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The game has added an easy-mode and the normal difficulty has gotten significantly harder. I like the changes. More enemy types, more daemons, everything feels incredibly costly in the very first mission. The first mission feels like it has the difficulty that the third or fourth used to have. I love the feeling that I may have to bail at any given moment, even the first heist can get fucked up. This is going to be a great game. 

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I just bought this after stumbling upon a vid of Tom Francis doing a brief Lets Play. Considering the age of this thread (and the thread before it) it feels like I'm late to the party... and yet the game is still in "early access" so maybe there isn't a party to be early or late to.

 

The game is rad. It's very successfully the kind of thing that feels obvious and like something someone would've explored many times before, and yet it's fairly unique as far as I'm aware. What an exiting and fortunate space for a game to be in.

 

I've made a couple annoying mis-steps (not fully understanding the consequences of certain moves, accidentally selling unique items and realizing there's no undo or buy-back) but these aside, I have no complaints. It's the game I start to think about as the end of the day approaches.

 

I haven't played it a ton, though, so I don't have a sense for how much stuff there is to play with down the road. My long term interest in this game probably depends on the amount and variety of stuff (items, moves, enemy types, etc). Hopefully there's a lot, or they'll keep adding more.

 

Also, I'm not sure but I assume the tileset I'm seeing is the only one in the game. If so, that's a bit of a bummer. I'm not tired of it yet, but entering a new kind of area with different aesthetics is one of the big joys of contemporary rogue-derivative games.

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I love Invisible Inc.. I played a bunch of it and hit a few bumps after a lot of playing and it just became a game that I'll come back to once it has more content to find out about. As a system it works very well.

Both Rust and Offworld Trading Company have similar roles in my library. I'm just like "Oh yeah, this is great, I'll check in on you in a couple of months." And then I do and Rust is still lacking in essential features.

Maybe I'll load it up tonight. Last time I played, they had just introduced drones and made the first two levels much harder. I found myself doing things out of habit that were no longer very effective. That's when I decided to let it ferment a bit.

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So this game officially released. I played a bit of it about two weeks ago, and wow, the difference between the 1.0 release and the later early access build is impressive. I think I could stand to live without the cut scenes, but whatever. It's basically the same game from two weeks ago, but there are so many impressive quality of life improvements to the game that I'm actually excited about playing it now!

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I don't think there are any other environments? I finished a campaign on easy and didn't notice any others.

 

I really enjoyed the game, and the structure (short, repeatable campaign that unlocks more tools/characters) is neat. Difficulty felt just right; the game is tough, but 5 rewinds is pretty forgiving and the game gives you some time to learn on easy missions. The unlocks I got seem significant and kinda interesting, so I'm looking forward to upping the challenge a little bit and playing through again.

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I think I could stand to live without the cut scenes

 

I hate all of the cut scenes, voiced dialogue, and increased animation since Early Access. Having played the game before they were in, every time I'm forced to spend a second watching the plane fly across the globe, or click through the opening text I think "A month ago the game wasn't wasting my time with this". I also noticed that guards spawned from alert levels now seem to have loot, which means if you can take the difficulty, you should now max out your alert level and check the pockets of every guard spawned to maximize your payout, gross.

 

Those are minor issues though, the core game is still fun, and pretty much the same as when it was in EA. My main complaint is that I wish that the game tried a bit to bell curve your rewards rather than generating them completely at random. You can get some pretty huge swings in power level from the right items (holographic terrain is practically god mode, and you're fucked if you can't assemble enough armour-piercing weapons and augments by the endgame), and finding an extra agent in a detention center is still about four times as good as any of the other mission rewards.

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I played through the beginner mode of this game last night. I hadn't played since waaaaaaay back in early access and I like what they've done with it. I remember in the early days it felt impossible to win anything. Maybe it was the low difficulty setting, but it felt more satisfying to me this time. I'm excited to play on normal mode and explore different item combinations and stuff. Plus I'm a sucker for unlockable characters, so I'll probably play it until I catch 'em all.

