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In general, I think more recruitment options should be available earlier in the game. Pickings are a little too slim at the time when you most need them. Having certain (not even that strong) Henchmen only available toward the very end of the game is annoying. Sir Daniel being a late pickup is fair enough because he's extremely strong and his recruitment mission is relatively difficult, but CLARA? JACKIE? Come on.
One other small quality of life feature would be to have Henchman stick around a spot for a bit when they're manually ordered there. Even if it's just 30 seconds. It's EXTREMELY annoying when I'm trying to set an ambush for a group of Soldiers and I have to micromanage Henchmen to keep them from wandering off.
It would also be good if it was easier to direct their Deception style effects. I don't mean stuff like Silver Tongue. It's a bit hard to find, but several of them have specific ratings for stat drains when interacting with Agents in the casino. They can drain stats by passively talking to Agents just like Deception minions. If it were possible to direct this or trigger it manually, it would make certain Deception minions MUCH more valuable.
Now, onto individual employee evaluations. This doesn't include special missions. Other than Fugu's free heat reduction, I actually think they're mostly not that good considering how late you get them.
Fugu, Jubei, Ming
They're perfect, don't screw with them.
Eli
Silver Tongue falls off a little too much in usefulness late game, IMO. I think a small boost to the numbers would help without significantly unbalancing Eli. He's quite solid as-is though, especially for a starter.
IRIS
Her walk speed is VERY slow, which is terrible for a Henchman that always wants to be the first one into combat in order to tank. I'd either increase her speed a bit, or make her defense buff include a small damage reduction aura (but no regen except for her). This would make her a bit more consistent.
Janet Bombe
Oof. Alright. Scramble Evidence isn't TERRIBLE in a trap heavy setup, to remove suspicion caused by the dead Agent body bag situation mentioned above. Still pretty niche. What does Remote Detonation even DO? In one case, when I tested it against Agent X, it seems to absolutely tank his damage output. But it's wildly inconsistent and I haven't yet seen a good breakdown of the effects. In direct combat, she dies to a stiff breeze. Fair enough if her support abilities were Ming caliber, but... they're not. It's hard for me to give a good evaluation without knowing more about how Remote Detonation works, but if I don't even notice what it's doing, it's probably not doing very much.
Carl Cafard
Double oof. Janet might be useful in a very few edge cases, and somewhat balanced by being an early unlock, but Carl has no such excuses. His LAND MINE trap DOESN'T DEAL SPLASH DAMAGE, and is in every way inferior to a Venus Spy Trap. To be any good, it would need to either have splash with a VERY high trigger rate, or a MAJOR damage buff. The longevity should be increased either way. His fake artifact is absolutely pointless... to change it, I'd give it a persistent Skill drain when carried, and also be prioritized by the AI over any other loot. Even then, he still wouldn't be that great. His design is just... bad.
Sir Daniel
Mostly fine, except that his damage bonus from Camo seems a bit inconsistent in activating. His sheer firepower borders on OP, but it's balanced by the fact that he's a late game Henchman and VERY annoying to get. Also, the auto capture tag from his trap can lead to some weird results... but that seems like an actual bug rather than a balance issue, and I'm going to report it as such.
Incendio
Considering how low his damage is against Agents, he should do substantially less damage against lair objects. Otherwise basically fine.
Clara Jones
I didn't use her for very long, so, grain of salt here. Heirs and Graces seems okay for a Deception focused playstyle, although if I remember right, the numbers are a bit on the small side. Knowledge of the Ancients sounds good on paper, but I haven't had a chance to test it much yet. Depends how much it raises the trap chance.
Full Metal Jackie
Her GRENADE LAUNCHER somehow DOESN'T do splash damage? And even the single target damage is hot garbage without Fire Sale active? Even though her damage rating shows as 5 stars? Come on. Also, Hand Guns is useless. A solid pun, but useless. I have a feeling this ability was designed in a phase where alert levels were planned to be more similar to EG1 where Minions weren't always armed. If that were still the case, I could see this being good. But now Minions are always armed, and guns are cheap. This should probably be replaced with some kind of damage buff aura similar to Ivan's Do It Now aura. Maybe she hands out high quality ammo with bonus damage?
