All is fair in love and war when it comes to being hired as a mercenary in Jagged Alliance 3. But knowing who gets along and who doesn’t is important when choosing your team. With a limited budget to start with and four distinct rosters to choose from, with different skills and hiring prices, knowing who can work with each other will make your life a lot easier and work well for the money left in your wallet. . So this is Vincent’s guide to all mercenary relationships and affinities they have with each other in Jagged Alliance 3.
All Merc Relationships in Jagged Alliance 3
In Jagged Alliance 3, it’s important to look at who can and can’t work well together. If members of your team don’t get along, you’ll find that they’ll stop working together for the duration of their contract, have to be placed on another team, or demand a higher payment in order to compromise. In terms of statistics, a mercenary’s morale is affected by whether or not he likes his comrade. If they prefer to work with specific mercenaries, you will find that their morale increases by 1 point. However, if there is an aversion between the two mercenaries or on one side, the mercenary or mercenaries concerned will see their morale decrease by 1.
Every Merc in Jagged Alliance seems to have a set preference. However, this is only discovered by recruiting a variety of team compositions, as the game does not indicate during the recruiting process that the Merc has a preference for specific co-workers. Some Mercs are neutral in their likes and dislikes, often being able to work with the majority of others. But there are plenty of Mercs who have preferences that can have a massive impact on your game. Use the table below to recruit your mercenaries based on their relationships.
Related: Best starters in Jagged Alliance 3.
Note: Another with (PLOT) Or (POINT) means likes over time and dislikes over time, meaning the Mercs relationship changes if you keep recruiting the same pair over and over to extend their contract and complete missions with.
Relationships play a big part in Wildermyth, allowing the characters you bring to each adventure to develop and grow together, ending in marriage or rivalries. This element can have lasting effects both inside and outside of combat, so it is essential to know beforehand how it works. This guide explains everything there is to know about relationships in Wildermyth, the benefits you get in combat, and how romance, marriage, and children work.
How do relationships and romance work?
This broad and rather existentialist question can be refined by speaking of Wildermyth. But the answer still has subtleties. In the game, each character has their own personality stats – some can be greedy, brash, or cowardly, among others. This will naturally give them major or lesser compatibility with party members, leading to three possible outcomes: friendship, rivalry, and romance.
Relationships can happen randomly over time or as a result of certain story events, and the character’s personality stats eventually adjust to those possibilities. As your team fights battles together, and takes part in missions, quests, and random events as a group, they are rewarded with relationship points. This all happens in the background, so don’t worry about that element intertwining with the experience in general. But it’s important to understand that while the odds are very arbitrary, there are factors involved that can lead to some results rather than others.
Romance, for example, has a few additional requirements, as it can trigger randomly if both characters are eligible beforehand. This includes personalities (a diagram in the wiki shows all permutations – blue is positive, orange is negative), but also love interests. Each character has a hidden aspect that defines whether they like men or women (this can only be seen via devmode), and yes, there can be same- relationships as well.
When it comes to relationships resulting from events in the story, it will depend on the choices you make throughout. If you are not in the random aspect, you can choose to turn off random romances and / or rivalries in the character sheet, in the Customize menu. This will ensure that these two types of relationships only occur after the events.
Also, if you want to have some agency in relationships that can happen in a new adventure, you can revive the characters as many times as you want, as well as change their stats to achieve specific results – a romantic hothead. , a greedy snark, and so on.
The agency can also be used to ensure the continuity of your characters in other adventures. Wildermyth allows you to “save” characters in the game and choose them again in future adventures (which work like campaigns). If you want certain characters to maintain their romances and rivalries, you can choose to “lock” them in the Relationships tab of the character sheet. Just be aware that while you are locking status, you will lose any levels you have earned for either.
List of relationship benefits and how they work
Relationships aren’t just for deepening your character’s story, as they also provide some handy bonuses in combat. Friendships, rivalries, and romances can have up to five levels, each increasing this bonus a bit more. This will happen at the same time that the aforementioned relationships are working, so again you will see the results as the game progresses, unless you participate in specific relationship-related events.
Friendship
The most common and neutral outcome of relationships in Wildermyth is friendship. The benefit of this occurs when your friendly characters wall out, which is a fancy term for when they are adjacent to each other in the battle grid.
Buddy (level 1): +10 to block chances
Confident (level 2): +15 to block
Comrade (level 3): +20 to block chances
Companion (level 4): +25 to block chances
Blood Bond (level 5): +30 to block chances
Romance
When it comes to romance, a character will gain bonus damage against enemies that attack the fictionalized counterpart, until the end of the mission.
Favorite (level 1): +1 damage
Flame (level 2): +2 damage
Honey (level 3): +3 damage
Lovers (level 4): +4 damage
Soul Mate (level 5): +5 damage
Rivalry
Finally, rivals will get a stunt bonus every time the rival performs a stunt. This will last until the opposing character also performs said action, so no, they don’t follow each other. In Wildermyth, this term refers to a critical hit rather than a stun.
Pair (level 1): +25 to the waterfall
Annoying (level 2) : +35 to stunt
Enemy (level 3): +45 to stunt
Antagonist (level 4): +55 to stunt
Rival (level 5): +100 at the waterfall
How does marriage and children work in Wildermyth?
Marriage and children are much more arbitrary. As of yet, there is no way to manually trigger either event, although we do know how each can happen.
Marriages can occur between characters in a romance (they don’t need to be level five) during the Peace Years. It’s a sort of epilogue that follows after completing a chapter of an adventure. The game will display this event in its comedic thumbnails if it occurs, but there is no guarantee for this.
The same goes for children. Marriage does not always lead to this, as couples can still have children without ever getting married and vice versa. In our experience, we’ve come across the son of only one character, so again that varies.
