One thing that's not really a big deal mechanic-wise, but could do with some fleshing out in terms or story, are the informers and how they fit into things.

Basically, sometimes when you send an agent somewhere, you discover an informer, and are informed (!) how long the informer will take before telling you something. Enemy agents may potentially hatch a plot to take the informer out prior to this time. This is all good, is interesting and makes sense.

However, where did the informer come from? If they were always working for our group, why do we only hear about them once we happen to land in their city? If Wouldn't we know about their existence prior to this (even if we didn't know their exact location)? If they were not working for our group, does this mean our agent finds and then recruits them instantly once they arrive?

IMO informers should appear in a central place, e.g. there should be a list of them somewhere in your base. If they're recruited by our agent, then there should be a task to attempt to recruit them (taking some time). I would think it possible that recruitment attempts could fail (possibly resulting in an ambush?), or even if they succeed the source may be unreliable - either due to just being shifty or not high ranking, or due to being an enemy plant or double agent (albeit less dangerous than the double agent operatives you can potentially recruit).

Most importantly, informers need a CODENAME. Ideally also a dossier of what we know of them, including ties to groups etc. The latter would influence the type of intel (and who from), while general reliability/position would influence quality of the intel. For example, as an operative, I'd like to know I have a source called "RABID SCARECROW" operating out of Casablanca, affiliated with Red Faction and having access to supposedly important information but is rated as B- (not that reliable), so his info could be wrong (and would need verification), that he is on the verge of discovering something big, so when his life is threatened I can decide whether it's worth saving his ass or not. In game so far, we only get the agent's location and how close they are to finding something, so generally the decision to save them or not comes down to whether you have spare agents or not.

I realise the above is probably going far beyond the scope of how informers were envisioned for the game - but it's a wishlist. I'd be pretty happy if they just added a codename for informers, and made current informers accessible from a central location for easy reference (e.g. like we get for enemy agents).

Related to the above, it would be great if we had to actually rescue the spy - which could potentially result in a tactical rescue or ambush mission. This would differ slightly from the "enemy plans to kill informer" in that in this case, instead of planning to kill the informer, the enemy instead uses their connections/political power/mates/spreads intel such that the organisation the informer is a part of - or possibly a Gov agency operating in the city - plans an arrest. Or possibly has already arrested them, and you can potentially break them out of the temporary safehouse they're being held at (you'd have limited time to act before the spy is effectively out of reach). Or if you just want to cover your ass (ie stop danger from rising due to the interrogation of the spy revealing stuff about your org), you could just kill the spy (naturally not getting anything from them). If successfully saved, the spy would still be out of commission from then on (they've been compromised after all), but you'd get one final intel payoff (or possibly other contacts).

Yes that is also way extending the scope (probably) - it's easy to get carried away with this stuff, especially since so few games tackle covert operations in any meaningful way. Hopefully mods will allow these kinds of things to be added.

Hi devs. Loving the game to bits except for one tiny thing. (No, I got over the clips vs. mags thing.) My new pet annoyance is the constant recentering on agents. It's driving me nuts!
Here I am, in a good position to move my agents around but when I click on one the whole view is destroyed as I recenter. Then I have to pan all the way over to where the hell I was at the first time and go up or down so I can get my agent to where I wanted it to go in the first place.
Feels like such a waste of time.

Situation:
"Argus, go stand next to the door on floor 2. Now where is Indigo...? Oh on the floor below, awesome. You can stand next to the doo as well."
*Click on Indigo*
*Zooms down one level and to the left*
"FFS! Now I have to pan over to Argus again!"

