Put about 6 or so hours into it.
Wrestled with the control scheme a bit at first, mainly because when you try to build or select your Genius or w/e, the movement keys for the camera become locked. But screen edge panning still works?
So far it more or less seems like an across the board upgrade. It looks very nice, even though some of that is purely cosmetic fluff.
It definitely feels grindier though. Money seems to flow around pretty quickly. For example, there's multiple tiers of rock to cut out of your base that you need to research for. I unlocked the second tier of rock diggery and went to expand my power plant room that was along the edge of the (previously) undiggable rock....the same space in dirt cost like $8k to $10k....this cost like $100k. And that's Tier 2 of I think 3 or 4.
Global Missions had me a little confused at first too, and to some extent still have me confused. You have jobs that consume minions, that take (so far) either 3 mins or 20-30 mins to complete, and net either $10, $15k or $20k. They generate 15 or 30 heat.
Obviously, the $10k job is just....better? You get cash faster with less heat. 30 mins in this game is a long time, especially if you're pausing all the time.
And heat, as far as I can tell, is a number that when it maxes out locks down the area so you can't do new missions or upgrade the spy network there for a few minutes. Then it resets to zero. Because this is the tutorial, I have no doubt some stuff that's supposed to happen is currently turned off. What I think happens is when you max out your heat and the area locks down, you earn a little "rep" with the Force of Justice that controls that region, driving up their response when they eventually decide to investigate you, which is probably tutorial locked at the moment.
There's also missions you can run to completely eliminate heat from that region (although not your rep with the FOJ in that region....) They range from taking like 30 seconds to complete, to 20 minutes, and cost $5k or $10k. I spent a lot of money in the early game doing this and basically offsetting my earnings, thinking that if Heat maxed out I'd have agents of justice showing up. But that doesn't seem to be the case....yet?
Missions feel weirdly balanced from a risk reward perspective. At least right now. I'm sure once missions that require specific minion types unlock that the trade offs will seem more interesting/strategic. Right now though I just cue up the fast easy money, stop paying attention to heat (since it goes up naturally over time as soon as you set up a criminal network there, which means the bar inevitably fills up at some point.) To the point I have to keep expanding my treasury (and of course unlock "item wot lets you store more money per tile.") This is on Medium difficulty and I'm still clearly mid tutorial. Like I said, money just seems to kinda slosh around in thousands here, thousands there.
The fact missions consume minions is also kind of at odds which the fact they have traits and you're supposed to seem to care about at least some of them? (I've seen traits like "Really wants to be a technician" or "fast reflexes" or "sniper shot.") But there's not a good what I can see to either decide who promotes to what via training, or who gets sent on what mission and gets eaten. Minions seem to kinda work like cash right now, everything is staggered. You don't earn $10k from a mission upon completion, you earn $10k over 3 minutes. Your minion isn't really "gone" until the mission is actually over. The game seems to fudge a lot of things in order to keep everything flowing. And that seems at odds with any sort of micromanagement of your minions. Right now I pretty much just trust that my ranks will auto refill themselves over time. I spend minions on missions, the game brings new ones in all the time. (I think every 60 seconds.) It works but F trying to identify ones worth keeping or firing.
I just got done unlocking covert operations and minions, and so far they seem about as useless as they were in the first game. After having covert operations set up, gambling tables, bars, etc...the game is still telling me the income I've earned from that is zero. Several agents have walked through the whole area and not stopped or been lured by anything, whether they flagged to distract or not. When I flagged an investigator to capture, as instructed by the tutorial, one of my workers promptly ran out into the casino and started fist fighting them, got killed, left a body which the investigator then photographed. He seemed primed to run back to the docks along with all the panicking tourists but instead decided to walk toward my base where he promptly got beat up by an actual guard.
So without having spent a whole lot of time poking it, or doing anything other than repurposing the front of the house area already provided by the game, right now the whole "covert resort to keep enemies out of your base" seems as pointless as the first game. By and large none of it ever meaningfully stopped or delayed decent enemy agents in the first game, and just gave them a bunch of your stuff to start smashing before inevitably heading into your base. I hope unlocking more stuff in the second game proves otherwise. I don't have security cameras and a lot of stuff unlocked yet. Don't even have Henchmen unlocked.
I also don't have multi-level bases unlocked yet which....man almost seems like overkill. Bases can have 5 or more levels, which is crrraazzzzyyyyy. Maybe that's why everything is so grindy and cash seems like it kinda matters more in this. There's a lot of base you can build, and no doubt end up moving things around as more space becomes available. Maybe the whole covert ops thing works better when an entire floor of your base is a disguise.
Anyways, it seems like a pretty chillaxed game so far. Looking forward to spending more time with it.
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Topic: Evil Genius (Read 34483 times)