I had a blog post about Team Selection in Jagged Alliance 2 written, and I lost the draft due to a software defect. I’ll re-write it later. Instead, here is a brief thought:

Don’t Believe What They Say About The Meta Unless They Show You Math

If you don’t actually see someone show their work on what the meta is, they probably did not do any work at all. Which means they’re repeating something they heard from someone else. Who also probably did not do the work either.

Today’s example: Jagged Alliance 3. It is commonly believed by players of this game that rifles are the meta, because they do very high damage and can be aimed very accurately even by mercs with poor marksmanship. While it is true that rifles have these qualities, they are not the meta.

How do we know what the meta actually is? I suggest that the best weapon for a mercenary to use is one which maximizes their damage output per turn. We can compute an expected value for damage per turn by determining how many attacks per turn of any given attack type the weapon and mercenary can produce, and multiplying them by the probability of scoring hits.

One must account for the mercs’ marksmanship, dexterity, action points, level, and the presence of auto weapons and ambidextrous traits in order to compute the correct answer. I have done this on a Google Sheet, which I will release in the near future. It contains a VLOOKUP field that will let you see exactly which weapons each merc is best with based upon that merc’s stats.

The answer almost always is: FN FAL with Short Barrel and Recoil Booster. The Short Barrel decreases AP per attack by 1, which often results in the merc getting an extra attack. The Recoil Booster increases the expected damage of burst attacks by adding an additional bullet to it. This makes the already high-damage FAL do even more damage.

Most mercs cannot attack twice in the same turn with most rifles. The main exception is the Winchester 1874 - it has an AP cost of 6, while most rifles cost 7, so many mercs can shoot with it twice. It gets even easier to attack with it twice if it has a short barrel. This is why it will typically squeak out the modded FAL for mercs with low AP and low marksmanship against targets without armor.

Don’t take my word for it; I’ll update this post when I share the spreadsheet.