Missions

In a Nival forum post, Warper elaborated a bit on how missions work. So here it is for your information. (Reworded slightly for clarity)

Mission Order

There is no set order to missions, but there is some kind of plot tree based on clues. Once you find a clue, you "open" a mission. Several clues are considered as key ones and thus you can't finish the mission without them, but all the rest aren't nececcary - you'll probably just miss an additional "predefined" mision. You move between region maps on the global map. I can't say it's very exciting screen, but you have to select the region somehow.

Selecting Missions

On the region map you move between "points", which are made up of scenario missions, random missions and your private airplane. Random missions appear and disappear randomly, and you can be caught occasionally. Although mosttly it's your choise whether you go on a random mission or not - there is no obligation for random missions like it was in JA.

Random Missions

Going on random missions helps to power up your soldiers with:

• experience (mostly for frags)
• skills (you get it for usage but it's a bit boring to just "shoot trees", shoot some frags is much funnier thing)
• weapons and ammo

Some special weapons can be found only in rare random missions. To get those weapons you have to "hunt" the needed encuonter. I'm not absolutely sure, but probably the encounter map is determined according to region map. So try to find encounters in unusual places and once done you'll be equipped like gods.

Maps

There are 23 mission maps where clues would tend to turn up. Random missions are in addition to this number. I suppose there is something like 100+ map templates for random missions. A map's template is limiter on it's randomness. There are "patches" and some parameters for them. For example, a house can be placed somewhere. It may move or rotate, but it won't change much itself. When you visit the same random site you get the same map. It's quite logical, since the site is locked to global map coordinates and represents the same place (that you visited before). Random missions (maps) will change a bit from game to game.