Video Game / Jagged Alliance

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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, released in 1995, 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 Pack, Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games^note developed in-house by Sir-Tech, released in 1996, 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, released in 1999, 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 game! Some of the trope examples are due to, modified, subverted, or averted by this mod.

The sequel's stand-alone Expansion Pack, Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business^note Sir-Tech Canada's penultimate release, also published by TalonSoft, released in 2000, 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, newly restored to his throne and knowing that Arulco has not recovered enough to effectively deal with this crisis, hires you to resolve it. This game is very short and remarkably more linear than the basegame, and the main draw of it is the map editor, which was added (along with other new features in this game, except the new mercs, unless you count the v1.13 mod) to Jagged Alliance 2 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. It was finally released by THQ Nordic in 2023, and reviewed well, with critics hailing it as a return to form for the series.

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 released Jagged Alliance Online, a free-to-play isometric tactical MMORPG, in August 2012. It was shut down in April 2015. A successor, Jagged Alliance Online: Reloaded, was released in May 2015 and shut down in November 2018.

Jagged Alliance: Flashback by Full Control, the makers of the 2013 videogame adaptation of Space Hulk, was officially released in 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.

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

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.
  • In the third game, no one likes the Legion, but they have all the power in the region. People celebrate when you kill Legion soldiers, and if properly motivated and trained will be more than happy to fight back against them.
• Three-Quarters View: Used in Jagged Alliance 2.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Inverted in the first game. When you start out, you have access to a single processing plant and only a few Fallow Sap trees (and the plant is broken). Once you start processing the sap, you're a minority producer, as Santino has access to the rest of the island and the other three processing plants, and as a result, he has no problem forcing the market price down to prevent you from getting a good price for the sap you can produce. Once you capture more trees and more processing plants, you become the majority producer, and start getting better prices for the sap you produce.
• 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, 2, and 3 in which all guns use their real name.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: In 3, either after you meet with Biff or you are contacted by Santiago to 'clear' the confusion and meet up in a certain place, you will be too late to realize that your former employers have decided that you know more than they want you to and is planning to kill you and your associates. After escaping the encounter all the towns and mines you control will come under attack by by an overwhelming force by not the Legion, but rather the rebellious Grand Chien Army.
• 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.
  • In the third game, you can shoot people in the groin. And it's a good tactic, as it suppresses (half AP) on a successful hit.
• Animal Wrongs Group: At one of the garrison posts, freeing a prisoner named Petta will cause her to get angry at the fact there are caged hyenas and will unlock the cages, causing the hyenas to turn immediately hostile. Killing the hyenas beforehand will save her life and make her extremely mad at you for "killing helpless animals".
• 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.
• Anti-Frustration Features: In Jagged Alliance 3, your mercs will occasionally tell you when there is only one enemy left in a sector. Mercs with higher wisdom are more likely to do this.
• Anyone Can Die: If you screw up bad, or if your luck runs out... Even your custom IMP merc isn't immune. The requirements for it are different in each main series game.
  • In the first game, mercenaries taking enough damage will collapse and bleed out over the course of a few turns when their HP gets low enough. Bandaging them will keep them from dying, but they'll need serious healing time before they can fight again.
  • In the second game, similar to the first, mercenaries will collapse if their health gets too low. However, they have no real protection against death and taking enough damage will kill them instantly.
  • In the third game, if a mercenary is reduced to zero HP, they'll go down and start dying, with an increasing chance of permanently dying each turn that they remain in that state. The more damage they took, the faster they'll die, and sadistic enemies can keep attacking them to kill them faster. If a mercenary takes a lot of damage, or explosive damage, they can die instantly, with no Downed state, and higher difficulties remove the Downed state entirely, just killing mercenaries when they hit zero HP. Bandaging a mercenary will bring them back to the fight, and ending hostilities will bring them back with one hit point.
  • 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.
  • Initially played straight early in the third game, however. The citizens on Ernie Island couldn't care less about the simmering multi-way civil war and just want to be free from the Legion. They become more willing to be involved, eventually fielding militia soldiers with the help of your mercs, if you've liberated the island. Other cities are more interested in the civil war and fighting the Legion, but they have no training or ability until you train some militia.
• 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, who is deeply religious, says "Forgive me for taking life".
• Arbitrary Gun Power: Played straight in the first game with the weaker guns, but mostly averted in Jagged Alliance 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.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 is outright weird about this: single-shots from weapons will always do the most damage-per-bullet, while burst fire and autofire will drastically reduce the damage-per-bullet. For example, the Uzi does about 20 damage per shot on single fire and 5 damage per shot on burst fire. The advantage of burst fire is a better chance to hit due to shooting more, but there's rarely a time when you'll want to use anything other than single shot. In addition, weapons do more damage based on their rarity rather than their bullet caliber: an AK-47 is available from the beginning of the game, and despite firing a large 7.62mm rifle round, does less damage than an M-16, which is somewhat harder to find and fires the intermediate 5.56mm round.
• 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 Jagged Alliance 1 (enemy limit is removed in Deadly Games). Jagged Alliance 2 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.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 will only let you hire fifteen mercenaries from A.I.M. However, you can recruit a number of M.E.R.C. and local fighters on top of this number, bringing your maximum number of actual soldiers up to 21 if you find them all and create a custom mercenary with IMP.
• 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.
  • You are strongly encouraged to do this in Jagged Alliance 3, by finding and intercepting diamond shipments as the Legion tries to send them out of the country.
• 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 target’s armour.
  • Kalyna in Jagged Alliance 3 has this as her active skill, allowing her to completely ignore armor with any attack (though shotguns are excluded), which is fantastic against unique boss enemies, who are always heavily armored.
• 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 Jagged Alliance 2, but running different contraband.
  • Bobby Ray from Jagged Alliance 2 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." Bobby Ray's comes back in Jagged Alliance 3.
  • 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.
  • In later versions of 1.13, you can define a background for custom mercs, and one of those can be an arms dealer. It grants bonuses to marksmanship as well as the prices selling and purchasing equipment.
  • Various markets in Jagged Alliance 3 are available to purchase from, and they usually have weapons, ammo and grenades available if you're willing to pay for it.
• 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 Artificial Stupidity 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.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, enemies will notice when things happen in their perception: gunshots will draw attention, killing an enemy with suppressors may still draw a cry of pain that gets attention, and explosions will alert everyone. If the enemy doesn't know where your mercs are, they will still do their best to investigate where the attack came from, or take cover if they can't. They can still be exploited, however: see Artificial Stupidity.
  • Also in Jagged Alliance 3, militia get smarter as they level up. A recruit militia will sit in the open, use autofire and make silly decisions like shooting beyond the range of their shotgun. Veteran militia will use burst fire, take cover and generally engage without wasting ammunition if the enemy is outside their range. Elite militia will pin down enemies, work to flank if possible, and use precise single-shots to cause debuffs or hit unarmored body parts.
• Artificial Insolence: In Jagged Alliance, some mercenaries such as Fidel "Leave me alone, I busy" Dahan cannot disengage from attacking an enemy. Subsequent actions must be another attack on the target, until the enemy is downed or moves from their position. This insolence doesn't detect playing with inventory, where unequipping a weapon forces disengagement.
• 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 as 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, alerted enemies will sometimes try to reach an alarm trigger to set off a major trap or to blow up a building. Only one enemy will do so, but if that one dies, another will be selected instead, and it's without regard to defensive movement. If a player reaches that point first or sets up a killzone, they can pick off opponents one-by-one.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3 enemies will do their best to investigate the source of an attack; even if the mercenary that made the attack is hidden and can't be found, the enemy will move towards the general location that the attack came from. Attacking them with a mortar, however, results in them getting confused: the attack came from above, and they can't actually figure out any more than that because mortar attacks are considered silent. As a result, enemies will bunch up in the area of effect of a mortar attack, setting them up to get hit with another mortar attack.
• Ascended Extra: Hamous is a native guide in Metavira in the first game. He becomes a hireable mercenary in Deadly Games and by Jagged Alliance 2, he can be recruited if you manage to find him, for a pittance and he comes with his own transportation. An Ice-Cream Van, no less. He stole it in Paris. Somehow.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Averted with Ivan, whose 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 repercussions. 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.
• Attack Failure Chance: Guns degrade and will jam or misfire when degraded, but only for the player.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, using grenades and other explosive weapons has a chance to "misfire", where the attack goes somewhere other than where you intended. Low explosives skill makes this happen more often.
• 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 the specific 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.
  • Machine Guns in Jagged Alliance 3 are good for one thing: area denial. They can fire a lot of bullets on overwatch for a very low AP cost. But if you want to shoot with them, you are all but required to set up in the prone position, as firing from any other position will incur a massive accuracy penalty. They chew through ammo very quickly and even when heavily modified, half of the bullets fired will likely miss. Using a number of machine guns to set up an ambush is effective, but using them for anything else is impractical.
• Ax-Crazy: Several of the mercenaries you can hire tend to enjoy killing a little too much, firing 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" Reuban (hedge trimmer) from the first two games being poster children for the trope. Fidel "Leave me alone, 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 sometimes spend all of their 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."
  • Psycho is an actual character trait in Jagged Alliance 3 and gives special conversation options that tend to scare the crap out of people, while also occasionally making the merc use autofire instead of the chosen option when attacking (giving them single-shot-only weapons will make them sad).
• 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, along with having a 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 mercenary, 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 a 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.
  • An explicit mechanic of Jagged Alliance 3, where melee attacks on unsuspecting targets can be absolutely lethal and absolutely silent^note When shooting an enemy with a stealth attack, they may sometimes cry out in pain (even if their head explodes!), alerting other enemies. Stealth killing an enemy with a melee attack is always perfectly silent. Doing it with a basic combat knife is extremely difficult due to the low damage of the knife, but using upgraded knives, machetes and bigger weapons gives you a good chance to clear an area without being detected. Dr. Q has a unique unarmed attack that, if it hits, is guaranteed to knock the target unconscious if they don't die, which is fantastic for back stabs.
• Bag of Sharing: In Jagged Alliance 3, each merc has their own inventory and how much they can carry is dependent on their strength stat. Each squad has a shared squad inventory that can be accessed by each merc in the squad at will. There is a restriction on this, however; Only ammunition, parts and medical supplies can be stored here.
• 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.
  • If you go out of your way to kill the market merchants in Jagged Alliance 3, they won't restock their merchandise for obvious reasons.
• 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.
  • Gus Tarballs in Jagged Alliance 3, despite still technically being on the roster, is retired and will refuse to be hired for the mission. However, if you recruit Len or Scully, he'll reconsider and allow you to hire him, as he loves working with those two.
• 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, The Major in the third game.
• 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 Spectra/EOD-armored teams with prototype weaponry will be mowing down grunts that look like they came fresh off the set of The A-Team or Commando. 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 32).
  • 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...
• Black Comedy: The taunts of some mercs in Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games can be considered this, especially if they are about mercs they hate:
  Eli: Eliminating Skitz would not only make me happy, but society as a whole would benefit!
  Kelly: From here on in he'll be known as Unusually Dead Reuban!
  Mitch: So, you think you're a physician, Raffi?! Well let's see how good you are at plugging your own holes!
• Blade Enthusiast: In Jagged Alliance 2, One recruitable mercenary, Bill "Razor" Lamont, is crazy about knives and talks about cutting throats or how knives "never run out of ammo" with disturbing regularity.
• 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.
  • The excuses that mercs give for stealing money in their inventory often amount to these:
  Bernie: I think...I might have left the lights on at my place. I gotta leave!
  Ice: I've got to go! I forgot I had a...dentist appointment.
  • Subverted in Jagged Alliance 3 to surprising effect: if you find Biff, he'll tell you about his exploits in Grand Chien and it's clear that he's embellishing his record to say the least (because he's Biff Apscott). But when he tells you that he had to retreat from the attack on Diamond Red because his forces were actually attacking Grand Chien military and not the Legion like he was told, he's being absolutely serious.
