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If they don't have multiple levels i'm gonna be MAD as HECK. That would be a huge boon in the limitations on base size! I had to go through a lot of contortionism in order to fit my whole base into strange room shaped because of those DANG ROCKS. Those felt like a VERY bad limiting mechanic. Now, I could get if you can't do anything about the rock areas until later when you research a special drilling technology or something, but keeping them permanently was really, REALLY annoying.

I do see the point of having to choose particular minions of others, but wouldn't it be simpler and more inclusive to have it be similiar to the way the original EG works? You can choose how many of each minion type to train and you can't have more minions then your max population. We were able to push up the max pop by filling our barracks with lockers to boost it, and we got more naturally as our notoriety rose. Both were good ways to manage to the population limits, although again, the low pop cap in the original game made things quite difficult even though our systems could handle more minions. Honestly, they actually had double minions rendered so they could fake the shiny floors with duplicate minions mirrored underneath. This is evident if you look at a guard minion training as a mercenary. If you have your base in yellow alert status, they will have a rifle on their back while lying on the floor doing the training, periodically, due to the animation, the gun will dip down and the barrel willl go into the floor, and a mirror barrel will POKE UP from the floor. Surely they could do this more effectively using actual reflections now? Or some kind of imposters. The double minion rendering may have been part of why they had a pop cap like they did, since they were inefficiently using extra resources for a 'shiny floor' type effect.

However, I could get behind a kind of 'end game minion' pick and choose type thing where you have to make a choice of which kind of top tier minions you want to use. In EG 1 there were two of each top tier. maybe they could come up with a few more and you have to choose which two to use from a pool of four or something. Each pair could have some kind of interesting synergy as a result, possibly, but you're still locking in. I do enjoy replayability but artifically forcing it through arbitrary choices tends to really kill my interest. The end-game of EG1 of choosing a single superweapon from the possible three was neat, and very natural. I enjoyed going through the game to see what each cinematic looked like. Also, your choice of superweapon didn't really affect your research much. It was kind of the other way around, which of the uberloot you stole would have a effect on which kinds of superweapons you could build. (I think it was the uberloot?) I usually just took all the loot and had all three options at my disposal since the loot itself was pretty useful to put in certain places of your base. I kept the Totem in the control room most often.
Post edited June 18, 2019 by Shalmendo
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Shalmendo: If they don't have multiple levels i'm gonna be MAD as HECK. That would be a huge boon in the limitations on base size! I had to go through a lot of contortionism in order to fit my whole base into strange room shaped because of those DANG ROCKS. Those felt like a VERY bad limiting mechanic. Now, I could get if you can't do anything about the rock areas until later when you research a special drilling technology or something, but keeping them permanently was really, REALLY annoying.

I do see the point of having to choose particular minions of others, but wouldn't it be simpler and more inclusive to have it be similiar to the way the original EG works? You can choose how many of each minion type to train and you can't have more minions then your max population. We were able to push up the max pop by filling our barracks with lockers to boost it, and we got more naturally as our notoriety rose. Both were good ways to manage to the population limits, although again, the low pop cap in the original game made things quite difficult even though our systems could handle more minions. Honestly, they actually had double minions rendered so they could fake the shiny floors with duplicate minions mirrored underneath. This is evident if you look at a guard minion training as a mercenary. If you have your base in yellow alert status, they will have a rifle on their back while lying on the floor doing the training, periodically, due to the animation, the gun will dip down and the barrel willl go into the floor, and a mirror barrel will POKE UP from the floor. Surely they could do this more effectively using actual reflections now? Or some kind of imposters. The double minion rendering may have been part of why they had a pop cap like they did, since they were inefficiently using extra resources for a 'shiny floor' type effect.