Espectro
Haven't had a chance to try the DLC yet. So, no idea.
In general, I'd like to see stronger Super Agents (except Steele) with weaker teams. With MAYBE the exception of Agent X, the Super Agents aren't even really a threat, it's the teams that are. This feels backwards to me.
Also, using Lure doesn't give you a chance to disrupt their team. It really should.
Wrecking Bola, Blue Saint, Atomic Olga
They're fine. Don't screw with them.
Agent X
I'm flagging him up separately from the above because I really LIKE his design. He's not that dangerous... unless you ignore him. I like how he separates from his team and your job as a player is to track them both down and mark/uncloak them. He's not that strong in a fight, but he can summon people who are if you let him get away. Feels more strategic than the others. The only problem I have with him is that his team showing up and getting killed in the wrong location can lead to a Body Bag Death Spiral. But I think this has more to do with how Minions select which body bags to handle first.
Symmetry
For the love of God and all that is holy, beat Symmetry's team with the nerf bat AND KEEP DOING IT UNTIL THEY STOP MOVING. You can't have them bypass all your defenses AND be functionally immune to traps (just like everything else, but still) AND be more deadly in a straight up fight than THE ACTUAL SUPER SOLDIER. Either her team needs to be MUCH more fragile than it currently is (like, 150 Vitality each, or maybe even less), or they need to be much more vulnerable to traps. Or, frankly, both. Making a trap gauntlet in front of my vault SHOULD be something useful rather than a pointless money sink.
John (and Jane) Steele
I'm... torn. I like the concept of the lone, actually strong Super Agent, but his ridiculous stat block means that (say) Sir Daniel, who normally hits like a truck full of trucks, ends up doing the same damage to him as a Worker does. Is this a good thing? I'm not sure. It does force you to approach him differently, I guess, but it also means certain combat strategies that would work anywhere else are useless against him. I want to say more health and less armor, but that would nerf certain tactics like Fugu's poison. Like I say, I'm conflicted on this one. Also, you currently get NOTHING for managing to capture and interrogate him. You should get a solid chunk of Intel. Like, 15-20.
There's still too many unknowns for me to be comfortable evaluating balance here yet. But I will say this, I've had a lot of loot just not show up and I don't know why. In my second campaign, I made it a point to do EVERY side quest available before moving on with the main story. There were still several things I never saw in either campaign. For example the, Dodo Egg. Again, I have no idea why.
I'd like to see more thorough descriptions of effects. It's okay with a few being a mystery, like Pandora's Box. But I shouldn't have to guess or look up a guide on what the freaking Hubbard Slice does, considering what I had to go through to get it.
There are a few loot items that should be just plain unstealable once in the lair. Specifically, the traps, and the Doors of Fort Knox. How is a door useful when you can just STEAL it? The traps because, well, you HAVE to put them out front for them to be useful. Having them be vulnerable to theft if you have the nerve to ACTUALLY USE THEM is baffling.
For the most part, I actually quite like the changes to mission design. However, the mission cap in a region needs to either be raised, or missions need to rotate more often. In particular, it's extremely annoying to not find a long term heat reduction mission so you can stop worrying about a region for a while.
The mission descriptions feel like they were written by two different people. Most are a paragraph, usually with a clever pun or two. Others are just a single phrase like "rob the national bank of Brazil" or something like that. It can cause some pretty serious whiplash to see the second kind, since there's no joke and not a lot of effort.
Also, we DESPERATELY need a "go to next idle region" button. Having to manually pick through the entire world map every time there's an idle region is a TITANIC pain in the balls.
