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These new jobs seem useless, unless I'm not doing them right.

After getting tail agent, I tried it out. The description says it will allow the enemy's mission to go succeed and reveal their cell. So far there only seem to be two types of missions, enemy scouts and informant assassinations. Why would I allow an informant to get assassinated instead of stopping it and getting a free agent? The enemy scout missions increase danger and expose my agent's identities if they're in the city when it completes. I tried this on a scout mission that would result in only a small danger increase due to its distance from my HQ. I assumed that if my agents were tailing the other agent, they would be careful not to be seen. I was wrong, and when the job completed, I had two agents with blown covers. Why would I ever want to do this again?

Seek Agent takes two of my agents one day to complete. Every time I have done it, I find the information from informants or signal analysis before the agents finish, and then I have two agents tied up, unable to be used until they finish this job even though I know everything about the agent they're seeking.

Stakeout Cell takes four agents and two days to complete and doesn't seem to be doing anything. When it finishes, I just get a message saying it's done, and that's it.

Infiltrate cell I can sort of understand. It takes two agents one day and you get intel without risking your agents on an assault, but while the cell is active you lose income and/or take a steady increase in danger. You get more intel by assaulting the cell and collecting the secret documents and capturing the agents for interrogation, and it takes less time.
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Mean.Jim: These new jobs seem useless, unless I'm not doing them right.

After getting tail agent, I tried it out. The description says it will allow the enemy's mission to go succeed and reveal their cell. So far there only seem to be two types of missions, enemy scouts and informant assassinations. Why would I allow an informant to get assassinated instead of stopping it and getting a free agent? The enemy scout missions increase danger and expose my agent's identities if they're in the city when it completes. I tried this on a scout mission that would result in only a small danger increase due to its distance from my HQ. I assumed that if my agents were tailing the other agent, they would be careful not to be seen. I was wrong, and when the job completed, I had two agents with blown covers. Why would I ever want to do this again?

Seek Agent takes two of my agents one day to complete. Every time I have done it, I find the information from informants or signal analysis before the agents finish, and then I have two agents tied up, unable to be used until they finish this job even though I know everything about the agent they're seeking.

Stakeout Cell takes four agents and two days to complete and doesn't seem to be doing anything. When it finishes, I just get a message saying it's done, and that's it.

Infiltrate cell I can sort of understand. It takes two agents one day and you get intel without risking your agents on an assault, but while the cell is active you lose income and/or take a steady increase in danger. You get more intel by assaulting the cell and collecting the secret documents and capturing the agents for interrogation, and it takes less time.
Infiltrate cell is pretty much what you describe - a "free" source of hassle-free intel, if you don't count the agents being unavailable for ages and the cell being active eating your income or increasing your danger...

Seek Agent - my experience is the same as yours. It seems to take a while to actually "find" the agent, and often I end up locating the agent well before "seek agent" finishes via other means. The "info" about the enemy agent is pretty much useless anyway - knowing their current identity is completely irrelevant, all we really need to know is their codename and their location. I'm also not 100% sure if "seek agent" always finds the agent's location - I'm pretty sure I've "found" an agent's ID, but not a location (possibly because the agent was between missions?).

Tail agent is hardly ever useful, since you usually end up locating enemy agents just by collecting signal analysis and doing missions. If you don't know the location of a cell, then "tail agent" will locate it - but similar to "seek agent", by the time the task completes and it locates the cell, I've usually found it already via other means (so "tail agent" comes back with a message saying it couldn't find anything).

I guess you could tail agents if they're doing recon but it's far away (so it causes 0 danger) - but of course the agents you send still get maxed out heat. Informers are a dime a dozen, so if I had a cell that's increasing danger and I didn't know where it was, I'd be happy to sacrifice an informer (however, it's likely that rescuing the informer would net the same information PLUS a free agent, so also not that useful).

If you have lots of "time" on the doomsday counter for whichever part of the plot you're on, you can always let them complete one of their "conspiracy plots". Again, you're better off assaulting the place instead.

Stakeout cell is the opposite of "tail agent" - it allows one to potentially locate agents (on "mission") that belong to a particular cell. Unfortunately since agents on "mission" seem to always be detected automatically anyway (as far as I can tell), this is also useless. This does tell you exactly where an agent is and what they're doing, instead of just a flashing "point of interest", so I guess it could save some time - except taking 4 agents and two days it's probably not worth it.

Stakeout cell doesn't seem to get results when it "finishes" though - as far as I can tell, it appears to get results throughout the two days, if any agents from that cell are on "mission" during that time.
Agreed with OP.

I'd bet that at some point in development of the game there was more emphasis on out-foxing the enemy on the strategic side, but it just didn't work that well so it's now mostly about tac missions. Why play cat and mouse when you can just barge in and get them.
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Peterus: Agreed with OP.

I'd bet that at some point in development of the game there was more emphasis on out-foxing the enemy on the strategic side, but it just didn't work that well so it's now mostly about tac missions. Why play cat and mouse when you can just barge in and get them.
A lot of these mechanics would have made much more sense if they were more necessary than they are now - that is, if (for example) the only way to detect enemy cells is via following an agent, or if it were possible for enemy agent "missions" (such as scout or plot) to not be detected by other means.

At the moment, scout/plot/etc. missions are ALWAYS detected - as in, even if we don't get this intel via the solving the intel board, we always get possible locations highlighted as flashing dots, and all that is required to detect the actual missions is sending agents to those locations.

It would be cool if, for example, it plot/scout/etc. missions would start (and potentially complete) without us ever being alerted to it - until they complete of course (e.g. we get some report that a scout has gathered intel, or a plot has destroyed a building or something). That would make this game feel much more like a true "spy game", where we're always trying to stay one step ahead of the enemy - instead of always being told "here are some locations" and being guaranteed that at least one of them will be an agent mission, and these always being discovered the instant the mission starts.

Naturally, we should definitely still be able to "detect" these via solving the intel board - but perhaps the intel board might have outdated data and not be a guaranteed way of finding certain missions. Possibly the intel board only provides those red blips (which we'd still have to investigate)? At the very least, it would be awesome if there were some kind of game mode where we don't get red blips without doing some kind of investigation first...

Hopefully there'll be some kind of mod support at some point to allow someone to add this - or possibly some kind of DLC... ? ;)

Actually what would be an awesome DLC/mod would be something that changes the strategic layer to be similar to that old classic "Covert Action". I loved the strategic part of that game - but I kind of hated almost all of the mini-games in it. Now, if the strategic part of "Covert Action" were to be combined with the tactical missions of Phantom Doctrine (plus the intel board, possibly with some kind of rework so that agents are actually required to be assigned to the board to extract the code words) - that would be really, really awesome.
Post edited November 06, 2018 by squid830