One Happy Team...

Completed Jagged Alliance.
Day 11. Capturing the last refinery was by far the easiest. I couldn’t believe my luck when I managed it on my 1st attempt with 3 mercenaries. The only issue now is that even with all refineries, I don’t generate enough revenue. I might need to either fire one of the mercs just to keep even at this rate. And I have no idea where the stolen totem is. At least now I have enough upgraded Spectral Shields for everyone.
Day 12. Mechanic with a lockpick is a must. I literally had to restart the day, because last enemy was behind a closed door, and the key was nowhere to be found. Also, at the “Santino peninsula” as I call it enemies carry ridiculous number of tear gas grenades. Gas masks are mandatory.
Day 13. Recovered the burned journal, and didn’t care to reload for it, since I’ve never got the quest in the first place.
Day 14. Some good news, the price for a tree actually went up. So now I can maintain more active mercs.
Capturing last sectors, Santino is surrounded. Since Magic and Spike, two of my best lock pickers, are healing, and Scully can’t pick most of the locks, I have to “knock”. If you fire at a door, enemies usually open it to look for you 🤡
Also, picked the headstones so natives don’t rebel. I don’t know what was to point of putting it on an island in the middle of nowhere, instead of some safe.
Day 15. I wanted to hire Mike, the best mercenary, before storming the compound. The problem is that I progressed too quickly and fired too many mercenaries, so he wouldn’t join until stats improve, which would mean just sitting there 🤡
Even with the best mercenaries, this last sector is so much not fun I’m surprised I ever finished it. Luckily I’ve read that the enemies are almost endless (basically Santino can deploy all his guards), so I didn’t try to ambush them like in other sectors.
Santino talks about the fallow sapling that he’s gonna blow, but nobody ever mentioned it or its importance before.
Also, I felt like in this area all the weapons jam more often. And if it isn’t enough, the game can get stuck mid-mission, probably due to too many enemies.
But I must say I’m very proud of myself for coming up with an idea to use two bombs to blow the wall enough for my entire team to sneak behind the bushes. This, and semiofficial way to save the sapling by Kelly jumping through a hole in the wall Santino left.

The game is deeply flawed, and I don’t use that term often. The sneaking mechanic is basically non-existent, the jamming is unpredictable, and so is visibilty and hits. But it is still incredibly engaging, mostly due to its handcrafted nature.

Day 7, some of the top-tier mercs are available now: Scully and Spike, among others. But same as with Magic, I actually don’t have that much money to pay them.
The reason everyone suggests to allow Santino to kidnap Brenda: once you rescue her, her father pays you a huge bonus 🤡

Even if you know where she’s been kept, rescuing Brenda is extremely difficult. Both of the bridges are mined and guarded, and as soon as guards are alerted, one of them will run to execute her.

This made me wonder, I always thought that when I played the game for the first time, she was killed because it took me too many days to rescue her. But maybe I was just too noisy when I did.

Day 8, mostly freeing the north of the map. There’s no interesting equipment there bar boobytrapped M14. I’m amazed that this game has what seem to be one-off mechanics. Jack says liberating the ancestral grounds made natives happy, but I’m not sure how it reflects on the bottom line.

Speaking of M14, while it’s recognizable in its original form:

I still don’t know as an firearms expert what its upgrade supposed to be:

Day 9. Ice asked for a pay raise, I refused, he isn’t worth that much, so he resigned. Speck resigned as well. Hired Kelly and Scully, two amazing mercs that come with their own M14 and M16.
Day 10. Capturing the 2nd refinery wasn’t any easier than the 1st, maybe even harder. Fire from the windows, enemies blowing the refinery after the first shots. Ironically I managed to capture it after countless attempts, when all my merc got badly injured, but nobody blew it.

Day 6, Brenda gets captured. As I kid I completely missed it, and she got killed waiting for the rescue. But even as an adult with the full grasp of English language, it’s kind of confusing: her sector gets invaded from a direction that shouldn’t be possible, and once you recapture it, you can find her coat, but without any indication where to look. Actually, there’s an indication, if you equip her coat, you’ll get a message, but no other item uses this mechanic, all the notes can be read without “equipping” them.

From watching Zemalf’s playthrough

I learned, among other things, that there’s M14 hidden in Sector 10, which I already captured. And I was pleased with myself to discover that you actually don’t need a stone to trigger the trap, you have enough time to dodge it. Rifles in this game are a big deal, mostly because there isn’t much firearms balance. They are simply better in every way.
The encounters are ridiculous at times. Opened a door, one enemy, trying to hit him, gun jam, trying to hit him with the second merc, gun jams, enemy throws a grenade, luckily, one of the mercs had a 2nd gun, fires it, missed, and the duo receives a second grenade as a present. Reload.