 

...and you're fucked if you can't assemble enough armour-piercing weapons and augments by the endgame

 

Yeah, I hear ya Ninety-Three! That's what happened to me in the last mission. One guy was impossible for me to kill or stun, so I had to do some complex bait-and-cloak to get him to move out of the way so Monst3r could get in place and open a terminal. But that was kind of fun too. Until that moment, I'd never had to bait anyone anywhere. I'm hoping stuff like that becomes more useful/prevalent at higher difficulty levels.

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Yeah, I hear ya Ninety-Three! That's what happened to me in the last mission. One guy was impossible for me to kill or stun, so I had to do some complex bait-and-cloak to get him to move out of the way so Monst3r could get in place and open a terminal. But that was kind of fun too. Until that moment, I'd never had to bait anyone anywhere. I'm hoping stuff like that becomes more useful/prevalent at higher difficulty levels.

 

That is incredibly disappointing. I bought the game on the strength of the Three Moves Ahead podcast, wherein both Rob and the designers of Invisible, Inc went on about how they hated FTL for having an endgame that required a very specific kit to beat and how Invisible, Inc didn't have anything like that.

 

Oh well, I'm still enjoying it, and once I know what the endgame expects of me, I'll be able to focus on that.

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It's not as extreme a situation as FTL, but it isn't a totally flexible system like playing an old Thief games where you had a lot of freedom how to approach the levels.

 

The 3MA episode was a bit of a softball and didn't feel like much of a critical appraisal. 

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It's not as extreme a situation as FTL, but it isn't a totally flexible system like playing an old Thief games where you had a lot of freedom how to approach the levels.

 

The 3MA episode was a bit of a softball and didn't feel like much of a critical appraisal. 

 

I generally don't like it when their first coverage of a game on TMA is an interview with the developer, especially just after release. Rob often gets caught up in the glow, although not nearly as much as Fraser, and doesn't really seem comfortable asking any hard questions except for "why is your game so difficult for me to beat," which is fine if the game is great, but not all games are great. Invisible, Inc seems great, but I'm just miffed that such a half-truth was agreed upon by everyone on the podcast.

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Oh well, I'm still enjoying it, and once I know what the endgame expects of me, I'll be able to focus on that.

 

By the endgame, there will be guards with 2 armour. If you're lucky, you can dodge them, or do some fancy bait and cloak shenanigans, but it's possible to end up needing to KO them (once, on the second mission, the only exit from the starting room was a hallway with a stationary Armour 1 guard staring down it, no cover to be had. KO necessary, and no armour-piercing weapons had even spawned on level 1  :(  :(  :( ).

 

The other big thing is that the endgame will demand you break so many firewalls. I don't feel comfortable unless I have two  "DPS" programs with different characteristics (ideally Hammer and Parasite 2), plus a way of generating extra PWR (Prism straight-up generates PWR, Xu or anyone with an EMP generates virtual PWR by disabling things rather than requiring a hack, or anyone with Hacking skill and a Portable Console). Unlike with armour-piercing, I've never felt like I got screwed because the game didn't spawn hacking stuff, but it's important to know to prioritize it.

 

Disclaimer: This is based on playing with Fusion for PWR generation, I haven't played much since Seed came out, but it looks like it could make hacking way easier if you can reliably get a program that can use all the Seed PWR.

 

Also, extra agents are, while not necessary, five times better than all other rewards so prioritize detention centers above all else.

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I generally don't like it when their first coverage of a game on TMA is an interview with the developer, especially just after release. Rob often gets caught up in the glow, although not nearly as much as Fraser, and doesn't really seem comfortable asking any hard questions except for "why is your game so difficult for me to beat," which is fine if the game is great, but not all games are great. Invisible, Inc seems great, but I'm just miffed that such a half-truth was agreed upon by everyone on the podcast.

 

I'd say 3MA episodes are a mixed bag when it comes to interviews with developers. I recall Rob being very critical in the Naval War: Arctic Circle episode. On the other hand, it does seem like something they've shied away from in more recent episodes. The last critical one I recall was when they brought on Jake Solomon to talk about XCOM, and there were some pointed questions asked, and people on these forums basically accused them of being disrespectful which I thought was odd. I'm never sure how much they actually read the forums, but I sort of wonder if that might have had any impact.

