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Ran my first campaign on Expert meanwhile. I was mostly scraping by and escaping by the skin of my teeth. Still made it to the final mission with four agents, although one of them didn't even have any equipment at that point since I sold his empty handgun a while back. I got closer to pulling the final caper off than I expected, but ended up having pretty bad luck with the level layout since the two hotspots were as far away from each other as possible.

 

Interesting thing about this game, I guess, is that it's pretty easy to find yourself in a situation where you can no longer win, but pretty hard to just straight up lose. Like, I lost the guy I had sent to hack a console, but since the guards in that area showed no intention of ever moving towards my pile of pinned guards (Invisible Inc., more like Guards of Hanoi, really), I eventually got my agents into position for one to hand over medgel to another, and for that one to try and rescue her downed friend. Which she did, shortly before both of them got knocked out again. At this point I had all my remaining agents on pinning duty and thanks to the Volt Disruptor and surplus energy, what with everything important on the stage already being hacked, it took a pretty long time for my arrangement to no longer be stable. Even once most of my agents got knocked out, I managed to sneak one away into a far off corner that the twelve guards now running around like headless chickens showed no intention of ever investigating. After like ten more turns I had to actively go out of my way to end things.

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I still haven't ever seen an extra agent on a mission. The closest I ever got was having a courier that I was supposed to escort out of the building, which I screwed up, and didn't know how to reset the mission as opposed to resetting the entire day.

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You basically pick a mission that is a detention facility to get the extra agents.

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I have not seen one of those yet either. Is it necessary to do the missions that give you lists of more missions to find them? I typically avoid doing those as the options for new missions have been pretty poor.

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I'm not really sure how the types of missions are generated. I've always had one of those as an option, so I guess you've been unlucky. When you do see them definitely take them right away, I feel like having additional agents is the most cost effective (because it's free!) way to increase your power by a long shot!

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The Detention Centers come up on their own, although if you do a Site List mission after the first one, you get to pick a mission to add to the map from a short list (not sure if it covers all types) so that may be a way to increase the odds.

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Weird, maybe it's a difficulty thing. I've still only played two days on experienced (played one day, died, and now am a day into my next try.) 

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I don't think it's a difficulty level thing as I'm playing on the same difficulty level.

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Weird that you haven't seen any pop up, but maybe it's just bad luck. I saw my first one pretty late into my first run, near the end of Day 3. You should go for them when you get the chance though, extra operatives are among the most useful things you can get in the game. Even before you get any equipment for them they can help with scouting and keeping guards pinned down.

 

My second favorite ones are probably the vaults.

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It's just bad luck, detention centers come up like anything else. Extra agents are so good that if you don't have one, it's worth hitting executive terminals to find one. My next favorite mission is augment crafters, because I prioritize the armour-piercing passive highly (and because I always run Nika, who wants Predictive Brawling so badly), and I always hit terminals until I have parasite, something to beat demons, and either lockpick 2 or hammer. Vaults (and vault codes) are actually my lowest priority, every other mission has something I irreplaceably need, vaults just have bonus credits which will get sunk into agent speed.

 

For the longest time I favoured Hunter (5 power, ~3 recharge, kill one demon) over Ram (2 power, 0 recharge, randomly move one demon), but I just had a run where I was forced to take Ram, and holy crap it's so much better if you have Xu. Xu's disable bypasses demons, but a safe that's been opened with it still technically counts as firewalled, so Ram will still dump demons onto it. I played through three levels, and every single use of Ram sent a demon to somewhere I never intended to hack (audio bugs, safes, cameras in empty rooms, etc), it was just strictly better than Hunter.

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Finally got new agent missions on a new play last night, two in a row actually, and ended up screwing the second one up and losing. Oh well, I didn't have enough equipment for 3 agents, let alone 4.

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Hmm, so I'm running into a wall on experienced. In the second mission (so I have no option to have picked up any meaningful new equipment) there are rooms that have 3 people patrolling through them. This has happened three times in a row, and those rooms must be traveled through because the exit is behind them. I have no idea how to deal with this situation. I end up hanging around trying to figure out a gap in their patrol patterns until it is too late and more guards start to spawn and I eventually have to retire.

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Assuming there's no good cover, the solution to that is usually to lure guards out and KO them (use strategic door opening, or sprinting to attract attention). There's a slim chance that you just got an unbeatable room though, I've gotten armoured guards stationary on long coverless hallways, or null drones idling behind seven layers of unhackable security. Do you have a screenshot of the setup?

 

What are you doing that it takes so long to figure out a gap in their patrol pattern though? Most patrols are on a two turn cycle, and the longer ones are only a four turn cycle, how did you end up staring at patrols until more guards spawned?

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This last time, I was generally indecisive, running around try to attract attention, and I hacked a camera drone to make sure I really needed to go through that room. No screen shots unfortunately. I always forget the sprint is there though, so that might have been a good trick to keep in mind.

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The level generation seems to balance out across a longer campaign, but you definitely get some weird results. Sometimes it's a stationary guard staring at a wall at the end of a corridor that leads nowhere, sometimes it's a stationary guard staring down a corridor that you absolutely have to get through.