One way to increase your odds is to have fewer than five party members (which is the maximum party size). Again, that won’t guarantee this, but the game will most likely result in one of your characters introducing their children as a member of the group.
In summary, you can force certain relationship results through the aforementioned expand mode, or just by disabling random results. But if you experience Wildermyth as originally intended, have fun watching your characters have fun or declare their rivalry to each other!
How to marry characters in Wildermyth
Your epic adventure in Wildermyth can take you and your various characters all over the world working together to try to prevent one of the many evils from taking hold of what’s left of the world. Your characters will develop relationships with each other along the way, and some of them might even fall in love. When they fall in love, a random event may occur where they spend part of their years in peace getting married, but it doesn’t always happen.
First and foremost, you need to make sure that the two characters you want to marry have had at least one romantic story development. This can happen during Random Events or Story Events when you land on a tile. Both characters have a chance to develop a romantic engagement based on their reactions. After the event, you can check their character sheet to see if they have become “flames”.
You want to make sure that these two characters stay together, because the characters can fall in love with each other. This can happen if you don’t lock their relationship as a soul mate in the character sheets. You only have to do it with one of the two characters. By locking down their relationship, they won’t try to romantically engage other characters.
The marriage between two characters will occur during the years of peace, following the end of a chapter. You’ll read about this during the synopsis of what many characters are up to. This is not guaranteed to happen between two soul mates or those who are developing a romance. Sometimes the couple will never get married, but they will refer to each other as “love” and even have children together. You can increase your chances of two characters getting married by increasing their “romantic” trait during the character creation process.
One of the novelties of the early access of Darkest Dungeon II is the development of positive or negative relationships between your heroes. It can be love or friendship, but it is more often hatred and resentment. Here is a guide to the social aspect of the game to get you out of it.
If you’ve already started a game on Darkest Dungeon 2’s early access, you must be painfully aware of the dramatic turn it can take in relations between your various heroes in-game. This will seriously affect the group’s performance in combat, and it can even dangerously frustrate and even stress you as a player. Fortunately, while this new feature is not yet well integrated, and is unbalanced, it is not a lost cause either. If you do it right, everyone can be friends with almost everyone.
How Relationships Work
The basic principle is simple, events, some fixed, others random, can produce positive (yellow) or negative (blue) points of relation between two characters. These points cancel each other out, so a lot of the characters keep a neutral relationship, at least initially. When the bar is full of yellow dots, or blue dots, a relationship is randomly determined.
The effect of each relationship is different, for example the characters who respect each other will often assist in combat which will give rise to free attacks and bonus damage, they can also encourage each other which will heal stress . Whereas if the two characters hate each other, they will insult or even embarrass each other which will cause stress, block support capacities, or even impose damage penalties. This will slow down the pace of the fights either way, as these special events and swaps happen far too often.
Relationships only have 4 points, and they cannot be deepened. This means that if there are enough positive or negative events, the resentment can disappear or the lovers can separate. They can then develop a new relationship between two, nothing prevents former lovers from hating each other, it’s time to call the marriage counselor!
All the characters in the group can enter into different relationships with all the others, it has no influence and they are well separated. If your Brigand loves the Pillager and hates the Man-at-arms who respects the Pillager as well, it has no impact.
Special dialogues triggered by relationships do not produce a reputation point, positive or negative. And that’s a good thing, otherwise it would be almost impossible to get out of a negative relationship for example.
How do you develop good relationships and fix bad ones?
Stress is bad
There are quite a few factors to consider in relationships, but by far the most important is stress. As soon as your characters’ stress increases, they will become irritable and take everything wrong. for silly (and sadly realistic) reasons. It starts from 4-5 stress points, and it gets bigger. By keeping stress levels very low, your heroes will even tend to naturally develop good relationships. This is obviously easier said than done. The best method currently is touse (and abuse) the Improved Prevention technique of Doctor Lapeste. It reduces the stress of the whole group by one point, to 100% (it feels the nerve fast). The Man-at-Arms has a fairly similar ability, Enhanced Encouragement, which has a 50% chance of being reduced. The Jester also has a song that reduces stress by 2 points, or even 3 once improved, but for a single target. You can also use certain consumables like Laudanum and anti-stress items at the inn. Also remember to select the path for which the most members of the group voted, when it’s possible.
Reinforcement objects
Another easy way to develop good relationships, at least when stress is low, is to use supportive skills. on other group members. They will appreciate and often give a connection point. For example the military care of Doctor Lapeste, the Protection of the Man-at-Arms. For classes that don’t have one, you can also use combat items such as Anti-fire Balm, Antitoxin, care kits, etc. Once at the inn, use special items like card games, darts and more to try to bond. Take a tour of the hostel store, and the hospital store, anti-stress and relationship items are generally inexpensive.
Make the right choices
A very reliable way to improve character relationships is to choose answers they agree on at events. It’s easily recognizable by the golden aura that will surround other like-minded characters. Be careful though, it’s a double-edged sword and others will not like it. Try to balance your choices, or pick another character with whom losing a relationship point or two won’t be a problem. The response combinations are sometimes different, so be sure to go through all the characters.
The attributes that change the game
Finally, the most determining factor besides stress, but over which you have little control, is that of attributes. When you select a character for the group, you can see a positive and a negative attribute, it can have a huge impact on their relationships. A lot of negative attributes will quickly sour relationships when traveling, so remember to remove them as soon as possible in a hospital.
On the other hand, certain positives can completely change the dynamics of the group, such as the “Optimist” who heals one stress point per turn. And above all, the rare and very desirable Ray of Sunshine, which will make the character the heart of the group. He will encourage and calm others which will cure their stress and develop good relationships. If you see similar Attributes when selecting the party, seriously consider getting the hero involved, even if that is not your preferred class.
