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The ASSOCIATION OF INTERNATIONAL MERCENARIES, the most professional choice for commanders in need of a qualified hired gun.

— Jagged Alliance 2, AIM website.

A series of turn-based squad-level combat strategy games for the PC that came out in the 1990s, with some role-playing elements, financial management, and a weird and wonderful cast of mercenaries ranging from out-and-out maniacs to seasoned professionals (And in some cases, maniac professionals). Pick a modern combat trope, and they've probably used it shamelessly.

The first game ^note developed by the short-lived Madlab Software and published by Sir-Tech takes place on the South Atlantic island of Metavira, which was once a nuclear testing site during the Cold War. Because of radiation, some trees mutated into fallow trees, and their sap contains amazing medical properties that is every doctor's Christmas wish come true. Thus a research team led by Jack Richards and his daughter Brenda arrived on the island to study the trees and, if possible, reproduce them. But one day, the labs burned down in suspicious circumstances, and Lucas Santiano, a senior member of the research team, proposed to split the research team in two, arguing that two heads are better than one. Despite Brenda's objections, Jack agreed, and with his new found autonomy and authority he hired his own (literal) Redshirt Army, and took over most of the island to monopolize the sap-supplying business. This is where the Richards hire You to reconquer the island and to kick Santiano's ass with the help of Hired Guns provided by the Association of International Mercenaries, or just A.I.M for short.

The stand-alone expansion, Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games ^note developed in-house by Sir-Tech, has you working for Gus Tarballs and accepting small-time mercenary missions. Eventually, the stand-alone missions tie together into thwarting the DFK, a high-tech organization whose plans involve using satellites for orbital superiority. As this game was made specifically for multiplayer (complete with map editor), all strategic elements were sacrificed for tactical ones; instead of overworld management, the campaign is a series of one-sector scenarios.

The sequel, Jagged Alliance 2 ^note developed by Sir-Tech's surviving Canadian branch and published by TalonSoft takes place in Arulco. Hired by dethroned king Enrico Chivaldori, you and your band of mercenaries — from both A.I.M. and newcomer M.E.R.C. (More Economic Recruitment Center), which was founded by (surviving) ex-members of the former — are to liberate Arulco and to kill Enrico's ex-wife Deidranna Reitman, who usurped the throne a decade ago and ruled since then with iron fist of tyranny. Surprisingly well thought out and complex as computer games go in its approach to physical injury, fatigue, the effectiveness of firearms and the use of explosives and noted for its excellent Turn-Based Combat. Notably it's got a lot of mileage out of the v1.13 mod (a reference to the last official patch being v1.12 and, probably by coincidence, the last official versions of both original JA and Deadly Games), which drastically changed the game and even introduced a multiplayer mode that wasn't in the unmodified JA2! Some of the trope examples are due to, modified, subverted, or averted by this mod.

The sequel's stand-alone expansion, Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business ^note Sir-Tech Canada's penultimate release, also published by TalonSoft takes place in Tracona. Ricci Mining and Exploration was the company that ran the mines in Arulco for Deidranna, and with her fall they lost them. Wanting to take them back, they set up a military base in the nearby military dictatorship of Tracona, gave Arulco an ultimatum to return the mines to [RMaE]'s ownership and launched missiles at the Prison in Arulco as a warning. King Enrico Chivaldori, knowing that Aruclo has not recovered enough to effectively deal with this crisis, hires you to resolve it. This game is very short, and the main draw of this game is the map editor, which was later added (along with other new features in this game, except the new mercs, unless you count the v1.13 mod) to JA2 in later patches.

Jagged Alliance 3 has had a troubled past after Sir-Tech closed down in 2003, with numerous false starts and developers throughout the years. In September 2021, Jagged Alliance 3 was finally unveiled by THQ Nordic with pre-alpha gameplay footage, seemingly returning to the series' roots, promising deep turn based tactical gameplay.

Kalypso Games and bitComposer Games released Jagged Alliance: Back In Action in February 2011, a real-time remake of Jagged Alliance 2. In August 2012 they released the sequel to BiA, Crossfire.

Gamigo and Cliffhanger Productions are working on the Jagged Alliance Online, an isometric tactical MMORPG.

Jagged Alliance: Flashback by Full Control, the makers of the 2013 videogame adaptation of Space Hulk, was officially released on 21 October 2014, having previously undergone a period in Steam Early Access. It is turn-based with elements from the 1.13 mod, taking place in 1991 depicting the origins of AIM. The Kickstarter goal was reached, and the game was released in October 2014.

A Spin-Off titled Jagged Alliance: Rage! was released in December 2018 release. Featuring survival elements, the game is again a turn based tactical shooter.

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Provides Examples Of:

• 0% Approval Rating: Deidranna's regime, at least among the majority of the population. The extremely wealthy, business tycoons, and the elite elements of the military all work for her willingly and happily, with some old-money families even selling out relatives working for the rebels to the secret police. However, among the general populace of the country, virtually everyone openly calls for her death, and the rare few that don't are apathetic. Even the soldiers that prop up her regime are mostly forced conscripts who only work for her out of fear.
• Three Quarters View: Used in Jagged Alliance 2.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Averted, with the special mention of the first game: Only having one processing plant (Out of 4, with the rest in Lucas' hands) and a handful of fallow trees, you are unable to meet the demands of the sap buying company and because of this they set the low price for the sap, all while the buyers talk about the more prospective supplier. Capture at least one plant back and a lot of trees and the prices get stabilized.
• Affectionate Parody: The series, particularly the Sir-Tech entries, is this to 'Men on a Mission' B-films and the "Gun for Hire" mercenary image popularized by the Soldier of Fortune magazine. In the world of the games, Hired Guns are popular and well-known enough to the general public to be treated like rock stars, to the point that stalkers and crazed groupies are said to be a problem for those in the business. The mercs themselves are a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits hired by way of online sites (available to anyone who is over 18 years old and has less than two felonies!), pitted against the types of hammy Card-Carrying Villain that wouldn't be out of place in The A-Team or Commando, and the writing lovingly embrace every single possible trope. There is also elements of Deconstructive Parody in the gameplay, with brutally realistic combat, potentially lethal personality clashes between mercs, and an Anyone Can Die mentality.
• A.K.A.-47: For some weapons in Jagged Alliance: Back In Action, this trope is used for the first time in the history of the series. The Glock 17 is the Klock 17, and so on. The Combat Evolved mod reverts all the firearms to their real name. This is averted with 1 and 2 in which all guns use their real name.
• Amusing Injuries: The backstory for Gus Tarball's slow movement in Jagged Alliance 2 is that, while arguing with AIM over his salary, his mobile home collapsed on his leg. While he was trying to fix his septic system.
  • Deidranna keeps slapping the Hell out of her underling. It gets to the point where, when he reports the mercs are marching on Meduna, he's bruised and bloody - and that's before she shoots him in the forehead. And he survives.
• Anti-Air: SAM sites in JA2. You can move in SAM-infested space, but your 'copter WILL be destroyed if you don't get out of there ASAP. ^note It is actually surprisingly durable for a civilian copter, taking 4 rocket hits before it goes down. You can pretty much expect it to drop your mercs right near the SAM site and live through the trip back. You need to take out SAM sites to have the copter move safely, and if you don't leave behind militia, enemies WILL retake the site.
  • While you can try to ignore AA zones, Rider takes this risk seriously and increases helicopter wage by 10 times if you insist on flying in dangerous airspace.
  • Safe airspace also allows you to drop newly hired/rehired mercs freely within it. Before you capture any SAM sites, you can only use two sectors as a drop points.
  • If you're quick and sneaky, you can temporarily neutralize an anti-air position without having to kill all the guards. Blowing up the computers inside the anti-air base will shut down the site for several days until they can be repaired. This is easier said than done, requiring you to sneak into the compound, cut through the fences, and get inside the control room, before using a bomb on the control system then getting the hell out.
• Anyone Can Die: If you screw up bad, or if your luck runs out...
  • Although, in Rage!, none of your mercenaries can actually die - they only lose consciousness if brought down to 0 HP, and require being carried off the field later. After battle, they always recover to 1 HP automatically.
• Apathetic Citizens: Notably averted. In the first game, sap gatherers will refuse to work for you if they feel that the situation is too dangerous. You can convince them to work for you by offering more money, but wages can only go up, never down, which can cause an untenable financial situation if you raise it too high. In the second game, while almost every non-soldier citizen hates Deidranna, they won't speak out until you've liberated their sector, and even then they'll avoid speaking too loudly if they feel they're in danger (low loyalty). Training them to stand up for themselves, and having those militia soldiers successfully defeat attempts to retake their city will result in a much more vocal group of citizens.
• Arbitrary Gun Power: Played straight in the first game with the weaker guns, but mostly averted in JA 2, especially 1.13, a shot from any old pistol with glaser ammo on an unarmored opponent is almost always lethal, and nearly all of the 5.56 and 7.62 weapons do the same amount of damage.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You can hire up to 8 mercenaries in the first two games, 8 native guards per sector, and there can only be 8 enemies in the sector, which can be exploited in the final battle in JA1 (enemy limit is removed in Deadly Games). Vanilla JA2 allows you to hire up to 18 mercenaries, including the locals, which can be modified to 32 in v1.13 and raising the number of militia and soldiers in each sector to up to forty each. As you can imagine, the gunfights get pretty nuts. And as of this edit, there is a modification in very early development that removes the limit, or rather raises it very high, and lets you hire all the mercs (theoretically up to 256 mercs) and face against up to 512 enemies with the help of maximum 512 militia.
  • Downplayed in Back In Action and Crossfire. The 2010s real-time remakes work with squads, which maximum size is six men; nothing technically prevents to enter a map with several squads, although controlling several squads in the same time requires a lot of painful micromanagement. The trope is averted about the total number of squads, because if you have enough money, you can hire all the available mercenaries (although some of them will refuse to join because they absolutely hate some of those who are already there).
  • Rage! only allows a choice of two mercs (from a list of six) for the majority of the game, with a third becoming available upon contacting AIM HQ and a fourth if you manage to rescue Fidel. This is handwaved by the job initially paying enough for three people, including Fidel, and for La Résistance putting forward enough money to pay for an extra merc.
• Armed Blag: In Deadly Games some criminals did this. Unfortunately for them, the stolen cash was a counterfeit that was intentionally planted to destabilize economy, and now you have to shut 'em up, permanently.
• Armor-Piercing Attack:
  • Armor Piercing ammunition, along with default NATO ammo and weapons with specialized ammo that were meant to pierce armor (such as the G11).
  • Raven gets one as her Limit Break in Rage!, which lets her bypass a targets armour.
• Artificial Brilliance: Enemy AI is clever enough to investigate noises, patrol areas, and take up good firing positions on rooftops. It is also smart enough to accurately mimic bad decisions, like poorly-trained and overwhelmed soldiers running back and forth in a mindless panic, or large numbers of troops laying down suppression fire at your smaller numbers of mercenaries in an effort to take advantage of how many guns they have. 1.13 expands their intelligence greatly, resulting in an AI that aggressively flanks and sneaks around, trying to hit you from directions you're not expecting. If you don't pair up your mercs and cover all angles, they will surround you. If your troops are in good cover, the AI will pelt them with grenades to force them out of cover. If you have rooftop snipers set up, they'll try to sneak around and climb onto the roof behind your snipers. Enemy snipers will lie down in cover and use spotters to locate your people and blast them from across the map. Soldiers from neighboring sectors will even come to reinforce their compatriots if you start up a major gunfight.
  • Militia AI, while not that brilliant (see below) is still surprisingly clever. For example, if a merc is wounded, militia troops will move closer to the merc in question to cover him/her while you move a medic in to patch them up.
• Artificial Stupidity: Civilians will wander into mustard gas areas. Better than X-COM though, as when they are caught between the crossfire, they are still smart enough to get down or get to nearby cover and let you hit the baddies behind them.
  • Rookie Militia are deliberately programmed this way, often charging at enemy positions and getting gunned down, and suffering civilians' affections of wandering into mustard gas areas (though they stay on the border, if the cloud expands, they're good as dead). Once they're trained up to regular (or elite) militia, though, they become MUCH smarter. (Even better than Deidranna's elite forces.)
  • On a side note, the AI (enemies or militias) have a lot of trouble fighting non-human enemies (bloodcats and crepitus). Which you can use to your advantage if, for example, you're under attack by a large enemy force and a pack of bloodcats moves into the area. Pull back, consolidate your defensive position, and wait for the cats to run around killing all the hostiles, then mop up the surviving cats.
  • Militia have a problem with making sure they have a clear line of fire. A militiaman with LMG will gleefully open fire on full auto at an enemy soldier, regardless of intervening cattle, civilians, other militia, or very startled mercenaries.
  • AI who are very close to enemies will often forego shooting and instead run in close to beat them down with their bare hands or stab them with knives. This is perfectly fine when fighting human enemies, and even acceptable when used against Crepitus or bloodcats. Not quite so understandable when that militiaman is trying to punch a tank to death.
  • In both Jagged Alliance and Jagged Alliance 2, enemies will sometimes try to reach an alarm trigger to set off a major trap or to blow up a building. If you get to that point first, you can pick off the enemies one-by-one with the other enemies behaving defensively.
• Arms Dealer: Several.
  • Micky O'Brien from Deadly Games is an international version of an Gangland Gun Runner and is depicted as an stereotypical slimy merchant that gives creeps even to such badasses like Gus Tarballs. He functions as an Auction, and if you pay too much, your mercs will comment on your poor trading skills. He reappears in JA2, but running different contraband.
  • Bobby Ray from JA2 is a shady Online Gun Shop Owner. Many of the guns he sells could not possibly be legal unless he sells primarily to governments. He even sells mustard gas, although the item description says it is to be used strictly for pest control. This gets even more ludicrous in v1.13 due to the vastly expanded arsenal. It's lampshaded further with experimental weapons - "We found a shipment of G11s in a warehouse somewhere. Please don't ask."
  • Tony in San Mona, operates behind an adult video store. His partner running the front requires a favor before you can access Tony's wares (namely, getting rid of an annoying customer).
  • Raul in Unfinished Business sets up shop inside a warehouse. Much of his inventory was gotten by the neighbouring Arulco. (A callback to JA2
• Apologetic Attacker: A few will make comments likes this about the kills they make. For example, Spider, a medic, will say "I'm such a hypocrite". Barry says "Forgive me for taking life".
• Ascended Extra: Hamous is a native guide in Metavira in the first game. He becomes a hire in Deadly Games, and by Jagged Alliance 2, he's a recruitable extra who comes with his own transportation. An Ice-Cream Van, no less.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Averted with Ivan, as his Russian is actually fine. (Хорошо!)
• Asshole Victim: Doreen, head of the child labor factory in Drassen, is one of the few civilians you can kill with no repurcussions. There's also a scientist in Orta who will extort twenty grand from you before unlocking the door. There's nothing to stop you from taking your money back.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: In Jagged Alliance 2, you get to recruit various local rebels. Three out of four are varying degrees of useless (although they can be trained up, if you can be bothered — and if you use their skills they have quite some potential, at least you don't have to pay them); the fourth, the rebel leader, however is something of a hardcore badass. More importantly, the Evil Dictator in JA2 is a skilled markswoman with heavy armour and an automatic rocket rifle. Subverted with pretty much everyone else - while they are marginally better shots than grunts, the vast majority of high-ranking enemies can often be taken out with just a few well-placed bullets, sometimes before they even get a chance to shoot back.
  • Interestingly, normally Deidranna does not carry weapons or armor. If you are sneaky enough to cut her off her hidden stash with rifle and bodyarmor, you will meet her in a throne room. There will be with some soldiers, but Deidranna herself will be unarmed and without any armor.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Ultra Shield Vest in the first Jagged Alliance provided a powerful armour boost, and could be worn with normal armour to make the merc incredibly resistant to damage. Unfortunately, it has no pockets, and vests are the only way for your mercs to carry more than two items (With their weapon being one, and ammo likely being the other). Deadly Games improved them by giving them three pockets.
  • In JA2, the Rocket Rifles look impressive. However. they are electronically locked except to registered user, the rifles can only hold five shots and can't have any accuracy-boosting accessories mounted on them. While powerful, most players prefer a rifle's mag size and accuracy to deliver consistent headshots by this point in the game. If you are playing 1.13, then they are pretty much useless since either an anti-material sniper rifle or an assault rifle with drum mag and various other attachments will pretty much outclass them.
  • Shotguns lose their punch about a third of the game in, when enemies begin to carry better body armor. They are given a particular niche in 1.13 though, thanks to the suppression mechanic - since every pellet suppresses as much as a single bullet, it can be used to scare the AP out of elite soldiers with spectra armor.
    • Shotguns also have a secondary use as a stun-stick: taking a full blow from buckshot, even if it doesn't penetrate armor, is a great way to get the wind knocked out of you (reducing your stamina). Two full blows will put down just about anyone, full armor or not. Slug ammunition is also great at popping heads: though the range on most shotguns is inferior to an assault rifle, a slug shot delivered to an unarmored head will kill anyone (and severely injure anyone not wearing a spectra helmet).
    • 1.13 makes shotguns viable again by giving them a range of specialized, shotgun-specific ammunition, as well as a variety of more useful variants (such as a one-handed, four-shot big-pistol-sized version, which, when loaded with lockbreaker ammunition, basically does away with lock-picking and/or finding keys as long as you don't mind being loud).
  • The silenced .50 VSK/VKS Vychlop. Good: it's .50 and silenced. Bad: It's only got a range of about 500 meters, far less than the other anti-materiel sniper rifles. You can just use cold-loaded .308 rounds.
• Ax-Crazy: Several of the mercenaries you can hire tend to enjoy killing a little too much, fire on full automatic even when you tell them not to, or get very cranky if you try and give them orders before they've finished killing someone. Some of them will even kill other squad members between missions.
  • Postie (weapon of choice: letter opener) and "Unusually Ruthless" Reuben (hedge trimmer) from the first two games being poster children for the trope. Fidel "I busy!" Dahan even has it listed in his bio that he was constantly gunning after another A.I.M. member ^note Specifically, Hurl. If you have Hurl in your team at the same time as Fidel, the former will "mysteriously" disappear after two days.
  • Made even worse in v1.13, 'psycho' mercs with auto weapons will sometime spend all remaining action points or ammo to fire in full auto, whichever comes first. Can be (somewhat) avoided by spending more action points to aim a single shot, as they have no qualms killing with head shots, and can be partially subverted by not giving them automatics, which will instead result in them losing a bit of morale out of frustration.
  • Several of the terrorists that Carmen sends you to hunt are complete psychos. Most notably is "MOM," the "Matron of Mayhem," who is wanted for mustard-gassing a Christmas parade and will open up on your team with a LMG if you try to take a shot at her, and promises to kill your friends and family once she's done with you.
  • Bill "Razor" Lamont pretty much the poster child for this. But don't tell him that. In his own words, he's not "psychotic," he simply "has a passion for his job."
• Back Stab: If you sneak up behind an opponent without being seen or heard, you can insta-kill the target with a throwing knife/star in the back. Dmitri is one of the more useful "indigenous" recruits for this reason having decent aim to boot. Shank can be this... once he stops sucking in general.
  • Stealth and Night Ops are one of the most useful combination of traits for your customized alter ego, especially while using said throwing knives. In 1.13 with the new trait-system it is even possible to combine those two traits with another useful one like throwing, unarmed or melee weapons.
  • If you're particularly stealthy/lucky, you can even pull off a more traditional backstab on an enemy by creeping up behind them and cutting their throat with a knife, machete, or sword.
  • In Rage!, thanks to less random stealth mechanics, stealth-killing enemies is much more viable (and wise) idea. All mercs can perform them, even with bare hands. The throwing-knife-kill variety still exists, but is restricted to Shadow only, other only deal normal damage.
• Ballistic Discount: Shopkeepers drop their inventory when killed, but this is a bad idea in general, especially if you've trained a town militia. There's also a couple of characters who demand bribe money who can then be gunned down to get your cash back.
  • Raul in Unfinished Business can be killed to obtain his inventory from a crate next to him. However, if you don't kill him instantly, or are too slow on the draw to get a shot off before he notices you trying to kill him, he'll detonate a bomb that kills him and destroys ALL of his inventory.
• Badass Army: Veteran militias can become this, easily curbstomping Deidranna's elite troops with no help whatsoever, even when outnumbered. They'll even be armed with weapons you can't readily access, like rocket rifles.
• Banana Republic:
  • Tracona from Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business.
  • Arulco, possibly. Some parts of the country seem to be more of a Ruritania, with log cabins and pine forests, while others are desert and jungle (complete with American native Saguaro cacti). The rest of the countryside shows a chaotic mixture of accents and ethnic backgrounds, with American, Latin American, German, and vaguely Eastern European names and accents handed out seemingly at random. It does, however, have the dependence on a single export (in this case silver rather than bananas), corrupt upper-class and oppressive dictatorship down pat, though.
• Bash Brothers: Several characters mesh together very well. One example would be Henning von Branitz and Rudolf Steiger, a former East German officer and GSG-9 operative respectively. Despite having been on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall, they get along really well and often compliment one another in combat. Igor and Ivan Dolvich, along with Grunty, also form a hell of a team, as do Grizzly and Bull. As the game progresses, certain characters who work together often will develop a rapport and become these, signified when they start complimenting each other in combat (i.e. Ice will get along well with Grizzly, saying he's "got style, dude!"). This is also the only way you'll get a merc to join your team if there's someone s/he hates on your team already: hire their buddy, and they'll agree to join, and stay on as long as their buddy stays and they're kept away from the merc they hate.
• Battle Couple: Several examples throughout the series. Being in the same unit improves their morale. If one dies, the other will mourn their death, and suffer a nasty morale drop.
  • Raven and Raider, An ex-police officer and ex-police sniper, respectively, who were forced to quit, and so turned to mercenary work. Caution: Don't let Hitman near Raven.
  • Originally Buzz and Lynx were this in Deadly Games (among other "couples" like Margaret and Mouse).. not so much in the following games.
  • Biff and Flo, although they're less a Battle Couple and more a 'Whimper Pathetically And Run Away At The First Sign Of Trouble' couple (their low wages and good teaching skills make them extremely good militia trainers when working as a team, however). Digging a bit into the dossiers hints that the entire reason why Flo has a job at M.E.R.C. is because of nepotism thanks to being with Biff.
  • Wolf and Fox are another example. Wolf says he got in better shape (Explaining his improved physical stats between 1 and 2) because of Fox.
• Bearer of Bad News: If Ivan dies, his nephew Igor will mourn while wondering how he will tell this to his Aunt.
  • Elliot. Poor, poor Elliot...
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Lucas blows himself up as soon as he sees you. Two problems with that: 1) Your mercs are very close to the explosions and 2) the Baby fallow tree is in the room; Brenda would be really happy if you save it.
• BFG: Rocket Rifles, which are essentially railguns without super-sonic projectiles. There are also quite a few real-life (or in some cases, would have been real-life if they ever went into production) examples present in v1.13 such as the .50 Beowulf, Barret .50, USAS-12, KVSK (a silenced .50 sniper rifle), OICW, AICW, PanCor Jackhammer, and XM-25. And the description of the Gepard Anti-Material Rifle Mk2 speaks for itself:

  There are big guns, there are big, big guns, and then there's this gun. Bring shoulder pads.

• Big Bad: Doctor Lucas Santiano in the first game, Queen Deidranna Reitman in JA2.
• Bigger Stick: Are your mercs not that well trained in 1.13? No problem. Arm them with something like a G11, Steyr ACR [not to be confused with the other ACR, this one shoots armor-piercing 5.56 darts], or a FN SCAR-H with a sniper barrel and dress them in Spectra armor or bomb suits to make up for their marksman deficiency, lack of firepower, and measly health points. In fact, arming more experienced mercs with aforementioned guns is often overkill, since anything in range will die. Especially applies if one didn't turn on auto-leveling in 1.13, where your EOD-armored teams with prototype weaponry will be mowing down grunts that look like they came fresh off the Soviet bloc from the 70s. Also applies to Spectra/EOD armor, the latter of which protects from everything and can withstand a shelling from mortar rounds (they're not called EOD for nothing). Encouraged, since you're only allowed a finite number of mercs (and the latest 1.13 limits mercs to 24).
  • Can also be utilized by Deidrannan forces, if you're not a cheating bastard. You'll probably have low-grade AK-47s or just the weapons the mercs arrived with (often just pistols and sub-machine guns - only Gus has the best starting weapon, both in vanilla and 1.13), and the enemies will have FN FALs, M16s with laser sights and maybe grenade launchers, M4A1s...
• Bland-Name Product: Lameboy, Fumblepak, and Neveready in JA 2. Oxxen and I-Device in BIA.
• Blasting It Out of Their Hands: While the games don't allow you to do this, it is possible to make the enemy drop their weapon, most commonly with a serious hit to the head or shoulder, or a powerful shotgun blast at close-range. Or throwing a grenade at them and causing them to fall over, but that's not so much blasting it out of their hands as (almost) killing them.
• Blatant Lies: M.E.R.C. dossiers are like this, especially if you played the first game, taken Up to Eleven in 1.13 where you can hire Speck himself, whose bio exaggerates his achievements, calls A.I.M. corrupt, and states that his poor stats are out of date and that he simply didn't have time for checks and tests. Their later mercs have more plausible dossiers, since it's no longer necessary to cover up for sub-par skills like with the early mercs.
• Boom, Headshot!: With the occasional exploding head. Overall a sound tactic, but only with a high accuracy and a scope on a good long-range rifle.
  • Or if you are sneaky enough to get close for a sure shot with something silenced.
• Bond, James Bond: The name's Tarballs, Gus Tarballs.
• Bond One-Liner: Many mercs say such things when they kill someone, or during some events.

  (After watching someone's head blown off) IMP Voice 2: Someone took a little too much off the top.