• 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.
  • Mines are everywhere in Jagged Alliance 3: you'll first encounter them in Emerald Coast, and they will show up in the most surprising places. Only mercenaries with a decent explosive skill will actually detect them, and disarming them requires a good explosive skill. There's also two types of trapped containers: ones trapped with bombs (explosives skill required) and ones trapped with electricity (mechanical skill required).
• Boring, but Practical:
  • In the first game, the lowly .38 caliber revolver. While by far the worst weapon in the game, ammunition for it is plentiful, meaning you'll be relying on it for quite a while. It's especially handy to give to your medics and mechanics, in order to give them something to enable them to participate in combat while saving the ammo for better weapons for your best marksmen.
  • 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.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 has a number of fantastically boring ways to win fights.
    • Sniper rifles with suppressors are basically "I win" buttons if you give them to sufficiently skilled marksmen. A headshot with a sniper rifle is almost always an instant kill; if the attack is made while you're hidden, even more so. The only defense is armor, but using armor-piercing ammunition makes that a non-factor. It's possible to stealth an entire combat just by picking your shots carefully.
    • Tear Gas Grenades are an absolute terror on the battlefield: if the unit isn't wearing a gas mask (which is very rare for Legion and relatively rare for Grand Chien military, then they are guaranteed to be blinded, reducing their accuracy, and stand a very good chance of being panicked, forcing them to run away and preventing them from attacking. And Tear Gas also acts as a smoke screen, providing cover for your mercenaries and making Smoke Grenades almost redundant.
    • The AK-47 and the FAMAS assault rifles. Both are highly customizable. Both are decently accurate. Both provide good damage. Both have excellent ammunition availability. They're not the best options for assault rifles, but they're perfectly good enough, and they're everywhere.
    • Flak Armor. It's not the best by a long shot, but a full set of flak armor offers 30% damage reduction to 5.56mm ammunition, which can be upgraded with Weave Padding to 40%. And the relatively easy to acquire perk on the Agility tree doubles your Free Move capability as long as you're only wearing Flak Armor (or no armor), giving you thoroughly ridiculously mobility. Assaulters will still want Kevlar or Heavy armor, but Flak Armor is great for everyone.
    • For Mercenaries, there's two that are far, far better than their price tags: Barry and Livewire. Barry is one of the best explosive experts in the game, starting with a ridiculous 90+ Explosives skill, and he also has high Wisdom, which means he can train up his sub-par Marksmanship and Strength skills with ease. It's entirely possible to play through the entire game without getting another explosive expert, or to use Barry to train everyone else in Explosives. Livewire is a subpar markswoman, but she has a ridiculously high Mechanical skill, an equally ridiculous Wisdom, her custom PDA (which takes up a slot in her very small inventory) occasionally lets her get additional intel when she gets intel, and if she's present in a sector in which intel is available, she makes every single enemy visible at all times.
• 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.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: The player characters at the end of the day are a bunch of mercs paid to kill people. It's just that the people they're paid to kill really have it coming.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, while all the mercenaries recognize that they are hired killers, they do have some morals, and certain mercs will react negatively if you, say, dig up some bodies to get to the weapons that were buried with them. Or allow a sadistic, murdering slave driver to remain in control of a diamond mine just so that you can get more profit from it.
• Blown Across the Room: Occasionally, and it generally requires a burst to the chest at close range.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: In Jagged Alliance 3, in addition to the usual suspects like the AK-47 and FN FAL, both of which seeing considerable action in post-colonial African conflicts during the Cold War, among the weapons found in the third game are German firearms from World War II such as the Gewehr 98 and MP-40. Justified, however, given how the Kriegsmarine had operated around Grand Chien at the time (even having a bunker on Ernie Island), and that the Legion isn't above scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to equipping its low-tier Cannon Fodder. The Grand Chien military is equipped much better, and Legion veterans and elites like to carry modified high-tier weaponry.
• 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.
• Brutal Honesty: The lines of some mercs when they steal large amounts of money left in their inventory.
  Smoke: See ya, hosehead! This kind of cash is going to get me one hell of a lonely man weekend, eh!
  Spam: Get with the program! We kill people for a living! Do you think stealing is beneath us?
• Bulletproof Vest: While there's no such thing, each game handles armor a little differently.
  • In the first game, armor is worn under your vest, and reduces damage. It's usually in the form of kevlar and can be upgraded with Compound 18 to provide more protection. Helmets are also available.
  • The second game adds pants. The best armor, Spectra armor, will still struggle to protect against high-powered armor piercing rounds, while lower grade armor such as flak jackets won't provide any protection from rifle rounds, but will mitigate pistol calibers. Armor is upgradeable with Compound 18, and a full suit of Compound 18 Treated Spectra Armor will tank multiple hits without damage (though lucky shots will still get through).
  • In the third game, armor again comes in the form of helmets, vests and pants, but you now have to consider if armor protects your arms as well (vests do not). Available in three forms: Flak (Light), Kevlar (Medium) and Heavy. Heavy armor restricts movement. Armor can be upgraded with Ceramic Plates (massive damage resistance increase, but only protects against 4 hits) or Weave Padding (small but permanent damage resistance increase) and the very, very rare Composium 48 (medium but permanent damage resistance increase). Armor will never actually protect from all damage; even protected by Heavy Armor with maximum upgrades, a merc will still take 1-3 points of damage, and high caliber armor piercing rounds will still punch through.
• Bulungi: Grand Chien in the third game is a small French-speaking country somewhere in West Africa. It is dependent on diamond mining, and trapped in a multi-way civil war with rapidly shifting allegiances.
• 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.
• Call-Back: A lot of them in Jagged Alliance 3.
  • There's repeated e-mails describing how Arulco, the setting of Jagged Alliance 2, is doing, including 419 scam emails. Apparently they turned Deidranna's old castle into a tourist attraction. Certain characters will mention moving to Arulco too. Vicki Waters apparently lives there.
  • The research into the Fallow Trees from Jagged Alliance 1 has borne fruit in the form of Metaviron. It's an instant healing item for all wounds and health for your mercs and needed for several quests.
• Cannon Fodder: The basic lower-tier enemies encountered in every game are little more than disposable thugs, militia, and forced conscripts who can and will die in droves. That doesn't make them harmless, however, especially when a few lucky shots can still down your own mercs.
  • The Legion in Jagged Alliance 3 uses their basic troops as this. Veterans and Elites are more capable, but the basic troops are generally poorly armed and while aware of tactics, aren't necessarily capable of executing them.
• 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 expanding the number of created characters to six). Jagged Alliance 3 allows for the player to chose to do the personality test or skip right to the character creation, but limits the created character to 1.
• 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 throughout the game.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Almost every quote Rudolf makes contains the f-word.
• Cold Sniper: Reaper, a creepy religious maniac. Shadow, your stealthy attacker, rarely raises his words above a whisper.
  Reaper: I'm bleeding. (Beat) That's cool.
  • Raven, a former SWAT sniper, is business-like to the extreme. She's not cold so much as emotionless when she's working, though she warms up during downtime.
• 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.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 has Blue for your forces and militia and Red for everyone else.
• 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 in particular being an 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 also good at melee combat and highly dexterous 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:
  • In Jagged Alliance 1, gasoline is hard to find, since you're on a tropical island with no road network. You can use it to make some extremely powerful explosives. Chunks of metal, which can be used to modify weapons, are also hard to find.
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, a lot of items are hard to find, such as glass jars, batteries, and LameBoys, though given these are used to make fantastic items, it makes gameplay sense. Gasoline is extremely difficult to find in large supplies as the Queen has enforced rationing to such an extent that you can only find a few jerry cans.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The second game is rife with instances of this trope.
  • 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. 1.13 changed it so that mortarmen need to have someone to actually see you before they'll open fire (so your mercs had better be 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 to 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.
  • Blackshirt enemies in Back in Action and Crossfire have higher stats than is possible for your mercenaries and the AI is on some level, always knows where all of your mercenaries are, you'll catch them throwing grenades directly on top of mercenaries they couldn't know were there if they see a completely different mercenary on a completely different part of the map or "suddenly" turning and attacking a mercenary they shouldn't be able to see or hear if they start targeting them.
  • Enemies in Back in Action and Crossfire will sometimes throw grenades that explode instantly despite the fact that all grenades are supposed to have a fuse.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3:
    • Enemies have an unnatural ability to hit your mercs from across the sector. While this is understandable in the case of a sniper with a heavily modified rifle, it gets ridiculous when a Legion thug uses burst fire on his assault rifle and nails you with all three shots. Twice in a row.
    • Enemies can get more health than is possible for your characters. With 100 Health and an appropriate perk, it's possible to get 120 maximum. Grit, which is only available for doing certain actions, can increase that to effectively 150 Health. Enemies, especially melee enemies, will consistently have between 120 and 150 Health, which implies that everyone in Grand Chien is a Health nut with maximum health, perks and Grit.
    • Some enemies get buffs that can render your most powerful attacks ineffective. The worst offenders are the Diesel Super Soldiers, who are immune to Suppressed, Slowed, Panic and Inaccurate.
    • Special characters, such as Pierre, have special armor with a star, which protects against everything except high-caliber, armor-piercing rounds, making fights against them an absolute slog as they shrug off far too much damage. If you recruit Pierre, he is indeed wearing a full suit of Heavy Armor. Special characters also have far more Health than they should, in some cases getting upwards of 200 hit points, which is more than is possible with the mechanics of the game available to the player.
• 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.
  • Played more straight in Jagged Alliance 3, where cover and concealment are often the same thing, but certain things that look like cover actually aren't, because they are not thick enough to protect against bullets.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: In Jagged Alliance 2, 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.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, if you do things other than rescuing the president, Emma LaFontaine may comment on it, but won't push too hard. But if you complete other mission-critical objectives such as killing Colonel Faucheaux or capturing Corazon, she will send you an email with her comments, and then ask if you could please prioritize saving her father now.
• Continuing Is Painful: Losing your best mercs in a botched operation or running out of funds to keep said mercs on board at the worst possible time in most games can make things significantly more difficult. While not impossible to recover from nor an automatic game over, more often than not it's better to start over. This becomes even more pronounced with Ironman mode in the third game, which removes Save Scumming as an option and makes every mistake all the more palpable.
• 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.
• Contrasting Sequel Setting:
  • The first Jagged Alliance takes place in a South Atlantic island, where you are contracted by a researcher named Jack Richards to help liberate said island and and recover his research from a treasonous researcher.
  • Jagged Alliance 2 takes place in a Banana Republic where you're hired by the country's deposed King to depose and kill his wife, the current ruler.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 takes place in a Western African country where you're hired by the President's daughter to rescue her father from a warlord and end a multi-sided civil war.
• Cool Shades: In Jagged Alliance 2, they increase your vision during daylight, and for obvious reasons, decrease it at night.
• 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: In Jagged Alliance 2, 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.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 averts this entirely, by restricting a merc's inventory based on their strength stat. Wearing Heavy Armor or carrying a weapon labeled as "Cumbersome", however, will prevent the merc from using their Free Movement.
• Critical Existence Failure: In the first and second games, this is 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.
  • The third game plays this in a different way: taking a major hit will result in a Wound, which will reduce the merc's maximum HP until they are treated by a doctor during downtime (usually requiring several hours per Wound), or stay in a hospital (faster but much more expensive). There are certain perks available, such as Rage, that increase a merc's damage based on how many Wounds they have, or give them a bonus the first time they get a Wound in combat, but their baseline performance will never suffer.