Okay... it may be too late to start making changes to map design, but here we go. Crown Gold and Caine Key are fine as far as it goes. Crown Gold is a bit smaller than the others in the end, but it's flat and easy to design for. Caine Key has the unique and potentially useful feature of enemies being forced through the main casino entrance. Monatas Gemelas... is not good. I'm seeing people reporting the ship getting stuck, and I've had that problem as well, but nevermind that. What's even the THEORETICAL advantage of this map? It bills itself as having a chokepoint, but that's just a flat out lie. Caine Key has a chokepoint built in, and you can easily make one in Crown Gold by connecting the casino and the helipad in the little corner between them. Montanas Gemelas, despite being advertised as having a choke point, is the one map where you CAN'T make a good one. It's hard to make a good trap hallway because the entrance areas are so narrow, and you basically end up having to do two because it branches out in different directions.
The travel times between the two sections of the base can be fairly punishing, and you are EXTREMELY choked for space early on, even building just the bare necessities. Add in the slow travel time of stairs and the fact that you have no choice but to go multi-level, I can't see how this base is ever good. Technically, it has the highest amount of usable space... but by the end of the game I had more than I ever needed without even touching the basement, so who cares?
Exactly what advantage does this map actually have? I can't find one.
Stairs. Characters are just too slow in navigating them. The more vertical your base is, the worse it is. Not to mention that you can't reverse direction without going ALL the way down and then back up, or vice versa. And everything is locked while you're on them. I can't tell you the number of times I've wanted to Wind Walk Jubei and I just... can't. Because he's on some stairs. They should be a little faster, and you should be able to reverse direction on them immediately.
Megasafes. Either make security against Rogues actually DO something, or remove the power requirement. It's incredibly annoying to have to turn them off manually just so they're not sucking power for no reason. I would say that, if turned on, they should have a fairly high chance for the Rogue to fail to pick them up, and pass or fail it should drain a bit of Skill. This way it actually makes sense to protect your vault from Symmetry with a trap hall.
The "object has been destroyed" alert is useless if I can't find the dang thing, and clicking on the alert does NOT take me to it. Even if it did, half the time it ends up being a trap and I can't even remember what was there before. What I'd like to see is for a destroyed object to actually leave behind a destroyed, non-functional version of the object. Click it allows you to either remove it, or replace it with whatever was there before at the usual cost.
Remove suspicion from body bags. It sounds counter intuitive and not traditional, but it'll be better that way. It'll prevent the Vitality trap issue above, and also stop Investigators from getting suspicious about corpses THEY CORPSED. The Body Bag Death Spiral from morale is punishment enough. It really is...
Also on the topic of body bags, I'd very much like to know how Minions decide which ones to pick up first. I've had them go way the heck out into weird areas of the base to grab a small pile... meanwhile, a main hallway is in a Body Bag Death Spiral, and they're just ignoring it as Minions desert in droves.
Along with area based tags, I'd like to be able to designate an area that REMOVES tags. Why? Well, here's an example. I have a trap hallway, untagged. Further into my base, Agents get auto tagged for distraction. They get led back into the Casino, but when they try to come back into my base again... they're still distraction tagged, and get escorted out immediately. I want them to be forced to run the trap hall again before getting retagged. And yes, I can manually untag them, this is just a convenience thing.
Hotkeys. Give me something for power, destroy object, etc. Please. Doing them in bulk without this is terrible. Honestly, just having a multi-select of some kind wouldn't be awful.
Mod support. Yeah, I know, something something copy protection... I know this isn't likely, but I'm asking for it anyway.
I don't want to end this post on a negative note. Despite a few regressions, the 1.3 patch still feels like a HUGE improvement overall. EG2 is already a fun game, but with some tweaking, I think it really has the potential to be great.
So, give me your thoughts. Other balance issues? Better ideas? I'm all ears.
A partially functional, graphical version of the build was pushed to full release and they are already getting busy with the season pass content..while the main game continue to stall.
They have no idea on how the game will feel through the campaign from the users' perspective. The developer blog article about heat is a FoJ - Fury of Joke.
I don't understand why sandbox is needed when combat is automated and traps only work randomly. What will one be testing in sandbox when most of the game features and items are not enabled to function properly?
Or change bodybags into 2 types, minion and agent/tourist. Minion bags generate no suspicion while agent/tourist bags do. To wit: A dead suspect is no longer suspicious.
Otherwise, I agree with almost everything you have written. Nice post!