However, I could get behind a kind of 'end game minion' pick and choose type thing where you have to make a choice of which kind of top tier minions you want to use. In EG 1 there were two of each top tier. maybe they could come up with a few more and you have to choose which two to use from a pool of four or something. Each pair could have some kind of interesting synergy as a result, possibly, but you're still locking in. I do enjoy replayability but artifically forcing it through arbitrary choices tends to really kill my interest. The end-game of EG1 of choosing a single superweapon from the possible three was neat, and very natural. I enjoyed going through the game to see what each cinematic looked like. Also, your choice of superweapon didn't really affect your research much. It was kind of the other way around, which of the uberloot you stole would have a effect on which kinds of superweapons you could build. (I think it was the uberloot?) I usually just took all the loot and had all three options at my disposal since the loot itself was pretty useful to put in certain places of your base. I kept the Totem in the control room most often.
I do think the limited number and types of minion is interesting, but I think that having them be so interchangeable kind of limits the game. You get a bit of say in terms of how you allocate them, but barring a significant increase in cap, there's just not that much to do with them. You need a certain number of the top level minions to train the others, and the others aren't really that useful in most cases.
Surprisingly, some of the minion tasks could only be done by certain mid/lower level minons. Only construction workers could build rooms and unpack objects. I had a few occasions where I ran out of construction workers and I couldn't do much with my base as a result. Only technicians can repair objects, etc. And the various levels of minions would perform different types of attacks on enemy agents. This was especially evident with the social minions, as the valets would mostly drain attention, but the diplomats would drain loyalty. In the military minions, they mostly got stronger as they levelled up, until you got to the top tier and then it was a choice between snipers and martail artists. While the snipers had a good single shot power, they fired slowly, so you wouldn't want to fill your base exclusively with snipers, and martial artists (while quite deadly) were limited to melee range. So just using all the top tier minions only would cause some issues.

Like I said, I hope they have a decent pop cap so that we have wiggle room in how we want to allocate minion training. It's a pretty strategic choice. If you don't have enough military minions your base could easily get heavily damaged by intruding agents or soldiers. If you have a lot of social minions you could redirect a lot of agents passively without raising heat (as killing them outright would actually raise your heat slightly as they weren't reporting back to their HQ and were going missing...agents going missing is somewhat suspicious, but not as suspicious as a photograph of bodies hanging in your meat locker).
I hope that this time they handle the alert levels properly.

In the original you had three:

- green alert: default/initial alert level, construction workers and all military minions (except marksmen) unarmed. Anyone that's armed (e.g. from a previously higher alert level) will casually walk to the nearest relevant locker and put their firearm away, before resuming their normal behaviour. No problem with this one.

- orange alert: construction workers and all non-top-level military minions will head to the nearest relevant locker (mercs have a choice between flamethrower and LMG, so they tend to head to whichever is closest I think) to arm themselves. Naturally martial artists are always unarmed and marksmen are always armed, so doesn't apply to them. This one is generally fine, EXCEPT the minions will CASUALLY WALK to the gun lockers, instead of running - which means that unless you activate this alert ahead of time (e.g. before soldiers arrive), then by the time they've armed themselves the battle(s) are either already over, OR your base is in flames.

- red alert: one would think that if orange alert is too slow for a rapid response, then red alert would fit the bill? It seems to - minions will actually RUN to the gun lockers instead of walking, so that part is fine. If that were the only difference between orange and red alert, all would be well; however, for some stupid reason red alert will make ALL minions ATTACK EVERYONE on sight. So your weak social minions and scientists will be heading head-on towards enemy soldiers and attempt to engage them in fist-fights - and naturally dying horribly.

In the original I managed to mainly avoid alert issues by 1) staying on green most of the time and using social minions primarily to thwart enemy investigators and (in some cases) even super agents - then if I wanted to capture them, I'd do so after the social minions had neutralised them (which also makes capture easier); 2) If I expected a firefight and/or didn't want to bother with capturing and/or using social minions, I'd switch to orange alert ahead of time and keep them on that mode until things had calmed down.

So, TLDR: red alert shouldn't mean "all minions attack everyone in sight" - not only is it stupidly suicidal, as they even attack tourists its a sure-fire way to get your heat up to stupid levels. Either that, or "orange alert" should still get the military minions to head to the guns a bit faster than casual walking pace.

