Almost all the 1.13 options are just that, options. You can turn them on and off as you please, to customize it to what you want to play.
Also, for the crashes, which version are you using, and where did you get it from? The 4870 version shouldn't be crashing that much, so it does seem weird. Feel free to either post here or visit #bearpit on quakenet to see if we can help you a bit more. Be aware that most of us there are europeans, which means we sleep when it's night in Europe. If you don't like irc, feel free to PM me, though I'm not sure if I can help.

Hiya JMich.

I run the newest version, 4870, grabbed it the same day of my first post :). Grabbed it from the forum posts at http://www.bears-pit.com/

I been playing it a bit more, i found a workaround on the worst crash bugs. What i got hit by (3 times now), in start area and Drassen was that the game seems to drop one or more mercs from the group.
The first time, i had no groups at all when in "action mode", despite the game saying that all mercs were in group 1 if i were in map mode. This happened in the start zone.
The second time, I had a group of Ira and Meltdown, other 3 mercs were missing.
Can't remember how many the game thought i had in my group the 3rd time.

The crash was a bug wiht the text "<merc's name> is not in a valid group. (pSoldier->ubGroupID is 0.", and only happened when i moved my mouse cursor to the edge of the map screen, but was 100% repeatable.
I found two workarounds. One was to just not touch the edges of the map with the mouse cursor :). The second was to go out in map mode, assign all mercs to another group, and go back in action mode, that solved the issue too.

Also had the occasional crash while quick loading, usually it would go in a loop and refuse to quick load that particular save, but using regular load instead worked fine.


Apart from those issues, I must say that the mod is an amazing piece of work. I went all out and put on almost all options, and im having a lot of fun, despite having absolutely NO clue what weapons to go for, the weapon choises became incredibly complex now, even at the start. I took ONE look at Bobby Rays, and decided to not even look again till after the Drassen attack so i actually got some money and hopefully some better weapons :).

Oh, and im impressed with the new targetting. In the old JA, im 99.9% sure that quick loading before enemies turn, and NOT doing anything would give the same result (tested from completing JA2 5 times), so if you wanted to quick load and hope to aviod a shot, you had to do something, even if it was just move.
In the new one, the shooting seems to recalculate each time, so it's not so predictable.

And now, back to surviving Drassen counterattack with 5 mercs :)

Can't recall hearing of this bug, not sure if it was fixed in the 4870 bugfix. Do a post in the bear's pit if you can, to let Rowa and Flugente know about it if possible.

This usually happens when there's a bullet flying, an explosion happening, or something else going on. Best to only quickload on your turn.

By default, the game starts with Bobby Ray set to awesome, which means he gets a +10 on coolness level available to sell, and x10 on the amount available. Starting it with BR set to normal will have the items appear in a more coherent number, thus you'll be able to see the new items easier.

NCTH is different, but the random part also works with OCTH. You should be able to toggle it in the preferences, though on newer revisions you can change it only when starting a new game. Personally, I think NCTH still needs a lot of work, especially for vanilla 1.13, but if you do enjoy it, go ahead :)

Make sure to read the relevant thread at the Bear's Pit, or you can try ambushing the groups before they make it to Drassen.

The NCTH thing I had to turn off. It can't be working right. Last time I played I had Buzz and my sniper on the roof of a building (mine sector in Cambria). Suddenly an enemy pops up right in front of Buzz who is holding a Colt Commando MG. She does not get the interrupt but the enemy is out of APs. So on my turn I set Buzz's gun to "burst" (or maybe it was full auto...can't remember) and unloaded point blank (Buzz had a marksmanship of 92 at this point).

All missed.

So I unload another burst at point blank range, not aiming for any location but torso.

All misses.

Had like 10 AP left so I lay down in the prone stance.

Then I turn things over to my sniper who has a scoped sniper rifle and 90 marksmanship. She is about 5 tiles away from the rooftop enemy, aims for his head...and misses. She had just nailed two guys in the head from about 25 tiles away and I took careful aim (using all APs) for the guy I just missed.

Next enemy turn the enemy fires his revolver at Buzz twice...and misses.