• 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.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, anyone with a high enough Wisdom score is this. Wisdom determines how quickly a mercenary improves their skills, and if they have a sufficiently skilled teacher, they can improve even faster. As a result, a lot of the low-tier Basic mercenaries, such as Barry, Livewire and MD, are actually worth much more than their price would suggest, as they have exceptional Wisdom scores and will improve very quickly to competence in just about anything and everything. By contract, Kalyna, one of the best Basic marksmanship specialists, is a Low-Tier Letdown, as her Wisdom is abysmal and she will struggle to improve, especially because Wisdom is the only skill that cannot be trained.
• Crouch and Prone: In the first game the merc can crouch, but cannot move or fire until they stand up. In Deadly Games, mercs can fire while crouching but must stand to move. Jagged Alliance 2 added the prone position, and the mercs can move in any pose, with sneaking being much easier the lower to the ground a mercenary is. Some weapons also have bipods, which increase accuracy significantly if the soldier firing is prone.
• Culture Chop Suey: While Arulco is very much a Latin American Banana Republic, it's also a mishmash of various cultures, including Italian, German and vaguely Eastern European influences.
• 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/her), the character will likely suffer a lot of damage and pass out. At this point, the character cannot be moved (he/she's passed out) and his/her inventory cannot be accessed, so he/she cannot be told to wear his/her gas mask if he/she 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/she 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 an enemy in a 1 VS 1 fight, he/she is already dead unless his/her weapon is faster than the enemy and he/she is accurate enough or have them just try to run to cover. This feature affects the AI troops, too; the safest way to win a short-range/middle-range fight is to, of course, exploit this with a 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 to aim.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 make Mustard Gas less abominable, by forcing those exposed to take 30 damage at the end of their turn, and then making them Exhausted (-3 AP until they rest). However, Flashbangs are now the new awful: getting hit with a Flashbang automatically applies the Suppressed debuff, which lowers AP by half on the next turn. Getting hit with a second Flashbang while Suppressed applies the Tired debuff, which lowers maximum AP by 1 until the soldier gets 12 hours of downtime to rest. Getting hit by a third Flashbang while Suppressed and Tired applies Exhausted, which lowers maximum AP by 3 until the soldier gets 12 hours of downtime, which brings them to Tired, and then they need another 12 hours of downtime. They also can't travel or retreat as long as they're Exhausted. While enemies will never throw flashbang grenades, if they have an underbarrel grenade launcher, it's probably loaded with a 40mm Flashbang, and they will spam your soldiers with it.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Jagged Alliance 2 was a clear tonal shift from the first two installments. Instead of outlandish plot setups we are toppling a merciless dictatorship that is abusing both the country's nature and people for wealth. At the same time the mercenary roster was pared down, with most of the removed characters being particularly humorous in their design.
  • Jagged Alliance 3, while overall lighter in tone compared to Rage!, is darker and more serious than the prior mainline games. The plot deals with a brutal paramilitary takeover of a West African nation that isn't above slavery and openly displaying dead civilians as warnings, a form of Rabies turning people into zombie-like homicidal maniacs, and The Major as well as Colonel Facheaux's forces and the Adonis Corporation is a far more serious villain than the hammy Deidranna. Fitting for the darker and edgier tone Action Movies took in the 2000's.
• 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.)
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Due to being released in 2023, Jagged Alliance 3 maintained its 90's and 2000's social values of their mercs (especially casual sexism) that would fit more with its game's setting and era when previous eras were released.
• Demolitions Expert: Mercenaries specializing in explosives. In the first game, most of them are insane, and the ones that aren't won't work with the ones that are. In the second game, A.I.M. hires some explicitly non-insane explosive experts, and purges the psychos from their ranks. The ones that remain are very qualified and level-headed. Except for Red, who is stark-raving mad, but he's Scottish and he doesn't blow up his allies, so it's okay.
• Dented Iron: The entire cast of Rage! is this, all of them are suffering mentally or physically from their 20 years of service in A.I.M such as Ivan taking damage due to his bad knees when jumping any significant height, Shadow having a compromised immune system due to a mix of surviving cancer and a chemical attack and Raven not being able to control recoil or use heavy weapons anymore due to general weakness after living in a forest.
• Destroyable Items: Your equipment can be damaged in a variety of ways, from normal wear and tear, to explosions causing damage, to swimming in water. Items can be permanently destroyed by being on a soldier that drowns, or by sufficient explosions.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • In Jagged Alliance 2:
    • 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^note She will only show up in very specific circumstances, and getting an enemy to offer a surrender is itself very difficult to pull off normally. 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.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3:
    • If you promise that you will let Pierre live, and then tell him that he's free to go, your quest will update to tell you that you fulfilled your promise. If you then kill Pierre before he leaves the map, too bad, you failed to keep your promise.
    • Every enemy attack in the game is visible on the map. One of the big events in the game is the N-Night attack on Port Cacao, which doesn't initiate until you liberate the Port Cacao docks and talk to people there to find out about it. You can then spend some time training militia and recruiting the Coffee Beans to help you repel the attack. But it is visible on the map, and you can intercept it and defeat it before it even gets to Port Cacao. If you do, the news report will point out that N-Night seems to have been a big ol' lie (rather than reporting on the defense effort).
• Diegetic Character Creation: In Jagged Alliance 2, you get a link to an in-game website called the Institution for Mercenary Profiling (I.M.P.) which says it'll give you a total analysis of your mental and physical state to provide an accurate profile, which ends up being the stats and traits of your created mercenary. Most of the information, such as numerical stats, is simply adjusted directly, but traits and attitudes are determined with a lengthy (And humorous) personality quiz.
• Dirty Old Man: "Pops" can't seem to leave the female mercenaries alone, particularly Fox and Beth. Both Fox and Beth will threaten to quit unless you fire him. Bernie, meanwhile, is even less fussy, and gets awfully handsy with both male and female mercenaries, which leads to his dismissal from the organization before Jagged Alliance 2.
• Disc-One Final Boss: In Jagged Alliance 3, early on you are mostly facing the Legion who are mostly armed with World War 2 weapons and old AKs, though they do have a few better armed Elite Mooks to watch out for. However, after Santiago decided that You Have Outlived Your Usefulness you will start facing Colonel Facheaux' army who are much better trained and equipped.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • In Jagged Alliance 3 if you helped out the Refugee camp enough Sangoma the Witch Doctor will give you his armor from when he was in a death squad, netting you a full set of heavy armor as soon as you get onto the mainland.
  • Barry's Shaped Charges: they have an unusual cone-shaped explosive radius instead of a sphere, and if anyone other than Barry uses them, there's a very high chance of misfire. But in Barry's hands, they do 50+ damage^note Stick Grenades do 20-30 damage, and high-end grenades that do 40+ damage aren't really available for several hours, almost always go exactly where you want, and will rip apart unarmored enemies and tear through the armor of armored enemies. Barry gets 2 for free every 7 days, and can make as many as he wants with his high Explosives skill once you find a place to make explosives.
  • If you rush towards Diamond Red, the port to the south of the diamond mine has a weapon smuggler that will sell you an M14 rifle. While it's not the best rifle in the game, it's much, much better than the AK-47 and the FAMAS that you'll be more likely to come across. In addition, Diamond Red is one of the most potentially lucrative mines in the game, only surpassed by Fosse Noire, if you know how to upgrade the output.
• Divorced Installment: Hired Guns: The Jagged Edge was originally meant to be Jagged Alliance 3 but following development troubles ended up becoming it's own standalone game.
• 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.
• 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 the first Jagged Alliance game, this is the attitude of some mercenaries to "Smoke" Peterson's pranks involving short-fusing explosives.
  Hector: Smoke Peterson been here one day! One day too much! He think he funny. I think he crazy. I no stay if he stays!
  • 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..."
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, doing particularly heinous things, like digging through a mass grave for loot, will demoralize some mercenaries.
• 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 Jagged Alliance 2 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.
  • The first Jagged alliance is particularly brutal to newcomers. At the start of the game, you control a single sector and your sap factory isn't even operational. While finding the part needed to repair it is easy enough, you have still have to run a severe deficit for days of gameplay until you capture enough zones to turn a profit. Until then you have to get buy with crappy low-quality mercs armed with terrible weapons.
  • 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.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 pulls no punches: most of the mercenaries that you can hire will start with a Hi-Power Pistol, which is weak, short-ranged, and loud. No one affordable has any armor, and better mercenaries will refuse to work with you outright (and you can't afford them anyway). Enemies don't drop any good gear, the weapons you do find are in poor condition, ammunition and medical supplies are limited, and you have no income at all beyond the occasional windfall bonus from your employer. Once you get off Ernie Island and hit the mainland, you can start properly upgrading your gear, capturing diamond mines for income, and hiring better mercenaries (or training the mercenaries you have to be better), but until then, you'll be struggling.
• 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. Pierre and the Major in Jagged Alliance 3 if you play your cards right.
• Elite Mooks: In Jagged Alliance 2, the guys wearing black shirts are not playing around: they will flank you, pin you down, throw grenades, and generally make your life a living hell.
  • 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. Keep your head down.
  • On top of the Legion's own elites there's the Grand Chien Army under Colonel Facheaux, which is far more well-equipped and trained compared to just about everyone else.
• 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: In Jagged Alliance 2, you will occasionally get a mission to bring certain people to certain locations. The first you're likely to run across is Skyrider, who needs an escort back to his helicopter, which is easy enough. You can also escort two civilians from one town to another so they can escape the country, which nets you a cash bonus and a unique pair of Automag 5 handguns that shoot .50 caliber rounds.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In Jagged Alliance 2, Deidranna has no qualms about killing children or Cold-Blooded Torture and horrifying experiments, but even she's against using Child Soldiers.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, Pierre is an unrepentant Legion soldier who truly believes that he is doing what is best for Grand Chien by serving in the Legion under the Major. If you ask him what he'll do if you let him go, he honestly tells you that he will go back to the Legion and probably fight you again. But once you do run into him, his torture in Diamond Red and other camps has convinced him that the Legion is not all it's cracked up to be. He may still attack you if you're not proving to be any better for the country.
• Everyone Has Standards: For all the things they've seen and done, certain mercs tend to express genuine disgust at some of the things they encounter while in action. Very few people find rotting bodies being eaten by birds to be a particularly nice sight, for example. And most mercs really don't like it if you force them loot a mass grave.
• Every Bullet Is a Tracer: You can see your bullets, but 1.13 adds in actual tracers, which give your characters an aiming bonus at the cost of the enemy knowing where you are immediately.
  • Tracers are an option in Jagged Alliance 3, doing as much damage as standard ammunition, but also inflicting the Exposed status on a successful hit (target loses the benefit of cover).
• 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 triggered when your psycho merc goes berserk.
• 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 Asian, cold, and mountainous country, with autochtones that have Persian and Arabic names, and which has been invaded by a army of religious fundamentalists. It is a fictional counterpart of Afghanistan.
• Fatigue Mechanic: In the first two games, characters have an "energy" meter that gradually depletes when in combat, taking damage, and traveling. The less energy a character has, the slower they move and the more likely they are to make mistakes (DO NOT have a tired character try to disarm explosives!). In addition to energy being used to run and climb, energy can be drained by getting shot, particularly if the shot doesn't penetrate armor^note Shotguns are excellent energy drainers in the mid-to-late game, where enemies have armor that can't be penetrated by buckshot, but will instead take massive energy damage and collapse. If energy is fully depleted, the unit will collapse and be unable to do anything until they get their breath back, which can take multiple rounds. Energy can be refilled by drinking water in the second game, but maximum energy will go down over time until the mercenary is too tired to do anything and has to sleep.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, mercs will get tired over time by traveling and fighting. You get a warning when they're getting tired, and then a notice when they become Tired, which imposes a -1 penalty to AP and prevents the unit from using their Free Movement, lowering their mobility significantly. If the mercenary continues to travel while Tired, they will eventually become Exhausted, which imposes a -3 penalty to AP and prevents the unit from traveling between sectors at all. 12 hours of down time will turn Exhausted into Tired, and another 12 hours will remove Tired. You can also, for a small fee, pay for your soldiers to get some R&R in a town, where, after 12 hours, they will become Energized and get bonus AP for a while.
