Jailbreak Developer Network: Changes/Players

This page describes What's New for Players and is aimed at players who have had previous experience with Jailbreak III for Unreal Tournament.

For a less change-oriented, more thorough explanation of all features, see the manual.

Jails and Releases

A map may have more than just a single switch to defend or attack. Multiple release switches (shown as multiple compass dots for your or the enemy team on the HUD) may open all the same jail or completely distinct jails – watch the corresponding compass dot pulse to see where your teammates are jailed. The faster it pulses, the more of your teammates can be released by attacking the corresponding switch.

Subject to the mapper's whim, a release switch can be anything between a simple touchable switch (as it was normal in Jailbreak III) to destructible structures or locked switches you need to find a key for first. However, you'll be clearly informed what it takes to release your team, so you won't have to desperately guess around while enemy defenders are closing in.

Bot Support and Team Tactics

Where in Jailbreak III the "team stance" just affected whether up to two bots more or less were sent on attack or defense, Jailbreak 2003's five distinct "team tactics" correspond to five actually different overall team strategies:

• Evasive tells players and bots to try to avoid the enemy instead of engaging in fights. That's a useful strategy when all your team needs to win the match is avoiding a capture when the time limit is near.
• Defensive tells players and bots to try to keep the defense up at all cost, even if teammates are waiting in enemy jails to be released.
• Normal (the default) carefully balances attack and defense, trying to keep the defense up as well as possible while putting a certain priority on attacking the enemy base to release teammates if any of them are jailed. It also always deploys at least one player to each release's defense.
• Aggressive may leave the team's own base undefended if there are teammates to be released.
• Suicidal is all-out attack with no regard to defense. Players and bots either all roam the map on search for enemies to frag, or all attack the same enemy release switch to release their teammates.

You can switch team tactics either by binding keys to them in the global key binder, via the Team Tactics submenu in the Orders menu of the standard in-game voice menu, or by directly using the corresponding console commands.

Human players' behavior directly affects the orders bots assume – that means that humans can freely choose whether they prefer to defend, attack or freelance by just doing it while bots take care of the rest. On top of that human players' assumed positions are displayed like bot orders in the scoreboard for their teammates' reference.

You can manually switch team tactics (for your own team) as you did with Jailbreak III's "team stance," or you can leave team tactics selection up to the game – as long as "auto selection" is enabled it'll reassess the current game situation every couple of seconds and automatically select appropriate team tactics. You can, of course, override that manually by simply selecting different tactics.

On top of the team tactics setting that affects all bots in your team, you can now also directly order bots if you want. They will stick to the orders you give them until you reset them to "freelance," and other bots will take their positions if necessary.

Add-Ons

Llama Hunt, Release Protection and more are add-ons. Many features that were previously directly integrated into the game core are Jailbreak Add-Ons now.

You can select and configure add-ons in the Add-Ons tab in both the Instant Action and Host Multiplayer Game dialogs. Still, Llama Hunt and Release Protection are active by default already, but you can completely disable each of them if you like.