It would have been very nice if the keys you found would have been labeled. Because they are distinct, but you have absolutely no idea which door they fit. So I went to reconquer Brenda’s laboratory only to discover that none of the 3 keys I have until now fit.
Day 4. Fired Snake, who was the weakest link. Hired Static, a great mechanic with good markmanship. In theory, you can have up to 8 mercenaries deployed. In practice, until now, at least one is constantly repairing stuff. Another one is a permanent doctor, healing two most injured mercs. So you are deploying with 4. One one of them is probably Elio, who’s a cheap “mule”. So you actually have just 3 guys fighting.

Day 5, situation is improved since I replaced Wolf with Lynx, a great marksman. And since now I have 2 sets of upgraded Spectra Armor, my mercs take less damage.

Capturing the first refinery is not easy, even if you know what you’re doing. In the previous sector there is a stock of silencers, and I had Fidel, explosive expert, to disarm the C4. And yet it took me a couple of tries anyway.
Still, that’s 6 sectors captured in a day.

Damn, this game is hard. I have no idea how I completed it as a kid. Maybe that’s why I only managed it with the bad ending.
At first, I was pleased with myself. Finished the first day with 3 sectors captured, a lot of good equipment, all the mercs are injured, but now I’ll get to hire better ones, right? Wrong. Not one good merc accepts to join on the second day.
And my mercs are out of shape, so either I hire few more even worse mercs, or waste a whole day healing.
What’s worse are the enemies with grenades. Enemies with guns can miss. But grenades are almost guaranteed hit, and also risk or permanent injuries. Permanent, for the rest of the game, on the second day of playthrough.
And all this without understanding English that well back then. The game does give you clues, but they are quite vague. Like your employer saying that everyone is feeling unwell, must be the flu, and a guide he gives you (which you can decline) mentiones that the source of the water is to the north, and you need to connect the dots that somebody is poisoning the water supply.

As I mentioned I completed Jagged Alliance once, but it was a very long time ago.
This is somewhat of an annoying game. You start with hiring mercenaries. Some of them don’t have weapons at all. Some have a pistol, but no ammo. There’s plenty of .38 ammo to begin with, but if you hired someone with .45, you may run dry.
If you didn’t hire a medic: though luck. After taking a single hit your mercenary will continue bleeding out. If they seriously hit, they also lose HP… permanently.
The inventory space for each mercenary is very limited. So you also need to know that some of them come with useless items, like detonators without the explosives.
In general, you need to know a lot of stuff. On the first day you’re told that you can’t get any money until you find a stolen purifier chip. Where is it? Nobody tells you. I went north and found it on a mercenary there, but I wonder if I went west, would I be stuck without source of income for a few days?
On the other hand, if you know where to go first, you may be good, as some of the items are not random. For example there are some best vests (maximum inventory slots) in the first couple of sectors. If you know where to head first.
I think I didn’t know there were quick saves in the game. Otherwise I’d abuse that option as a kid. Although there’s just a single save for an entire day, a day may include multiple fights, and if you quit the game, that quick save is lost. How do I know that? Guess.
Another thing I surely didn’t know: there is a sneak move. It’s nowhere in the UI, you just need to read the manual to know that Shift is sneak modifier. How efficient sneaking is without cones of sight or any alert indication for that matter is another question. The only way I know enemies saw me is when the bullets start flying.

I lost count of how many revive attempts were there over Jagged Alliance. This one is convincing, though, at least at a first glance.
I finished both Jagged Alliance 1 as a kid, and Jagged Alliance 2 as a teenager, but honestly, I don’t remember much.

They brought many of the fan favorite mercenaries, like Ivan, Scully and Shadow. Also, each mercenary has an absolutely unique perk, in addition to common ones. And they also immidiatelly introduce the relatioship system: MD asks more money if you’ve already hired Steroid. Characters also have quips throughout the mission to reflect on certain events. And those are voiced, which is doubly impressive.
Unlike most tactics of the past 10 years, Jagged Alliance 3 doesn’t use the 2-action-points system from Xcom. Instead, each character has different number of action points available. This is pretty powerful, as Ivan, always the best starting merc, can fire two bursts from AK in a single turn.

I wanted to complain about enemies not dropping their weapons. But it makes sense, as that would be too hard to balance. And by the 3rd area I already had my entire team with AKs anyway.
And the most impressive bit is that tactics actually works. In the fight for the bunker, my squad was wiped out at first. I repositioned them, and won the fight without serious injuries.
Despite each mercenary having their own inventory, there’s one nice detail that reduces the micromanagement significantly: ammo is stored in a stash, so there’s no need to manage individual magazines.