• Firing One-Handed:
  • Averted in Jagged Alliance and Deadly Games, where everyone will shoot a gun with both hands.
  • Played straight in Jagged Alliance 2, where attacking with a pistol while standing will have the soldier hold it in one hand, though they'll use two hands if they crouch. You can also give characters two one-handed guns, and they can fire both at the same time, though this is a terrible idea unless the character has good marksmanship, high dexterity, and the ambidextrous trait. With sufficiently high Strength, Male characters get a different model in game that shows them firing machine guns with one hand when standing.
  • Averted in Jagged Alliance 3, where soldiers will properly hold their pistols in two hands. But you can once again make them go Guns Akimbo if you want (and it's more viable in this game).
• 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 from the first and second games 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.)
  • Jagged Alliance 3 sets up Scope and Shadow to be this. Both are talented snipers, but where Scope is a talkative, sociable urban combat specialist, Shadow is a taciturn loner whose preferred environments are open wilderness. Their rivalry is pretty amicable, though, and the worst they do if put on assignment together is swap tall tales and try to one-up each other.
• Flavor Text: A ton of item descriptions do these, with a ton of Shoutouts 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, and in Jagged Alliance 3, she makes biscuits every week.
  • 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 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".
• Gaiden Game: Rage! is considered more of a Spin-Off than a mainline entry to the series. Despite returning to the turn based mechanics of the classic games, it strips back both the strategic elements and the huge ensemble cast, while focusing more on survival elements.
• 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:
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, damaging a civilian in combat in any way 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: v1.13 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 Jagged Alliance 2, Queen Deidranna, when informed that the rebels have managed to take Drassen, will sensibly order a counterattack to take it back ("Send my best troops to the location at once"). The worst you'll run into is an enemy squad from one of the nearby sectors investigating your presence. Notably, the developers did intend for there to be a massive counterattack, on the order of dozens of enemy soldiers (when you probably have about six mercenaries), in order to make the player aware that they should not try to win every battle, but they turned it off when it was determined to be not fun, while keeping the cutscene. 1.13 turns it back on, and makes it clear why it was turned off, as it forces you to retreat and allow the enemy to take the town back, before attacking again to reclaim it (without a counterattack this time) when the bulk of the forces leave, essentially doing what you just did for no reason.
  • Doreen the child slaver can only be dealt with by the player themselves. Even if the player forms a hardened militia around Drassen, no one will do anything about her despite their children being held in her place and her having no protection.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, you are accused of war crimes for using gas attacks specifically on civilians. While you are, in fact, innocent of what you are accused of, there's nothing stopping you from actually using gas attacks, whether with gas grenades or mortars, and no one will comment on it.
• Giant Mook:
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, you'll run into tanks in Meduna, though they are easy enough if you have rockets. If you don't have sufficient heavy weaponry to deal with them, you can just ignore them; you won't capture the sector, but they are immobile due to being surrounded by sandbags, and by the time you reach Meduna, capturing the city is not the main objective: killing Deidranna is.
• Global Airship: In Jagged Alliance 2, you can get several vehicles, but the first one you're likely to get is Skyrider and his helicopter, which can take you anywhere on the map for a fee (and can be shot down permanently if you don't neutralize SAM sites). Alternate vehicles are trucks and vans, which can only travel on roads, so they can't go everywhere, and also require refueling with the limited gasoline supplies you can scrounge, but they have their own inventory to make carrying lots of stuff easier.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: In Jagged Alliance 2: To say Deidranna is a total prick would be an extremely severe understatement. She's ruthlessly tyrannical and authoritarian, leveled the only University in the country to further her control, and constantly hungers for more power. All Crimes Are Equal under her rule, which is to say all crimes are punishable by death. Unfortunately, it's not swift death, all criminals and other "undesirables" are sent to a literal death camp in Tixa. And as stated above, All Crimes Are Equal. Growing "plants" ? To the death camp. Didn't attend a speech and clap loudly, because your kid was sick? To the death camp. Make the mistake of getting Deidranna's attention when she's in a bad mood, which is often? To the death camp. It's a wonder the country runs at all under her rule.
• Good-Looking Privates: Fox is depicted repeatedly as such - she was centerfold and a model. In Jagged Alliance 3, merchants selling magazines can mention that they have dirty mags for sale as well, and Fox might comment that she remembers that issue because she posed for it.
  • It's possible for an AIM result of a test to note that an applicant is very attractive (but it doesn't do anything).
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Jagged Alliance 2 makes a distinction between the skills of Hand-To-Hand and Martial Arts, both enhancing unarmed strikes. The former grants a large damage bonus, but the accuracy bonus is lower. Meanwhile, the latter gives a larger accuracy bonus and the ability to perform a spinning kick on fatigued enemies that does twice the usual damage, but also has a smaller damage bonus on normal strikes.
• Grade System Snark: Trevor's end-of-battle soundbyte in Jagged Alliance 2.
  Wah hey, they're all dead! Got to give them an A for effort, though.
• Grandfather Clause: Lampshaded in Jagged Alliance 3, as it retains much of the same irreverent action movie satire from the '90s titles, even while taking jabs at contemporary issues. This is extended to the tongue-in-cheek disclaimers at the start of the game.
• Grenade Launcher: Available starting in Jagged Alliance 2, where they come in both shoulder-mounted (M79) and underbarrel (M203) variants. Jagged Alliance 3 includes those as well as the Milkor RGB-6, if you really need to shoot multiple 40mm grenades in the same round.
• 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.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, you can specifically target the groin, which will, on a successful hit, apply the Suppressed debuff (reducing AP by half for the next round). Leg protection is, however, very common, and will also protect the groin, meaning it's not always a viable option. You may also get a side job to kill 3 enemies in battle with groin shots, just for giggles.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • In Jagged Alliance 1 and Jagged Alliance 2, mercenaries will generally not comment on their feelings towards other mercs until it's too late: in the first game, the merc might give you warning that they're not happy, or they might just leave. Or they might just kill the other merc. In the second game, if you hire several mercenaries at the same time (like at the start of the game), mercs won't complain about another merc until they arrive, when you've already paid them and they're locked in for several days, all but forcing you to endure their wrath. Likewise, they won't necessarily comment on mercs they like, so you might not even know that Wolf and Fox are exceptionally well-suited to working together, for example. Jagged Alliance 3 occasionally has mercs talking about their preferences, such as Barry suggesting you hire Red because they're good friends, or Mouse telling you that she'll work with you because you have so many girls on your team, alleviating this quite a bit.
  • 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.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 has several.
    • Gus Tarballs is on the roster for A.I.M., but explicitly listed as "Retired" and won't allow you to hire him if you contact him. If you hire Len or Scully, his friends, he'll reconsider, but only if you have a good reputation, and only if you've talked to him before.
    • You have the opportunity to recover Grand Chien artifacts that you can cash in for $3,000, which is a lot of money (a bag of tiny diamonds sells for $500, as a comparison). However, what you should do is hang on to them until you liberate Port Cacao, and then give them to Emma La Fontaine to get reputation boosts and free militia. And even if you DO suspect that you're supposed to do that, you absolutely need to ask Emma if you can get paid for the artifacts, and then, when she tells you no, talk to the governor and insist that he set up a fund for the recovery of artifacts, so that you do get paid when you give them to Emma.
    • Similarly, selling bags of tiny diamonds is fine, but you could keep some to give to Leelee in Fleatown, who will give you up to ten "loot boxes". Most of the loot boxes will be unhelpful, but several will contain very nice pieces of equipment and skill magazines.
    • Recruiting the Coffee Beans to protect Port Cacao Docks requires you to speak to each member and convince them with stat checks. However, one member, the easiest to convince, will just attack you with a melee weapon and then agree to join (she's crazy, you see). This will inevitably result in a couple of wounds and some downtime for your merc, unless they have good agility and dodge, in which case the attack will miss, and you'll still recruit the member.
    • Talking to random civilians in towns that you've liberated may have them mention that they're looking for work. If you let the dialogue play out (i.e. don't interrupt it by talking to another civilian), then your associated mine income will increase because of the new worker. This can happen a couple of times per mine.
    • When fighting story important characters, you can absolutely go all out: as demonstrated by Pierre early in the game, story important characters cannot be killed by you. When they take enough damage, they will surrender so that you can talk to them and then decide what to do with them. Properly identifying a "story important character" is more difficult. Pierre cannot be killed in his first appearance. Other important enemies are Corazon Santiago, The Major, and the Slave Master of Diamond Red.
• Gun Accessories: Lots of them. 1.13 gives even more.
• Guns Akimbo: Starting in Jagged Alliance 2, you can do this by giving two one-handed weapons to a character. But it's usually a bad idea; in order to be effective, the soldier has to be close to their target (making them vulnerable), it takes more Action Points to fire two weapons, and they are inherently inaccurate when dual-wielded, meaning that even with aiming and close range, a lot of the time, you'll miss. Characters with the Ambidextrous trait will reduce the penalties, and characters with a high Dexterity will perform better^note Meaning that Fox, a combat medic is below average marksmanship, will be absolutely brutal when dual wielding if her marksmanship is improved: she has Ambidextrous and maxed out Dexterity score by default. That being said, equipping a character with two submachine guns and sending them in to autofire both at a target will be devastating, thanks to the Death of a Thousand Cuts (even more so if you have hollow-point or armor-piercing ammunition, as appropriate for the target), and even if the shots don't penetrate armor, the target will be pummeled and likely collapse from being out of breath. In short, Difficult, but Awesome.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, this is somewhat more viable, as combat ranges are generally shorter and the penalties are reduced slightly, but you still want someone with Ambidextrous and high Dexterity to make it work. Now, however, it's possible to fire just one gun if needed.
• 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."
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses:
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, the main focus on the game is fighting squads and platoons, and there's a hard limit on stats (For humans, at least). As a result, 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 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 close quarters, and the fact that there's more than a couple of dozen of them.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 plays this a bit straighter: bosses will generally be named, have voice lines, and wear much heavier armor than their counterparts, making them tricky to take down in direct combat. They also tend to have more soldiers around, making direct combat risky all on its own.
    • Pierre commands the garrison at Fort L'eau Bleu, which is 6 soldiers, and has two bodyguards besides, meaning the full complement is 11 soldiers, about 5 more than you might have faced on previous maps. He's also wearing heavy armor and you only have light weapons and basic ammunition at this point, meaning he'll shrug off most attacks. Explosives work wonders, and if you can stealthily fix and then man the machine gun in the tower, he'll be in trouble.
    • Slave Master Graff of Diamond Red wears heavy armor and absolutely refuses to move from his house overlooking the mine, which is heavily guarded. He also has a powerful sniper rifle that will hurt very badly if he hits you with it, and his accuracy is decent. If you're spotted, he's much more interested in killing the slave miners than he is in fighting you. And he's not wearing armor on his groin, so if you can get a line of sight, you can prevent him from attacking at all by hitting him in the groin to Suppress him.
    • Colonel Faucheaux is the exception, as while he is wearing heavy armor, he's not any more impressive in a fight than any of his soldiers and goes does relatively easy if you can get to him. The keyword being "if": Faucheaux is taking cover in his well-defended military base that has few points of entry, and has a massive force of 25 soldiers, more than any other location in the game.
    • The Major sits in his fort in Eagle's Nest for the entire game, and getting there requires traversing several bottlenecks in the terrain that are heavily defended. The Major himself, however, is wearing heavy armor and has good marksmanship skills, as well as a force of 20 soldiers, which is by far the second most powerful force you'll have to face. But the reason he's difficult is because if you focus on his forces instead of gunning for him, and you're detected, he'll order his soldiers to drop everything and kill President LaFontaine. Getting to the President to protect him takes some time, during which he will probably be gunned down if you don't focus on bringing down the Major to demoralize his forces into attacking you once more.
