ALL MERCENARIES / MERCS Explained - Jagged Alliance 3 Guide 

Raider and Raven (husband and wife) have damn good synergy in their traits - Raven gives crit on over-watch and Raider gets accuracy bonus on over-watched targets... Strangely it works best if Raven has light machine gun (like Minimi with wider over-watch cone) and Raider some fast assault rifle (like G36 - 5AP for attack and moddable to 36 range) to finish anything alive inside over-watch cone.

Fox seems to make your forget all other doctors but one thing to keep in mind, that medical skill will still fail some medical checks in the game, the same can be said with Thor. Grunty's unique skill is pretty interesting, if he has an MG deployed, he can still shoot outside the cone with that skill.

still a lot of mercs i need to try but so far ive found a few clear favorites, both in terms of gameplay and personality/JA2 nostalgia: Scully Gus Fox Nails Ice (sober) Larry Shadow Meltdown honestly its such a strong roster and they did such a good job with the art style and presentation, im still kind of in disbelief

You forgot about Nails's leather jacket. He won't take it off, so that's quite a disadvantage later in the game. Same with Ivan's hat.

For Recruit level mercs, I think Barry and Livewire are the A+ picks. Barry for his overall skills and stats, Livewire for her Skills and unique, which is completely OP. Knowing where exactly all the enemies are gives you such a big tactical advantage. High wisdom for both means they're easy to make excellent. Fox and Igor the next in terms of good value. Fox's ability means that she's actually best if given a heavy hitting sniper rifle. She can take full aim to headshot one enemy, and then keep all AP and immediately headshot another. Scoundrel means that if you want to swap her to dual pistols, you can also do that for free. On the Veteran tier, I think Buns is the A+ pick. Mainly she's good because she's cheap and has awesome stats and skills. On the Elite tier, I don't think anyone are must-haves, but Raider is good for a second team lead (IMP is the first). High leadership is an absolutely huge increase to map move speed. I tend to stick with the lower tiers because by the time my income is good enough to afford them, my mercs that have been with me all game have leveled up and are better.

Kalyna is really good as sniper due to her unique ability to ignore armor. She can shoot hollow point ammo at highly armored targets negating armor penetration reduction. Plus she can operate pretty well in dark.

Fauda doesn't even need to get close that much. The trick with her is to juggernaut it up: Full heavy armour and a HK21. On the HK you put a short barrel, compensator, improved sights, UV dot and foregrip. She now hipfires long bursts for 2 AP each while having full free move despite cumbersome armor and weapon. (Give her an agility magazine to read, 80 AGI is an important breakpoint.) And any time she fires a burst at a target, she gets extra aim bonuses from both the compensator and the Recoil Management perk. Add in 80 marksmanship and she'll cut down enemies at 20-30 tiles with like 2-3 bursts aimed center mass even if they're armored. The only real downside to this whole approach is that it requires a big up-front investment in her gear and she eats a lot of ammo doing it.

Buns is Danish, not Swedish.

Great video, reslly gives us a lot of information about the mercs, i bet most of the players are like me and just picked a team based on their team back in JA2 😂

Livevire could be trained realy fast becouse of her wisdom.i bought MD for 1 week and trained her in medicice and later i trained her in shooting

You should have point, that this is only a "basic" guide.) There is much more for mercs: they have different preferences about who they work with (to the point, when some of them flat out refuse your contract invitation if there is person in your team, who they don't like), blocked some inventory slots if a merc is too good stats and price wise and they can demand more pay from you if they performed excellently during past contract. And here is 3 basic tips before starting a campaign: 1) you should have at least 1 merc with leadership 70+ in your team (as mentioned in the video, my choice was Rider) 2) you should think beforehand about who whuold you take in with wisdom stat 90+ (healer or mechanic) 3) my imho from the good old JA 2 time is "better to have 1 pricy pro merc and 1 cheap noob, then 5 cheap noobs" If you do all hiring right, there will be no problem with your own avatar creation.)

Fox's inventory's isn't an issue, as long as she has her brothering arms team up with her: Grizzly and Wolf. All she really needs is two extended guns (worth it in all aspects), a knife in case she specials and a first aid kit. So all in all she still gets to be the best hoarder the game has to offer in the end: Fox is simply perfect. EDIT: sorry I don't have time to wtch your interesting video any longer than that. I need back in game, like right now. So just make sure you don't say no bad things about me Grunty, here. For I can see you there, but you'll be so wrong if you do. Überraschung all the way with a silenced M-14 under the good care of seine Liebche! >> 100% CRIT, even before actually shooting something, all of that in perfect silence. Ha, me Grunty! 😎 Also I killed four ennemies during suppress fire, only with me Grunty! 🙃 I'll be checking this in good time, tough...