And of course they need a decent population cap - the original was almost unplayable with the default cap, but easily playable on the hardest level with some modding and a 150 cap (the modding was required to reduce the crazy armour values on the enemies, since it became tedious at that level otherwise). This was in addition to the other patches/mods to fix up various bugs and correct stupid stuff (like your "playthings" not being able to regenerate health).
Post edited June 18, 2019 by squid830
I personally thought the 'red alert' level was supposed to be like an all-out everyone attack everything or we're going to die kind of 'extreme emergency' type deal, but now that you put it in that light, it does sound pretty overkill.

I do recall how I would find scientists and valets punching tourists. It's kind of funny but was very ineffective.

Maybe they should have more alert levels and tweak them a bit? Also, maybe we should have a policies control that allows us to more clearly define what we want to happen for certain alert levels, or just in general. Keeping armed minions out of public areas like the hotel would be a nice policy to avoid exposing them to suspicious agents. Tweaking trap sensors to only go off on certain kinds of agents or under certain conditions might be nice too, or introducing delays in timing to make your traps that much more deadly.

I always viewed orange alert as a kind of raised security state that you want to plan for. It had the downside of arming your construction workers (if you purchased the appropriate cabinets) and meant that they would become targets more easily and probably pull out their own weapons to fight back, which could cause a bit of a mess out on the exterior of the island, but it did mean that they could cannon-fodder mob the enemy with pistols. Orange alert was definitely something you would use pre-emptively to get your minions armed when you were anticipating trouble, I viewed it as a kind of strategic option to take advantage of when I knew my heat was high, or going to be high (About to start missions or something).

The population cap does need some heavy testing I think. The original limit was, as you say, almost unplayable. Thankfully, editing the population cap was actually fairly simple once you knew which files to look in. I personally didn't like the restriciton of having so few minions and having to carefully choose which types to have more of because it usually resulted in a heavy lack of minion types in other areas that made the game more tedious. If you really are a massive Evil Genius with a huge lair and recruiting network, (assuming you have enough notoriety) the population cap should be pretty huge anyway! I don't think population limits should be a major part of the game management... It worked well in DK but now that minions have a lot of jobs to do, and only certain ones can do certain jobs, it makes it kind of a crash waiting to happen. By 'crash' I mean waiting forever for a single construction worker to deliver generators or blast out a room, type stuff, essentially blocking your ability to get something done because the minion type to do it isn't available.
Post edited June 18, 2019 by Shalmendo
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Shalmendo: I personally thought the 'red alert' level was supposed to be like an all-out everyone attack everything or we're going to die kind of 'extreme emergency' type deal, but now that you put it in that light, it does sound pretty overkill.

I do recall how I would find scientists and valets punching tourists. It's kind of funny but was very ineffective.

Maybe they should have more alert levels and tweak them a bit? Also, maybe we should have a policies control that allows us to more clearly define what we want to happen for certain alert levels, or just in general. Keeping armed minions out of public areas like the hotel would be a nice policy to avoid exposing them to suspicious agents. Tweaking trap sensors to only go off on certain kinds of agents or under certain conditions might be nice too, or introducing delays in timing to make your traps that much more deadly.

I always viewed orange alert as a kind of raised security state that you want to plan for. It had the downside of arming your construction workers (if you purchased the appropriate cabinets) and meant that they would become targets more easily and probably pull out their own weapons to fight back, which could cause a bit of a mess out on the exterior of the island, but it did mean that they could cannon-fodder mob the enemy with pistols. Orange alert was definitely something you would use pre-emptively to get your minions armed when you were anticipating trouble, I viewed it as a kind of strategic option to take advantage of when I knew my heat was high, or going to be high (About to start missions or something).

The population cap does need some heavy testing I think. The original limit was, as you say, almost unplayable. Thankfully, editing the population cap was actually fairly simple once you knew which files to look in. I personally didn't like the restriciton of having so few minions and having to carefully choose which types to have more of because it usually resulted in a heavy lack of minion types in other areas that made the game more tedious. If you really are a massive Evil Genius with a huge lair and recruiting network, (assuming you have enough notoriety) the population cap should be pretty huge anyway! I don't think population limits should be a major part of the game management... It worked well in DK but now that minions have a lot of jobs to do, and only certain ones can do certain jobs, it makes it kind of a crash waiting to happen. By 'crash' I mean waiting forever for a single construction worker to deliver generators or blast out a room, type stuff, essentially blocking your ability to get something done because the minion type to do it isn't available.
The expansion patch upped it to 150, IIRC, but even that can be difficult to work with, especially later in the game when you start having to deal with the super agents.