• Heal Thyself: In Jagged Alliance 1 and 2, doctors working on wounded mercs will not restore hit points, but rather apply bandages to their existing wounds to prevent additional damage from bleeding. A merc that takes 25 damage and then gets bandages is still down 25 damage, they're just not bleeding anymore. Restoring HP requires time (slow), a doctor spending time with the patient specifically (faster), or a hospital visit (fastest).
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, medkits will restore health directly, but if a merc takes sufficient damage from an attack, they will get one or more Wounds. Wounds reduce maximum HP by 10 for each, meaning that a soldier with a wound is much easier to kill even at full HP. Treating wounds requires spending downtime with a medic or doctor, or finding and paying for a hospital stay.
• Heel Realization: It's not quite as cathartic as just gunning her down, but in Jagged Alliance 2 Doreen the sweatshop owner can also be convinced to shut her child-labor operation down by a character with sufficient Leadership skill.
  • The Major had this moment early in his stewartship of the Legion in Jagged Alliance 3. Unfortunately, he came to the conclusion of Then Let Me Be Evil.
• 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: The entire point of the series: you're hiring mercenaries for possibly altruistic purposes, but ultimately, they are mercenaries, and they will only fight for you as long as they can get paid. That being said, A.I.M., the Association of International Mercenaries, tries very hard to offer quality, in the form of true professionals that are not psychopaths, and allows mercenaries to decline jobs if they believe it doesn't align with their morals. As such, A.I.M. has a reputation around the world for only supporting "the good guys". The More Economic Recruiting Corporation (M.E.R.C.) on the other hand, is a gutsy start-up with no ability to pay more than lip service to either quality or altruism.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, it turns out that your A.I.M. crew was not the first group to be hired to take on the Legion: Corazon Santiago initially contracted M.E.R.C. to take back the diamond mines in Grand Chien, but they failed and seemingly disappeared, to her utter annoyance. And that also wasn't her first foray with mercenaries: she hired The Major to forcibly take over the diamond mines from the Grand Chien government, and only resorted to fighting his Legion when he cut her out of the deal.
• 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 MP5SD especially if he is wearing an Extended Ear. 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".
  • Jagged Alliance 3 allows you to put suppressors on most weapons, and they are almost perfect silencers. Some weapons (specifically labeled as "Noisy") will still be heard at short ranges with suppressors, unless they're loaded with subsonic ammunition^note only available in 9mm. Even then, enemies might hear their buddy's cry of pain and react appropriate (or see their buddy's face explode). While proper suppressors require a steel pipe (obtainable from scrapping guns) and provide a bonus to critical chance for subsequent shots, you can almost always make an "improvised suppressor", which works just as well despite clearly being just a can, with the only drawback being the lack of bonus.
• Homemade Inventions: In Jagged Alliance 1, '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), though the .38 revolver cannot be modified, and it's likely to greatly reduce the condition of the modified gun until it's properly repaired.
  • Expanded in Jagged Alliance 2: 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.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 has all of your weapon modifications being made out of generic "parts". While the advantage of not needing to find a specific scope is obvious, it means that every modification requires some Mechanical skill, and even something as simple as putting a red dot scope on a picatinny rail can fail and reduce the condition of the gun (and maybe even destroy some parts).
• Horde of Alien Locusts: In Jagged Alliance 2 with Sci-Fi mode, after you take over three cities, you'll eventually see a cutscene in which the Queen tells Elliott to stop feeding "Them". He tries to object, but ultimately agrees, and within a day, one of your mines will shut down as the Crepitus starts killing workers. Loyalty in the town will continue to decrease until you go into the mine, kill the monsters, and ultimately destroy the Crepitus Queen.
• 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!
• Improbable Taxonomy Skills: In Jagged Alliance 2, everyone has a comment on the monstrous and unearthly creatures you'll inevitably encounter if you tick the "Sci-Fi" option. Most mercenaries express various forms of surprise, but the medical doctors of your team will immediately start pinning down their taxonomy at first sight. (Crustacea, they seem to agree, which amusingly makes them Giant Enemy Crabs.)
• 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!
• 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.)
  • You come across several burial grounds in the wilds in Grand Chien. Sometimes they have ancient treasure.
• Informal Eulogy: A few characters will comment on others' deaths.
• Insurance Fraud: In the second game you can insure your 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 Container: Jagged Allaince 2 has ammunition stored in magazines or clips. If you need to reload ammunition for a weapon that uses the wrong type of container (e.g. a .357 Magnum 6-round clip for the Barracuda when needing a .357 Magnum 9-round magazine for a Desert Eagle), it's presumed that characters have a spare empty container required to transfer bullets into, before reloading the weapon - which in turn means it takes slightly longer to reload said weapon.
• 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.
  • Justified somewhat in Jagged Alliance 3. Saving cultural artifacts instead of selling them will give Emma LaFontaine more legitimacy and be able to raise militia to reinforce locations you already liberated. However you only get one squad per artifact as National pride only goes so far.
• 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: In most entries, it's crucial to keep an eye on how much time's passed, be it due to mission-sensitive objectives, or the impending expiration of your mercs' contracts. Night missions and, in the third game, weather conditions also change constantly.
• 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.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 simplifies inventory by giving mercenaries inventory in proportion to their strength, from 4 slots up to 17, in addition to allowing two weapon loadouts and armor. Further simplifying things is that ammunition, meds, and generic parts^note but not specific parts, like steel pipes, lens and chips are stored in a "squad inventory" and are effectively weightless: you need to make sure you have the right ammunition to put in your gun, but mercs will automatically pull from the squad inventory to do so any time they need to reload.
• In Vino Veritas : One of the first missions the player gets in JA2 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 also turn them against you (and really gets you nothing worthwhile).
• 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.
  • In Jagged Alliance as a whole, Biff Apscott. He is a terrible mercenary. In the first game, he has abysmal stats, and if forced to kill someone, he will desert. In the second game, he tries to set up a competitor to A.I.M., which he calls M.E.R.C., but his mercenaries are massively inferior, and while he can be hired again, he's not any better than he was in the first game. In the third game, he's hired by Corazon Santiago to take back the diamond mines (before she hires you), fails spectacularly, and gets chased to a small sanctuary that, if you choose to go to his defense, is attacked by four waves of Legion soldiers. And if you say the right things, he doesn't even get to leave with the extremely valuable Green Diamond that he risked his life for.
• Item Crafting: The three main series games offers a number of item crafting opportunities, mostly in the form of modifications to weapons. The third game also allows you to manufacture ammunition and explosives if you station someone in a repair shop to do it (and they have sufficient Explosives skill).
• 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. In the first game, if he somehow manages to kill an enemy, he'll desert in the middle of the night (and take anything in his inventory with him) and refuse to be hired again. The only real reason to hire him is either a Self-Imposed Challenge or to hear all of his lines.
  • "Unusually Ruthless" Reuban is this in 1. Has a laughably low daily wage, terrible stats, and brings a hedge trimmer as his primary weapon (which, to add insult to injury, cannot be used as a weapon).
  • While most of the non-mercenary hires are decent in Jagged Alliance 3, special mention goes to Larry, who is a drug-addled, brain-damaged mess of a human being. Hiring him at all requires giving him a shot of the extremely valuable Metaviron, and if you choose to recruit him, you'll be rewarded with a character that lackluster stats (except for Explosives), a slot permanently taken up by his teddy bear, and the lowest Wisdom score in the game. He is an absolute terror with a mortar, however.
• 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: In Jagged Alliance 2, 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.)
  • Also appears in Jagged Alliance 3. If you have both the Major and Pierre in your party, the Major states that he intended for Pierre to kill him and take control of the Legion, and that he is desappointed that Pierre never got around to it.
• Knowledge Broker: Recon Intelligence Services from Jagged Alliance 2: "if you don't know where to find us, we don't want your business." They give you the background information on Arulco.
• Land Mine Goes "Click!": Most notably during the assault on Meduna in Jagged Alliance 2, where they're as thick as flies in some parts, in an attempt to keep you bottlenecked.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, your first trip to the Emerald Coast will likely have you trying to rescue Herman, who was told to dance in a minefield by Legion soldiers and stepped on a mine that won't go off unless he moves. An Explosives check can disarm the mine. He's also tough enough to survive the blast, but he'll be less than pleased.
• La Résistance: In Jagged Alliance 2, Miguel's rebels and, technically, you and your mercenaries are the Resistance against Queen Deidranna. Upgrading the Resistance to a Rebellion and then a full on Revolution is your goal.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, there's the resistance against the Legion, which is you and your mercenaries (and whatever towns you manage to liberate and train militia). There's also the Communist Resistance, located in Pantagruel, that is more than happy to work with you to drive out your common foes in the Legion. Once you get Pantagruel loyalty high enough, the Communist leader steps down and names your crew as the new leaders.
• Laser Sight: A possible accessory in Jagged Alliance 2 that improves accuracy, particularly in the dark, and in the 1.13 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.
  • There's options for this in Jagged Alliance 3 for appropriate firearms (generally ones that have a picatinny rail). The normal laser sight will apply Marked^note Next attack is a guaranteed critical hit to any target that is hit with a shot aimed 3+ times, while the UV laser will automatically apply 1 aim to each shot for free.
• Last Episode Theme Reprise: The final map of Flashback has a remix of the title music playing during combat.
• 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 thanks to their international reputation and improved roster.
• Law of Chromatic Superiority: In Jagged Alliance 2, enemies in Yellow are basically cops and enforcers, armed only with handguns and occasionally submachine guns and shotguns, and won't show up much beyond the beginning of the game. 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.
• Little Useless Gun: In Jagged Alliance 1, the .38 Special is hands down the worst gun in the game, hampered by both its small ammunition capacity and poor stopping power, but it's also the gun you start with. It returns in Jagged Alliance 2, even more useless due to prevalence of better weaponry. MD has it equipped by default.
• 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 better the armor, the more they can take. However, you can abuse their armored status to knock them out; a blast from a shotgun will knock the wind out of anyone with sufficient armor.
• Magikarp Power: In any of the games, if a mercenary has a high Wisdom stat 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 supersede Gus even faster.
  • MERC in the second game is an entire organization that runs on this. Their initial pool of mercenaries are at best mediocre. However, the more you use their services, the more they will expand their operations, with the final mercenary added to their roster being proper elite.
• The Magnificent Seven Samurai: The plot of Metavira and Arulco operations is essentially like this. The Grand Chien operation is more of the same, but with a few extra twists.
• 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.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, a Sanatorium is named Creutzfeldt-Jakob, the name of a horrifying prion disease in humans that turns the brain into a sponge like consistency. So it's hardly a surprise it's the source of a zombie outbreak.
• 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). However, with few exceptions, all of the medics have excellent wisdom, meaning they can learn combat skills quickly (where more combat focused mercs might struggle to learn medic skills).
• MegaCorp: The Adonis Corporation in Jagged Alliance 3, which owns several diamond mines in Grande Chien and is responsible for why the Legion not only exists but has gone rogue. All while still having enough resources to have a backup Regime Change plan.
• Mega Neko: Bloodcats, genetically engineered felines that love to tear the arms off bipeds. Enemy forces can often be seen ambushed by them. They are absolutely murderous: a group of six bloodcats can wipe out a squad of 20 normal soldiers.
• Merchant Money Cap: Tony, the Arms Dealer in 2, has a finite cash pool that resets every 24 hours. If you sell him too many high-value weapons, he literally runs out of money to pay you. This reinforces both realism (he's a black-market dealer, not a bottomless ATM) and strategy (sometimes you need to hold back gear until he's restocked).
