The Blue Sun Mod

[safoolfool]

Hey there, another fantastic update to this amazing mod!
That said, one thing that bugs me is the money setting. Easy money seems to give you far too much money, trivializing the economic aspects. You can still go broke buying a shitton of city guards, but basically any weapon/gear you want you can easily afford. This means you can basically min/max and hit every minute upgrade: going from, say a 5.56 HK416 to a 6.8mm costs almost nothing, as you can sell the 5.56 for 10k and the 6.8m only costs say 10.5k (numbers from my ass, to demonstrate the point), so the upgrade only costs 500. With hard money you can't do incremental upgrades (the 5.56 now sells for only 1k, so in effect the cost of upgrading is 9.5k. I like the effect of hard money where you have to save up to get new weapons, and can't upgrade your entire squad at each CGL without breaking a sweat. That said, I find hard money too hard: receiving 1/8th or 1/10th the money of before means I find it damn near impossible to hire more than 1-2 mercs.


I guess that's a long winded way of asking: how would I go about editing the effect of not choosing easy money? Is there some line in a .cfg that says "if easy money = 0 set sell price = .1" that I could change to .4? Or is it some weird thing like there's an alternate economy file that lists sell price for everything if easy money is not enabled? Or is it some hardcoded whatever?

[R@S]

JackintheBox, sorry, there is no way to repair armor any more. You need to buy or scavenge new ones.

safoolfool, I am very glad for your post, all I ever hear about the economy in the mod is that it is too easy and you have too much money even if "easy money" is turned off. I was even planning on spending 2 weeks on making it even harder, going through all the ini and ShopINI files to find a better balance. The thing is that I also find money a bit too easy to come by, but I usually only hire 1 merc and use the free ones as much as possible. I also only buy weapons for my main char, the others get by with hand-me-downs and scavenged ones. Even if I save as much money as possible, I still don't have enough to finish the final Tang missions quickly, I have to spend some time defending my sectors and selling the loot.

But to your question, the entry you need to change to get a better price when selling is in the shop's ShopINI file. Lower the "PriceCoeff" to 2 or 3.

On another note, how's the "Boot Camp" working? Is it to hard/easy, are there any way to improve it and finally, is it funto play? If you didn't select it at game start, go to Santa-Maria and open up your Killbok and you'll get to try it.

[Hurzwa]

Yes, the economy part is still very easy even with the "hard money" option. Maybe it would help to make the stuff enemies drop also degraded not only the guns. I almost never spend money in shops as I get enough stuff from loot.

The boot camp is still very hard as the guys who join you after some mission are pretty dumb. They have shooting skills less than 20 and are no help to me. On some maps you are surrounded by multiple enemies and it´s very hard to survuve that.
Another thing with the boot camp is that it raises your skills too much. When you start the boot camp and complete it at the beginning of a new game your merc´s level and skills increased a lot. As you are still at the beginning of a new game after the boot camp this feels a bit like a cheat. Fighting the boot camp alone against only 5-10 enemies per stage could solve that.

[R@S]

Originally Posted by Hurzwa

Yes, the economy part is still very easy even with the "hard money" option.

This is the problem, experienced players find the economy too easy, others too hard. If you feel it's too easy you need to make it harder by yourself, playing with your own set of rules to find a balance. Maybe stop selling loot and only take money given as quest rewards. And as I stated above, even if you have a lot of money at the early parts of the game, it's nowhere enough in the later stages. The only thing I could do to balance this is to make weapons appear at shops much later, forcing the player to use whatever the enemies drop.

Originally Posted by Hurzwa

The boot camp is still very hard as the guys who join you after some mission are pretty dumb. They have shooting skills less than 20 and are no help to me.

I find them useful as spotters, they watch my back pretty well, and if their adrenalin is low they actually hit the enemy once in a while. Once you have 2 or 3 of them they can handle themselves good enough, at least that is my experience.

Originally Posted by Hurzwa

Another thing with the boot camp is that it raises your skills too much. When you start the boot camp and complete it at the beginning of a new game your merc´s level and skills increased a lot. As you are still at the beginning of a new game after the boot camp this feels a bit like a cheat

Considering that you only have 30 points o spend on skills at the beginning(50 in vanilla), I think the skill increase you get from this training as fair and shouldn't be considered cheating. It is meant to be a training campaign and to complete it on veteran level should be almost impossible. I've made it as hard as I feel comfortable and should present a challenge to the most experienced of us, and not being able to complete it is not a big deal.

Originally Posted by Kuujis

1. When I entered it while on a mission to escort Miguel to the prison - he joined me in the boot camp map.

This is something I hadn't foreseen, I never thought anyone would enter the Boot Camp while having another active mission. I guess I have to add some sort of "automatic fail" on active missions.