• Booby Trap: Mines, though you probably won't be in much threat by them until you hit Meduna, where there's two fields full of them. And in Deidranna's hidden bunker, too.
  • Also, there are plenty of trapped chests that can just shock you or explode.
  • As of June of 2012, the 1.13 beta allows you to make trip-wire based traps and place rigged guns.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • When choosing traits for your IMP in 1.13, you can never go wrong with the Auto Weapons + Marksman + Bodybuilding combo. Auto Weapons adds 5% to all autofiring weapons, reduced AP cost on using LMG's and Reduced auto penalty by 30%. Marksman gives 5% CTH with rifles, 10% CTH with Sniper Rifles, Extra CTH to All guns except handguns, 5% damage shot per every aim click after the first. Bodybuilding gives you 25% damage resistance, 30% effective strength for carrying weight capacity, reduced energy loss when hit by Hand to Hand attacks by 50% and 100% increase in damage required to fall down. All these traits complement each other into making your IMP into a versatile wrecking machine who can, with some training, do anything just as well as the expensive guys; a fighting force to be dreaded.
  • The humble M4A1 carbine. It's a simple, low-powered, medium-ranged weapon with 5.56mm ammunition, but it's also very lightweight and accurate and uses one of the most common ammo types in the game, and as a result it is an ideal choice for your low-strength or dedicated support troops carrying tools and medkits, as well as a main weapon for troops with special equipment like mortars, rockets, or close-combat weaponry.
  • 5.56mm ammunition in general is one of these. Compared with other ammunition calibers, its damage and penetration are unremarkable. However, its high accuracy and the fact that virtually every enemy squad will have a few troops carrying rifles shooting it means that it will be very available and highly reliable. Even if your shots don't easily penetrate enemy armor, each hit will exhaust them until they either pass out, you get a lucky hit, or their wounds add up and they either bleed out or run away.
  • One of the simplest and most boring tactics in wilderness battles in JA2 is to lay your troops down prone, have one of them set off an explosive, and ambush the enemy as they come to investigate. The enemy will start trickling in to check on the noise, and your prone mercs will be able to spot and shoot them due to being less visible and having stable weapons. When the majority of the enemy arrive, you'll still have an advantage, as they will be standing and thus much more visible and easy to kill.
  • Tear gas grenades can be this way early on, and even later can be surprisingly effective, since only elites will often spawn with gas masks. It won't kill enemies like mustard gas, but it will blind them and cause them to panic and maybe even fall unconscious, letting you loot their corpses or finish them off at leisure. Since it won't inflict damage, it is also safe to use around civilians. It is also really effective when used on houses that enemies are holed up in.
• Bottomless Magazines: Played straight for the enemies in the first game where reloading itself costs no AP. Averted in Jagged Alliance 2 where the enemies still have to reload, and if you let them live long enough, they will run out of magazines too (in which case they will start running, or pick up another weapon if they find one).
• Bounty Hunter: Carmen. Specifically wants his targets dead, not alive.
• Blown Across the Room: Occasionally, and it generally requires a burst to the chest at close range.
• Breakable Weapons: Almost all weapons, armour, and other items in the game have a percentage 'status.' Rather than going straight from perfect to useless, weapons slowly degrade, lose range, and jam more often. Armour protects you less the more damaged it is. Aside from a few items, almost everything can be repaired back up to perfect condition, no matter how heavily damaged. Fan mods may adjust the speed of item degradation (as well as the odds of a jam).
  • 1.13 add another layer in form of dirtiness, where the guns in good condition may still jam because they got dirt in them.
• Brick Joke: Hamous left AIM by stealing an Ice Cream truck in Paris and heading to Istanbul in it, according to his bio on the AIM site. He managed to wind up on a South American country.... Not that he's lost, he's just... lost
• Bulletproof Vest: Good armour is the difference between dying instantly and just being badly winded.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Many of the mercenaries only have jobs at all because of their proficiency at killing. The A.I.M. roster is packed with crazies of varying types and intensities. Even the more level-headed ones have their quirks.
  • Pretty much every MERC mercenary who isn't outright useless. Gasket is a good mechanic, but has violent issues with Russians. Razor is damned well crazy despite his excellent physical stats. Gumpy is a good explosives specialist with amazing wisdom, but is also a quirky nerd with limited combat ability. Bubba is tremendously strong but dumb as a brick and pisses off a lot of people. Larry is a great explosives specialist and medic, but is also The Alcoholic who will take on a completely new personality if there's any medical equipment in his inventory for a prolonged period. Numb's got an impressive resume, but he pisses everyone off.
• Bus Crash: Mercs on missions for other clients can die on assignment, and some of the first game's mercs who don't return in Jagged Alliance 2 were killed.
• Butt-Monkey: "Elliot, you IDIOT! "
  • Just wait until you can send flowers to the Queen's doorstep.
• Cadre of Foreign Bodyguards: In Jagged Alliance 2, while Deidranna mainly uses We Have Reserves forced conscripts, at least one (the others may be, but they don't have names or faces) of her close bodyguards are foreign mercenaries. Of course, by the game's premise, all but a small handful of the party are foreign mercs as well.
  • Your team can wind up doing this to the tourists trapped in one of the towns.
• Canada, Eh?: Referenced on the description of the Diemaco assault rifle. Amusingly enough, the branch of Sir-Tech that developed JA2 was based in Canada.
• Character Customization: Jagged Alliance 2 allows you to create mercenaries via I.M.P., the Institute for Mercenary Profiling. In the vanilla JA2 it was done using the Player Personality Quiz and was changed to Point Build System in Unfinished Business. v.1.13'' uses the latter and improves on it in other ways (including expansing the number of created characters to six).
• Child Soldiers: Mentioned by Deidranna in frustration at the uselessness of her own soldiers. Elliot takes the exclamations seriously, and suffers for it.
  • In Deadly Games, during one of the mission briefings Gus tells you how a near-perfect mission he was participating in was almost ruined because a child shot him in the leg and could have done worse if one of his squadmates didn't stun the kid. His wound gets worse through the game.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Almost every quote Rudolf makes contains the f-word.
• Cold Sniper: Notably Reaper, a weirdly creepy religious maniac/fatalist. Shadow, your stealthy attacky, rarely raises his words about a whisper.

  Reaper: I'm bleeding. *Beat* That's cool.

• Color-Coded Armies:
  • In the first game: Green are your mercenaries, Red are your enemies, Blue are the guards you hire from the native population and Yellow are the native workers who extract the fallow sap.
  • Deadly Games ditched the strategic elements and the above colors now represent different Color Coded Squads plus White for NPCs.
  • Jagged Alliance 2 has Yellow, Red and Black enemies in rising order of danger and Green, Light Blue and Dark Blue militia in rising order of competence.
• Colonel Kilgore: Stogie, Reaper, Fidel (who wishes to be a raven in his next life so he can eat the dead after a war)...
• Communications Officer: Some of the mercs have this as a background, which mostly amounted to a fluff reason for their stats and gear. In 1.13 there is a new trait called Radio Operator that allows you to use a backpack radio, with one of the options being able to order the militia from the adjacent sector to provide mortar fire. Beware, for the enemy also has them.
• Combat Medic: Anyone with decent medical skills. Highball and Dr Q are examples of the few doctors (judging by their profile photo) with decent marksmanship, however, and Danny was a combat medic in Desert Storm. Many of them are good at melee combat and highly dexterous, if that's your bag, and they generally have good wisdom, letting them level up other skills quickly. MD in JA2 is explicitly described as being an expert with a knife.
• Commonplace Rare: A lot of items, such as glass jars, batteries, and LameBoys. Gasoline as well, though that is explained (Rationed in JA2) or justified. (A tropical island with no roads or vehicles in JA1)
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Elite soldiers seemingly will never run out of grenades/break lights to throw at you. If you're lucky, you get dud grenades thrown at you.
  • All enemies can open locked doors without using a key. (You can, too - provided you're on their side of the room, which is impossible without cheating or blowing a hole in the wall.) Worse yet, they almost always close the door after going through it (And they never seem to spend any time to do so.)
  • Mortar-wielding enemies and snipers know exactly where you are. Gets infuriating when you're jammed into a small area and the sniper is packing a Barrett, DSR-1, or Erma. Patched in 1.13 so that mortarmen need someone to actually see you before they'll open fire (so your mercs had better been damned fast on those triggers!)
  • Enemies knows exactly where mines (even yours) are placed, though they will still step on them anyway if there is no way they can reach their destinations without avoiding them.
  • Bloodcats can traverse half the map and still tear out the throat of one of your heavily armed mercs, then deliver a coup-de-grace them while they've got the AP penalty due to injury. (Although their enlarged size can prevent them from reaching you behind a narrow row of rocks or thick of trees.)
  • Crepitus can apparently "see" you from across the map in the dark unless you have rubbed elixir over your body to camouflage your scent.
• Concealment Equals Cover: Averted. There is a complex system in the game to calculate the concealment and protective potential of every possible combination of cover element, merc positioning and incoming projectiles. Flimsy cover like bushes or dinner tables will hide you but won't deter most bullets. Moreover, armor piercing munition has been known to pierce right through walls and doors often.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: Enrico sends emails to you to express his worrying on how slowly/praising on how quickly you are gaining ground, but nevertheless prompts you to pick up the pace. As these mails are sent rather spaced out (around each ingame month) they are rather effective. Note that (outside of 1.13, where it is disabled by default) negative emails actually have a penalty to your income and the morale of your rebel-aligned mercs, to penalize turtling.
• Continuity Nod: M.E.R.C. is like A.I.M. in early games, where you pay by day, most members are psychos, and the more reputable hires don't want to talk to you.
• Contract on the Hitman: In one of the later missions in Deadly Games you are tasked with snapping a photo of the assassin fresh out of plastic surgery. He didn't like that and threatens you and the client, so next mission you are assigned to assassinate the assassin.
  • In the second game, Slay, one of the wanted terrorists, is a professional hitman who outlived his usefulness.
• Cool Guns: And how! Nearly every single gun on the Cool Guns page appears at least once in the game. There are only seven that don't. It only gets crazier in v1.13, in which all the listed guns appear.
• Cool Shades: They increase your vision during daylight, and for obvious reasons, decrease it at night.
• Corrupt Hick: The aptly-named Hicks in JA2 (what American rednecks are doing in the middle of a South American country, no one knows) love to harass the nearby town, stealing and razing things. Getting rid of them nets you enough morale to start a militia in said town and discounts in the nearby store.
• Counterfeit Cash: you have to retrieve them in one early mission in Deadly Games, and they are as close to the real thing as they can be, since they were made by the guys who make the real ones in the first place.
• Coup de Grâce: Shooting, stabbing, or delivering a killing two-handed blow to a dying enemy.
• Cowardly Sidekick: several hire-able mercenaries will complain about shooting people, complain about being shot at, complain about not having enough backup, and (in some cases) desert you at the end of their first real fight.
• Critical Encumbrance Failure: Carrying more than 100% of your weight capacity (which is depending on the character's strength) results in faster drop of the stamina bar and lower action points in combat. However, it is also a good way to increase the character's strength. Getting wounded will lower that cap so you have to drop some load if you are to remain effective (at least until the wounds heals).
  • The 1.13 mod adds combat backpacks that serve as huge additional inventory space, and the option to drop them in combat with just one button so that the merc does not tire from wearing them. Large packs prevent the user from climbing up to roof tops, and the packs themselves are an additional weight.
• Critical Existence Failure: Doubly subverted. The lower the hit points, the worse the combat performance of a soldier (less AP, low accuracy, depleting health, higher encumbrance penalties). An almost dead soldier even becomes unconscious and bleeds to death unless patched up. However, unless your soldier is dead, he will fully recover within a week if you have a decent medic on the team. Less than two days if placed in a hospital.
• Crossover: Apparently with Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 in Jagged Alliance Online, as the Soviet commando unit from that game, Natasha Volkova, can be hired.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Gumpy, an overweight, unattractive nerd cracking outdated pop-references with a speech impediment and severe allergies, can potentially become quite a competent soldier with training due to his high aptitude for learning. (Though untrained, he's virtually useless.) Though it does take a while to train him.
  • In crossfire, he becomes a badass in all things explosives. Give him a grenade, landmine or a rocket rifle and a clear line of sight and anyone in his crosshairs will receive an explosive gift.
• Crouch and Prone: In the first game the merc can crouch, but cannot move until they stand up. In Deadly Games, mercs can fire while crouching but must stand to move. JA2 added the prone position, and the mercs can move in any pose.
• Cultured Warrior: quite a few, most notably British-born Sidney. Several profiles even state that they can easily be an intellectual or a rich guy. (Someone like Lynx isn't a psychopath for hunting down endangered species; merely eccentric.)
• Curse Cut Short

  Magic: MOTHERFFFFFFFFFFF........!

• Cycle of Hurting:
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, Mustard Gas grenades work like this. If your character is not wearing a gas mask, and walks into a Mustard Gas cloud (or, more commonly, a Mustard Gas grenade is lobbed at him), the character will likely suffer a lot of damage and pass out. At this point, the character cannot be moved (he's passed out) and his inventory cannot be accessed, so he cannot be told to wear his gas mask if he has one at all. Each turn, the gas will drain a large amount of health and breath points from the character, making sure that he cannot escape. To make matters worse, it is even impossible to move the body out of the cloud by having another mercenary drag or lift it, so the afflicted mercenary just lies there in the cloud, completely helpless, until death. If you're fortunate though, the gas may dissipate before the character actually dies.
  • In Back In Action and Crossfire, actions like aiming and reloading are reset when you're hit; no matter how many damage you suffer from or if you wear body armour, each hit has this effect. So, if one of your mercs is caught flat-footed by the enemy in a 1 VS 1 fight, he is already dead unless his weapon is faster than the other and he is accurate enough. This feature affects the AI troops, too; the safest way to win a short-range/middle-range fight is, of course, to exploit this with rain of small caliber fast weapons, which Scratch Damage mainly serves to buy time in order to allow the mercs with heavier weapons to able able to aim.
• Deathbringer the Adorable: "Spider" is a female medic with a nice personality and even a southern drawl... and is one of the worst shots in the game. (Her nickname comes from her sibling, who kept teasing her all the time with that name, as she was deadly afraid of all insects.)
• Demolitions Expert: Mercenaries specializing in explosives, and most of them are insane.
• Destroyable Items: Your equipment can be damaged in a variety of ways. One reason you preferably don't kill enemies in water.
• Developers' Foresight: There's a few in the sequel:
  • Minor, but when you liberate your first town, a woman shows up to angrily demand why you are here. If you give her the letter right away, she confusedly asks what it is - it doesn't happen if you try to talk with her and explain who you are.
  • If one of your mercenaries surrenders, they'll be transported to a prison - which is accessible on the map. Your target, Deidranna, will be there to interrogate them. If you have mercenaries already on site, they can find and kill her there.
  • Enrico gets more and more agitated the longer you take your time liberating Medina, with increasingly irritated e-mails.
  • Shooting the kid or the civilian after liberating the first town has you ambushed by a VERY angry Dmitri.
  • Using the mortuary's webshop to send flowers to Meduna will give you a little video of Deidranna's response to your taunting.
  • When Miguel sees Ira kill an enemy soldier, one of his barks is "Ira, you are full of surprises!". Considering that Ira has one of the highest wisdom stats in the game and has spent about six in-game months on the battlefield since the last time she and Miguel went into battle together, and will more likely than not have become one of your most competent shooters in that time... yeah, the devs saw it coming.
• The Dog Bites Back: If a mercenary is captured and gives all information to Deidranna on their fellow mercs, Elliot will wait until Deidranna leaves... then will giggle, scream "YOU IDIOT!" at the mercenary, and punch them. Taken further in Rage!, where Elliot has suffered some serious Sanity Slippage, likely the result of his gunshot wound to the head, and has sworn revenge on AIM.
• Dirty Old Man: "Pops" can't seem to leave the female mercenaries alone, particularly Fox and Beth. Beth will threaten to quit unless you fire him.
• Divorced Installment: Hired Guns: The Jagged Edge was orignally ment to beJagged Alliance 3 but following development troubles ended up becoming it's own standalone game.
• Double Agent: You have to deliver a briefcase full of documents to one in the Russian intelligence community in Deadly Games.
• Dude, Not Funny!: In-universe, if Haywire gets killed and Razor is present. Razor will start yelling at Haywire that playing dead in the middle of combat isn't funny, and after ranting at Haywire's corpse he'll get annoyed and dismiss it, saying "Anything for a laugh..."
• Due to the Dead: You can pay for proper funerals for dead mercs. The alternatives, like dumping the body into the river in the first game, is bad for your reputation. The mortuary website in JA2 is a shout-out to this. The first IMP mercenary voice will also remark on informing the next of kin of the enemy you've defeated once a battle is over.
• Early Game Hell: Unless you've got some experience, prepare to get your ass kicked. This is especially evident in 1.13, where a major assault begins the very night you take a town if you don't turn it off in the options. How major? A hundred-plus soldiers, against, at most, five of your guys.
  • In Rage! your two mercs start with basically nothing, you lack ammo and armor to fight straight on, you lack medical supplies to recover quickly, and lack water to be able to just rest off the wounds. Before you kit your mercs out properly, you need to be really careful.
• 11th-Hour Ranger: Gus in Deadly Games, who joins for the final mission if you have a free slot. Miguel and Carlos in Jagged Alliance 2.
• Elite Mooks: Those black shirts can kill you if you are not careful.
  • Not to mention those camouflaged commando guys (another variant of the Queen's Elite. The black shirts tend to use heavy weapons (mortars, anyone?) more often, though.
  • All the enhancements to sniper rifles in 1.13 that allow you to place head shots from two screens away? The black shirts absolutely love them. Go figure.
• Eloquent in My Native Tongue: Ivan in Jagged Alliance 2, due to him just starting out English-as-a-second-language courses.