• 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. Only a few mercenaries are ex-military, and most of the rest have little military experience.
• Military Brat: Some mercs are this, most notably the Roachburns. Buzz, from Deadly Games, vocalizes she wants to make her daddy proud.
• Military Maverick: Considering the personalities of most of these mercenaries, it's not surprising.
• Min-Maxing: Subverted: if a mercenary has zero points in a skill, they will never improve in that skill^note barring some unusual occurrence, such as a critical success on disarming a landmine with zero Explosive skill bumping it to 1, but don't count on that. Most mercenaries that you can hire have at least a minimal amount of points in a skill, so that they can, with enough time, become an expert in that field. However, the process for going from novice to proficient is slow enough that it's usually not worth it, even with high Wisdom to speed up the training. It's possible to make your custom mercenary a very specialized (high stats) or rounded (low stats), but it's generally more useful to focus on one or two specialties.
• 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.)
  • Similarly, don't stand behind the RPG launcher in Jagged Alliance 3.
• 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). Wildfire, on the other hand, is little more than a glorified mod, with it just being Jagged Alliance 2 only harder and with a small few plot changes (You now work for the CIA instead of Enrico) and a change in some of the mercs.
• Money Is Not Power: No matter how well you play the game, it is not possible to bribe mercenaries into working with mercs they hate or cannot stand, as they often have good reason to not work with that other mercenary in the first place.
  Cliff: Raffi's a quack! Some sort of a bush butcher! I bet you never even asked to see his qualifications! Unload him...and you can have me!
  Eli: Skitz Bonner has a serious medical condition, and by no means should he be out in the field! I can't join till you get rid of him!
  Len: Unusually Ruthless Reuban has given this business a bad name! I won't work beside him!
  Scully: Kaboom needs help tying his freakin' shoes. And you actually expect me to work with him? You must be crazier than he is!
• 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.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 brings back town morale (affecting the cost of services, the income of associated mines, and the cost to train militia) and combat morale. Scoring a "good kill" (read: popping a head or landing an unlikely shot) will raise combat morale, and there are 2 perks that can raise morale, as well as three talents that can affect it^note Optimist occasionally increases morale just because, Pessimist occasionally prevents morale from increasing just because, and MD's Find My Feet talent will occasionally raise morale just because. Inversely, morale can be lowered by taking a lot of damage, seeing a mercenary go down (or worse, get permanently killed, especially if they're a friend), being forced into panic, and being outnumbered. High morale means improved accuracy and more AP. Low morale means reduced accuracy, less AP, and an increasing chance to panic or go berserk.
• More Dakka: If a weapon is automatic, it can usually shoot full auto (or autofire). Generally Awesome, but Impractical: much like in real life, keeping a gun on target on full auto is difficult at best, even with modifications, skills and perks that assist. Landing a full burst on a target is generally a guaranteed kill, however. Jagged Alliance 2 has a lot of options for bring More Dakka, like light machine guns and assault rifles, modifications to shoot more bullets, and so on. 1.13 adds even more options, like the Metal Storm^note Which fires multiple bullets from multiple barrels, C-Mags for massive ammo reserves, and ammo belts for machine guns to allow sustained fire. Jagged Alliance 3 gives multiple weapons capable of fully automatic fire, but generally makes it difficult to pull off...except for light machine guns, which can only fire in full auto, and are designed to be used while prone to maximize their accuracy.
• 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".
  • Downplayed by Grizzly in Jagged Alliance 3: if you have fewer Americans on the team than other nationalities, he'll complain about it, and then demand a higher price.
• Multiple Endings: While the first two games had minor differences in their epilogues depending on the survival of certain characters, the third game has vastly different outcomes for the fate of Grand Chien depending on choices made through the story. The ending changes based on: If you found enough evidence against Corazon to clear your name; if you saved the President or he died; if you recovered the Green Diamond or if Biff escaped with it; if you captured, killed or recruited the Major; if you recruited or killed Pierre; if you killed or ignored Faucheaux; if you solved the Red Rabies problem or ignored it; if you convinced Chimurenga to get with the brothel madam. At the end of each game, your current group of mercenaries will also comment on their feelings at the end.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: Certain mercenaries will refuse to be hired if you have other mercenaries working with you already. It's possible to have these mercs work together anyway^note by cheesing it: if you hire them at the same time, technically the person they hate is not working with you yet, but they'll complain about it, and likely leave or do something worse. In the first game, for example, Fidel hates Hurl for unknown reasons, and after working together for two days, Hurl will "disappear" after a couple of warning threats from Fidel (who kills him).
• My Master, Right or Wrong: In Jagged Alliance 2, Elliott will never abandon Deidranna, no matter how much she beats him. When you storm the palace in the final act, Elliott, his face bruised and bloody from Deidranna's abuse, with a bullet hole in his head from where she shot him, will still fight against your mercenaries to the death.
• Native Guide: In Jagged Alliance 1, if you have free room for more mercenaries, Jack offers you for one to accompany your team. You can get up to four guides, though their quality as both guides and soldiers varies wildly. One of the guides, Hamous, gets a taste for combat and shows up in Arulco in Jagged Alliance 2, available to be recruited for an almost insulting low price if you're so inclined. Ira and Dimitri serve this purpose in Jagged Alliance 2 as well, offering their services for free and commenting on the various locations in the country, though their insights are dubious at best. Miguel and Carlos will do the same, but they're available to be recruited so late that their insights are not especially helpful. They are, however, excellent soldiers.
• Never Mess with Granny: Jagged Alliance 3 has two instances.
  • Port Cacao used to be protected by a group of female vigilantes known as the Coffee Beans, who are now all much older and retired, though still capable of defending themselves. You can get a side quest to recruit them to defend the port from N-Night, and if you succeed, they will kill ass and take names like no one's business.
  • The Beast of the Cursed Forest turns out to be a gentle and caring old woman who has zero patience for the Legion.
• Night-Vision Goggles: Available in Jagged Alliance 2 and 3. In both games, it negates the vision and accuracy penalties of darkness, making them valuable, but in Jagged Alliance 3, they take up the helmet slot, making your soldiers vulnerable. 1.13 also restricts the peripheral vision of anyone wearing goggles, changing their perception from 180 degrees to 90 degrees.
• 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: Reputation with mercenaries will affect your ability to hire mercenaries: experienced mercs will refused to work with a commander that hasn't proven themselves. This is most prominent in Jagged Alliance 1 where more than half of the available roster will refuse to work with you even if you have the money to pay for them.
  Len: Sorry, I only accept assignments that meet my standards! It should be written in my file but the incompetents running the show refused to put it in there!
  Moses: I've lived a long time, and I know it's because I've avoided working for young cocky fellas...much like yourself!
  Mike: Weren't you shown a copy of my biography?
• No Name Given: The commander (You) in each game. Though if you go by what Gus calls you, your name is "Woodrow". Jagged Alliance 3 implies but never states that your custom mercenary is you, but if you don't make a custom mercenary, then this still applies.
• Not in This for Your Revolution:
  • You and your mercenaries, in general, are only ever involved because of a contract, and couldn't care less about the stakes involved, at least initially. Even at your most benevolent, you still expect to get paid or have something in return for all the effort. Even the most idealistic mercenary will still contact you to negotiate an extension to their contract when it's coming due.
  • The Adonis Corporation in the third game seems to be concerned about the conflict in Grand Chien only insofar as it's damaging their financial bottom line. Meanwhile, the downtrodden citizens on Ernie Island, at least initially, don't care much about politics or President LaFontaine and just want the Legion thrown out so they can be left alone.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: The zombies in Jagged Alliance 3; as an NPC doctor might say, "we don't like to use the 'z-word'". Ordinary folk generally refer to them as "les cadavérés".^note the corpses
  "Painless" Doc Roberts: At least I... won't become... a damned Z-word...
• Nuclear Mutant: Nuclear weapon testing on Metavira Island in the 50s resulted in mutated trees that produced sap with amazing medical properties. All attempts to reproduce or grow new Fallow trees have failed, making the sap an extremely valuable resource.
• Oddly Small Organization:
  • You and the rebels in Jagged Alliance 2. Justified by your lack of starting capital, forcing you to restrict your mercenary hires at first. For the rebels, they've been fighting a losing battle for several months, and their last stronghold in Omerta was hit by a huge attack only recently, killing most of the civilians and forcing the rebels underground to lick their wounds.
  • Averted in the third game. While LaFontaine's loyalists are initially shown to be a handful of bodyguards, they do have support from Grand Chien's military, who are trying to keep order in the country despite the Legion. Your mission is not to destroy the Legion, but rather to rescue President LaFontaine so that he can stabilize the country. Then the bulk of said military goes rogue as part of the Adonis Corporation's Regime Change scheme, reducing LaFontaine's loyalists down to a handful of supporters and you.
• One Bullet Clips: Averted. Each game explicitly tracks how many bullets remain in a magazine when appropriate. In Jagged Alliance 1, bullets and magazines were treated as the same entity: a box of .38 always contained six bullets, for example, while a magazine for a Colt .45 always had seven bullets, and the game would consolidate ammunition when needed. In Jagged Alliance 2, bullets are always contained in a magazine, but you have functionally infinite numbers of magazines: swapping 9mm bullets from the magazine for a Baretta M9 to an MP5 took longer as you're implied to be removing the bullets from one magazine to put them into another magazine that fits the new gun. In Jagged Alliance 3, magazines are removed entirely: if you have ammo in the squad inventory, you can reload.
• Oh, Crap!: Many mercenaries 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.
  • Averted in Jagged Alliance 3 due to Arbitrary Gun Power: a headshot will not necessarily kill a target, especially if they're armored. However, a sufficiently powerful weapon will do a lot of damage, a critical hit headshot will likely kill a target, and a Stealth Kill Headshot with an assault rifle will likely kill anything (unless the shot fails to penetrate armor).
• 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. Achievements in Jagged Alliance 3 encourage finishing the game with just two mercenaries, and just one mercenary.
• One Nation Under Copyright: The Adonis Corporation in Jagged Alliance 3 once came close this in Grand Chien and is revealed to be plotting for pulling this off outright, with Colonel Facheaux as its willing Puppet King.
• 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 you could "recruit" 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. In Jagged Alliance 3, if they like the job due to some factor of their personality, they may forego a pay increase (such as Mouse stating that she'll stick around because you have so many female mercenaries, or Fox stating that she'll stick around as long as Grizzly is around).
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: When Mike is encountered, certain mercs will ask you to allow them to kill him personally, among them Gus and Ivan (who both have bad blood with him after being screwed over by 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.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 makes stealth much more explicit: you can active a stealth at any time you're not being directly observed, and you get important feedback when a mercenary is about to be spotted. This is vital, as Stealth Kills are a massive part of the game: if you attack a soldier that is unaware, you have a high chance to instantly kill them regardless of their remaining health. The more aware and alert a soldier is (if, for example, they know someone's around, but they don't immediately see you), the lower the chance of an instant kill.
• Only Sane Man: Russell "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).
  Rusty: If you're shopping for an explosive expert, feel free to check out the competition. I have no history of psychiatric illness or sheet metal in my head!
• Orange/Blue Contrast: The cover and the title screen of the first game, seen here as a page image.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The third game has a number of sidequests and encounters centered around the Red Rabies virus. Those infected with it eventually turn mindless but also highly aggressive. Red Rabies turns out to be an attempt at making a biological weapon by cryogenically frozen Nazis. Yes, really.
• Overheating: An optional 1.13 feature that mainly applies to assault rifles and machine guns. Treated realistically, as hot barrels affect accuracy and reliability if not allowed to cool.
• Overworld First Strike: Jagged Alliance 2 prevents this in some cases. For example, if you attempt to directly attack Mistress of Mayhem, regular combat starts instead. This can be bypassed by attacking one square away using explosives.