So, the problem with this is mentioned in the trap section. If you have a group of Investigators and one of them dies in a trap, well, suddenly suspicion. I did my best to position Vitality traps toward the back, but this still happened more than once.
Maybe there's a better way to handle that besides removing heat from body bags entirely, I'm just not sure what it is yet.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2481694259
I have had Clara Jones for quite a while. Her voice is sexy, and I loved her quest missions! Heirs and Graces plays out a fair bit like Eli's Silver Tongue, more or less. Having both Clara and Eli, there was a lot of overlap there.
Knowledge of the Ancients, I had problems with. Some traps she would buff, like Killer Bees, but others she would completely ignore, like Paywall. Others, like the Shark Tank, she would go through her motions but the trap was not buffed. As far as the buff is concerned, well, you get a big visual cue, and the buff seems to last until the trap is triggered. I can't say the trigger is all that much of a difference, either. It's difficult to test. I was worried that minions would trigger the trap by mistake, but that didn't seem to happen (not that I was watching very closely). That, and the cooldown for KotA is quite long.
I'm not sure I agree with you on stairwells. I do agree that they lock out anybody who is on the stairs, probably so that they can pathfind under unusual conditions, and that is a nuisance. However, I don't see minions taking much longer on stairs than they would be in a hallway of the same length, considering that the stairs double twice.
... interesting. I didn't know that the distraction tags was actually required for Deception minion interaction inside the Casino. I thought the only thing it did was tag them for escort out of the main base.
In my defense, the reason I thought that is because that's what the game SAYS it does. Direct quote from the security zone screen: "Minions will confront any intruders spotted and escort them to the Cover Operation."
But I'm glad to know why that was happening.
I'm going to have to do some experimentation of how that effects trap trigger rates in practice. That being said... doesn't affect agents that come through the back door (without some extreme weirdness in base design that I'm not sure is possible on all maps), and it's screwy with how tags work.
That is, if they're tagged for distraction in order to weaken them for traps, they're never going to actually make it as far as the traps. So you'd have to manually untag them if you want them to get to the traps. Otherwise they'd get stopped by a minion. They might get escorted out, but you risk starting a fight.
Now, that last paragraph is only if you're an idiot like me and trying to use traps to defend your actual base for some reason. I see now how you could path them to a trap corridor detached from the rest of the base. It feels counterintuitive compared to defending your base entrance with traps, and more like an AI exploit, but I think I get how it would work.
Yeah, I couldn't really think of a good way to measure stairwells in relation to hallways. Stairs FEEL a lot less efficient, but I don't know that I can really prove it. You can see them slow down their walking speed, and they seem to get bottlenecked with a lot of minions present... but maybe it looks worse than it actually is by numbers. I hadn't considered pathfinding to be the reason for the stair lock, it's a possibility.
This seems to be more of a problem with the traps than it is with the body bags. The simple fact that too many traps hit vitality is more of the problem here. A good example is the KO gas trap. In EG1 terms, this should hit endurance, not vitality. Since EG2 removed the endurance stat, it should instead give a large hit to smarts and a smaller hit to resolve without touching vitality. Or a small hit to smarts and morale along with a 20-30 second immobilize.
If your trap hall is designed to kill agents, suspicion is well warranted.
You should be able to create fun, effective trap halls that embarrass, frustrate, and demoralize without hurting them though.
Let's say the mechanics conceived by the developers should really work like this. The game still needs to be changed. It is worth transferring the "total amount of heat in force of law" from statistics to the general interface so that the player can constantly observe the heat. In hard mode, agents must be really dangerous, it is worth increasing the number of arriving agents by 3-4 times. Interrogators should not walk through the aisle to the helipad.
But I don't like corridors 2 cells wide, I don't think the developers intended them that way. But in your case, this is a necessity, both for casinos and for traps. Agents are more likely to use casino items if they are relatively close to them. The narrow passage allows fewer agents to pass if I don't want all the traps to be neutralized at the same time. The inner perfectionist in me just screams in horror when I look at corridors 2 cells wide. Then it is really worth introducing doors with a width of 2 cells.