  Enemy force. Located locally.

  • To a lesser extent, Steroid, who is more prone to malapropers, but otherwise, he sounds further along in his courses than Ivan. The Polish version of Unfinished Business understandably makes him eloquent in his, well, native tongue.
• Escort Mission: Fortunately, the escorted are controllable in all the games, though you'll need eye contact in the first games to order them.
• Even Evil Has Standards: While Deidranna has no qualms about killing children or Cold-Blooded Torture and horrifying experiments, she's against using Child Soldiers.
• Every Bullet Is a Tracer: You can see your bullets, but V 1.13 adds in actual tracers, which give your characters an aiming bonus at the cost of the enemy knowing where you are immediately.
• Evil Laugh: Killing Deidranna nets you one. However, if you kill her in her bunker? ELLIOT!!! YOU IDIOT!!!
  • If (most) of your mercenaries kill enough enemies to hit their top morale, they will usually chuckle or guffaw a bit. Reaper's is just downright chilling.
  • Also triggerd when your psycho merc goes berserk. *cackles*
• Expy:
  • Stogie is pretty much a younger Gus Tarballs, minus his speed penalty and not as good of a leader.
  • Gus Tarballs fills in Mike's role - hideously expensive and arguing with AIM over salary, but extremely good in nearly everything and with the best starting equipment out of any merc.
  • Crossfire is set in a Central Asia cold and mountainous country, with autochtones having Persian and Arabic names, and which has been invaded by a army of religious fundamentalists. It is a fictional counterpart of Afghanistan.
• Firing One-Handed: Averted in the first games, Played Straight in JA2; if your secondary hand isn't empty or your strength high enough, pistols can be shot one-handed.
  • Male characters with a very high Strength stat even fire heavy machine guns with one hand when standing.
• Five-Finger Discount: Pablo, the shipping agent, randomly steals items, hoping you don't notice - but you can prevent or stop these losses, via bribing or punching him. If you kill him, he's replaced by someone so incompetent, he'll lose entire shipments, and you can't do a thing about it. If you kill HIM, you can't receive further shipments at all until you reach Meduna itself (to use their airport), and take a hit in loyalty amongst Pablo's town.
• Fixed Damage Attack: Averted for the most part, but there are a few situations where fixed damage is dealt, such as getting hit by the backblast of a rocket launcher.
• Foil: Both of AIM's top mercs are this to each other. Mike and Gus are both affable, The Ace, and have a price tag to match, but Gus is simultaneously more professional and more personable, and prefers to live a life of simplicity (as evidenced by the fact he lives in a mobile home despite ostensibly being wealthy.) Mike is a Jerkass It's All About Me who is Only in It for the Money. Best exemplified by what they do when not recruitable in the games; Gus runs a personal merc crew to deal with international threats, while Mike signs on with the Big Bad of JA 2 for no other reason than she pays well. Notably, there's a lot of bad blood between Gus and Mike, and Gus will express enthusiasm and appreciation at being given the opportunity to kill him in 2.)
• Flavor Text: A ton of item descriptions do these, with a ton of Shout Outs on gun descriptions.
• Foreign Cuss Word: Several mercenaries say these kind of words, most notably those with non-English backgrounds. Like Grunty.
  • East German battle buddies Brain and Scream (added in v1.13), in particular, are downright foul-mouthed, especially in stressful situations.
• Former Regime Personnel: Ivan Dolvich, for the Russians, and Iggy and possibly Conrad, who both defect (or can defect) from Deidranna's army. And who knows where Mike used to hang out.
• Freemium: Jagged Alliance Online and its Updated Re-release, Jagged Alliance Online: Reloaded run with this model. The base game is free, which comes with multiplayer and a couple of single player missions with the main campaign and several mercs locked behind a paywall.
• Friendly Sniper: Sheila "Scope" Sterling is a well-spoken and cheerful young woman. She is also ex-SAS and has nearly maxed out marksmanship stats. Charlene "Raven" Higgins is an ex-LAPD sniper, who is also quite kind, though a tad snarkier than "Scope".
  • On the male side of things, Gaston and Biggins are suave and sophisticated, respectively.
• "Funny Aneurysm" Moment: In-Universe Lynx used to joke about the ultra-messy headshots. Cue one too many friends dying that way, and the jokes are not funny anymore.
• Funny Answering Machine

  Buns: "You have reached my video voice mail, please leave me a message. And Gumpy, if this is you, leave me a message like the last one, I will send you a reply that explodes on impact. I am not kidding."

  Steroid: "Robert Gontarski is ummm... UNAVOIDABLE right now. Tell me who you are and what you want and maybe I put him in touch with you, maybe not."

  Fox: You've reached Cynthia Guzzman. I'm kind of... -giggle- tied up at the moment, but leave me a message and I'll call you. If you would rather not hear from me, breathe heavily. Just once.

  Fidel: How this thing work? Fidel no here now... OK, I am here now, but I no be here when you get message, because if I here, you no get message, you get Fidel... One thing for sure, Fidel like to kill. And Fidel like money.

  Malice: "Hello dere. Single, white, French-Canadian guy looking for married, Black, English girl dat, uh, oh, uh, bad message. Leave me somet'ing, I get it back to you."

• Fun with Subtitles: You can almost feel the mischievous glee of the developers once you discover that Ivan's Russian dialog is subtitled also in Russian, making him The Unintelligible for most of the target audience. (Ivan learns more English as the series progresses. And not just the swear words!)
• Gadgeteer Genius: Trevor is described in his bio as someone who "can turn a harmless toaster oven into a lethal weapon".
• Gas Mask Mooks: Anyone, provided they're wearing a gas mask. Interestingly, this is somewhat subverted - there are no cosmetic changes to the model sprite, and though they're more common on black shirts, they show up randomly amongst Deidranna's grunts. They're also quite useful, but staying in mustard gas too long will cause damage as the filter erodes. v1.13 adds changes to your mercs' portraits to reflect if they have gas masks equipped.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Accidentally damaging (stray bullets, them wandering into a mustard gas shell, behind an enemy when a bullet over-penetrates, behind a wall when you turn it into rubble with C4, et cetera) a civilian in combat has them permanently marked as an enemy. Even if it's just a little kid. Killing the civilian will cause a drop in morale. Retreating will cause a drop in morale. You could always get the militia to do it for you, however, but it's extremely annoying in areas you're liberating - you can't leave until you shoot a kid in the face. 1.13 corrects this, at least; civilians will still get angry if you shoot them, but they won't turn hostile.
  • Rarely, an enemy hit by a stun grenade will be rendered both permanently unconscious and invincible. Not even planting a dozen chunks of C4 on the unconscious body and pounding them with rockets and mortars will affect them. Fortunately, this can be fixed by just leaving the area after killing everyone else (technically a loss for you) and coming back immediately, or reloading a save just before you stunned the target.
• Game Mod: V 1.13 for Jagged Alliance 2 adds several new and Dummied Out features to the game, such as improved inventory, a variety of ammo types, and shitloads of new guns.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: In stock JA2, the Queen will sensibly order a large counterattack, containing the best of her troops, on Drassen, the first city you take, to take it back. The worst you'll run into is an enemy squad from one of the nearby sectors investigating your presence. v1.13... well, even on the lowest difficulty, more than eighty troops will show up, containing Elite Mooks, and are often vastly better equipped than you will be. Note that at this point, you'll most likely only have a five-man fireteam.
  • The massive counterattack was actually present in the original form of the game, but "turned off" in the code by default, since it was felt to be too steep a learning curve for the new players. v1.13 re-enabled it.

• Giant Mook: those tanks in Meduna, easy enough if you have propelled explosives though. A bit harder to try and run in and plant a bomb. Impossible if all you have are machine guns (which look like pea-shooters next to the cannon).
• Global Airship: Skyrider's aircraft is the helicopter variant. Seats up to 6.
  • Technically, Hamous's ice cream truck (really!) and other land-vehicles can count.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Deidranna is a total prick.
• Good-Looking Privates: Fox is depicted repeatedly as such - she was centerfold and a model.
  • It's possible for an AIM result of a test to note that an applicant is very attractive.
• Grade System Snark: Trevor's end-of-battle soundbyte.

  Way hay, they're all dead! Got to give them an A for effort, though...