Originally Posted by Kuujis

2. When I came back from the boot camp mission - Paquito was waiting where I left him, but the merc I hired from AIM was gone and nowhere to be found

In my testing I never encountered this, the mercs did wait in Santa-Maria, but their placement was random and sometimes I had to look around a lot to find them. And you shouldn't have to tell them to wait for you, that is already done in the script.

Originally Posted by IceShade

1. The Kedr PP-91 has a unfolded and a folded model, but I can't seem to actually fold the stock.

Yup, it is an error in the WEAPONINFO file, thanks for spotting it.

Originally Posted by IceShade

2. The money offered for the mission is a bit.. weird..

This is a weird one, the kind you get when you change the source code files and then load an old save. Did you start a new game after installing any of the fixes or did you continue an old one?

[IceShade]

Not only that, I always do a fresh install of everything (unofficial patch, up to installing the mod) every new version. I did it again, just in case I missed a step. I'll tell you once I've done the missions again.

Finishing up bootcamp now

[JackintheBox]

JackintheBox, sorry, there is no way to repair armor any more. You need to buy or scavenge new ones.

Really?!

Wow. Thats really lame.
I respect your design choices, but im really against this one.

You could make an item similar to the repairtools only its for armors.
Like the compound-18 in JA Wildfire. The mod changed the repair system in so far that you cant repair armor by hand and need to apply c-18 to fix em.
Aside from my taste it could be another neat JA throwback item.
You could make it expensive if you want to further torment me.


On another note, why are certain plot items now real items?
I.e the trade permit, police badge etc. I find it inconvenient to actually have to carry the permit in my pocket.(could keep another grenade there)
And often when i get those plot items my merc drops his weapon and i have to stuff away the item and get my weapon off the ground.
Not a big issue but inconvenient.

regards

[R@S]

Originally Posted by IceShade

Finishing up bootcamp now

That's the spirit mr. Shade
The idea is make it so hard that it forces you to try something new, hopefully something that works too. And in the end you come away from it feeling like you have accomplished something, which is what makes playing games fun.

Originally Posted by JackintheBox

Wow. Thats really lame.

Well, that's your opinion, but I disagree

Originally Posted by JackintheBox

On another note, why are certain plot items now real items?

It's another thing I added to make the game more fun, some things should come with both rewards and penalties. Sure, they take some of your inventory space, but you'll get access to some pretty good things. When I played through the game a few months ago I discovered that I made it too easy, and I didn't like that. So I've made it a bit harder, and I've given the player more choices, choices that sometimes are hard to make. If you don't like that you can go back to trolling the JA:BiA forum(This last part is just a joke, don't take it seriously, we're old friends, right? Nothing wrong with some playful ribbing)

[Kuujis]

Originally Posted by R@S

That's the spirit mr. Shade
The idea is make it so hard that it forces you to try something new, hopefully something that works too. And in the end you come away from it feeling like you have accomplished something, which is what makes playing games fun.

I actually started using shotguns

On the same topic - how many levels are there? Got past 8, then remembered that merc's time is ticking, and since cash seems quite hard to come by - I decided to use the merc for some missions, then finish the boot camp Btw - maybe it would be a nice idea to "stop" time for the hired mercs, while boot camp is in progress? Also - will I have to do everything from the start again? =)

Originally Posted by R@S

It's another thing I added to make the game more fun, some things should come with both rewards and penalties. Sure, they take some of your inventory space, but you'll get access to some pretty good things. When I played through the game a few months ago I discovered that I made it too easy, and I didn't like that. So I've made it a bit harder, and I've given the player more choices, choices that sometimes are hard to make. If you don't like that you can go back to trolling the JA:BiA forum(This last part is just a joke, don't take it seriously, we're old friends, right? Nothing wrong with some playful ribbing)

Wait... what? someone is trolling JA:BiA forums? =) Nooo... that can't be right...

[Kuujis]

Originally Posted by R@S

On another note, how's the "Boot Camp" working? Is it to hard/easy, are there any way to improve it and finally, is it funto play? If you didn't select it at game start, go to Santa-Maria and open up your Killbok and you'll get to try it.

Since you asked ...

Boot camp is fun, sort of quick challenges for a short sit down
I noticed two problems with Boot Camp though:
1. When I entered it while on a mission to escort Miguel to the prison - he joined me in the boot camp map.
2. When I came back from the boot camp mission - Paquito was waiting where I left him, but the merc I hired from AIM was gone and nowhere to be found

Am I doing something wrong? Should I ask mercs to wait, while I activate boot camp?

While thinking about the boot camp... maybe there is a way to script some fun like "defend a bunker" where you get mp5 wit ONE clip and a ton of mines/explosives/detonators etc Just you know... to get one into the traps/bombs things, which I frankly tend to skip =)

[IceShade]

I found a tiny bug and a more interesting one.

1. The Kedr PP-91 has a unfolded and a folded model, but I can't seem to actually fold the stock.

2.



The money offered for the mission is a bit.. weird..
Same goes for the previous mission; finding explosives for Urbano. I got over 233 million?