I have to agree with what others have said concerning the frustration of this game.

Here are my thoughts on it:

PRO: Fun theme, neat concept, addictive gameplay, great music, I really liked the management aspect of the base/minions/world domination.

CONS: Low production value, at times buggy, at times forced to trick the system rather than just play. At times wonky AI especially for minions (by design maybe?) This game would have been better with more development and polish, and more control.

In short: I had some fun while playing it, but was happy to uninstall it when the experience was over. I felt like a typical bond baddie, complete with frustration towards agents of good messing around in my base and the incompetence of minions and henchmen.

Good strategies were often counter-intuitive. So rather than just playing, I had to figure out what the game was thinking. Often I felt like I had to resort to dirty tricks to counter some of the more annoying aspects of the game.

For example:

1) Notoriety. At first, one would think that gaining notoriety would be a positive thing, and that it would come with increased power and influence.

What it really does: Makes super agents appear. Makes the game harder and annoying. A good strategy is to keep notoriety low as long as possible, even up until the end of the game. Also, if you figured out that each world region had an independent notoriety score (where does it mention this anywhere except for the internet?) then you could focus your AoIs in just 1-2 sections, thus preventing the most annoying super agents from appearing until later.
Theoretically it comes with more minions, but with a room full of lockers, I hit the minion cap very early. It comes with henchmen. (who usually die to super agents because they are wandering outside instead of guarding the doors like they are supposed to). It unlocks more AOIs which… allow for even more pointless notoriety.

I’d unfortunately unlocked Dirk by the time I was moving to the second island. (Ooops). Trying to build a new base with four super agents breathing down your neck. Not fun.

2) It’s so hard to find good help these days.

Minions: It’s cute that they don’t listen to you. For example. John Steele is incapacitated on the floor with a capture tag (or maybe he’s standing around scratching his head after a trip in the biovat). Alarms are sounding, there is a security camera on John and loudspeakers in every room, yet sometimes the minions continue to ignore him. Then Agent Steele gets up and starts creating havoc again.

Henchmen: It’s also cute that they don’t listen to you. For example, John Steele is incapacitated on the floor (finally!), with a capture tag. I click on my Red Ivan, I tell Red Ivan directly to capture John Steele. He says “I’m not a nanny!” Then he wanders around my base some more. John Steele eventually gets up and starts placing bombs everywhere

The best way to effectively deal with John Steele was to trap my Evil Genius in his room using poorly placed treasure and to set Steele up for interrogation. Because the Evil Genius can never get to the interrogation location, John will just wait there indefinitely, stuck in a glitch. I used the vats, but this halted all research for the rest of the game (it was worth it).

While I understand, to be a true evil genius simulator, I cannot have direct control over minions, but allowing that (like more of a starcraft interface) may have made for a more pleasurable game experience.

Traps: Awesome idea. They sometimes catch agents, nice.

They don’t catch super agents or soldiers. These good guys will just destroy your traps from long range. I did implement a twisted corridor of INT draining traps as was recommended, but often these agents still just blew them up. That was ok, though because this only happened with high heat, so I sort of deserved it.

Hotel: A cool way of generating extra revenue right? Nope, just costs a lot and distracts tourists. I never needed a hotel. Tourists always fell into the nerve gas trap, or I killed them, woops.

World Domination Screen: The “Complete” Bar. Hogwash. As a completionist, I thought I was missing AoIs, so I spent a long time getting to 500 Notoriety and then plotting in these regions. Nada. Looked it up online and I had actually finished all of the AoIs in that region. Awesome. I guess they included the henchmen and kidnapping missions or something, but once all minion types are unlocked, these missions are pointless, and you only get one henchmen at a time, so is it impossible to complete all of the AoIs?

At the end of the game, when I thought I’d finally done it. The game glitched at the final John Steele thing, leaving both of us standing there confused. I had to reload a save and re-do the final objective.

Jet Engine testing?
The only way to beat this objective is to train a bunch of construction or science minions and hope that they wander into your test chamber. It wasn’t hard, but the strategy there, really odd. It would be cool if I could have timeclocked the room or actually ordered minions there.

/QQ

Hah, I can so relate.

I've beaten the game, twice, and I shan't be going back. It deserves a reboot though.

I agree with most of these frustrations, although there's sometimes a solution (like any sim, one does have to work out some of the idiosyncracies of how it works, and play with those in mind).

I do have to vehemently disagree with the "Low production value" statement. I had the opposite impression - there was a great deal of care in many aspects, in item descriptions, in little details of minion behaviour, and in overall quality of presentation. There were very few bugs - I normally played for hours without hitting one (say, roughly 6 hours between noticed bugs?). I consider that pretty stable. Of course I'd prefer better!

I've just replied to the same effect to nitrogenfingers, but it seems entirely non-counterintuitive :) to me that notoriety would lead to difficulties. Indeed, you can see it happening from the beginning - your notoriety, and of course your heat, clearly draw unwanted attention. I believe the manual's pretty clear on the value of keeping heat down, but it definitely does NOT give that advice for notoriety, so this is a bit of a trap for the player. Very frustrating, I agree. Yes, me too. Pretty awful.


As to minions and catpure tags - alarms/security cameras are great for kill tags, not so awesome for captures, since an incapacitated agent will be targeted for capture by just ONE minion, someone who's not currently busy with something higher-priority (like responding to an alarm with gun at the ready). That could probably have been tweaked, but the best way to ensure subdued agents are captured is to have your henchmen do the subduing, or to be sure your minions aren't too busy or too far away. Even then, it's going to take your direct intervention to keep your henchmen around to thump the Super Agent if they do get up. A bit of micromanaging, and I agree this is annoying, but it's not that you were being ignored. If it was a capture tag on a lively agent, your minions and henchmen would have gladly gone after them. Since they were already incapacitated, it was left to whoever was already committed to "pick up the trash". That someone was probably far away, because everybody near was all frazzled by the alarm.