• Grenade Launcher: Both as underslung accessories and shoulder-fired guns.
• Groin Attack: With v1.13, locational damage generally results in hits to the legs, shoulders, arms, or head that can inflict stat damage and knock opponents down. But very, very rarely, you get a hit in on the groin, and the pain pretty much paralyzes the target completely as if they'd been dropped by a stun grenade. For some reason, Razor seems to have a much higher chance of scoring groin attacks than other mercs.
• Guide Dangit: With a few exceptions, you likely won't know which mercs hate or like each other until they've worked together in the field. You'll need to consult a guide or wiki just to make sure you're not going to walk into any pitfalls - if you don't, you risk heavy morale drops, or, in some cases, some mercs leaving and taking their hard-earned gear with them.
  • You can actually solo assassinate Dedrianna by drawing her out of her palace, but the way to do so is incredibly obscure and with no hint that it can work anywhere in the game. In order to do it, you have to wear one of the Dedrianna T-shirts as chest armor and send your IMP merc into enemy territory on their own. After a couple of rounds of fighting the enemy troops will try to capture you. If you surrender, you'll be taken to a military prison to be interrogated by Dedrianna personally. You can then escape and assassinate her. If you send anyone beside your first IMP merc, they'll just be captured and have to be rescued later on.
• Gun Accessories: Lots of them. 1.13 gives even more.
• Guns Akimbo: Generally not a good idea, unless you're using mercs who have Ambidextrous and Gunslinger traits. Tex, Meltdown, Fox, and Danny are some of the better mercs for this role. Otherwise you'll be spraying bullets everywhere, and you can't use burst or autofire while dual-wielding. Dual pistols, machine pistols, and revolvers really come into their own in close-quarters combat, especially when outfitted with laser and reflex sights and scopes. Even if individual shots don't do much damage, the sheer volume of fire adds up, and every hit wounds the target and reduces their breath, effectively paralyzing the enemy.
• Gun Porn: Old guns, new guns, rare guns, common guns. Shotguns both pump and semi-auto (and even a few break-action), rifles in bolt-action, lever-action, semi-automatic, and full-auto flavors, pistols of every possible variety, machine pistols, submachine guns, machine guns, rocket launchers, mortars... you name it, this game has it, including literally every single AK variant made to date (over four pages of them) and several guns that are so extraordinarily rare as to be unobtainable in real life. You're likely to use less than a quarter of them over the course of any given playthrough. It gets worse with 1.13 mods. You can find (on average) five different variants for a given gun - in fact, the first three pages of the assault rifle section of Bobby Ray's contains nothing but AK variants.
  • Then you have the attachments. High magnification scopes, tactical lasers, fore grips, grenade launchers, longer barrels... gets even further in later 1.13 mods as the number of attachment slots increase and you actually get to see where the attachments are being placed. There are even more attachments, including folding stocks, reflex sights, even longer barrels, caliber changing barrels (5.7mm barrels for AR-15 variants, 5.56mm NATO / 7.62mm NATO / 6.8mm SPC barrels for SCAR rifles), EBR kits for M14/M21 rifles, C-Mag adapters, and Sci-Fi mode only 3 round burst trigger groups. It's quite common for the player to spend some time scavenging attachments, trying to put the optimal attachments on a given gun, and admire all the numeric enhancements and forget about fighting. Did someone say guns are Barbie dolls for men?
  • Men don't argue for hours which accessory looks best on their... waaaait a minute.
• Hand Cannon: The bigger revolvers. Some of which sound louder than rifles. In 1.13 the Desert Eagle and the "Automag" weapons become the biggest handguns in the game.
  • The M29 SATAN and the "Big Bertha" Automags (that fire .50 Beowulf rounds) in 1.13.
    • Lampshaded in the .50AE ammo description, which says "If you are using an oversized, unreliable handgun instead of a good rifle, you are going to need the ammunition for it."
• Handguns: Useless after the first few battles out in the open. It was revamped in 1.13 though, with the addition of AET bullets which are only available in pistol calibers, as well as holsters for easy storage that everyone should have one as backup. Dual silenced pistols on the hands of an ambidextrous merc can be deadly in stealthy night ops. Handguns also prove to be a good secondary weapon for soldiers who use slower or heavier weapons but end up in close quarters. Thanks to their low AP cost in both readying and firing, they are effective at room clearing or shooting someone who runs up to your merc in close and triggers an interrupt. This is, in fact, the single biggest reason why dual-wielding troops are so deadly in close: in the time it takes a rifle or shotgun-wielder to fire a couple of shots, a dual-wielding trooper can fire off six to ten rounds, and every hit will knock some breath out of the target.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: Since the main focus on the game is fighting squads and platoons, and there's a hard limit on stats (For humans, at least), a single target is hardly a challenge without backup. And even with backup, they're usually not that much tougher than the Elite Mooks. Thus, every boss in JA2 could be considered one.
  • The Warden of Tixa Prison is less combat effective than any of her mooks, and less dangerous, unless she gets the jump on you somehow and sprays a full burst of rounds into one of your people.
  • The legendary mercenary Mike gives you a 'head start' before beginning his attack. Though where you fight him changes, he's still likely to be one of the last few enemies, and a fairly easy target for your entire team to attack. The only thing is that several AIM members are unwilling to kill him, easily circumvented by the few that don't are either superior to him (namely, Ivan and Gus), hate him already (Fox once dated the creep), or are out of sight and lobbing mortars. Others simply don't care and some of the rookies aren't as intimidated, having never actually seen him in action before.
  • The Crepitus queen in sci-fi mode is the closest thing to a real boss in the game. But she is immobile, meaning any merc of a decent level (to avoid interrupts) can walk into her room, throw a grenade (gas is surprisingly effective) and walk out a few times.
  • Kingpin, the 'Godfather' of San Mona also qualifies if you wish to fight him (to steal his money, because he is scum, or just for fun). He is better than the warden, but still, he goes down as easily as any of his thugs or the queen's red shirts. (Just have to make sure you survive his revenge-fueled army patrolling in his artificial town.)
  • Even though Deidranna is, individually, a lot tougher than you'd expect, she's still only one target against your entire squad. Especially since she stays out of the way while you fight her elite guard, and doesn't actually start attacking until you assault her.
  • The General in Alma is tough (taking four shots to the head), but by the time you meet him, you've probably cleared his goons in the nearby room, and once he gets hostile, you're most likely right in front of him... and it's your turn first.
  • Darryl Hick, the terrorist hillbilly grandfather near Cambria is only armed with a hunting rifle, a lot less deadly than any of the queen's red shirts who are much better armed, he also doesn't wear a helmet, so a shot to the head will finish him. His bastard kids, on the other hand, are deadly on account of full-auto shotguns in CQC - but that's if you don't have Spectra or EOD armor... or didn't rig the place to explode.
• Heal Thyself: Mostly averted. Medikits will not heal wounds, but are used to stop bleeding and slightly reduce the physical penalties caused by wounds. Treated wounds will slowly regenerate, but to really get a merc back on his feet, you need to assign another merc to be a doctor (And give him a Medical Kit. First Aid Kits won't cut it.) However, there are Regen Boosts in Jagged Alliance 2 which will heal characters in a couple of minutes, though these are very rare and should only be used in an emergency.
• Heel Realization: It's not quite as cathartic as just gunning her down, but Doreen the sweatshop owner can also be convinced to shut her child-labor operation down by a character with sufficient Leadership skill.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: While helmets do exist and are indisputably useful, the in-game sprites are never shown wearing them, presumably so that it's easier to tell different characters apart.
• Hired Guns: Duh.
• Hollywood Silencer: You can unload a MAC-10 into an enemy and provided you've got a one-size-fits-all silencer fitted, the bad guys in the next room won't even be aware a gunfight is happening.
  • Say goodbye to the Hollywood Silencer in v1.13. Sufficiently close enemies will still hear the gunshot of your MP 5 SD especially if he is wearing an Extended Ear (basically acoustic headphones). While you can now put suppressors on assault rifles and sniper rifles, they are nothing more than a heavy flash suppressor if you don't use subsonic ammo. Even then, if you're using said subsonic ammo, enemies close by will hear you. The in-game sound effect is the standard Hollywood "fwip".
• Homemade Inventions: 'Eagle' explosive devices in original: take a jerry can of gasoline, tape a grenade of some flavor to it, and throw. You can also use a chunk of steel to permanently modify a gun with an extended barrel (better range and damage, not available for the .38).
  • Expanded on in the sequel: You can make an X-ray detector out of various components to scout a room before you go inside; you can combine RDX crystals with various things to make horribly dangerous explosives; combining a steel rod and a spring gives you a replacement recoil spring to reduce AP on certain guns; duct tape and a steel tube allows you to create a barrel extension for better accuracy and range that may or may not go flying off the gun when you shoot...
• Horde of Alien Locusts: The Crepitus if you turn on the game's Sci-Fi mode.
• Hypocritical Humor: Gus when briefing you on one politically sensitive mission in Deadly Games.

  Gus Tarballs: Don't want no international incidents. I'm headed out to create my own!

• Incredibly Lame Pun: When Ice complains about his squad (done by using the talk command out-of-battle and clicking on him), he'll say the mercs he work with are more like... Jercs.
  • Capture enough mines and you get this:

  Deidranna: How can I make money from the mines when they are not MINE?!

• I Like Those Odds: In Jagged Alliance 2, every mercenary has a special line when they can see 3 or more enemies simultaneously, usually suggesting retreat, or something like, "I'm fighting a losing battle here!" Magic takes the opposite stance, exclaiming, "This is when I'm at my best!
• I Love Nuclear Power: The Nuclear Testing on the Metavira Island in the 50s resulted in mutated trees that produced sap with amazing medical properties.
• Inappropriate Hunger:
  • When your mercenaries come across a decaying corpse with ravens pecking at it, they'll comment on it. Most will react with revulsion or disgust, but the Axe-Crazy Meltdown will say

  Meltdown: Would you look at that! Hey, when do we eat?

  • Making an enemy's head explode also results in a comment from the responsible mercenary. Many tend to be quite impressed, though Stogie's is a bit odd.

  Stogie: Reminds me of soup. I like soup.