Some kind of summary after solving the case would be nice. For example, we have a case of a Web Project, which is described as a XYZ. Then, after solving it, we would get a dialog box with text description of what this project was about, who was involved in it etc. Because right now, cases are kind of flavourless. They just dissapear, giving you stuff

Equipment presets would be fine, enabling us to switch to a given set with one click of a button

Assault/Raid missions, in which you cannot stealthily inflirtrate, alarm is set on from the start, there are more enemies, but there are no endless reinforcements. Because you give us sooo many tools, like mines or grenades, but usually it`s better not to use them, but exercise stealth. Maybe you could have an "assault" switch on the beggining of the mission

Option to synchronise our agents` actions, so two guys can shoot the outdoor enemy at once, or three guys carrying enemies can walk at the same time so you don`t have to wait, kind of like in Silent Storm or XCOM Apocalypse

A buy/sell pannel, so we don`t have to switch windows every time we want to buy things belonging to different categories

Option to teach your agents new languages

An option to mark points on the map

I`d like the ability to use the sexual element of agents. For instance giving women the ability to almost guarantee to distract or befriend a man from his job not just by clicking her fingers. Of course if she comes across a guard that`s not interested in women it won`t work and she can say something like, "Damn, this man don`t seem interested in women!"

The same could be used with men. Did you know that the Russians in the 1980s actually trained men to sexually get involved with Western women so they could trick them into handing over top-level US secrets? The same was done with women too and I wouldn`t be the slightest surprised if the CIA did the same.

Spying has always involved an element of sexuality whether in real life or movies. The way it`s completely missed out here is quite noticable even if most people are too afraid to point this out.

Good point. Not sure it should necessarily be guaranteed or anything - unless it's something gotten via a "secret perk".

I guess me hoping the KGB playthrough will feature a honeytrap brothel is just wishful thinking then? It would make money AND be a useful tool for both blackmail and interrogation.

We DO get to blackmail people at some point, right? Though we do get MKULTRA so probably don't need to?

haha. I don`t know, I haven`t been as far through the game as you, i`m pretty sure, work and all that.

Although the discussed LoF/LoS mechanics are alright, in most cases there's almost no way to find a safe place for a badly injured agent where he/she can take cover without exposing. An agent under this circumstances would have no reason to lean around and would just want to keep his/her head low and stay away from enemy fire.

My suggestions for this:
-If an agent hasn't shot on his turn, he won't "sidestep" to purposes of being shot.
-Add a special action for 1 fire point, "duck", that prevents the agent from sidestepping, for LoF purposes, and ends the agent's turn.

Ah, you mean a `hunker down`. That would be useful.

I've got a few combat missions under my belt (a couple of cell "infiltrations", but really they are just massive gun shoot outs).

I'm liking the combat more, and I'm starting to get used to how the defender dodge mechanics work, but I still don't think I'll be a fan of it. I would much prefer it if the LOS sidestepping only worked for the selected agent in play, and not the defending target.

With defenders sidestepping, there can be up to 5 squares (as I understand it) they can be spotted and hit from, and since attackers can also attack from up to 5 different positions, it is very difficult to find cover that breaks LOS.

One idea about how to implement side-stepping would be to make you targetable from the square you had to side step out of to fire from in the previous turn (rather than the defender occupying all N,E,S,W squares as well, they occupy only the direction they shot from last).

As an example:

Two enemy agents (lets say blue and red).

1. Blue agent uses "Focus" to rebuild their "Awareness" then ends their turn.

2. Red agent steps out and happens to spot the Blue agent and makes a shot, but with the Blue agent's higher "Awareness" the agent dodges the shot. Red agent ends turn.

3. Blue agent can now target the Red agent, from two squares; the square the Red agent is standing in, as well as the square the agent had to move into in order to make the shot on Blue agent.

4. Since Blue agent can target the square that the Red agent moved into, they don't actually need to step out to make the shot, giving them the ability to shoot without compromising their cover for that turn. The Blue agent fires upon the Red agent doing a small amount of damage.

5. Red agent, on receiving damage from Blue agent (but before Blues turn is ended), withdraws to the square it initially stood in, to avoid further hits (ie the Red Agent only occupies that side stepped square for the first shot, or burst shot they receive, then they withdraw in response to injury).

6. Blue agent ends their turn.

This does give the agent that shoots first a disadvantage however, so perhaps a surprise mechanic could work here to balance things out, eg shots against the surprised target that normally cost awareness, have their awareness requirement dropped for that turn.

