In Jagged Alliance 3, you only have one character you create yourself, and which after an initial $6,999 fee is free for the rest of the game. All other characters cost money every day, which you pay in advance for up to 14 days. First tip: Try to hire mercenaries for the maximum duration of 14 days, as the price per day is lower that way. But you can say how reaching the end of the contract with all your mercenaries and not having the money to rehire them or hire new ones would be pretty catastrophic.

Unfortunately, the game is pretty tough here, even on the lowest difficulty. There are discussions on the Steam forum where people ran out of money before even leaving the tutorial island. The obvious trick is to make haste, and not waste time, as time in Jagged Alliance 3 literally is money. On the other hand, you need time to recuperate from wounds, and if you always heal all wounds using meds, you'll run out of meds (which is what happened to me). JA3 has a system where you can auto-resolve minor battles, but annoyingly that easily ends you up with more wounds than if you had played yourself, which I found I couldn't afford, even on normal difficulty. The system to get meds is annoying too, you need to walk over a map and pick them from rare resource nodes. Which apparently don't respawn, adding to the necessity to move forward all the time.

Besides for healing, time can be spent for thing like increasing the stats of your mercenaries, or training militia to defend points of interest you conquered. The most important points of interest to conquer and defend are diamond mines, which give you a daily income. In principal you could conquer enough mines to earn more money than you pay for mercenaries every day, but mines are few and far between, they deplete over time, and the enemy is likely to send troops to try to take them back. I never got to the point where I was earning so much money that I could afford to let's say spend two days to train my mercs in marksmanship.

One interesting point in the long run is that you will have to take decisions on whether to keep the mercenaries you played with. The problem is, that when they level up, they get more expensive. So kicking somebody out and taking a merc with better stats can be good. Just don't leave your best equipment on the guy you are kicking out. Inventory management is a bit of a problem. You can leave items in a "sector stash", but risk losing them if that sector is taken by the enemy. A big point of criticism on Jagged Alliance 3 on Steam is that there are no real merchants: You can't sell excess guns, you can only scrap them for parts. And your opportunities to buy ammo are very limited.

Overall, I am enjoying Jagged Alliance 3. But there is an obvious potential here for mods that make the game a bit more player-friendly.