stamina/breath

[ArtVan9000]

Every time I start a battle stamina/breath of every merc falls from 99% to 12%? Again, is there a way to edit this?

Must say I am disappointed with the game. Too many bugs

[SlickWilhelm]

Were your mercs injured previously? Or is this happening right away in the first sector?

[Erik Rutins]

I've never seen that - how much weight are your mercs carrying, are they wounded? What bugs are you encountering?

[ArtVan9000]

none were injured, weight is not over 75%

[Erik Rutins]

I try to keep weight below 50% personally, I'll see if I can duplicate with more weight.

[SeanD]

Try having your mercs walk instead of run when you move them around. If you're using every single AP they have every turn and they're moving around a lot you can expect their stamina to deplete rapidly.

[ShadoWarrior]

The breath issue is pretty bad in this game. Pulling the trigger on a weapon, no matter how much weight you are carrying, should not cost you 5-6% of your breath each time you fire. Standing still and firing your gun should not cause you to run out of breath after a few turns. This is ridiculous.

[Erik Rutins]

What you describe doesn't happen to me unless my guys are already overloaded with weight. How much weight do you have on your mercs? I generally try for 35%, definitely no more than 50%.

[ShadoWarrior]

Over 50%, most in the 70-95% range. How much weight you are carrying should have no, I repeat, no impact on how exhausting it is to pull the trigger on a gun while standing still. This is an unrealistic and just plain bad game design decision.

[JudgeDredd]

ORIGINAL: ShadoWarrior

Over 50%, most in the 70-95% range. How much weight you are carrying should have no, I repeat, no impact on how exhausting it is to pull the trigger on a gun while standing still. This is an unrealistic and just plain bad game design decision.

Whilst the weight should not affect you when you pull the trigger, it still does have an effect on you...whether you are standing still or moving. If you don't believe me, stick a 100lbs backpack on and stand straight and see how long you can do it for. Then try doing the same without. I think you'll notice a difference in your stamina level.

What I'm trying to say is over-weighting your mercs will have an effect on stamina regardless of whether they are standing still or running. Sure they'll lose more stamina running, but standing still/aiming/firing or whatever, they will still lose stamina because of the weight they bear.

So the game does not punish you for pulling the trigger whilst carrying too much weight...it just punishes you for carrying too much weight...period.

That's how I sees it anyways. [:D]

[ShadoWarrior]

In HG you recover stamina by standing still, even though you are loaded down. Pulling the trigger is not a significant expenditure of energy. What really irks me is that nowhere in the manual (as best I recall) does it say that you start to suffer serious penalties once you go over 35-50% of your load. In JA2, you had no negative effects unless you went over 100%, and that is what anyone coming to this game from JA2 (which is most of the people buying the game) will expect.

[Erik Rutins]

I understand the confusion, but while I do understand your points regarding pulling a trigger and better documentation, but that doesn't change the fact that in the end you're not playing the game as it's designed to be played. Within this game, you should keep your weight below 50% of your merc's limit. 100% is basically the most the merc can drag along, just barely. 50% is already fairly heavy. If you want to run and fight and have decent stamina, try to stick to the 30-40% range.

[ShadoWarrior]

Roger that. I'll have to adjust my merc's loading. I sure hope you guys do something about the documentation, else you're going to have a lot more complaints like this. Especially from those of us who've been playing JA2 for 12 years. If the game is designed to be played markedly different from JA2 then those differences need to be highlighted so that folks know about them.

(I'm a member of the JA2 Mod Team, so I'm especially sensitive to where the game differs from its roots.)

Personally, I wouldn't have made it a stamina loss based upon load and the AP expenditure of pulling the trigger. I would have made it a stamina loss at the end of the turn based on load. That would change it so that pulling the trigger causes no stamina loss (or maybe a token 1%), but being loaded prevents you from recovering as much (or any) stamina. Yes, I know that's harsher. It also reflects reality, and wouldn't be an unexpected surprise to players.

[Koalab]

35%????

That sucks. How about all the loot you find. I will have to leave about 80% of it behind, because of this limit. And the fact you cant move items between stores makes this low weight limit a pretty bad design decision.

[ArtVan9000]

So I tried a memory hack with action points to see how many times a merc can fire before he is out of breath. So in this world Hired Guns shows a professional merc, a soldier of fortune, a war veretan, would collapse of exhaustion after firing 12-13 shots! Come on really. This game need some serious fixes.

[NobillyT]

Yeah, I'm having problems with mercs running out of breath as well. For example, one merc is only at 40% weight capacity, but runs out of breath from shooting from an automatic weapon while in a crouched position. I know guns can be a little heavy, but c'mon...I think that is kind of silly.

I think only movement, melee combat, and being beyond some critical weight (50% or more or something) should lower breath. Of movements, running should cost the most, then crawling while prone, then moving while crouched (because I would think dragging oneself on the ground while prone would require more effort), then walking the least.

It's a pity, because aside from the kooky translation and the camera, this breath thing is the only thing irking me about this game so far. Hired Guns really seems like a diamond in the rough, with another patch or two, and a strong modding community, it could be a real classic.

edit: moved walking to taking the least stamina of movement, because walking seems to be the least demanding of the movement modes, IMO. Also took out the part of doubting the devs would change anything about the game, as I've been reading in the tech support area and it seems there is still work being done on it (which is a very good thing).

edit2: fixed some errors and added melee combat (I don't use it in the game myself, so I forgot) to list of breath expending actions

[ShadoWarrior]

I restarted with a new game (this time at normal diff. instead of easy), and my custom merc with only a 30% load is losing 3-4% stamina with each shot fired. This is not the way the game should work. I'm sorry, but it's ridiculous and it's a bad design.

[milkweg]

If you don't like the way it is in HG then go learn how to change it via modding. The developers probably saw it as an improvement because carrying so much equipment as you could in JA2 with no effect is just not very realistic.

[ShadoWarrior]

Milkweg, before you tell someone to "change it via modding", shouldn't you check to see whether it's something that can be fixed by modding? It probably can't be, otherwise the good folks at Matrix probably would have made the suggestion.

Frankly, I find your post less than useful, and bordering on insulting to those of us that see this as a legitimate problem. The designers of games are not infallible, nor do they always have the best solutions to accomplishing a given goal (like dealing with mercs being able to carry too much stuff).

Those of us on the JA2 Mod Team have fixed many of the problems of the vanilla JA2 not by modding but by rewriting the game's base code. Most game modders don't have the luxury of access to a game's source code. Please bear that in mind before making "suggestions" to customers on how the customers themselves should fix what they don't like.

[Chris Bisson]

I agree that stamina is one of the biggest battle issues. I find myself resting mercs (ie laying them prone and NOT shooting) during every battle for several turns in a row to get that blue bar back up before continuing the battle. I find that it really affects gameplay and battles become verrrrry long as a result. It is silly that my merc collapses instead of shooting an enemy right next to him, saying I need a rest. Hellllooooo did anyone see this during testing?