I'd love to see a dynamic cap of some sort where you have to pay for extra minions beyond a certain point and they stop working or leave more quickly if you don't pay.
I liked how your cap was tied to your notoriety. That definitely makes sense, that you can't recuit more people unless you either pay for it in the form of lockers in the barracks, or earn it via evil deeds and getting more known in the criminal underworld.

A max cap you can increase through notoriety would make sense, instead of just filling a barracks full of lockers to get to the absoloute max. Or perhaps doing research for betting minion support increasing the cap. Maybe you could get a bonus to your cap based on the lair you choose to purchase, or some other factor. Either way, being able to have enough minions should be balanced as your ability to recruit more increases vs needing more to operate more equipment and do various other tasks due to your lair sprawling further and needing more minions to send out to the world map.

A dynamic cap sounds good, but i'm not sure it should be solely based on paying extra like you said. It kind of seemed like they were donating their time to your cause rather then taking wages, except when their low loyalty has them stealing gold bricks from your strongroom. But maybe they should take wages now and you could boost their wages for various benefits including slower loyalty decay or something.
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Shalmendo: I liked how your cap was tied to your notoriety. That definitely makes sense, that you can't recuit more people unless you either pay for it in the form of lockers in the barracks, or earn it via evil deeds and getting more known in the criminal underworld.

A max cap you can increase through notoriety would make sense, instead of just filling a barracks full of lockers to get to the absoloute max. Or perhaps doing research for betting minion support increasing the cap. Maybe you could get a bonus to your cap based on the lair you choose to purchase, or some other factor. Either way, being able to have enough minions should be balanced as your ability to recruit more increases vs needing more to operate more equipment and do various other tasks due to your lair sprawling further and needing more minions to send out to the world map.

A dynamic cap sounds good, but i'm not sure it should be solely based on paying extra like you said. It kind of seemed like they were donating their time to your cause rather then taking wages, except when their low loyalty has them stealing gold bricks from your strongroom. But maybe they should take wages now and you could boost their wages for various benefits including slower loyalty decay or something.
I didn't mind that there was a cap - just that it was too small (though 150 is easily enough - 200 was overkill I found).

The lockers being a limiting factor kind of made sense - so for that reason I'm not too sold on the fact that notoriety can effectively mean you don't need lockers any more once it's high enough. Surely your minions still need to stash their stuff, no matter how awesome you are?

The fact that higher-tier minions took time to train sort of balances things out somewhat, though I agree that they should probably all take a wage instead (who works for free?). Higher tiers would naturally cost more, so that would be an additional limiter. Then one would have to balance various acts (e.g. on the world map) to generate enough income just to keep things moving.

In addition to that, the damn hotels should actually generate some income! I know that their main purpose was to act as a "cover", but it would be a more effective cover if we actually made money off of the damn tourists! Ideally, a decent hotel (filled with tourists) should be enough to cover the costs of a base-load of troops - or at least part of a base-load of troops. I know in the original some people advised to limit the hotels (or not even build them at all) since that would mean less pesky tourists (although it's possible to design the base in such a way that tourists rarely get to where they shouldn't be - but that takes effort, and there's no real reward for doing that).

Tourists should also potentially limit how aggressive enemy agents are in their vicinity, for fear of accidentally murdering their own countrymen (though this would be dependent on the country/organisation).

I also really wish I had some way of directly connecting my hotel to my base, e.g. via a secret wall/passage or something. I've built bases that come close, by surrounding the base entrance with buildings (hotel and shacks) - but it doesn't seem as awesome as something from James Bond or Get Smart...