Great guide thank you!

Fox is golden. I can use her with my custom Alpha to stealth clear the entire map no matter how many enemies there are. She's smart enough to train easily and once she hits about 75-80 she's good enough. I can pretty much do everything with sniper rifles and knives. I always let her go first because she can zoom fully, and then still have two more shots in the first round (assuming I use a 5 or 6 AP single shot [mods help there]). Tie that with her extremely low cost and she even makes mouse unnecessary for the stealth gameplay guys like me. And as a bonus to being a badass, her comments are hilarious

Kalyna has really shitty stats but her ability is better than it appears at first glance. It bypasses all armor so you can load her guns up with hollow points or shock ammo with no armor piercing and make her a crit machine.

Btw guys dave your game before hiring or trying out nails. There was a funny story in jagged alliance 2 to give him better armor so consider this a possible minor spoiler shead: his chest armor (leather hells angels wannabe Jacket) CANT be removed. In the prior gsme he even tells you to **** off if you xlixk his jacket 😂 in a "las Vegas" ish town Ou got a quest that gsve you a kevlar leather jacket and you could equip nails with that making him a lot more tanky. He isn't bad but you should know that quirk before hiring nails.

Igor is Ivan's nephew. I'm going to have to try Red out, as Barry's commentary is working on my nerves (and he used to be one of my favourites in JA2)

(2:40) When the heck does Fox become a Doctor? :P Where is Spider? Spider had Night Ops..

On my game Blood is always long range sniper, and he do it well. Just give him good weapon. Hight agilitty make him exelent mobillyty and hight AP. Exelent recon man.

Kalyna's stats do not look that good for sniping I agree, but she consistently devastates the enemies in my campaign, especially after I gave her the Gold Fever. Only downside is I don't like her personality that much, which seems to be an unpopular opinion.

Fox is deadly with a knives. She’s got 100 dexterity + high agility which means she’s super stealthy. I’ve killed entire sectors only with her, 1 knife and a silenced gun.

Playing with Shadow and 2 good snipers feels Like cheating. So strong in scouting and stealth kills. I love him

27:36 what do her biscuits do?

hello, do you make spreadsheet of what perks should each merc get when they level up and what stats should we focus to increase? im kinda lost when they level up and cant decide what perks should i choose for them. Finally, what is the best squad composition to play?

I'm just gonna ask this here: For a non ambidextrous merc, if I have pistol in one hand grenade in the other (and a shotgun as secondary weapon), does he loose accuracy because both hand slots are occupied? Do I have to switch between pistol and grenade from the backpack?

You're underestimating the Teaching trait on a lot of mercs like MD or Fox. It's actually massive. MD with his 4 leadership and that trait is nearly as good at training militia as Gus with his 85 leadership. And the way the trait works, it creates a feedback loop when you increase leadership, too.

Probably a mistake but. I took over diamond mines and a bunch more played like 20 hrs. Had a sharp idea to not rehire anyone but steroid and use my free AIM character to train him. A ton of time later his agility is 76, Dex still low. He has like 11 or so AP shoots good heavy armor and a m24. Took forever had to intersect top the Biff square was just able to in time. What other timed stuff could be messed up besides mines dropping income and almost losing biff? Should I train his dex up now too? Was this idea a waste of time? Thanks

After several playthrough - i can tell there are no un-usable mercs. But there are some not good and/or requires a lot of training to make them work: steroid - good remarks, terrible agility (he is often doesnt have AP to even shot ). Omryn - not good enough at anything particular. Kalyna - terrible wisdom she wont improve much. There are no perks to select when leveling up. Fidel-always leaves when not getting enough kills, Barry is simply better in everything except of personality. Tex - expensive and useless later on. All Legendary mercs not really needed.

raven looked way cooler in JA2. too bad she aint blonde anymore...

If you don’t want to spoil yourself re relationships, but still want to try and suss them out before hiring; are there personality traits mentioned in their bios that could give you some hints as to who they might clash/get on with?

You can recruit Gus only if his buddies are on your team.

Wait Scully was Australian not Amerikan in JA2 right?

LOL I never used Thor's pills.

not good enough for relationship and skill description😅

Oh, you didn't say Hitt'-maaan Hennessey correctly...

I had Fox and Wolf together as a separate 2-person team exclusively to train militias quickly (this combo only requires 15 hours to get the job done each time)... bloody hell... the dialogues that come out of these two are CRINGEWORTHY. They're just horny as hell when together. Also worth noting is the fact that some characters refuse to sign up when certain characters were hired. Others like Fidel will outright quit if you relegate them to non-combat duties too much.

So which is the best Tome for the mercs? :P

Its all? Just aim No merc?