• Indian Burial Ground: When the casualties among the natives of Metavira (as hired guards and unlucky workers) reach a certain point, they will grumble about the lack of access to their sacred burial grounds. Failure to liberate it from Lucas' men will result in severe decrease of native workforce. (That can't be fixed with just salary hikes.)
• Informal Eulogy: A few characters will comment on others' deaths.
• Insurance Fraud: In the second game you can insure you mercenaries, and the insurance company will be on the look out for these. Hint: you don't get the payout if you're the cause of death.
• Instant Militia: Averted, training militia takes skill, time and money. 1.13 gives you an option to play this straight with the PMC Kerberus, which for the hefty fee will deliver already trained militia a day later.
• Interface Spoiler: How long it takes for the computer to run through the enemy turn will tell you roughly how many enemy soldiers there are in the sector. If it suddenly gets a lot longer, you know you should watch the edges of the map for freshly arrived reinforcements.
• In-Universe Game Clock
• Inventory Management Puzzle:
  • A very tricky part of the first two Jagged Alliance games was the limited carrying capacity, making the various multi-pocket vests very valuable commodities. How much a pocket could carry was limited to the same item, So you could carry five boxes of shotgun shells in one pocket, but not three .45 clips and two boxes of .357 bullets in the same pocket. Also a gun would take up one single pocket, no matter if it was a .38 revolver or an M-16 rifle. This wasn't so bad in the first game, where you could come back to the same area tomorrow to pick up dropped items (As long as you held the sector) but became very important in Deadly Games, where every mission was one day, and equipment left behind was gone forever.
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, each merc can only carry so much equipment, both in terms of how much stuff they can have and how much weight they can manage based on their strength. 1.13 adds even more complexity to it, as instead of simply giving you a set number of slots of set sizes, you can actually get vests, leg panels, and backpacks of various kinds with an array of pouches to carry a variety of items. There's even heavy backpacks with a huge inventory capacity but which slow down the merc wearing them in combat, which can be dropped to speed them up. You may end up having to (literally) weigh the difference between, for example, a Tactical Tailor Assault Vest (with lots of the ever useful assault rifle pouches), a Russian 106 vest (which gives a large number of different-sized pouches) or a German Flecktarn vest (which offers a good balance of different types). Then there's trying to figure out which rifles accept which scope, which laser sight, and if it'll take a foregrip or grippod. It adds an impressive (or annoying, depending on the player) level of micromanagement and logistics to the game.
  • 1.13 also adds backpacks, which are very useful for carrying additional gear, but severely drain stamina and restrict movement. Fortunately, there's an equally useful "drop backpack" option available for when it's time to spring into action.
• In Vino Veritas : One of the first missions the player gets in JA 2 is to organise food shipments to the besieged rebel base. The only person who is capable of doing so is Father Walker, a priest sympathetic to the rebel cause, but he initially refuses to help out of fear. However, he is also a well-known drinker and once you give him some alcohol, he drunkingly agrees to supply the rebels with the much-needed food.
  • You can avoid this by bringing Ira with you, or just having a high enough town loyalty in Drassen: if he spawns on the middle sector of the map, he'll refuse to help, but if he spawns on the bottom sector (which means you've likely cleared the other two sectors of bad guys beforehand), he'll be happy to help as clearing all three sectors will raise loyalty enough to get him to help out. Having Ira talk to him will prompt him to help no matter what.
• Invulnerable Civilians: Played straight and subverted, enemies won't deliberately shoot civilians except those you trained as militias. Crepitus and Bloodcats WILL attack civilian, so kill them before they can. You can shoot civilians if you want to, but you will lose town loyalty if you do, so don't. Attacking militias will turn (up to all of) them against you.
• Iron Butt Monkey: Elliot. Every time he brings bad news, Deidranna slaps him around. At one point she shoots him in the head and he survives. He even apologizes to the queen for failing to die properly, and gets to work cleaning up his spilled blood.
• Item Crafting: Limited combinations in all games. The 1.13 June 2012 beta has a new drug crafting system for creating stat enhancing drugs.
• Japanese Ranguage: Tex. Rusterers!
• Joke Character:
  • Biff Apscott, but much more so in 2 than 1. Lousy stats, low Wisdom so he'll only improve slowly (if at all), and likely to panic at the first sign of trouble. The only real reason to hire him is either a Self-Imposed Challenge or to hear all of his lines.
  • "Unusually Ruthless" Reuben is this in 1. Has a laughably low daily wage, poor stats, and brings a hedge trimmer as his primary weapon (which cannot be used in combat).
• Kidnapped Scientist: Brenda can be kidnapped by Lucas' men; she'll leave a trail of discarded items to follow, but take too long and all you will have is a bloodied bra. Thankfully, all of it can be avoided.
• Klingon Promotion: Surprisingly done by you in the case of the Grumm bar. Manny is a bar boy there, but it just happen that his employer is a wanted international terrorist and you're after his head (literally). Manny will take his position after you kill him. (And the Santos brothers will be united.)
• Knowledge Broker: Recon Intelligence Services from JA2: "if you don't know where to find us, we don't want your business."
• Land Mine Goes "Click!": Most notably during the assault on Meduna in JA2, where they're as thick as flies in some parts, in an attempt to keep you bottlenecked.
• La Résistance: Miguel's rebels and, technically, you and your mercenaries. Quite a few are happy to join up, though.
• Laser Sight: A possible accessory, and in the v1.13 mod there are two (both pistol and rifle models) plus an accessory that combines both this and a flashlight for some rifles, the Rifle LAM/Flashlight Combo.
• Last Grasp at Life: If your mercenary drowns in the first two games, the last you see of them is a clip of their hand desperately reaching up into the air.
• Law Enforcement, Inc.: After the Metavira and DFK operations, A.I.M. became like this.
• Law of Chromatic Superiority: Enemies in Yellow are basically cops and enforcers, armed only with handguns and occasionally submachine guns and shotguns. Enemies in Red are standard grunts. Enemies in Black are Elite Mooks. As an added bonus, black shirts also come in a camouflaged variety.
• Limit Break: Rage! adds Rage Points, which build up in combat by both scoring hits on enemies and taking damage. Each merc has a unique ability, ranging from Shadow's Shadow Walk to outright More Dakka from Fidel or Grunty.
• Littlest Cancer Patient: Not seen, but mentioned by the Richards.
• Little Useless Gun: The .38 Special is hands down the worst gun in the game, hampered by both its small ammunition capacity and poor stopping power. It's telling that some of the worst mercs come equipped with it by default.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: The first game had sixty hireable mercenaries. Deadly Games added ten to the existing pile. JA2 also featured many NPCs with voices and personalities all across Arulco that you could talk to.
• Lzherusskie: Averted; both Russian characters in the series are played by Russian voice actors.
• Mad Bomber: It seems to be a rule that if you're a mercenary specializing in explosives, you're either insane or have some kind of undesirable personality trait/mental defect. This is so prevalent that one of the exceptions flaunts his sanity as a marketing point. It is quite telling that when AIM cleaned up their roster after Deadly Games, removing the most obvious felons, misfits and sociopaths, they still ended up with at least two Mad Bomber-types on the roster.
• Made of Iron: One of the few combat tropes averted (mostly), characters will bleed to death in a few hits without armor.
  • The bad news: The ubiquitous elite mooks are armored as well and will take no less than two (non-critical) bursts from a light machinegun to the face at point blank range before they stop making a fuss about your presence.
    • Some of them simmer down quite nicely after a healthy dose of tear gas, though.
• Magikarp Power: In any of the games, if a merc has a high wisdom stat (preferably at 80 and higher) he/she can improve his/her stats and skills so fast it doesn't matter if he/she starts out as absolute crap; he/she will a master of everything in no time. Gumpy is well liked amongst the fanbase for having a high wisdom stat.
  • In 1.13, selectable personality traits like Intellectual and Teaching aid in stat growth. Greenhorns like MD will supercede Gus even faster. (And their salaries will reflect this.)
  • It is highly recommended that you allocate as many points as possible to abilities (especially wisdom and health) instead of skills on your custom merc, even if this leaves him/her with no skill in, say, explosives. Abilities are harder to train, while field experience (such as repairing items) raises both the skill and the corresponding ability.
  • MERC in the second game is an entire organization that runs on this. Their initial pool of hireable mercs are at best mediocre. However, the more you use their services, the more they will expand their operations, with the final merc added to their roster being proper elite.
• The Magnificent Seven Samurai: The plot of Metavira and Arulco operations is essentially like this.
• Mean Brit: The scientist working on the rocket rifles in the basement of Orta. He'll insult you. Keep insulting him back, and he'll back off (though still pissed) and give you want you want (that is, a heaping stack of rocket rifles).
• Meaningful Name: John "Bull" Peters was actually named after the real-life British mercenary John Peters, who worked with the famous gun-for-hire Mike Hoare's 5 Commando mercenary team in the Congo in the 1960's.
• Meanwhile Scene: Meanwhile, at Meduna, Deidranna slaps Elliot around after another report of your progress.
• The Medic: In this series it's more of a less-combat oriented Combat Medic. Dr. Mark "Needle" Kranhuim from the first game, the best doctor in the game (I've brought people back from the dead!), is a good example; his wandering right-eye makes his aim forever less-than-stellar. Few of the medics are particularly battle worthy (except for the former combat specialist and the martial artist).
• Mega Neko: Bloodcats, genetically engineered felines that love to tear the arms off bipeds. Enemy forces can often be seen ambushed by them. Warning: Don't engage in a straight fight, lest you want to get killed.
• Mildly Military: Justified; both A.I.M. and M.E.R.C. are run as business ventures rather than military organizations, but due to their line of work there are still a few pseudo-military trappings. Some mercs aren't even ex-military.
• Military Brat: Some mercs are this, most notably the Roachburns. Buzz, from Deadly Games, vocalizes she's to make her daddy proud.
• Military Maverick: Considering the personalities of most of these mercs...
• Min-Maxing: Subverted, putting 0 in a skill means the merc will never be able to improve in it (unless they get a critical success — such as accidentally defusing their first mine — to raise that skill from 0 to 1), and improving skills is a big part of what raises a merc's level. Almost all the mercs that you can hire have at least 1 point in every skill, meaning that given enough time and effort, you can train the doctor into an explosive expert (not that you'd want to).
  • You can either suffer trauma to reduce a skill to 0 (which your merc will gradually recover from), or in the case of your custom (IMP) merc, you can set your initial skill to 0 (from a minimum of 35; the game will warn you). If you do, then the merc gains 15 points of stats that can be allocated elsewhere.
• Missing Backblast: Averted, make sure nobody (other than a bad guy) is standing behind you before you fire your LAW. (Or RPG in 1.13.)
• Mission-Pack Sequel: Deadly Games can come quite close to this. However, the amount of additions and improvements would make it very expansive mission pack. Unfinished Business can be considered an another example of this, although it was actually marketed as stand-alone expansion to Jagged Alliance 2 (and not a separate game).
• Morale Mechanic: Jagged Alliance 2 has a morale mechanic which is raised by successfully killing enemies, teaming up friends, and liberating towns, and lowered by getting hurt, retreating, losing towns, and teaming up people who don't like each other. Mercenaries that are in a good mood will perform better and have exultant remarks and laughter during battle, while unhappy mercenaries will perform worse, disobey orders, complain, and possibly even permanently quit.
• More Dakka: The full auto mode of many assault rifles and the only way some heavy machine guns can shoot.
  • Rod and spring decreases the action points needed to start a burst/automatic fire. With the attachment, assault rifles with 3 round bursts can fire a burst volley as fast as a single shot. Slap in a C-Mag and never fire single shots again.
  • The Metal Storm Surf Zone SMG in V 1.13 is the epitome of this trope, next to the machine guns - it being... Metal Storm... it fires two shots per barrel (it has four of them). A "five"-round burst will guarantee anyone short of a fulled-armored black-shirt is swiss cheese.
  • A rare aversion comes into play with the sci-fi-mode-only "ACME Trigger Group", which will add a three-round-burst mode to otherwise fully-automatic weapons. This is incredibly handy for distance shooting and aimed autofire: mercenaries not specializing in automatic weapons tend to fire most rounds than intended on full auto, most of which will go to waste due to recoil. Emptying a magazine at a single target a third of the map away is singularly wasteful if only the first two rounds hit.
  • As of July 2012 Beta, ammo belts can be used to externally feed the machine guns and modified assault rifles, either from the large ammo packs on the gunner itself or another merc holding the belt, providing more lead without the need to reload.
• Multinational Team: Subverted, some mercs will refuse to work with each other because of this.
  • The rivalry between English sniper Scope and Irish arms-dealer Micky; Frenchman Gaston and French-Canadian La Malice; Americana-boy Gasket and anyone from Russia (Ivan, Igor, Iggy); crooked Southern prison-guard Bubba and until-recently tortured-prisoner (and black man) Dynamo; etc.
  • Another example is Steroid (Polish) who strongly dislikes Ivan and Igor (both Russian). With Fidel and Trevor, the matter lies more in "professional rivalry".
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: Many mercs dislike each other and will refuse any contracts or decrease group morale (or even leave on the spot) if the subjects of their hatred are involved. Reasons can vary from nationalistic as said above to personal.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: Poor, poor Elliot.
• Native Guide: In JA1, if you have free room for more mercs, Jack offers you for one to accompany your team, and of those is Hamous who will become a regular in later games. Ira and Dimitri serve the same narrative role in JA2, commenting on various places.
• Night-Vision Goggles: It only affects gameplay by increasing the wearer's vision range at night, you don't get to see through them.
• Nintendo Hard: You're supposed to take on entire armies with several mercenaries, who need a capable leader to pull it off.
  • v1.13 by default, although many of the options will make it much better. It's common to hear horror stories of early merc groups storming Drassen, only to be faced by sixty (later eighty) Royal troops with a quarter of them being Black Ops types counterattacking the next day. This "feature" is enabled on Experienced (normal mode) of all things.
    • The truly masochistic can enable an option in 1.13 that allows large-scale assaults like the Drassen counterattack to happen throughout the game; while it is obviously much easier with a properly-upgraded crew, the randomness makes it hard to be prepared for, and the massive army WILL overwhelm defending militia if you don't have mercs to reinforce.
• No "Arc" in "Archery": Averted in the latest version of 1.13 where bullets visibly start falling after passing a certain distance, most noticeably when using pistols.
• No Fame, No Wealth, No Service: In the first game, with you being a rookie commander, almost no Merc with the paycheck above 1000$ a day will provide their services until you prove yourself to be a capable commander. Two notable exceptions are Ivan Dolvich and Ice Williams, which is why almost every starting team ends up including at least one of them.
• No Name Given: The commander (You) in Jagged Alliance 1 and 2. Though if you go by what Gus calls you, your name is "Woodrow".
• Obvious Beta: From early reviews, Flashback seems to still not be feature-complete as of its official release date.
• Oddly Small Organization: You and the rebels in JA2. Justified by your lack of starting capital and a small pool of mercs to hire from in your case. And in the rebels' case, having being nearly wiped out by a Deidrannan air-strike on their village.
• One Bullet Clips: Well, sort of. It keeps track of how many bullets are in each magazine, and a magazine can be filled by transferring bullets of the same type from another magazine, but the action point penalty is nowhere near the amount of time it actually takes to empty a clip by hand.
• Oh, Crap!: Many mercs have a response like this if they can see three or more enemies simultaneously, either a direct variation of the phrase or some version of "Get me out of here!" Unless they celebrate it instead.
• One-Hit Kill: Shooting someone in the head with the sniper rifle, a shotgun at the point blank range or any decent rifle worth its name, even when armored, usually just kills the poor sob.
  • 1.13 offers many more ways to do this. Melee attacks from behind, especially "covert" weapons can inflict this. Glaser rounds will outright obliterate any unarmored sod they hit, but are worthless against armor. And sufficiently high-caliber weapons, like the .50 Cal snipers, can easily inflict this regardless of where they hit.
• One-Hit Polykill: Very, very rare by over-penetration by certain weapons. Heavy rifles are the easiest to do it with. And (obviously) explosives excel at this.
• One-Man Army: Not intended (nor recommended), but you can play this way as a Self-Imposed Challenge. In many cases, the merc of choice would be Shadow. (Unless you want to spend weeks training your created mercenary.)
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The Three Founders of A.I.M. are Colonel Mohanned, Commander Spice and The White Asian.
• Only in It for the Money: As soon as the mercenaries' contracts expire and you don't have funds to renew them (or just bankrupt in case of M.E.R.C. and the first games), they will immediately leave the theater of operations. Averted with the created mercs the PC can make and the resistance fighters, for obvious reasons. Also, many characters work for free (such as your created mercs) so you can really make it through with just the 'free' characters.
  • Renewing contracts, however, has some of the mercs say they like this job (and not because of the cash, but because they're doing something good). They will still expect to be paid, though.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: When Mike is encountered, certain mercs will ask you to allow them to kill him personally: Gus, out of bad blood with him, and Ivan, who just hates him. This is compared to most of the other mercs, who either don't know him, or refuse to fight him.
• Optional Stealth: All games in the series provide some tools to capture sector stealthily, even if mechanics of stealth and detection are very unclear, and sometimes randomised. In Rage!, stealth mechanics are made clear, making it more possible to eliminate enemies without having to fight them, which is especially important early on.
• Only Sane Man: Russel "Rusty" Hunter from the first game, when compared to other explosive experts, who are either bloodthirsty (Fidel), not very reliable (Larry) or just plain crazy (almost everybody else).
• Orange/Blue Contrast: The cover and the title screen of the first game, seen here as a page image.
• Overheating: A future 1.13 feature undergoing beta testing as of March 2012.
• Painting the Medium: JA2 laptop sections are designed to look like late 90s websites (much better designed, thankfully), and the M.E.R.C. website may crash periodically in-game, complete with a 404 error message.
• Parasol of Pain: Those free umbrellas from MERC in Unfinished Business do serve as a good melee weapon.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • Royal Jelly, which can be used to produce the best armor in the game and which can only be obtained from the corpse of the Crepitus queen, a unique enemy, in the relatively narrow window of time between the moment she dies and the moment her corpse rots away. 'Relatively' in this case meaning 'fast enough that if you didn't bring enough jars to scoop it up, you don't have the time to go fetch more'. And that is assuming you play in Sci-fi mode; if you're playing Realistic, you don't get to kill her at all. And don't mix it with already treated armor.
  • For your head-hunting bounties, allowing the bodies to decompose (or just wandering off screen) means you lose access to which you were paid to collect.
  • Maddog will only offer his services if you first speak to him with a merc with good leadership. If you don't, he won't join period. Conrad will start shooting at you (naturally, rendering the option to recruit him null) if you talk to him for too long. The rest of the RPCs will leave for good if you dismiss them after hiring them, or if they get fed up enough that they quit.
• Pinned Down: In JA2 being shot at can force the target to crouch down and go prone if already crouched, wasting Action Points. This is most effective during Interrupts. As usual, this is expanded in 1.13.
• The Plague: An optional feature in the 1.13 mod introduces various diseases, from merely catching a cold to getting infected with a pandemic disease.
• Poirot Speak: Some mercs mix in their native language in their speech. Some mercs that do this are Flo and Gaston (French), Grunty and Thor (German), Hamous and some of the rebels (Spanish), and of course Ivan in Jagged Alliance 2 (in original JA he spoke only in Russian).
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: When a merc sees an enemy after real-time mode, one example for a create-a-merc (from I.M.P.) is "Time to take out the trash!" The cowardly sidekick mercs' phrases do not count however. (OH MY GOD. I'M A DEAD MAN!)
• President Evil: Deidranna, although she's technically queen. (Voted in. For life.)
• Pretty Little Headshots: Averted and then some, at least when you use high-powered rifles against unarmored heads in Jagged Alliance 2. *Splotch*
  • "''That'' sure blows my mind! I guess it makes two of us."
  • Of course, unless you do get the random head-explodey animation, the enemy just drops dead. In 1.13, they often fly back a couple squares if they were hit hard with a big caliber and facing the bullet's direction.
• Private Military Contractors: A.I.M. and M.E.R.C., although the former are more of a guild for individual mercenaries than an actual private army. The latter on the other hand...
  • The 1.13 mod has a PMC named Kerberus, which is an alternate method of getting militia, where instead of spending time and money to train the locals bit by bit, you can just spend a lot more money (plus a little transit time) to hire a platoon of experienced militia. Only limited to towns with Airports.
  • In Rage!, the Black Shirts are portrayed as such.
• Professional Killer: Many of the mercs' background. Averted with quite a few of the medics, who are regular civilians with strange reasons for signing up with AIM.
  • Slay, one of the wanted 'terrorists' is just one of these, and he was only put into the wanted list merely because he had outlived his usefulness to his previous employers who feared he may turn against them. He can be recruited in later patches.