I totally agree on hotels and the "Complete" bar.

Thank you for the reply. These are good points. Perhaps "Low Production Value" wasn't the right way to phrase it. I do agree that a lot of the thematic elements (synchronized swimming, all of the music, minion behavior as you mentioned) was designed well and with care. What I meant was that, with a little more testing perhaps, they could have worked out some of the quirky behavior. The game freezing at the John Steele ending was what did it for me. =(

i modded my game so that instead of lowering loyalty, bodybags raise loyalty.

suddenly, no more constant desertions, and i can actually use my troops to openly fight, which i need because even the factions i have no heat with are non stop sending soldiers and saboteurs


and the best way to handle Super Agents is to leave Yellow Alert on all game, so your minions all have guns, and put a kill tag on them so your minions will shoot them instead of trying to beat them up. after they go down, change their tag to capture and theyll lock them up while theyre still passed out

and if you see a team of soldiers coming, you want to have 1 or more henchmen gather some minions and take them out before they get inside

An excellent review that captures so many of the frustrations of the game.

When things are working well it can be very satisfying, but it is so easy for your entire evil organisation to come crashing down when a couple of super agents invade at the same time. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't take so damn long to train minions and raise funds again!

Despite this, the game is very deserving of an evil genius 2 - with flaws ironed out.

You guys should probably just play on easy, and I'm being serious. The game is somewhat difficult and unforgiving the first playthough but there *is* actually a right way to be doing things. But hey it's 2013 now and all games are meant to be easy enough for my grandma to play.

Also the OP had no idea what the terms "production value" and "polish" meant.

Do hotels even work at all? It seems like most tourists just ignore it. I'll have a fully staffed hotel with valets with only one visiting tourist, while there's a bunch wondering around my lair entrance.

I find my minions act stupid most of the time. They always die in my own traps, and they seem to do everything the opposite of what I want. It would be much nicer if I could at least tell a minion "don't go there", "don't do that", "i only want you doing this job". Some more commands would be helpful and more fun for me. I like a lot about the game, but there's just so much that's frustrating so far.

I just started playing the game, but I'll probably stop and try another time. It gives me a nice sandbox feel as an evil genius and that's super fun, but it doesn't give me too much control over my own operations.

You need multiple hotels to occupy tourists, that way they'll bounce between the hotels. You'll also want the hotels to be near the helipad & docks as that's where tourists spawn.

Also, if you have issues with minion loyalty getting drained by body bags after every fight, play Alexis as she reduces loyalty drain.

Yes, so it's better to build two smaller hotels (or three on the second island) rather than one massive one. Tourists don't tend to stay inside one place all the time.

The somewhat ironic thing is that the more hotel rooms you build, the more freaking tourists actually show up! Personally I don't mind this, but it's something to note if you really hate the tourists.

I also ensure my hotels and topside shacks surround my base entrances, so that you can't even SEE the base entrance unless you go behind one of the buildings. The whole idea of the game is you don't have direct control of your minions - if you did it would be way too much micromanagement.

To do what you want is relatively easy. Firstly, if you don't want minions in a certain room, you either set the time clock to red (also saves power), or just set all the doors leading into it to level 3. For high-priority rooms, setting the level greater than 1 ensures there's always a supply of minions ready to take over when the others leave for their meal/break/etc.

With traps, what I do is have two winding corridors full of traps leading into my main base. This can be done from a single base entrance that branches off. Then I set the doors of one of these to 3 or 4: 3 for the door near the entrance, 4 to the final door leading into the base (so any agents that somehow make it that far get auto-tagged and attacked by door guards. Finally I turn all the traps in the open corridor OFF. That way minions don't get killed, and agents do (or get stunned or whatever).

Now, if you see agents heading into the open (minion-accessible) corridor, you can swap these over: turn off the traps in the closed corridor, set the doors on that one to 2, then close off the current minion corridor (one door only at first so your minions GTFO), then reactivate the traps in that corridor. This is a little bit annoying as it can be fiddly to re-connect a massive trap system, so I'd recommend pausing the game when you do this. It would have been cool if you could save trap connection configurations, or simply turn sensors on/off without disconnecting the traps, but we can't so the disconnect/reconnect trick will have to do.

Sure it's a tad annoying having to re-connect the traps, but if done properly you can generally find one corridor that gets used by agents a lot, with the other one (used by minions) hardly ever reached by agents. Generally agents will head to the closest door they see, and they tend to like locked (3/4) doors more.

You also don't have to necessarily create the corridors all the way from the entrance - you can use them to connect any parts of your internal base. Investigator type agents won't gain heat if they don't see anything suspicious, so keep your low-heat stuff on the outer edge (near entrances) and connect the outer base to the inner base by multiple trap-filled corridors using the trick above.

Also you don't have to disconnect the traps in the minion corridor if your minions are alert enough. One way to achieve this is to have multiple smaller "recovery" rooms (staff room, library, mess hall, barracks) near to where your minions work (much easier on the second island since you have so much room, but staff rooms can be really small so you can plonk vending/arcade machines everywhere and/or just directly connect a small staff room to your "worker" room so they have an arcade machine in the corner of their workplace!). If the rooms/corridors are deep inside the base then sticking some loot in there helps too (or even directly in their workplaces). Apart from more alert minions, they won't need to travel as far so you'll have less minion traffic.