Jagged Alliance 3

• When recruiting initial mercs, make sure to click the IMP tab at the top to create a custom merc. This is "you" and after the initial cost, has no upkeep costs. Also, make sure you have at least 4, preferably 5 in your group initially (including IMP).

• Try to make sure you have enough specialties in your group. You want a medic, a demo expert, a mechanic, and some solid shooters. It's good to have someone with decent leadership too for training mercs and militia.

• When you make a character, look closely at the stats. Talents can only be taken if stats are high enough, with the breakpoints being 70, 80, and 90. If your stats are too low, you won't be able to gain any benefits from leveling up. That said, stats can be raised by training.

• Training in this game is different than JA2. The old strategy of high wisdom and low everything else doesn't work as well, because field experience Stat increases are more rare.

• The main way to improve mercs is training. The relevant stats here are Leadership (for the teacher) and Wisdom (for the student). So a high leadership merc can teach whatever stat they want well, and high wisdom mercs learn quickly. Keep this in mind when choosing long term members.

• Wisdom is not trainable, so don't shoot your IMP in the foot at the start.

• When doing training, there is a button on the bottom of the interface to change what stat is being taught.

• There isn't really a hard timer, but don't dilly dally. Money is a problem to start, but once you get some mines going it becomes less of an issue. The mines DO eventually run dry, though it takes a while.

• Train militia whenever you can, they do good work in holding off attackers. It might even be a good idea to hire a merc specifically for this, and have them go around keeping militia levels high while your main team does stuff.

• Save tiny diamonds, they can be used in Fleatown.

• Historical artefacts have a use in Port Cacao, so you might want to hold on to them.

• If you call a merc and they straight up refuse to work with you, they're gone for good. If it's someone you really want, you might want to reload and hire someone they like first.

• In combat, listen to the audio queues the mercs give you. This gives you a good idea of how likely the shot is to hit. Or download the official hit chance mod.

• When shooting, right clicking in the targeting interface spends extra AP to aim the attack, making it more accurate. A lot of weapon modifications will play around with this mechanic.

• There is a distress call from some other mercs that happens a bit into the game, and you need to go far north to assist. Once this happens, a series of events take place that drastically change the state of the world, so try and get as much done before then as you can. Specifically, do everything you can in the Refugee Camp before this happens.

• Stealth kills with guns are simple. You get a silencer on your gun and you shoot someone who isn't standing near to another buddy. Melee stealth is different, you right click the enemy and select prepare takedown. You then just need to get the merc near them. When they get close the merc will do the attack automatically.

• If you kill someone in stealth someone near them will go to surprised rather than active combat a lot of the time. If you can down them with another merc before their turn starts you get to keep the rest of the map unaware.

• There is no downside to putting silencers on your guns.

• Operations go a lot faster if there are 2 people on it. They go faster if someone has high related skills. They go faster again if someone has a trait that improves the speed of operations. So if you wanted a separate squad that does militia training because you're main squad is doing the fighting Hitman and Wolf would be a good duo

• You can put people in overwatch before combat starts. So it could go stealth kill, stealth kill, oh no they noticed that, oh they all got destroyed in round 0. There are in general more than 1 attacks possible for an overwatch so overwatch is very action point efficient.

• LMGs are god when it comes to overwatch. The merc goes into prone, the overwatch cone is enormous and they will absolutely shred anyone in the cone and anyone standing near them and you get an enormous amount of overwatch shots. The only downside is it does eat ammo. They're fantastic when you're heavily outnumbered.

• Explosives are also very good for group management.

• Take cover gets you more action points in the next turn.

• Your mercs won't automatically change position to utilize cover they are near like in XCOM. If you move next to low cover, you have to manually crouch to use it.