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Also Ninety-Three's complaint about the two armor point guards brought up another complaint I have about the game -- there aren't enough ways to distract the guards! Being able to open/close doors to get guards to investigate is so useful, and I think it sucks that if you're in a situation where there isn't a conveniently placed door your ability to outsmart guards is pretty limited.

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Also Ninety-Three's complaint about the two armor point guards brought up another complaint I have about the game -- there aren't enough ways to distract the guards! Being able to open/close doors to get guards to investigate is so useful, and I think it sucks that if you're in a situation where there isn't a conveniently placed door your ability to outsmart guards is pretty limited.

 

Well there's my favorite program Ping, but I only get that on ~50% of runs. There's one other major source of distraction (though it's limited by several situational factors): you can deliberately sprint to attract a guard's attention.

 

Overall I agree though, you mostly either KO guards, or stealth them, and that feels like a deliberate design choice, the guards are more like terrain obstacles than enemies. I sometimes wonder if the devs were trying to produce a Far Cry 2-esque "shit hits the fan" cascade of errors simulator, because the game takes on an interesting and completely different tone when things start to go wrong, but the game is so punishing that it often just quickly leads to an agent death followed by a restart.

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I haven't come across ping yet. What a bummer.

 

And yeah, the game really doesn't provide a lot of space to get out of bad situations. If one of your agents dies it does seem like 95% of the time you should probably just start all over because most likely you aren't coming back from that.

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You're missing out. Ping costs 1 PWR, has 3 recharge, and lets you click anywhere on the map to generate a sound, which guards will go investigate (I don't think this will draw their attention away if they're already investigating something else). It's too powerful to just start with it in inventory, but I can imagine an interesting version of the game where you start with a higher PWR cost Ping as part of your toolbox.

 

Maybe I should mod that, that seems really fun, and like it would go a decent way towards mitigating some of the less fair RNG-screw.

 

Edit: It totally does distract guards who are already investigating something, though not if they have "hunting" status. This EA thing has messed me up, I have no idea if it changed, or I'm imagining that it used to work that way.

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Ping is pretty cool! It's really handy for tight spots. Cloaking is also really handy for that. Once I got cornered by a guard and was like "Aw, man, I don't wanna kill this dude..." but then realized I had a cloaking rig so "poof!" I vanished and ran for the elevator instead.

 

Internationale is amazing - I only played on beginner difficulty so far, but I can imagine that an Internationale with a maxed out hacking skill is one of the most useful agents in the game. Being able to draw power from consoles remotely was a HUGE benefit in the final mission. Because like Ninety-Three says, there's a ton of stuff to hack. Being able to blunder around and draw power from every room just by skirting the walls of the main room saves a lot of time. And in every other mission, it was still a really great tool to have.

 

Also, for hacking, I found a cool item called a prototype chip (I think?). I forget exactly what it was called. But basically, it allows you to store up to 10 PWR in it and then you can carry it on an agent who can hack stuff with the chip instead of Incognita. The PWR that you store on the chip stays constant between missions. I found it early enough that I was able to store max PWR on it throughout the course of the game, and then it was a great asset in the final mission when I started running out of PWR.

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The 3MA episode was a bit of a softball and didn't feel like much of a critical appraisal. 

 

I kinda agree, but I felt like this was cause the hosts hadn't played enough of the game; I don't think either of them had finished, and the issues that folks in this thread are talking about seem (to me, anyway) to be ones that are more serious on higher difficulties. 

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Ping saved my ass yesterday, 4 guys swarming around the room i needed to escape through. Then my other agent got caught with her pants down, so...:( This game is tense as hell, i'm enjoying it so much.

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I kinda agree, but I felt like this was cause the hosts hadn't played enough of the game; I don't think either of them had finished, and the issues that folks in this thread are talking about seem (to me, anyway) to be ones that are more serious on higher difficulties. 

 

I'm playing at normal difficulty! Maybe I'm just bad at the game :-(

 

I finally got ping last night, excited!

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I kinda agree, but I felt like this was cause the hosts hadn't played enough of the game; I don't think either of them had finished, and the issues that folks in this thread are talking about seem (to me, anyway) to be ones that are more serious on higher difficulties. 