Haven't watched it and don't plan to, but sounds a whole lot like what last year's(?) film adaptation of the novel "Red Sparrow" is about.


Couple things that might have been suggested already in one way or another:

1. A manual stance functionality (with two options: default upright & low-profile crouched)
Even if it wouldn't matter in regards to the likeliness of getting hit or not. And yes, manually assuming a crouched position while not trespassing but being watched by security personnel should absolutely trigger the alarm.

2. Probably not going to happen but: A bit more authentic and appropriate voice acting
So that immersion is not immediately killed when an agent who's supposedly only fluent in French doles out very American-English-sounding "motherfuckers" left and right. If the English voiced lines at least had a little bit of an accent corresponding to the respective agent's nationality/natively spoken languages it wouldn't be that bad.

3. Option to turn off the enemy forces' calling out when they go into Overwatch
Don't know if that's working as intended but during combat it's a little weird to hear the opposing side one floor below or above announcing and thus giving away their intentions in regards to setting up an Overwatch perimeter. Bit unfair, don't you think?

4. Operatives carrying enemy agents should not be able to jump from the first floor
... and just carry on as if there's nothing to it. At least have them take a considerable amount of damage (half of their HP sounds about right) and restrict their movement range even further if there are no plans to prevent that from happening.

5. Have the game calculate and present you with a couple different pathing options
If the waypoint system (like in Julian Gollop's upcoming Phoenix Point) that was already mentioned earlier is out of the question - how about something that would let you cycle through a couple different paths you could take to get from a specific point A to a specific point B. Basically just like it works now (with the paths being previewed before executing them) but for those regular cases where you don't want the agent to jump from the first floor or break through a window when he or she could travel the exact same distance but a bit more unsuspiciously and normal by going down a staircase or through a door instead.

Don't know, could be that it's only occurring in certain locations/on specific maps, which would make it a bug.
I had the game providing an agent carrying another agent with the option to jump out of a first floor window two or three times already.

If it's not a (very questionable) feature but a full-fledged bug then I hope this gets fixed rather sooner than later.
Disbelief is anything but suspended if your agents can just shrug off something that if attempted in real life could break your legs/feet, dislocate your hip joints and sent your knee caps flying.
I'm not asking for hyper realism but we're talking about a person jumping from a height of about 2.50 to 4 meters while carrying another person here. There need to be at least repercussions if Creative Forge intends to stick with it.

Now the game has a pdf manual, so ingame in the tutorial you should warn us agents must read the damn manual, as intelligence is the key. It gives very important whole picture(s) to understand what we do, to prevent us from restarting missions and moreover games. Even, it tells us reloading is no shame lol.

when you breach into a room during infiltration (with supressed weapons of course), sometimes you can't or don't see civilians and so if you don't manually set civilians as target they'll just set off the alarm but it's not logical, i undertand and fully agree that there are drawbacks when you kill inocent civilians but in this specific situation a not so dumb person would not spare civilian if it blows up the stealth operation... (actualy same issue with civilians who see an agent and don't trigger the overwatch)
i did go in combat mod many times because of that (especially when i decide to use breach to go up a stair whith zero visibility, safest choice in my opinion)
it's the reason i don't play in ironman mod any more, because every time this situation hapened i lose at least 1 of my agent (just in case you are wandering, i don't use ironman for this specific reason, but i don't use restart for other reasons, if an agent dies because I screw up it's normal, and if my character dies i manualy erase all my saves and start a new game).

Other thing, every single civilian or guard or whatever enemy should have some kind of peripheral vision or a little bit of awarness, i recently do as i said above and i went undetected and when i was busy cleaning the room, i saw a guard had died right behind a civilian looking at a shelf... personally if someone get shot and fall just behind me i think i would notice that...

thanks for reading this feedback and i know that when someone want feedbacks, many negative or not so great points come out, so i just want to say that you did a wonderfull job with this game and i'm glad that i can maybe help you enhance it with my feedback!