If deception minions are ignoring agents then either the deception minion is busy (restoring stats, job or acquired a different target), or the agent has acquired a target such as a machine or deception minion in another part of the casino. Agents seem to acquire targets based on proximity, so if your exit is near the entrance of a maze and separated by decorations then they might immediately skip most of the casino to the end to talk or interact and then even back track to the rest of the casino or to regroup.
Tourists are targets for deception minions. Huge flocks of tourists can keep them busy so much that they may not be able to attend to agents frequently. In this case placing slot machines to distract most of the tourists (and earn money in the process) can help, as well as hiring more deception minions to boot tourists out faster.
As you later mention, tag for distract is counter productive for trap corridors. The solution is an "airlock" design where the agent is unlikely to be seen entering the corridor from inside the casino. If technicians see the agent enter, then they will either be killed (small soldier suspicion, easily replaced) or they will be escorted back into the casino and hopefully try the traps again.
Bouncing an agent to the casino will usually cause them massive resolve damage so is generally good, however sometimes the agent will instead have their resolve fully restored (random?) and in worst case the agent goes hostile which can cause all other nearby agents to also go hostile, even ones that were successfully escorted.
I am noticing that skill has little impact on how trap prone an agent is. I see average quality investigators with 150 skill fall for all traps, and then the exact same be completely immune to traps, even after their skill has been lowered well below 80. For comparison 100 skill "poor" agents always fell for these traps, yet these 150 skill "average" agents sometimes always fall for them and sometimes never fall for them even below 80 skill. I would not be surprised if there is more to the system under the hood than just skill determining their trap disarm ability, such as agent quality, heat tier that spawned the agent (even if same quality) or even the region the agent comes from (some regions might be better at disarming traps).
The issue is not so much the fire, but the targets that can be set on fire. A single safe rack is set on fire and suddenly the entire safe room is ablaze. This does not even make sense given that the safe racks are literally steel and gold so not very combustable to begin with. Also all the decorations that get set on fire die so fast due to their 100 durability that they self-extinguish before they can spread, something that might be possible to exploit by making a ton of dummy decoration rooms just to reduce the chance of HAVOC setting fire to something that matters and can spread.
I personally would add a "fire resistant" mechanic to some items like safe racks and decorations. Not only will this reduce the damage the item takes, allowing it to last at least 30 seconds (so minions can actually extinguish a decoration), but also would make the target exempt from being set on fire directly by HAVOC. This would mean no fire storms in safe rack arrays and no decorations going poof that take forever to notice and replace.
As for current management of the problem... Design safe rack arrays such that there is tons of space to walk through the array to help minions combat the fire. For example have them in lines no longer than 2-3 before a 1 tile corridor for minions to cut across. At entrance and all along corridors leading to entrance place a lot of fire extinguishers, most of your fire combat capability will be needed for the vault. Overall you will want a lot of technicians to help repair and combat fires, as well as placing a lot of fire extinguishers so at least every minion has access to one nearby and larger rooms have them in the middle for faster access times. It is important to let minions rest between firing HAVOC as combating the fires will hurt their morale.
Rogues, Saboteurs and even Super Agents will already leave when their resolve hits 0. Your misunderstanding is caused by the game not communicating clearly what agents can be made to leave and what ones will never leave due to being objective spawns. Even normal investigators that are objective spawns might not be able to leave when resolve is 0.
The confusion is that objective spawns have resolve as normal, but will never leave when resolve hits 0. You can even get the stupid situation where they get bounced into the casino infinitely due to being low skill, having 0 resolve but being unable to leave. Agents that cannot leave should have their resolve field visibly different or even hidden if it has no other mechanical implications.
As an example, if you invite Blue Saint to your base and he enters from the casino, then you can reduce his resolve to 0 and he will leave. All his accompanying saboteurs can also have their resolve reduced to 0 and they will also leave. They might even leave using the back entrance despite coming from the front. However if he spawns as part of his side objective chain which asks you to "kill" him (defeat him in combat, he flees) then he will not leave with 0 resolve and will need to be defeated in combat. His support agents will also not leave with 0 resolve but like most objective spawns they will usually leave once the objective progresses such that they are no longer needed, such as Blue Saint was defeated.