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Yay, thanks to the big sprint tip, I just beat it on Experienced. It involved two agents getting killed and the third running around the level like a chicken with her head cut off, but Central and Monst3r just barely squeaked into the mainframe room before someone saw them. My alarm level would have probably been 9 or so if it could go up past 6, and I didn't have a single armor piercing weapon, but I did it.

 

Also, the insanity of that mission showed me how flexible things can really be when things go to hell, so I think I'll be able to do a little bit better next time. For now, I'm going to take a break though.

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I purchased the whole set for 14 bucks the other day. Really great so far. Tempted to get a steamtroller for max TV play ease.

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I think the UI might be hard to see on a TV, unless you can force it to run at 720p or something?

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Just finished a campaign with the DLC. Maybe I shouldn't have set it to 120 hours, didn't know the DLC would slap an extra 48 hours on top of that, so by the end there I had pretty much every upgrade imaginable. I was hoping to find Ping or Parasite 2.0 along the way, but the passive programs I ended up finding instead ended up being pretty useful too. Controlling drones for an extra turn is pretty helpful when you can suddenly hold onto these huge killer drones for two turns instead of one and move them further out of the way. Daemons lasting two turns less became pretty great by the end of the game, especially when those agent-tracking, device-rebooting and hack-disabling debuffs in the final mission get knocked down to a single turn.

 

I'm curious what kind of team setups people prefer. I still really love Internationale as my main hacker, remotely getting power from consoles is super helpful and sensing devices through walls is great for getting parasites running early and figuring out the rough layout of the current mission. I tried backing her up with Sharp this time, and after raiding a couple of cyberlabs early to stack implants, his KO damage was high enough to disable guards for eight turns, a real comfortable window even when I wasn't pinning them down. I unlocked his archived version after this campaign, and I imagine getting passive armor piercing would be even nicer for the late game. I also ended up finding Olivia in a detention center (not sure how the game explains having two versions of the same person around), and her passive of generating power for KO damage she deals also seems nice. It meant I could either get back all the power I'd have to invest in more fancy disruptors, or use an unsuspecting, unarmed guard to generate some power. You even get power for attacking guards that are already down, so if you're feeling particularly cruel you could keep one around as a kind of human dynamo.

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I'm really surprised how different my runs have turned out.

 

My first run was based around the traditional starting duo of Decker & Internationale and as deadpan say she in particular can really shape the strategy a team takes, with my entire hacking strategy being based of her scout to allow me to be incredibly efficient with the aoe hack datablast.

 

My Second run has been utterly different, i started with Xu and NIka as my starting agents and a combination of seed and golem, which meant i was far more discriminating with my hacking but used virtually no power, instead most of my power usage shifted to shock traps and the tasers. I had 2 very early rescues snagging decker and shallam and picking up the Burst program, which changed my style of play even more because i now had a way of generating AP and power, but which required me to plan for the turns following its use. Finally i picked up a aug for shalem which means if he kills someone for 3 power it has no effect on the allarm.

 

That last one in particular was huge, now if i cant babysit a downed guard they simply get killed!

 

edit: i forgot to mention it but i actually prefer the way the missions play out in the 2nd half of the campaign (after what is i assume a dlc introduced event takes place), the new mission format forces me to break up my team far more often than i had to previously

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I'm curious what kind of team setups people prefer.

 

Haven't played with DLC yet, but Dr. Xu and Nika are easily my favorites. Xu's disable is used almost exclusively on safes (occasionally on droids), and it will save so much power compared to any other power-focused character (Internationale, Prism, etc). It also bypasses daemons which is fantastic.

 

Nika has two things going for her. First, two attacks per turn + bonus AP for attacking, + the implant that gives even more bonus AP for attacking, means that she can spend 30 AP in one turn (don't forget to zap already downed guards for bonus AP), and it's as great as that sounds. Second, two attacks per turn and a volt disruptor lets you down so many more guards than any other team. Normally you want to avoid aggroing too many guards because a starting team with two neural disruptors has a very limited rate of disabling, but Nika bypasses that issue entirely.

 

For hacking I like to start with Mercenary (it's the only starting hack that isn't totally obsolete by the lategame) and either Fusion or Dynamo. RIP old, super-overpowered Fusion. I prefer Ram to Hunter for dealing with daemons, there are so many objects I never hack that Ram is reliably more efficient (if you Xu open a safe, the safe still counts as a hackable that Ram might dump to). Other than that I like Lockpick 2, Parasite 2, Hammer, and Ping.

 

My most important items are armour-piercing weapons and armour-piercing augments for Nika (always keep cash available for them), after that I like holographic terrain and tier 2 or 3 cloaking devices. The power-producing augment is always nice, after that none of the common items are especially memorable.

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I think they might have changed some stuff about Xu. I didn't really get to test that theory, since it was in an Expert campaign I started today where I immediately ate shit, but when I disabled safes to loot them, they didn't show up as hackable objects afterwards. Or is that how it's always been?

 

Also Volt Disruptors have cooldowns now, I'm pretty sure that is new.

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Hahaha oh man, I haven't played the DLC yet, but that reminds me that coming back to a strategy game you played awhile ago because of new DLC/an expansion pack is always such a surreal experience as you struggle to try and figure out if something seems different because they changed it up or because you are simply misremembering things.

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