[Anglachel]

Originally posted by Blitz:
Take pity on my BELOVED Jagged Alliance series. First, Sirtech goes tits up, then the franchise is purchaced by infamous garbage-spewer Strategy First, who oh by the way just layed off everyone and fired the whole JA legacy team. Then they hand the whole kit and kaboodle over to an unknown russian developer, who don't seem to have anyone on staff who speaks english. Actually to call them unknown would be generous, as they are best-known for a horrible piece of trash cyberpunk game whose name escapes me. To make things worse? TWO DAYS after the 2-year development program is announced, they RELEASE SCREENSHOTS. Yes in two days, they managed to get a working alpha going and post screens on the webpage. Seems they are using the "engine" of another TBS to kick start their process. I've never heard of a TBS using an engine from an existing game before. This ought to be interesting.

As far as what they have done with it is to release what is a mod of Jagged Alliance called "Jagged Alliance 2: Wildfire". It is a mod created already in the strong mod community for Jagged Alliance by this russian guy named Popov. It adds more guns, notably a lot of russian type ones, makes the game harder in that the easy setting for "Wildfire" is harder than the hard setting on the original game. By harder I mean they throw more men at you, make town loyalty harder to gain and easier to lose, and the AI will tend to dogpile you in daylight ops. Dressen airport, for instance, is extremely time consuming and difficult to take now and the AI makes damn good use of roof-tops. It is also designed so that you can run it on windows xp and down. Other than that it is essentually the same game as the original JA:2. It also has some really annoying bugs such as the sam site number 8 crash, game corrupts saves if you quick save and if you save in mine areas of a town and unfortunately because of a legal dispute between the russian modders and Strategy First over not getting payed there will be no patch fixes to the game forth comming except those fixes the JA community have been able to come up with.