Read the developer post about heat. If you constantly gain suspicion then the sent agent waves will become more powerful. This is irrespective of heat, but rather how frequently you trigger those agent waves. Killing agents, such as investigators, generates soldier suspicion which can trigger soldier waves. By the sounds of it you were killing absolutely everyone, and as such it will be generating mostly soldier waves and as such those soldier waves will be very strong due to how frequently you are triggering them.
Again, the special waves mostly ignore heat and instead are based on suspicion and how often they are triggered. Heat mostly determines the investigator waves.
Below is the original quote.
Incendio's range attack is very powerful not so much due to its damage, but rather due to its knockdown effect. It can stun groups of agents for several seconds, during which time you are free to unload as much ranged damage on them as you like. This is similar to Old School Red Irvan, and although less damaging is one way for other Geniuses to get that effect.
He also is one of the few deception henchmen. This means he will automatically patrol just the casino and will frequently talk with tagged agents and tourists, dealing 10-20 resolve damage a hit and delaying them. He also has an ability which does a lot of resolve and skill damage in an area, if you are willing to micro him.
You can try to ambush her at stairs. For the very points you mention in your post, stairs make the perfect place to ambush her since for a period of time only some of her agents will be able to act as the rest are stuck climbing the stairs. You can select and tag them as they are climbing the final flight of stairs so that your minions instantly engage as they reach the top. In the case of high range damage (Silver Lady + Old School + Incendio), they will usually die before being able to do anything, with the only losses being a few unlucky minions who were on the stairs at the time. This was tested on Normal mode, so in hard mode the tougher agents might make it less effective (maybe not instant delete, still doubt it will fail though).
You can tell idle regions by looking at the criminal network model for a region. Idle ones pulse faster and have a bigger/brighter globe on top of the transmission tower.
The choke point is late game once you have access to more advanced digging. You can entirely block off the path to the small pillar using the underground instead. You can then redesign the casino such that all visitors have to meet together at the top of the large tower. With maximum drilling tech you also have the option for 2 more paths to the casino area allowing for the deception minion barracks and guard table to be positioned there.
These extra holes also allow the casino to be dragged to near the back entrance potentially forcing agents into it irrespective of the entrance that is chosen. Potentially you could have your guard tables and hold point on another floor, such that you can exploit stairs as a choke point to kill agents.
Even without doing this, you can place your guard tables in the big tower near the back entrance and the original casino entrance giving them a response time of only a few seconds should unwanted agents come from either side.
The ground floor is large enough that you could open plan your entire operation down there, science, training, the lot. By keeping everything close it saves on travel time despite all the stairs needed to reach the top. The top pretty much only needs deception and guard barracks, as well as casino.
having the most buildable space also means it is one of the best for builders who want a less space efficient but good looking build, or who want to try out different room configurations. It really has more space than you can know what to do with.
You missed the part of my guide which talks about using line of sight to prevent your minions from heroically throwing their corpses at the agent's feet to stop them from entering the trap rooms. I even linked a picture with an example. It works. I assure you.
That said I agree, we need the ability to zone remove tags so we don't need to use line of sight trickery on our own minions. It has been requested a lot but adding it would require some UI work on top of coding the mechanic so its not something the devs can add in a short time. I still expect them to give it to us.
That last line is because I linked you to a guide I wrote. It wasn't a reference to you specifically but to everybody who makes a post on the forum misunderstanding how mechanics work and complaining. I am an unapologetic elitist jerk.
Unlearn what you have learned! The minions don't seem to care how wide the corridors are. You can't have 1 cell wide, but anything else goes.
I put little perpendicular "skin tag" dirt walls in my corridors two cells long and put cameras on either side so that I could get cameras (or traps, if I really feel I need to) into the middle of long corridors. The minions simply flow around them. Likewise putting the Million Bees loot in the middle of a corridor intersection. It's not really a bottleneck for them at all, not how like doors and paywalls are. The true minion bottleneck is how they arrange themselves for combat.