 

I just beat the game on Beginner (wow, the end comes fast, I can see the appeal of an endless mode) and it's a bit odd that Rob never beat it. I was not at all prepared for two-armor foes and seven-strength firewalls, but I still managed to beat it without any deaths on my team. The idea that Rob had never beat the game, when it was relatively simple on an easier difficulty, makes me feel weird.

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Got this recently after many recommendations and I've enjoyed it so far.

 

I only played two campaigns, but both of those took me all the way to beating the final mission. The first was a pretty straightforward run on Beginner difficulty where I only picked up another agent towards the end of the game, but didn't really have time to level them up, so I mostly used him as another paperweight for guards (which across all turns and all agents is probably their most common occupation). Second run was on Medium difficulty and I upped the length to five days, so by the end of that I had four agents with maxxed out speed and decent marks and equpiment across the board. Everything went pretty smoothly until the final mission, but that one was a bit of a close call.

 

I only had one guy who could take out the guards with level 3 armor and the very first guard I knocked out triggered a Daemon that locked me out of hacking for three turns. I ended up wasting all my rewinds pretty early on when I poked around too much and a guard wandered into the starting room where most of my crew was still hanging about. After rewinding a few turns, I got incredibly lucky when a camera drone (!) opened a door on which I had accidentally (!!) put a shock trap, and so knocked out not only itself, but the guard on the other side of the door (!!!), who was just taking aim on one of my agents (!!!!). Fast forward a bit and I have two agents still in the starting room pinning down two guards and regularly injecting them with paralyzers, one agent outside pinning down the two guards that collapsed on top of each other from my tranq darts and another who just knocked out one more. Took quite a bit of rearranging to deal with the constant reinforcements. Turns out you can't drop guards on a tile already occupied by another, but you can drag them there at least, although that does mean your agent can't do anything else while holding these two down.

 

I lost one agent just before everything wrapped up. In the next few turns like five more guards would have woke up directly on top of me, but it worked out. Just so.

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The more I think about it, the weirder the ending is. The ending cutscene crams in about three times as much plot as the rest of the game put together, and I wonder why Klei decided to get plotty all of a sudden. Plus the cutscene tends to not fit what's going on: I've had Monst3r getting cutscene-panicked about incoming guards when every single guard in the level is either dead or heavily sedated and being dragged.

The first time I saw the cutscene, I was so annoyed that Central just gives up on unplugging it after getting a little zapped. I was thinking to myself "I have a team right outside with a nuclear-powered plasma rifle, I bet that'll solve th- no, just walking away? Okay then. Cool cutscene bro."

 

My favorite team is Xu and Nika. Xu disabling safes saves so much power, and his shock trap gets useful in the lategame where it has infinite armour penetration. NIka's base augment, plus Predictive Brawling (seemingly the most common aug) plus a volt disruptor gives her two attacks every turn, and +9 AP per attack. As long as there aren't a lot of high armour guys, it feels like you can just chainsaw through anything without regard for stealth. She can even taze a downed guard to trigger the AP boost when no one's still standing.

 

It took me a while to realize that rewinds refresh with each mission, I'm used to the EA system where you got X rewinds across a playthrough. Even just the one rewind per mission on expert feels strong, letting me push my luck and try to find the last safe on a completed level, three or even five rewinds must feel like infinite take-backsies where you don't have to worry about making mistakes.

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Once I realized that rewinds could be chained, I agree it ended up being overpowered. Up until then I was assuming you could only do one at a time, which isn't necessarily very helpful depending on how long it takes you to realize you're screwed.

 

I just beat this the first time through on Beginner. I had a really hard time at first, because I assumed that if a guard ever wakes up, that the counter would go wild or something. The moment I had to stun one guard, I had an agent pinning him down for the rest of the level and tried to make do with just one available. Then came the inevitable time when i had three guys down and was running around playing wack-a-mole. Once I figured out it isn't the biggest panic if they do wake up, the rest of the game was much easier. I made it through the 2nd and 3rd day without having to restart a mission a single time.

 

I'm looking forward to boosting it up to experienced.

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