources

  • Jagged Alliance 2 v1.13 – Play Guide — previous starter documentation (r8741 era), sections "Keyboard shortcuts", "NIS/NAS", "Support roles", and "Starter tips"
  • Jagged Alliance 2 v1.13 – Starter Documentation — previous starter documentation (r8741 era), features list, FAQs, and glossary
  • Jagged Alliance 2 v1.13 – Recommended Settings — previous starter documentation (r8741 era), INI and XML tweaks tables
  • Data-1.13\Ja2_Options.INI and Data-1.13\TableData\DifficultySettings.xml from the current 1dot13/gamedir repository — defaults for every setting named on this page, militia training and upkeep costs, counterattack group sizes; the r8741-era SHOW_SKILLS_IN_HIRING_PAGE setting is absent from the current file
  • 1.13 source code from 1dot13/source: Laptop/AimMembers.cpp — the skills/traits tooltip on hiring-page portraits is unconditional in current builds
  • JA2 1.13 official hotkey reference (r9389), as drift-checked on the hotkeys page — backpack, goggle-swap and reload keys