• Painting the Medium:
  • Jagged Alliance 2 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.
  • Much the same can be said for Jagged Alliance 3, which features laptop sections that websites and email correspondence that wouldn't be out of place in the early 2000s.
• Pants-Positive Safety: When going into the Refugee camp in Jagged Alliance 3, apparently one of the Legion did this and blew off his scrotum. He's not pleased when the shaman says that testicles don't grow back.
• Parasol of Pain: Those free umbrellas from MERC in Unfinished Business do serve as a good melee weapon.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • In Jagged Alliance 2:
    • 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 mercenary 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 recruitable characters will leave for good if you dismiss them after hiring them, or if they get fed up enough that they quit.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3:
    • The poachers will hire you to find and kill Flay, a serial killer that's been hunting the poachers. You can recruit him instead, but if you kill him, he's, well, dead.
    • When you defeat Pierre in Fort L'eau Bleu, you can let him live. If you do, much, much later, you will have the opportunity to save him again, and recruit him (assuming he agrees with your choices). If you kill him at Fort L'eau Bleu, or just don't confront him there at all, you won't get that opportunity.
    • After some time in country, you will get an emergency assistance call from Biff Apscott, and a Legion attack ground will head towards his location. If you don't bother to intercept the attack, Biff will die.
    • If you manage to get into the Sanitarium basement, the doctor there will berate you for killing her test subjects, who she was using to keep herself from succumbing to the Red Rabies virus. You will then be given an explicit time limit of two weeks to collect at least four unique samples of the virus. If you run out of time, she dies and all her research dies with her, preventing a cure for Red Rabies.
• Pinned Down:
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, being shot at can force the target to crouch down and go prone if already crouched, wasting Action Points, with the chance increasing as more shots come their way.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, this returns in the form of a suppressed fire mechanic, which wastes Action Points and adds penalties to attacks for those affected. There's also an ability connected to dedicated sniper rifles call "Pin Down", which forgoes an attack now in exchange for a free attack at the start of the unit's next turn, doing guaranteed damage, but capable of being cancelled if the target moves out of line of sight.
• 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.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 features the Red Rabies, a rabies variant that turns its infected into Technically Living Zombies who attack on sight. One sidequest involves helping a scientist find a cure.
• 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-Asskicking One-Liner: Mercenaries are generally happy to find enemies, since they expect that they'll win, and they express it appropriately. More cowardly mercenaries instead lapse right into This Is Gonna Suck.
• Present-Day Past: Despite Jagged Alliance 3 being set in 2001, several cultural references are made from twenty years later such as social distancing and Karens, though the former is justified by virtue of the Red Rabies existing.
• President Evil: Deidranna, although she's technically a queen in a country is an elected monarchy. She married the King, then framed him for crimes and got him exiled. Then used her authority to establish an iron-fisted rule. Then abolished elections because why not.
• 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."
  • Jagged Alliance 3 will occasionally have head shots resulting in head explosions. When you get one of these, you will also likely get a morale bonus for a "Good Kill". If it happens to one of your mercenaries, they are super-dead with no Downed state.
• 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. M.E.R.C. operates as a guild at first, but by the time of Jagged Alliance 3, they tend to operate more as a private special operations group for hire.
  • 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.
  • Corazon Santiago's men in Jagged Alliance 3 are PMC personnel under the Adonis Corporation's employ who are more well-equipped than the Legion and eventually turn on you alongside Colonel Facheaux.
• 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.
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, 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 1.13 if you're so inclined.
• Psycho for Hire: Several, though sometimes a psycho can be a useful weapon.
  • In Jagged Alliance 1, there are several psychos, including a disturbing number of the explosives experts. Fidel and Leech are notable in that they will refuse orders in order to kill their chosen target, even if you're telling them to get to cover. Unusually Ruthless Reuben is a man who killed his family with a hedge trimmer (and recharged it twice before he was done) and can be hired for pittance.
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, A.I.M. has purged their ranks one way or another of all the people that are true psychopaths or mentally unstable (some were retired, some were killed, some ran afoul of police, etc), but they still have a few psychos on the payroll, specifically Meltdown, Fidel (who promises he's had anger counselling), and Steroid, all of whom will go full auto on their guns for no reason and will be sad if their gun can't do that.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, Fidel remains on the A.I.M. roster because despite is very clear mental issues, he is still an experienced and capable mercenary, and Meltdown and Steroid are somewhat less insane. You can also find and recruit Flay, a hunter who fell in with some poachers and was disgusted with their cowardice, so he turned to hunting the poachers instead, nailing antlers to the dead bodies' heads.
• 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?!
• Put on a Bus: The A.I.M. website in Jagged Alliance 2 has an Alumni section that explains why some mercenaries from Jagged Alliance 1 and Deadly Games are not available for hire. In most cases, it's because they wanted no part of the business anymore, fell into trouble with the police, or just straight up died from old age. A few of them show up in the game, with Hamous and Mike already in-country, and Speck and Biff showing up as the upstart M.E.R.C. company after about a week of in-game time.
• The Quiet One: Several mercenaries are professional to the point of being outright terse, making the few times they get excited more alarming.
• 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, terrorists, 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: Enemy soldiers are not guaranteed to drop all of their equipment, or any of it, when killed, though they can at least only drop things that they have on them^note In other words, if an enemy is shooting at you with a pistol, they're not going to drop a rifle, and if they throw a grenade at you, that grenade won't be in their inventory to drop. A setting in 1.13 in Jagged Alliance 2 forces enemies to drop all their gear when they die, which is exactly as unbalancing as it sounds.
• Rank Scales with 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, Deidranna does not normally carry weapons or armor. If you are sneaky enough to cut her off her hidden stash of 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.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, the Major is a capable combatant and more than willing to throw down with your mercenaries. He's a far better fighter than his Legion troops. Slave Master Graaf, by virtue of having a powerful sniper rifle, an elevated and defended perch, and heavy armor, is also a tough battle. Colonel Faucheaux, on the other hand, is difficult only because of the forces under his command; he's a decent soldier, but when engaged in combat, he's not any more difficult to fight than his soldiers.
• Railing Kill: Can happen in Jagged Alliance 2 with either powerful hits pushing an enemy over an edge, or destroying the floor under them. Both are very difficult, but when they happen, they cause a serious amount of armor-ignoring damage. There's also an animation for a dead enemy falling over an edge, but it only triggers if they die from being hit; the fall doesn't do additional damage.
• Real-Time Strategy: Played with: the overhead/satellite map views allow you to coordinate your squad movements and keep an eye on enemies, but action is paused by default. The first game only allowed you to make changes at the beginning of each day. Generally, time advances only when you want it to, though enemy movements in the second and third game are important to things to watch so you can plan your attacks.
• Real-Time with Pause: Non-combat moments in the games are real time, allowing you to move all your units simultaneously, with actions that take a lot of AP simply taking more real-time to complete (crawling is slower than walking, for example). You can pause at any time to consider your options. Once combat begins, the action becomes turn-based tactical combat.
• 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: In Jagged Alliance 2, Miguel, with Carlos as his right-hand man. In Jagged Alliance 3, Chimurenga leads the Communist Rebellion against the Legion.
• Redshirt Army: Militia that you hire train is essentially expendable: in the first game, losses among the sap gatherers will have them demanding more pay to compensate for the increased danger, but the amount that you pay guards only affects how many are available: they don't particularly care if they die. In the second game, Militia requires a start-up fee to purchase equipment ($1,500 for every 10 militia trained), but not only is there ever a concern about a lack of recruits, training militia actually increases town loyalty, making it easier to train militia in the future.
• Regime Change: In Jagged Alliance 3 it's revealed that the Legion was originally set up by the Adonis Corporation to have Grand Chien's President LaFontaine replaced with someone more amenable, only for the Major to go rogue and deciding that working for himself was more fun than answering to his corporate superiors. Eventually, however, Santiago and her employers decide to try again, this time using the bulk of the Grand Chien Army under Colonel Faucheaux.
• 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.
• Renegade Splinter Faction: The Legion in the the third game is revealed to be this to to the Adonis Corporation. Likewise the Grande Chien Army under Colonel Facheaux become this to LaFontaine's loyalists.
• Respawning Enemies: In the final battle of Jagged Alliance 1, 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.
  • No matter how many squads you kill in Jagged Alliance 2 or Jagged Alliance 3, more will spawn from strongholds and head out to meet your forces. The only way to keep enemy squads from spawning is to capture every single stronghold (and since the leaders of the enemy factions are in one of those strongholds, doing so will end the game).
• Ridiculous Exchange Rates: In Jagged Alliance 3, you can collect literal duffel bags full of the local currency that none of the locals will accept, only taking good old US Dollars. You have to exchange them to Istadi the Fisher in Port Cocoa for items as he uses it for wallpaper. Truth in Television in many countries that had or are experiencing hyperinflation.
• 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: In Jagged Alliance 2, Deidranna nearly does this to the Chivaldori family, with Enrico being the only survivor.
• Running Gag: Ahem, my queen, I have some bad news...
  • *slap* ELLIOT! YOU IDIOT!!!
• "Running Out of Time" Warning: The characters will comment if time is running out for the day, asking the player to wrap things up.
• Save-Game Limits: JA 1 saves tend towards Broad Strokes at the end of each day. During the mission, there is one quick save slot that acts similar to a Suspend Save.
• Save Scumming: Possible, but the first two games require some slight alteration of your actions to get a different outcome, as the random number seed does not reset when you reload, so the exact same action will lead to the exact same outcome. In Jagged Alliance 2, Iron Man mode prevents saving during combat, forcing you to play through combat and either live with your choices or start from the beginning. In Jagged Alliance 3, you can have tactical Iron Man, like in the second game, or true Iron Man, where you are limited to one constantly updating save file.
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: In Jagged Alliance 2, a sawed-off shotgun is realistically only good for a few feet before dispersing too much to be any good. Jagged Alliance 3 allows you to modify most shotguns to have much shorter barrels, reducing the range and increasing the spread significantly. You can also lengthen the barrel to increase range and reduce the spread.
• 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.
  • Early on in Jagged Alliance 3, you can, in The Rust, find a mass grave in the ground. Examining it with sufficient Wisdom will reveal that there's several guns in with the bodies. If you grab them, your more idealistic mercenaries will suffer a morale penalty for the next 12 hours due to desecrating the dead. This is your introduction to the idea that your random looting can and will affect your mercenaries states of mind.
• Scratch Damage:
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, thrown weapons will always do 1 damage if they hit the target, regardless of armor. This includes knives, grenades, and chemical break lights. Yes, it is possible to kill someone by hitting them with a glowing fluid suspended in a plastic container, funny you should ask.
  • Also in Jagged Alliance 2, if a unit is injured, no matter how little, they will eventually take bleeding damage if it's not bandaged. The severity of the wound determines how long it takes bleed damage to process, with big wounds bleeding out every round, and small wounds taking several rounds or real-life minutes to do damage. It's far more likely that a minor wound will heal itself before it causes a unit to bleed out, but it is certainly possible for someone to die from bleeding to death after getting hit with an attack that does 1 point of damage.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, no matter how heavily armored a unit is, getting hit by a bullet will do some damage. Even hitting a unit with Heavy Armor with a hollow point round will likely do 1-2 points of damage.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: Campaign morale is a hidden mechanic in all the games that determines how happy mercenaries are in your employ. If you have a solid amount of victories, pay people on time, treat wounded quickly, and have good loyalty with the denizens of wherever you happen to be, mercenaries will be happy to keep working with you, or more likely to let you hire them. If you have a string of defeats, constantly dismiss and replace your mercenaries, keep them wounded for long periods of time, or have them do something they don't appreciate (like killing civilians), mercenaries will either demand higher pay, refuse to let you renew their contract, or just straight up disappear when you're not paying attention. If your mercenaries catch you doing something particularly heinous (such as, in the first game, not paying to bury a fellow mercenary and instead kicking the body into the river), they will call you out and leave.