On an unrelated note, I hope they keep the general gist of the tagging/camera/speaker/security system - I've managed to get my base working really well with multiple "sectors" of security. They could do with more "security levels" for doors though - e.g. limiting some doors to minions of a specific type would be handy.
I wish the hotels would be a little more useful. In all the games I've played, they've never really done much as they take so many minions to staff and I'm usually needing them for other things.
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hedwards: I wish the hotels would be a little more useful. In all the games I've played, they've never really done much as they take so many minions to staff and I'm usually needing them for other things.
The hotels were SUPPOSED to be a cover operation to keep the tourists busy and keeping you from having to deal with tourists getting into your base, along with delaying agents of justice. That didn't work very well, and I really found their effectiveness quite small for the amount of minions it soaked up.

Hopefully the whole 'cover operation' will be expanded and you'll be able to make money on the hotel or whatever else you can use. I often saw tourists giving tips to minions and I was wondering if the minions were just keeping those tips! I would have understood not making money if you had made money off the casino, but you didn't make any money on it at all and you had to steal from the world map. It would be nice if you could capitalize on your cover operation and use it as a funding source that would allow you keep more of your minions on base instead of occupying the world map and pissing off the agencies. I've often had soldiers come through and shoot up all my social minions and destroy the hotels before moving on to the actual base itself. Pandemonium.
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hedwards: I wish the hotels would be a little more useful. In all the games I've played, they've never really done much as they take so many minions to staff and I'm usually needing them for other things.
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Shalmendo: The hotels were SUPPOSED to be a cover operation to keep the tourists busy and keeping you from having to deal with tourists getting into your base, along with delaying agents of justice. That didn't work very well, and I really found their effectiveness quite small for the amount of minions it soaked up.

Hopefully the whole 'cover operation' will be expanded and you'll be able to make money on the hotel or whatever else you can use. I often saw tourists giving tips to minions and I was wondering if the minions were just keeping those tips! I would have understood not making money if you had made money off the casino, but you didn't make any money on it at all and you had to steal from the world map. It would be nice if you could capitalize on your cover operation and use it as a funding source that would allow you keep more of your minions on base instead of occupying the world map and pissing off the agencies. I've often had soldiers come through and shoot up all my social minions and destroy the hotels before moving on to the actual base itself. Pandemonium.
That was my impression. They were expensive, too large to be easily placed and the minion requirements made them something I never bothered with in most games. On top of that, agents didn't seem very interested.
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Shalmendo: The hotels were SUPPOSED to be a cover operation to keep the tourists busy and keeping you from having to deal with tourists getting into your base, along with delaying agents of justice. That didn't work very well, and I really found their effectiveness quite small for the amount of minions it soaked up.

Hopefully the whole 'cover operation' will be expanded and you'll be able to make money on the hotel or whatever else you can use. I often saw tourists giving tips to minions and I was wondering if the minions were just keeping those tips! I would have understood not making money if you had made money off the casino, but you didn't make any money on it at all and you had to steal from the world map. It would be nice if you could capitalize on your cover operation and use it as a funding source that would allow you keep more of your minions on base instead of occupying the world map and pissing off the agencies. I've often had soldiers come through and shoot up all my social minions and destroy the hotels before moving on to the actual base itself. Pandemonium.
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hedwards: That was my impression. They were expensive, too large to be easily placed and the minion requirements made them something I never bothered with in most games. On top of that, agents didn't seem very interested.
The really annoying thing is that the amount of annoying tourists on the island is directly related to how many hotel rooms you build. Which sort of makes perfect sense in one way, but in another way seems strange since that means there are more tourists just because you've built the hotel (as opposed to them going there anyway, and providing distractions).

The aggro of the enemy agents is also something they need to tweak somehow - I've often had them shoot up lockers and other "harmless" objects. I think this is to do with how "aggressive" you've been to their agents over the course of the entire game, and is separate from the heat level (though killing agents also raises heat). Unlike heat, I don't think this "aggression" ever goes down, and it must modify the "threat" (?) values on all objects - so if you keep murdering agents from a faction, then eventually they'll assume everything is out to get them... ;)

On the other hand this kind of mechanic should still be there, since it was kind of cool seeing agent behaviour "evolve" over time - especially the higher-level agents (and of course super agents) - the first time they encounter a trap it may get them, but when they come back (or other agents follow up), they tend to avoid the first trap (or pre-emptively take out the sensors) - only to fall victim to the trap after that... ;)