Getting MK ultra punishes you for capturing enemy agents + punishment for failed agent tailing.

[Spookyfish]

I find it a tad ridiculous that after paying for MK Ultra, now I have to interrogate enemy agents, which costs $1500 and gives you 20 danger, and then another $500 to execute them.
Sure, you can lessen the expenses with upgrades, but my main gripe here is all the extra danger you are punished with. If you play smart and capture 3 enemy agents, in chapter 2, thats 80 danger and $6000 to interrogate them and get rid of them, only to get maybe 3 new agents or enemy agent reveal. If my memory serves me, thats the exact same revards you got IMMEDIATELY and for FREE before you bought the money scam that is MK ultra.

Second, I just failed an agent tail mission. Result? a♥♥♥♥♥♥ton of danger and 3 agents IDs exposed. IMO this is a bit much since you have zero control of the outcome of agent tailing, and simply foiling the enemy op is a guaranteed success. I get that there should be a consequence for a failed tail, but maybe just expose (some of?) the agents IDs? I dont get the reason for the extra danger since the agents were not captured.

EDIT: Seams that as per a patch, captured agents being interrogated do no longer give you increases in danger. Thus only capturing the number of agents you can interrogate at one time, will eliminate the previously punishing danger increases. This has fixed the most punishing mechanic of MK Ultra for me.
I have yet to test wether or not the rewards pre- and post MK Ultra are significantly different enough to warrent the hefty price increase though, but I trust all the others here who say they are and, I presume, have had time to test this.

[frankie60]

Interested to see what the replies to this are. I've heard multiple times that MK Ultra is a waste of time and money, and I haven't gotten that far in my campaign yet. Wanna see if I should just skip it.

[Battleseed]

Story requires MK Ultra being built, so you can't skip it. However, you can delay building it till it's required. Once built, need to manage how many agents you have captured at a time. The cost and danger added that early in the game can be hard to manage. Once you get the Faraday Cage upgrade, can go back to hording enemy agents as they don't add to Danger anymore.

PS, None of this is a new topic. There are plenty of threads on the topic already.

[frankie60]

Originally posted by Battleseed:

Story requires MK Ultra being built, so you can't skip it. However, you can delay building it till it's required. Once built, need to manage how many agents you have captured at a time. The cost and danger added that early in the game can be hard to manage. Once you get the Faraday Cage upgrade, can go back to hording enemy agents as they don't add to Danger anymore.

PS, None of this is a new topic. There are plenty of threads on the topic already.

When's the optimum time to build it? I wanna add that info to my notebook.

Edit: After doing a little searching, it seems the devs are gonna fix it somehow... So admittedly it's not balanced correctly.

[Battleseed]

Originally posted by frankie60:

When's the optimum time to build it?

Originally posted by Battleseed:

you can delay building it till it's required

[frankie60]

Originally posted by Battleseed:

Originally posted by frankie60:

When's the optimum time to build it?

Originally posted by Battleseed:

you can delay building it till it's required

Ah. yeah. You said that once, lol...

[Jhonny G]

Had a really hard time finding any practical use for the MK ULTRA facility in my first playthrough. All its upgrades and functions seem like nothing more than a huge moneysink as there are faster, cheaper and safer ways to get anything it might provide.

Instead of being part of a whole the MK ULTRA feels more like its own separate mini-game made to keep players busy. It consumes a vast amount of time and money while punishing players with additional heat, which in turn also cost money to get rid off. The trade-off is very limited if there are any..

[kycol]

Story goes that quality of intel you get form MKUltra is much better. Then again I wouldn't be bothered with much MKU untill Control phrase.

[Jhonny G]

Originally posted by kycol:

Story goes that quality of intel you get form MKUltra is much better...

In my experience that tooltip is a load of bull.. Interrogations doesn't seem to provide anything that the comms station and informers won't yield for free.

If there are any 'secret' blueprints or trade contracts hidden behind interrogations then I haven't noticed it.

[IRMcG]

It's more use late game when you can unlock the more advanced options (who doesn't love Sabotage :)). I don't build it until the story requires it, plenty of other unlocks that are more generally useful before then.

[Galactic Origins]

the prices are not that much
get the upgrades and they are cheaper
mkultra has a lot of captured enemy agent functions aswell

[Dorok]

MK Ultra is almost OP in fact.

Even soon interrogatory bring much better result than anything else. And brainwash is cool to cure a dormant agent but fo this, it's more for the mood.

But once you get any of the other possibilities, it's just very powerful.

[Brigand231]

I found the saboteur option to be an amazing time saver. I can do an informant or recon tactical mission to capture an enemy agent and turn them into a saboteur for a lot less effort than raiding a Beholder cell tactical mission.

[Mosey]

The one thing it does that I found a real use for is conversion. Making enemy agents my own is helpful, especially since I can 'shop' for agents by viewing enemy agent perks (more actors, or whatever) and capture when I see something I want. You still take danger for it, but I've found that enemy agents are usually better than who is available via purchase or informant rescue.

All other functions, save brainwashing, seem irrelevant. They can be useful, I guess, but I find it more useful to murder enemy agents rather than mucking about. Tailing, stakeouts, and the other options for tracking down cells seem like more than enough AND less of a hassle.

Taking the danger reductions make MK more useful generally, just not enough to make me think twice about shooting their agents.

[Volt Ron]

When I first got MKULTRA I had a stockpile of caputred agents. I built it as part of one of the story "quests". My danger for my base was raising crazy fast. I didn't learn that it was becuase of having too many captured agents was the reason why until recently. So now I keep 1 or 2, for doing interrogations, and then I get rid of them using the execute function. Doing that, makes it much more manageable.

And yes, one of the devs said they were looking into balnacing what you can do to caputred agents without MKULTRA vs what you can do to them with MKULTRA. So that should help.

[Dorok]

Originally posted by Brigand231:

I found the saboteur option to be an amazing time saver. I can do an informant or recon tactical mission to capture an enemy agent and turn them into a saboteur for a lot less effort than raiding a Beholder cell tactical mission.

Yeah it is pretty great but you lost the saboteur. Dormant Agent or Gambit can be reused.

Dormant can be triggered during stealth phase, but if the agent is also an enemy dormant agent, when combats starts he will go back to enemy side.

Gambit won't allow it because it triggers automatically when combat phase starts. But you need that combat starts.

Now I'm trying to purge them from enemy dormant hidden skill, give them each Dormant+Gambit+Location signal, and release them. It's a bit exploiting the system but I'm curious to try.