I played the game for about 2 hours and kept using my Evil Genius to kill intruders but that got him killed…so had to restart…but with some good stating info from online sites and now I’m doing better and understanding it more.
Press Z to set up auto distract/capture zones after you research it.
This sucks. The Startopia remake suffered the same indignities. Why can’t anyone do these right?
I will say you Tom, that the original wasn’t also that good of a game. It had a novel concept, style and a great ost, but it never was very popular for good reason. I think some people have forgotten that with the years, only remembering the good parts.
I think what they’ve done is taken the Dungeon Keeper blueprint and slathered a bunch of mobile Clash of Clans busyness over top of it. I turn it on and I’m stuck for hours, but I’m not really enjoying any of it. Bizarre.
There do seem to be a lot of plates to spin.
The world map game in particular is really annoying busywork. Once I made a couple of laser hallways my lair is more or less protected, the majority of my time is spent managing Heat on the world map and specialist minions to complete quests on same. DK did it much better by having digestible levels where you get to actually reach a win state over and over, this is more of a grind with no real idea of what the end state is going to be.
Other big annoyance that I’m not yet sure is valid, it seems at Tech Tree 3, it invalidates all of your old research areas and technology completely, and now your scientists are just World Table fodder? Bah.
The world map is some terrible UI. Even a simple tabular view would be far better. I hate having to hunt around the screen to figure out what’s idle, available, etc.
I stopped trying to keep a scheme going all the time in every region. I think I was making a mistake by doing so. The cost in minions becomes overwhelming, and the helicopter can’t keep up with dropping them all off anyway. It seems better to just pull occasional money jobs when the cash infusion is really needed and reduce heat when necessary. Once you have a lot of operations set up the passive income isn’t bad.
This is completely true. The game was kinda fun for a while and the concept seemed like it had tons of promise, but it never really came together and at some point descended into micromanaging constant superagent attacks. Setting up elaborate traps to confound the do-gooders was a big point of undelivered promise. Traps were practically useless.
While I’m enjoying the bit I’ve played so far, I do fear that the sequel just updated the game a bit without addressing the issues that made it mediocre.
I’m the kind of person who is usually happy to buy games I’m on the fence about, try them for 2 hours and refund them if I don’t find myself enraptured, but this thread makes it sound like even that would be a waste of time which is a shame.
I love the premise of these kind of games but the truth is I don’t think I have more than 20-30 hours in any of them so I must not really enjoy them outside of the premise.
If you’re interested in this type of game just get War for the Overworld, a Dungeon Keeper update that perfectly captures the feeling of indirectly controlling your evil minions. Evil Genius was always a cheap Dungeon Keeper knock-off.
This is disappointing. I really liked the original. I have not played this yet, but I still own a copy. Its looking more and more like I should just refund my purchase and maybe wait for some kind of GOTY super sale or something.
It just seems that there are so many games I look forward to coming out, but when they do, they end up as duds. In the past few months alone it was Cyberpunk, Breathedge, and now this.
If you really liked the original, I doubt you’d consider this a dud. Most of its failings are those of the original, or not doing enough to modernise it. It absolutely feels like the original game, to a fault. Though there are also some weird things about worker priorities that are sui generis and hopefully will get addressed.
Also: I can second War for the Overworld.
I should spend more time with War for the Overworld. Liked what I played, no idea why I put it down. Something new and shiny, no doubt.
I played EG1 through about six times once it became free. I had a lot of free time since my company and customers (mainly automotive) were mostly, if not entirely, shutdown for a few months. And I like figuring out the weak side of a game’s NPC AI as well as trying all the options available (in relatively simple games).
I agree that EG2 appears to be nearly an exact refresh of EG1. New graphics are great and some of the previous bugs appear fixed. And there are some small minor differences in the mechanics that I have played through so far, but nothing revolutionary by any means.
Most interesting to me is that this is the first game I have encountered that asks at the start up screen whether I want to play in Vulkan or DX12 for each session. I have tried both and can’t tell a difference. Anyone else?
M.
The game has gotten much better after I stopped trying to constantly do schemes on the main map. Now I’m just focusing on keeping heat down when the bar gets over half full, and only having maybe one or two cash missions going at most. I think this has also reduced agent activity, or perhaps I’m just assuming the lower overall heat should. I’ve finally dedicated some research to traps and have set up a little entry area with a wind trap that pushes into bumpers that lead to freeze and boxing glove traps. My valet force so far has managed to keep any agents from wandering into it but I’m sure it will get tested soon.
I’m getting a little annoyed with how investigators decide to murder one of my minions and then take pictures of the valet or worker they just killed as evidence. I wish I could figure out what triggers them. Does a failed distraction attempt result in murder?
Also it would be nice if the game didn’t feel the need to tell me “training is stalled” every five seconds when the reason training is stalled is there’s a red alert.
YMMV, my experience was that investigators, (the basic model that comes in constantly) would get killed by traps and then the other ones would take pictures and hit their Suspicion threshold, then peace out to report back. Generally speaking I never saw them initiate aggression unless I tagged one of them for capture or death.
Re: Training stalled, you just have to let them get back to it, they will eventually.
They come in to the hall I have off the cover operation. I have a camera there with the zone set to distract. Sometimes it works and my guys distract them and take them back to the cover operation. Sometimes the agents start killing.
I’ve given up on the game. I think I’m stuck with a bug. There’s a side story I can’t finish as the mission for it does not present on the map. It’s the Death Mote one. I have to cause a lock down in each Hammer region. It can’t be done through heat build up, only though a special mission. One of the regions doesn’t show the mission. Because the side story is stuck I can’t take another one, so I can’t get the karate minion type needed to continue to main story. I haven’t even seen the side story to get the minion to give level 3 tech. The game feels like a 100 hour tutorial in that respect.
I don’t know if this has cause things to progress too far as I’ve been in fast forward for a long time hoping the mission would show up. Now even with the difficulty on easy super agents keep coming in and slaughtering scores minions. There are a lot of different super agents now. Some of them spawn inside your base so there’s nothing you can do to keep them out. The worst one is the one that’s supposed to be a thief. The “heist” guys that come with them are super powerful. I frankly just want to let the take the money and go, but eventually combat triggers and half my base is in body bags.
The issue with training stalled isn’t that training is stalled, is that the warning repeats ad-infinitum until it starts again. When you hit red alert, training stops, but it still keeps repeating the alert over and over and over until I end the red alert and people get back to the room. I know training stopped, I stopped it, and if I didn’t know I’d know after the first 10 times it repeats the warning. It’s just annoying.
Well, yeah. I really wanted to love this game, but not so much. Only last tip is the superagents, you can do side stories to calm them down for a bit.