• Psycho for Hire: Several, most notably Fidel, Meltdown, and Razor.
  • In the first installment, Postie, Reuban, Skitz... okay, most of the cast really.
    • By JA2 A.I.M. got rid of most of them (being a somewhat legit business after the Metavira operation means you have to follow somewhat harsher standards), with only the most skilled, particularly hard-to-find talented mercenaries (who can pass a psyche-exam) like Fidel allowed to stay.
• Put on a Bus: Many characters from the first two games, as seen in the Alumni Section of the AIM website. Some of them, like Mike, show up later. In Jagged Alliance 2 proper, this can happen to mercs you don't hire right away - they'll be put "On Assignment", taking other missions besides yours. In most cases, at least one or two mercs will be unavailable for this reason when you start your campaign.
• The Quiet One: Aside from the hiring dialogue and if faced with the Crepitus, Shadow usually speaks softly in short-and-directly-to-the-point kind of way.
  • So does Reaper, though he occasionally rambles on about his fatalism.
  • Mouse from Deadly Games also brings her mime act with her.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The Squad can be like this if you hire the "right" mercs. By late-game, you team can consist of everything from professional mercenaries, locally-hired troops, and rebels. Within your own mercenary force, your troops will consist of everything from professional soldiers to ex-bouncers to paramedics to professional surgeons to ex-SWAT officers, and also includes a bevy of criminals and self-trained specialists, many of whom are criminally insane to one degree or another. And this is before you start bringing in the comical assortment of MERC personnel. Your team can certainly act like it, if you've got conflicting mercs or use the talk command to see how they really feel about each other.
  • Dr. Vincent Beaumont sums it up if you use his talk command: "Two words: Mental ward." Gumpy has something further to add: "Buncha post office rejects, that's what this team is!"
• Randomly Drops: Unless you select the 'Enemy drop all items' option in 1.13
• Railing Kill: Rare as rubies, since most enemies fight at ground level and the ones on the rooftops generally will fire at you from somewhere not near the edge. But kind of nifty to see when it does happen (such as getting an interrupt on one climbing up to meet you). And it results in practically instakill damage. (-56 HP from the hit, but -136 from the fall?!)
• Rare Guns: Boy, it's easier to point out what is NOT included. Out of the 18 guns listed on the trope page, all but five of them appear in-game. V 1.13 adds a "coolness" rating to guns that allows you to limit the more outrageous ones. Oddly enough, a lot of them are better than Boring, but Practical guns, like the G11 doing the same damage as a normal 5.56 rifle and having more accuracy.
• Real-Time Strategy: The Overworld sections. Also, the first game was an RTS early in development.
• Real-Time with Pause: Back In Action and Crossfire are played in real time, with a feature allowing to pause the game and give a series of orders while in pause.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: The rocket rifle. Although the one in the game is a fictional weapon, guns using rocket-propelled munitions have been prototyped in the past, with a few models even entering limited production (a 13mm rocket pistol was issued to a few Navy SEAL units in Vietnam, for example, although they were extremely disappointed with its performance and quickly stopped using it).
• Rebel Leader: Miguel.
• Redshirt Army: The local militia you can train are more or less expendable, easily replaced, and die quickly. (Especially quickly if you try to lead the battle.) Humourously, the standard uniform of the Arulcan Army is fatigue pants and a bright red T-shirt, making them a literal Redshirt Army. Unless you're training veteran rebels. A ten-man team will slaughter a thirty-plus squad of Deidranna's troops, with only two casualties.
• Relationship Values: Various mercs will enjoy working together with some individuals, and detest others. Sometimes the feelings are mutual, sometimes one-sided. This has gameplay effects with morale, how much money a merc wants or outright refusing to join. At the most extreme end, keeping a merc on the same team as someone whose guts they hate may have the result that one fine morning you find a merc "disappeared" during the night, with the heavy implication their own teammate up and killed them.
• Respawning Enemies: In the final battle of JA1, the enemy soldiers that die are quickly replaced with the new ones from the unlimited pool (the unverified rumor says that the cap is 99 soldiers), though there can only 8 at the same time. This can be exploited by stunning, but not killing, most of the soldiers, reducing the number of active threats to more manageable 3-1 soldiers.
• Revolvers Are for Amateurs: In the base game for Jagged Alliance 2, some of the worst mercs, such as Biff, come equipped with a .38 revolver, which is pretty much the worst weapon in the game.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Averted: In this series, the low-ammo count and slow firing rate usually makes any advantage that revolvers have null in close-range combat. Not to mention the inability to silence them.
  • They usually make up for it in power, but even then, the main drawback is the high AP cost, LOUD NESS (well, if you're that sort of sneaky bastard), and range. (They are handguns, after all.)
  • Tex Colburn's custom revolvers, however, are quite possibly this - a better range and AP cost than the M29 SATAN, especially if an Insight LAM and Small Scope is slapped on it, and it's got AET ammo. It helps that he's got good marksmanship and the ambidextrous perk.
  • In the first set of games, until you picked up assault rifles, your choices were slower pump-action shotguns, crappy revolvers, inaccurate SMGs, decent semi-auto pistols, and relatively good revolvers like the .357 and Ruger Redhawk. In 1.13, you can turn off the levelling list so you can get far superior rifles right away, but without, you'll get the consolation prize of a few A Ks, maybe in the damaged goods section.
  • With 1.13, revolvers come into their own, especially when dual-wielded by a merc with Gunslinger and Ambidexterity. Put a laser sight, reflex sight, and scope on a big, powerful model like an Anaconda or Redhawk, load them with AP or AET ammo, and two revolvers become medium-range murder machines.
  • Also in 1.13, revolvers get a unique property added that reflects a real-life advantage - they always unjam in one attempt. This is because all you need to do to unjam a revolver is rotate to the next chamber (provided the jam was due to a dud round, rather than the bullet firing but getting physically stuck in the barrel), which many revolvers will do just by pulling the trigger again.
• Rogue Agent: One spook tried to sell secret blueprints in Deadly Games. Your job is to kill him. His official death is a boating incident on the vacation.
• Roundhouse Kick: Martial artists can do this in Jagged Alliance 2, usually resulting in a knockdown. Quite useful in knocking down Elite Mooks in order to steal their guns.
• Ruling Family Massacre: Deidranna nearly does this to the Chivaldori family, with Enrico being the only survivor.
• Running Gag: Ahem, my queen, I...
  • *slap* ELLIOT! YOU IDIOT!!!
• Save Scumming: It is possible in Jagged Alliance to save-scum, but it takes a lot of extra effort where you backup save files. This can happen especially if you are the type who never let anyone get hurt, let alone killed, or miss a shot. There is an optional difficulty called Iron Man which doesn't let you do this with enemies in the sector. However, this only works if you choose a different action than the one you attempted last time, as the save files save the next "dice" result in the seed in addition to everything else.
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: With the games leaning on realism, you're really better off with a SPAS or something similar. The Jackhammer is even better.
• Scarily Competent Tracker: The 1.13v mod gives anyone with the Ranger trait or specific backgrounds an ability to track.
• Schmuck Bait: During Rage!, you'll come across syringes of the game's Fantastic Drug, Bliss. The description for it notes that using it will instantly fill the Rage gauge, granting the use of special abilities. What it doesn't tell you is that taking Bliss also puts the merc who takes it into an Unstoppable Rage, causing them to no longer be under player control and to attack randomly, friend or foe, with fists.
• Scratch Damage (Break Lights, annoying as your characters need medical attention from it. Also grenades when they hit your merc and failed to explode.) Strangely, if you wear the heaviest armor, shots sometime do 0 damage to you, BUT break lights will STILL do 1 damage regardless.
  • Can you imagine a more humiliating death than bleeding to death from a scratch caused by a tear gas grenade, while rendered helpless by the breathtaking effect of the gas?
  • Also punches from weak mercs also count, since they will always do 1 damage minimum.
  • Pistol rounds (especially laughable stuff like 9mm.. or less) against EOD or Spectra will still have a damage of at least 1. Thankfully, the wound doesn't bleed.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: Watch that morale, as both mercs and RPCs will walk out on you depending on the circumstances. Mercs from AIM will at least stay on until the end of their contracts, but will refuse to renew them if they're angry or you've got someone they hate on the team and there's no "buddy" to balance it out. MERC and RPC troops will just outright quit.
• Secondary Fire: in form of fire selector, usually between single, burst and full auto. (And grenade if you have an underslung launcher.)
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: In the first game, when trying to capture the processing plants, the enemy will try to set off explosives to destroy the plant, rendering it temporarily inoperative.
• Semper Fi: Some mercs served as Marines in the past. The IMP quiz will peg your custom-made character as a Marine if your marksmanship level is extremely high.
• Sergeant Rock: Many high-level mercs are like this. Especially Gus, who is a natural leader.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: 2 was much darker and more serious in tone than the first game. Accordingly, the list of mercs removed from the roster largely consists of characters who were useless, silly or just plain implausible.
• Shoot Out the Lock: Possible with any gun, but more powerful guns are far more likely to open doors. 'Lockbuster' shotgun shells in 1.13 are designed with this in mind.
• Shoot the Messenger: Finding out that the flowers sent to her were from the mercenaries pisses her off even more than usual, enough for her to order to shoot the messenger (said word-for-word in-game). And later she does this Elliot, but he gets better.
• Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: Sniper rifles suffer from this. Although, otherwise they would be game breakers.
  • v1.13 does give them much more range. Unfortunately, the enemy has them too. Not so much a game breaker when your mercs are suffering headshots from across the map. Later builds of 1.13 adjusts it so that the more powerful scopes have a mininum distance, inside of which they add penalties instead of bonuses to accuracy.
  • Each movement square is roughly 1foot in diameter. Range treats every square as 10meters however. This ends with weapons being roughly 1/33rd their real life range. Even a sniper rifles with nearly 800meters effective range only travel about 80squares.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Those Corrupt Hicks especially just love their shotguns. By late game however, all enemies will be wearing body armor, and along with their limited range (unless you modify them) pretty much limit the shotguns as a stunning weapon (such as for stealing). However, in 1.13, with the availability of Flechette shells, they are now a viable weapon again. BIA also give shotguns realistic range.
• Shout-Out:
  • Back in Action and Crossfire, three of the four mercs you control during the tutorial are named "Hartman", "Cow Boy", and "Joker". The fourth is named "Stanley".
  • Gus using the nickname "Woodrow" for the player is probably a reference to the novel Lonesome Dove, where the two main characters are named Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Somewhat subverted. As their profile states, Raider and Raven don't show any affection on the battlefield (though they left the LAPD SWAT team over nepotism). However, if Raider dies, Raven goes into a glurge-ish eulogy. Raider on the other hand, worries about their insurance not covering acts of war. (Wolf and Fox might be a better example.)
• Skill Scores and Perks: In form of stats and traits. 1.13 mod revamped the latter into major and minor traits, and expanded it with personalities, disabilities and backgrounds traits.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The Winter missions in Deadly Games, with very visible footprints and a chance of slipping on the ice.
• Smug Snake: Mike is AIM's best merc in the first game, and he knows it; he refuses to join you unless you have the highest possible reputation, is extremely expensive, and will quit on a dime if you provoke him.
  • Sadly leads to a Face–Heel Turn in the sequel; Deidrianna offering more money than AIM ever could which, combined with his bad blood with AIM since the first game, leads to him becoming an antagonist. He never loses his cockiness even when facing down your well-trained heavily-armed merc army, and a few AIM vets who know him will have comments on both his betrayal and his death.
    • 1.13 makes it possible to make him join you, if you have a merc with high leadership critically wound him and attempt to speak to him.
• Sniper Duel: Possible in 1.13, thanks to range buffs.
• Sniper Rifle: Boy, are there!
  • One of the more heavily buffed weapon system in 1.13. Rounds that fly across two screens (about a kilometer), landing on enemy heads, is quite a beautiful sight. Enemy elites may perform the same feat to your mercs.
• Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Played straight, Bobby Ray and Tony get better equipment available as you progress. Enemies and militias will also use better equipment as the game progress. Take note that Elite Mooks are given slightly better equipment than the current level, so always steal from them whenever possible.
  • In v1.13, however, there is an option for Bobby Ray's to have all their inventory available immediately. Incredibly game breaking if you 'hack' (more like just edit an INI file in Notepad) to start with, say, a billion dollars. 1.13 comes with an INI editor, so this can be done without hacking even by players with limited technical skills.
    • More legit scenario is to send a merc to San Mona to earn some money from quests, sell weapons and get to the Boss hidden stash.
• The Squad: Although without the turncoat-turnabout guy.
• Summon Bigger Fish: When playing in Sci Fi mode in JA 2, M.D. literally wishes this as a solution to the Crepitus.
• Super Drowning Skills: The best way to kill someone who is standing in water is by shooting at their legs. Still, if that guy has a good weapon, it is better to wait for him to be on dry ground and kill him normally. See Destroyable Items for that.
  • Swimming is fine for most mercs, but God give you strength if you enter combat mode with a pissed off merc/black shirt staring at you with a machine gun. (Hint: You can't fire back.)
  • In the first game, swimming is extremely hazardous, though you likely won't know why at first. Turns out there's water snakes, and the only way to swim safely is with a knife in your inventory. Otherwise, your merc WILL die and take all their sweet gear with them.
  • In 1.13 with new traits enabled, you can deliberately give this disability to your custom(I.M.P) merc to provide an additional stat boost.
• Take Cover!: The staple of the series, most evident in the first game with its impenetrable Kevlar bushes. As of June of 2012, the 1.13 beta allows to make and unmake your own cover with sandbags, currently limited to maps with buildings. Note that while cover is important, it's not always perfect. Armour-piercing rounds are capable of punching through some walls, though with a noticeable drop in lethality.
• Tank Goodness: Tanks start showing up on the outskirts of Meduna. They're immune to small arms fire, and grenades barely scratch the hull. LAW and HEAT rocket-propelled grenades are more effective, though you'll need multiple hits on them. If you're especially ballsy, a merc with C4 or other explosives can sneak in under the cover of smoke or darkness (the tanks' vision is severely limited at night) and drop charges right next to it before skedaddling. If they return fire with their machineguns, however, your mercs are going to get cut to bloody ribbons.
  • A mod for the 1.13 mod allows them to move, and they can be a part of enemy patrols.
• There Was a Door: Just add explosives to the wall. A very advisable tactic in situations where you're dealing with enemies holed up in houses, like the western half of Balime (the southern mansion always has at least three enemies in it with the only door trapped) or the munitions factory in Grumm.
• This Is Unforgivable!: In the original Jagged Alliance, if a mercenary quits it's generally possible to re-hire them, though they may ask double or triple their normal salary. But there are also two reasons why a mercenary will refuse to work for you again no matter how much money you offer them: if they hear you dumped a dead merc's body in the river (each time you do this, 0-2 randomly selected mercs will hear of it) or if you fire them (even if you've been paying them regularly).
• Throwaway Guns: Various single-use rocket launchers.
• Timed Mission: In Deadly Games you had a limited number of turns to complete your objectives (an adjustable option).
  • Some encounters in other games of the series required you to reach "point B" before the villains do. (Or else Brenda gets kidnapped, an alarm gets pressed and floods the prison with gas, etc.)
• Took a Level in Badass: ALL of the mercs from M.E.R.C became much better in crossfire. Flo now knows some firearms basic to stay alive in building combat. Gumpy makes even the most expert explosive specialists blush and Haywire is a cheaper Gus Tarballs.
• 'Tis Only a Bullet in the Brain: The severe Wisdom stat penalty sucks, though.
  • Elliot has this happen to him when Deidranna decides to literally Shoot the Messenger, as opposed to just slapping him.
• Top-Down View: Used in Jagged Alliance, which prevents you from seeing windows on the north and west of the buildings (that enemies use before you detect them)
• Training the Peaceful Villagers: It's a necessity if you want to keep your enemy from taking back any liberated town. Note that v1.13 lets you change up the nature of this. You can train them to the point that the "peaceful villagers" become their own army that can literally besiege Meduna without any of your mercs getting near!
• Trigger Happy: You should know the drill by know. Mercs in 2 with the psycho trait will always fire on automatic, provided they carry a select fire weapon. And perform an Evil Laugh as they do so.
• Tyrannicide: In Jagged Alliance 2, Queen Deidranna of Banana Republic Arulco has transformed the formerly peaceful nation into a militaristic dictatorship. former husband and king Enrico Chilvaldori, after escaping execution on her orders, hires a band of mercenaries to remove Deidranna from power, by whatever means neccessary.
• Unexpected Genre Change: Jagged Alliance 2 is a modern-day game of squad-level mercenary combat in a third world country, although you can play it in "sci-fi mode" if you want a few unrealistic things like giant man-eating insectoid monsters living in a nest under one of the towns.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: In Back in Action and Crossfire tutorial (it is the same mission), you must do a succession of actions (move the cameras, move your team, shoot, perform various advanced actions) in a specific order. One of them requires to have each of the units to shoot targets at a shooting range. One of the mercs wields an Uzi; if you didn't make him switch from autofire to single shots (the action isn't required by the tutorial), he risks to consume all his ammunitions before hitting his target and you'll be stuck in the tutorial.
• Universal Ammunition: 5.56x45mm and 7.62x51mm NATO rounds are used in many of the guns. This is, of course, Truth in Television. v1.13 also averts this hardcore - 9x18, 9x19, 7.62x25, 7.62x39, 7.62x51, 7.62x54, and upwards of two dozen other calibers, in ball, hollowpoint, Glaser, cold-loaded, match-grade, armor-piercing and many other varieties.
  • At least they do try to avert it further by increasing the reloading AP cost if you try to reload with an inapropriate magazine type.
  • The official Hand Wave is that whenever a merc picks up a new gun, they pick up a few empty clips as well. These are stored in the merc's "pockets" (the same ones where the credit cards that let you withdraw U.S. cash at any point in a Banana Republic go). The increased AP cost comes from removing bullets from one clip, and inserting them into one that is compatible with the weapon.
    • Or, you know, just look the other way.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Trevor Colby in the second game. He's described as a wiz-kid and has the skills to match, with decent marksmanship, good tech and explosive skills, some medical skill, and a range of decent-to-high quality gear. He starts at level one, and by the time you can afford to hire him, your mercenaries are probably level 7 to above. His bio specifically states that he's new to the business and just needs a chance to prove himself.
  • Michael "MD" Dawson: he's one of the absolute cheapest mercs to hire (the only AIM merc cheaper is Bull), and his marksmanship skills leave something to be desired. But his medical skill is outstanding and his Wisdom skill is extremely high, which means he'll learn marksmanship at an incredible rate. If he's hired at the beginning of the game and kept alive, he can easily be one of your best shooters by the end of it. And he also has a hidden bonus when it comes to using knives in close combat, which can be useful at the beginning of the game when you're typically fighting at close range.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Really, the hardest part of the game is probably near the beginning when all you have is handguns and you can't afford the more expensive mercs. Once you get assault rifles and sniper rifles however...
  • Or "rent" an expensive Merc and access their expensive gear.
  • More so if using 1.13 and you have the counterattack option turned on, which corrects Deidranna's order to send all of her spare troops to re-take Drassen amounting to a squad or two. It sends upwards of sixty (the latest 2011 1.13 release goes up to full 120) soldiers to fight.
  • Averted if you disabled lvling in 1.13 and used some foresight. You get quite enough money from San Mona to equip your best shots with top equipment and have no troubles in the beginning. It gets much harder later, because even the best equipment and mercs don't help that much against the opponent that uses antimaterial rifles and mortairs.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Most enemies do not drop all their gear upon death. If you want that bad guy's gun, you have to get in close and steal it from him before killing him. You can only steal weapons or anything in equipped in hand though, you cannot steal ballistic vests, helmets, night vision goggles, or anything else and you can only hope that it drop when they die.
  • Thankfully, in v1.13 you can steal more than just weapons (only when they are knocked down), and also there is an option which make enemies to drop all their equipments on death. This makes a huge difference.
  • In the first game, enemies dropped almost none of their gear, and there was no way to make them do so, which often resulted in the game's primary challenge being dealing with the inevitable ammo shortage.
  • Rocket Rifles come with a palm print scanner that mean they can only be used by its registered user.
• Unusual Euphemism: An incredible amount, considering the large number of quirky mercs:

  Magic: Got a Snapperhead!

  Leon Roachburn: Bloomin' Dogfish!

  Female IMP Voice 3: Aw, CRUMBS!

  • The expression "Top drawer!" with Len and Cougar. Which is the same as "Top notch", but still.
• Urban Warfare: Drassen and the assault on Meduna are major examples of this, since most of the game is fighting in open fields, jungle, or small towns.
  • Several stages in Deadly Games were on pavement as well.
  • Wildfire offers larger, more urbanized maps. Several mods, including AIMNAS (a 1.13 submod) add enormous, heavily-urbanized maps for those who can't get enough MOUT.
• Useless Useful Non-Combat Abilities: Some of the mercs have non-combat perks. This can range from fairly useful, to downright useless depending on your play style. Electronics skill can be downright useless to most players since you can still repair electronics anyway, and most of the time the things you want to repair are your guns and your body armor and not electronics. Teaching usefulness is largely debatable, but it is good for Training the Peaceful Villagers. Lock picking on the other hand can make you forget looking for keys, though in other times you can simply Shoot Out the Lock or use explosives and heavy weapons to blow a hole in the wall, though enough to make characters like Maddog and Dynamo to be a mild Game-Breaker since they can open almost any door and safe (and not to mention they are free).
  • Although Electronics did let you bypass the penalties for disarming electronic traps and locks (which there were plenty of... later on, after you can just blow holes with your LA Ws).
  • In 1.13's new trait system the old bonuses of the Electronics trait are a part of the more general Technician trait, making them a nice bonus in addition to more useful bonuses the Technician trait provides, unlike the old, very situational Electronic trait.
  • Leadership is a subversion. At first glance, looks relatively useless. Sure, it's good at helping you chat up the locals, but otherwise, it doesn't seem that powerful. But get a few mercs with high leadership together commanding some squads, and morale will shoot up like crazy, and high morale greatly boosts your mercs' performance. Especially noticeable late-game, where mercs who once had pitiful leadership but good wisdom will likely have shot up into the fifty-to-sixty point range (minimum; high-wisdom mercs like MD can be in the nineties) if they've been training militia and teaching other mercs, and your entire force is walking around with maxed morale and slaughtering enemy forces thanks to the hidden stat buffs associated with said maximum morale.
• Vehicular Combat: A mod for the 1.13 mod restored the Dummied Out code that allows the vehicles to be used in the tactical combat itself instead of just being a semi-abstract transportation on the strategic layer. Now you can use Hamous' Ice-Cream Truck as a mobile bunker to drive-by the enemies. As an optional pay off for this you can allow the enemy tanks to be mobile.
• Videogame Caring Potential: Many of the mercs have quite well-developed and likable personalities (aided by reasonably good voice acting), and it's pretty easy to get attached to them.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Read Invulnerable Civilians above and There Is No Kill Like Overkill below.
  • It's also satisfying to keep shooting someone's legs until they fall over, groan helplessly, and bleed to death painfully.
  • Invoked with Doreen, the asshole running a child sweatshop in the first town you take. The mercs enjoy going to town on her.
  • It is entirely viable for you to stand back and let militia and Dedriana's soldiers fight it out in 1.13, then loot the subsequent corpses of all their dropped gear. Especially veterans, who will have gear comparable to Deidrianna's elites. You can even... hurry it along with a few well-placed mustard gas shells.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Killing civilians causes a loss of loyalty in a given area.
• Villainous Breakdown: The Queen is already pretty much nuts at the start of the game, but she gradually loses it completely as your merc band and your rebel allies steadily seize territory from her.
• The Virus: At a certain point one of the fallow trees will get a infection that renders its sap not fit for extraction and will continue to spread across the island. You can either find a cure or just blow the infected tree up.
• Water Source Tampering: Lucas' men try to poison the water source early in the game.
• Weather of War:
  • Battle in the Rain: Fighting in the storm (1.13), which greatly reduces your vision, forcing you to fight your enemies almost toe-to-toe. If you're lucky, a lightning bolt will reveal enemies and can make an interrupt - for both sides. The upside is that rain greatly reduces the enemy's vision as well, making stealth significantly easier.
  • Heat Wave: Sometimes, the day in Metavira will be hotter than usual, tiring the mercs faster.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: Steroid. Polish accent missed by a long shot, accidentally ricocheting off Austria, getting stuck on the toilet and finally falling hard on its head.
• With This Herring: Played with. The mercenaries you pick have limited starting weapons, generally consisting of sidearms and some gear associated with their specialization. Usually, the more expensive the merc, the better the starting gear. However, said gear is generally much better than whatever the initial enemies of cops and random soldiers use, but you'll either be purchasing weapons or fixing up stolen gear later on in the game.
  • Even more apparent in Rage!, although justified by the circumstances - your mercs escape from captivity with nothing more than a few almost empty pistols and a few bottles of water.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: A new food system as of July 2012 Beta. Starvation and dehydration can result in stat penalties and slow death.
  • In Rage! dehydration was introduced - merc will need to drink water in order to remain in top form.
• Wrong Side All Along: Gus and Ziggy (the guy who saved Gus from being killed by the child soldier) got roped into working for Santiano by their ex-friend sgt. Adam Granger. They realized what's up four days later, and tried to kill Granger as payback. He survived, and because of that Gus and Ziggy have bad relations with A.I.M., forcing Gus to work as a middle man in the merc business. We are tasked to kill Granger later in the game.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: It is possible to deal more than 100 (maximum Hit Points) damage to someone. Nothing can stop you from unloading an entire magazine at a single 'critical' enemy just 2 yards away, or perhaps use a rocket launcher just to finish off a single 'critical' enemy, or plant a C4 next to a 'dying' enemy... the list goes on.
• You ALL Look Familiar: Since there's not a lot of features on the mercs in the field (besides different shirt and hair colours), it's easy to confuse, say, Gus and Hitman, or Scope and Raven. Mocked with the bartenders, who notes that each of them (they're quintets) act, look, and dress the same. Except for Manny. Poor Manny.
  • Apply camouflage, and everyone looks the same except for gender and build. Color of camouflage too, in the case of 1.13.
• Your Head Asplode: Try shooting someone (preferably unarmored) at close range in the head with a high powered rifle; burst/full auto just to make sure. This usually happens to enemies with poor health, and with any weapon, but for obvious reasons, happens much more often when someone uses a high caliber bullet (or bullets).
• Zerg Rush: Harder levels have more grunts sent to try and recapture towns.
  • On Normal or higher in v1.13, the enemy will often send upwards of a hundred soldiers to recapture Drassen once you take it. Since this is often the first town the player captures, they'll usually have nothing more than a lightly-armed, tired, and wounded team of six or less people with which to hold off the onslaught. This option, thankfully, can be turned off in the config file - but, if survived on any difficulty not insane, will take a large chunk out of the Queen's available soldiers and will guarantee no attacks for at least a week.

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Alternative Title(s): Jagged Alliance 2

Jagged Alliance 2 1.13 Windows 10 Black Screen

Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/JaggedAlliance

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