My next term Buzz again tries to go full auto firing all the bullets she can, still at point blank range.

And misses.

At this point I decided to start over and uncheck the option to use the NCTH.

So I finally got around to downloading 1.13 and I am going through the source files. You are right in that it's really great to be able to customize what I want and do not want via the INI editor.

However, I am looking through the Merc Profile Editor and I noticed that 1.13 uses new skills for mercs. Does it say anywhere what these new skills do?

Mousing over the skills for a couple of seconds should tell you what they do, both during IMP creation and on the Merc Stats screen in the laptop. There's also new personality and disability traits (can also be moused over for info) which has effects.

I read somewhere that some aspects of the shooting skills don't work with the NCTH system but I don't know if thats true, may need JMich to confirm/deny that.

I was going to list all the details of the Personalities and Skills and had it all typed out, but then I realised that I tweaked values of most of them a little so I deleted them as I don't want to post details that are a little off from the mods settings... oh well, 15 mins wasted :)

I'm a novice to Jagged Alliance 2 who loaded the 1.13 mod without playing the vanilla game first. I think it is great so far. I'm not too overwhelmed. I guess I will never know how easy I could have had it.

I did turn off the Drassen counter attack. That helped a lot. For those wondering, find the JA2_Options.ini file. Find the line that says STRATEGIC_EVENT_SEND_TROOPS_TO_DRASSEN. Set it to FALSE.

And Bobby Ray's, EGAD!, I picked Excellent and didn't realize that I would get the NRA's version of Willy Wonka's Chocolate factory! That can actually be a bit too much. When I saw the option of Normal to Awesome in Bobby Ray's, I took that to mean from Bad to Best. But I'm assuming in this case Normal just mean less variety but still good depending on your level and not a dizzying array of death dealers. Does that sound right?

Bobby Ray's selection depends on your current progress. The store will have items with a coolness value of up to progress/10. The Normal/Good/Great/Excellent (or however they are called) is a modifier to that value, with the modifier being +1, +3, +7 or +10. Thus with an EXCELLENT BR selection, you will have items with a coolness value of up to 10 (aka all items) right from the start. Usefull if you want to see what's available right from the beginning, not so usefull if you want to have some kind of weapon progress.

Excellent is +3, I think. The +10 is called 'awesome'.

True, shows how long it was since I last started a JA2 game.

The BR setting doesn't just decide what items are available it also effects the amount of each item in stock too.

This has been changed in more recent versions, but again, I can't recall exactly when. I think the 4870 stable one doesn't have them seperated, but as I said, way too long since I last fired up JA2.

Yeah, noticed a couple of days ago, I've been sticking to the stable versions, so 4870 is what I'm on. and I've read about some of the updates that I haven't seen yet (10 man squads - I want :D) but I've never been interested in using... whatever that updater program you use is called (I should stop visiting forums when I'm half sleepy, lol). Always preferred just downloading installer exe's.

It's been a while since I played JA2 with 1.13, of course I don't have my personalized config files any more
and have forgotten more than half of things that were important for me. There are just some changes where
I prefer the vanilla version. I can't get used to the new action point system where it goes up to 100. Is there
actually an easy way / a way at all to use the old one? Not that it's bad, an old dog can just learn that much
new tricks.

The Drassen counter attack was a nice surprise. I wasn't on the most hard difficulty, but I went
with the vanilla way, directly walking to Drassen. And got it handed to me. Well, I brought pistols to a
sniper rifle fight. They really had Dragunovs. In retrospect, I didn't do that bad. Hell, I played Battle Isle
and History Line when it came out. I don't care for odds. I don't leave until a battle is won. Or, of course,
I take the diskette and throw it against the wall, cursing the cheating basterd ai for being a cheating...

Data-1.13\APBPConstants.ini, AP_MAXIMUM = 100
Change the 100 to 25, and you are back to the previous system, even though the base 100 is better. Most actions cost 4 times what they did before, but 100 points allow for better customization. Thus while a pistol in vanilla may have needed 3 AP to fire, in JA 1.13 the same pistol may need from 10 to 14 APs to fire, thus allowing for differences between similar pistols.
I do prefer the 100 AP approach, but to each his own.