• Secondary Fire: Starting in Jagged Alliance 2, it's possible to mount grenade launchers to assault rifles and shoot them with secondary fire.
• Self-Contained Demo: Jagged Alliance has a unique map, designed to ambush the player should they take the main path. Jagged Alliance 2 takes place in Demoville.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: In Jagged Alliance 1, attempting to capture a processing plant will result in the enemies trying to set off explosives to disable the plant. If you still capture it, it will take a few days to bring it online. At the end of the game, Santino will, if he spots your mercenaries, blow himself up, which is a problem since he's standing next to the only existing Fallow Sap tree sapling.
• Semper Fi: Some mercs served as Marines in the past. The IMP quiz in the second game will ask if your custom-made character was a Marine if your marksmanship level is extremely high.
• Setting Update:
  • Jagged Alliance: Back In Action with references to "Idevices" and more recent weaponry is clearly set further in the future than the original Jagged Alliance 2.
  • Jagged Alliance 3, meanwhile moves the game's timeline forward into the early 2000s, which could be seen in both equipment and the quality of the in-universe websites.
• Sergeant Rock: Many high-level mercenaries are like this. Especially Gus, who is a natural leader.
• Shoo Out the Clowns:
  • Jagged Alliance 2 took itself much more seriously 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.
  • Jagged Alliance 3 has a consistently light-hearted tone, despite the Legion being very dangerous, but as soon as you deal with Biff Apscott, Colonel Faucheaux will destroy the Refugee Camp with a gas attack, blame your group, and send out an overwhelmingly powerful assault that is guaranteed to take control of every significant location in the game, leaving you with very little.
• Shoot Out the Lock: It's possible to do this in Jagged Alliance 2 (it won't work in the first or third game), but it requires a lucky shot for a pistol or rifle caliber weapon, or a couple of shots from a shotgun. There's also Shaped Charges, small explosive devices that can blow open a door (though they require a decent explosive skill to be used effectively). 1.13 added "Lockbuster rounds" for shotguns, which inflict almost no damage to people, but have a very good chance of breaking open a lock.
• Shoot the Messenger: If you send Deidranna flowers (a superlatively dick move that has zero benefit to you beyond hilarity), she will demand that Elliott have the delivery person shot. At the end of the game, if you take control of Meduna, she'll finally snap completely and shoot Elliott for telling her.
• Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: As a general rule, the "effective range" of a weapon is far, far shorter than it should be, in order to encourage "knife fight" distance battles. Pistols are wildly inaccurate beyond 10 meters (30 feet), shotguns disperse badly after about 5 meters (15 feet), and sniper rifles suffer a huge accuracy penalty if the target cannot be seen without assistance by the sniper themselves, limiting effective range to about 35 meters (100 feet). The 1.13 mod for Jagged Alliance 2 vastly changes this to make weapons more viable at long ranges, and there are a number of mods for Jagged Alliance 3 that give weapons better ranges across the board.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: It depends on the game.
  • In Jagged Alliance 1, where all weapons are single shot, shotguns are one of the best weapons in the game, only beaten by the rare M-14 rifle.
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, shotguns are somewhat viable at the beginning of the game, where buckshot will tear through unarmored opponents. Their utility drops as enemies wear better armor, but slug rounds can make up the difference for a while, and shotguns are the king of knocking the wind out of enemies and forcing them to collapse due to having all their energy drained by a blast of buckshot right in the armor.
  • In 1.13, the addition of new shotguns and shotgun rounds gives them a better range of utility for longer, with short, pistol-sized shotguns that can be used as effective backups, to dedicated door-lock destroyers loaded with Lockbuster rounds.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, shotguns suffer from the Short-Range Shotgun problem, where even with modifications, they have a range comparable to a pistol. They can still be useful, however, as they are the only weapon that can reliably hit multiple enemies due to their cone-shaped fire zone. And a blast of buckshot or a slug to an unarmored head will kill just about anything.
• 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.
  • As the story of Jagged Alliance 3 progresses, not only are references made to African-themed war films like The Wild Geese and Tears of the Sun, but also Heart of Darkness, especially once the Legion's true nature is revealed and The Dogs of War once the Adonis Corporation's Regime Change scheme comes to light.
  • When you meet with a nice old lady in the woods, she'll ask if you're lost. Your choices for answers are: "Yes", "No", "Maybe", "I don't know", "Can you repeat the question?"
• 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. In Jagged Alliance 3, Raider and Raven will occasionally talk about how their dogs are doing, or where they should go on vacation when the job is done.
• Skill Scores and Perks: Every unit in the game has a score for their base stats Health, Dexterity, Agility, Wisdom, and Strength from 0-100. They also have a skill scores for Marksmanship, Explosives, Medical, Mechanical, and starting with the second game, Leadership. Units can also have unique traits, such as Stealthy, that give them unique advantages when doing certain actions. Starting in Jagged Alliance 3, when a mercenary levels up, they can choose a perk associated with any base stat that's higher than 70, with better perks available at 80 and 90 (and higher levels).
• 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 (at $12,000 a day!), and will quit on a dime if you provoke him. Which 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 Rifle: Several starting with the second game, usually with a distinction between a Designated Marksman Rifle^note lower range, lower damage, faster firing and larger magazine and true Sniper Rifle^note higher range, higher damage, slower firing and smaller magazine.
• Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Played straight in that you will generally start with terrible weapons and gain access to better weapons as you make progress.
  • In Jagged Alliance 1, you start off with .38 Special revolvers, which are as terrible as they sound, eventually upgrading to Colt .45's, Beretta 9mm pistols, shotguns and finally true rifles.
  • In Jagged Alliance 2, it's possible to hire mercenaries with good gear, but you won't find ammunition for those weapons for a while, so you'll usually be forced to stick to pistol-caliber weapons (handguns, submachine guns, and revolvers) for a while. As you take over towns, you'll find better gear, and the Bobby Ray's website will have more stuff available to order.
  • In Jagged Alliance 3, every single mercenary comes with terrible equipment, usually a Hi-Power 9mm pistol with terrible range and damage. It's up to you to scrounge what you can from places that you liberate, though once you liberate Ernie Island, Bobby Ray's website will open up and allow you to buy new gear, eventually having more to offer after you take over two diamond mines and again after Colonel Faucheaux makes his appearance. You can also find and purchase weapons, ammo and other gear from merchants in Grand Chien's marketplaces, though they never change their stock, just refill it.
• The Squad: Although without the turncoat-turnabout guy.
• Stealth-Based Mission:
  • Certain situations may require sneaking past enemy patrols, quiet takedowns or slipping through cracks in their defenses in order to catch them off-guard. Given that you're usually outnumbered, however, even gung-ho approaches tend to require some stealthy finesse in order to keep your mercs alive.
  • Rage! has expanded stealth mechanics and doubles down on them with stealth being even more vital.
• 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.
• Suspiciously Small Army: The queen's army in vanilla JA 2 never attacks with more than two platoons at once, and their strategic points are usually guarded by only around 10 soldiers. A small mercenary squad can feasibly overthrow her entire regime by taking her poorly-defended towns one by one and mobilizing the population against her.
• Take Cover!: The staple of the series, most evident in the first game with its impenetrable Kevlar bushes. the 1.13 mod allows players to make and unmake their 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. The third game adds a full cover system similar to the one in XCOM: Enemy Unknown.
• Take That!: In the first game, if you fail too many missions whilst trying to hire Wink Dickerson, he will tell you that "your record is worse than the [Chicago] Cubs", a reference to their long string of losses in baseball at the time.
  • In the second game's IMP personality quiz, one of the questions is "A certain annoying, pathetic, furry, purple dinosaur should be:" along with the following answers:
    • A. Held up as a long role-model for children's morals and values.
    • B. Hung from a tree
    • C. Hung from a tree and shot
    • D. Hung from a tree, shot, gutted, and ran over by a Buick
• 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.
• Technically Living Zombie: The "Bliss Zombies" or "REDS" as called by the enemy in Rage! are civilians driven mad by exposure to Bliss, they charge blindly at anyone nearby and try to punch them to death.
• 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).
• Throw-Away 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.
  • Also invoked in the third game, given how the Adonis Corporation originally approached M.E.R.C. prior to A.I.M. to deal with the situation in Grande Chien.
• '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.
• Too Dumb to Live: In Deadly Games several mercs will think you are this if you unfairly fire Mike, the best mercenary available in the first Jagged Alliance game.
  Scully: Forget it! You dismissed Mike. I think that pretty much says everything!
  • In the first game, Tappers in a sector all die when their Guards do during an attack, rather than presumably retreating to a safer Sector.
• 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.
• 20 Minutes into the Past: Jagged Alliance 3 is set in 2001, which sidesteps the issue of the offscreen deaths of certain mercs, such as Igor and Raider, mentioned in Rage!
• 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 ammunition before hitting his target and you'll be stuck in the tutorial.
• Universal Ammunition: Downplayed. Many firearms use their real-life ammunition types but certain firearms are given more common ammo in the name of gameplay. Most notable in the form of 7.62 Warsaw Pact ammo in 2, which compresses the rounds used in most of the AK rifle series^note 7.62x39, Dragunov rifles ^note 7.62x54, and the Type 85 ^note 7.62x25mm into one type. The 1.13 mod averts this hardcore with every weapon having its appropriate type of ammo, often with variants in ball, hollow-point, Glaser, cold-loaded, match-grade, and armor-piercing.
• 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!
  Cougar: FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFuddle. Duddle.
  Female IMP Voice 3: Aw, CRUMBS!
  Scope: BISCUITS!
  • The expression "Top drawer!" with Bob 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.
• Video Game 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.
  • In Jagged Alliance 2 it's possible to sell a female merc to a group of inbred hicks as a Breeding Slave in return for their enormous stash of weapons. The only penalty is permanently losing the said merc. The whole thing is played for questionable laughs.
• 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.
• Violation of Common Sense: The stats for weapons in Back in Action are poorly explained which doesn't help how some of them function not how you'd expect, Pistols are fast to fire and heavier rifles take longer to aim, except for Light Machine Guns, which despite being some of the largest weapons, actually are faster than handguns to fire.
• Water Source Tampering: Lucas' men try to poison the water source early in the first game.
• Weather of War:
  • The first game has random heat waves at the start of days which greatly increase the rate that stamina drains from your mercs, outside of Hector and the native guides, who have the Heat Resistant trait.
  • Added in the 1.13 mod for the second game in the form of rain and thunderstorms, which greatly reduces vision across the board and makes firearms jam more often, Thunderstorms also have a chance that a lightning bolt will reveal enemies and cause an interrupt — for both sides.
  • Returns in the third game with a large number of possible weather effects, including rain, heat, fog, and sandstorms. Heat causes anyone who takes damage to have a chance to collapse, rainstorms reduce vision range and degrade weapon condition faster, and so on.
• We Help the Helpless: Downplayed. A.I.M. usually ends up on the side of the good guys, and several mercenaries express delight at working for the good guys. That said, it's stated that A.I.M.'s leaders found themselves on the good side in Metavira mostly by luck, and decided to vet their clients more closely in order to capitalize on the good press securing medicine for the world won them. Also, as much as mercs like being on the right side of history, they are still mercenaries and expect to be paid promptly and handsomely for their services, and several members of A.I.M.'s roster have a history of working for some seriously unsavory people.
• 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.
  • Averted in 3, as each mercenary now has unique model.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In Jagged Alliance 3, the Adonis Corporation eventually turns on you regardless of how the Major is dealt with using Colonel Facheaux's forces as a proxy for its Regime Change plans for Grande Chien.
• Your Head A-Splode: 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.