Invisible Inc.

[Sranchammer]

Or fight against a enemy group

 

[Zetor]

Picked this up last weekend (w/ DLC), figured it'd be a good time to try it out. Playing on experienced (because I need to git masochistic gud first). How long is the campaign, by the way? I'm at around 30 ingame hours remaining from the main mission, and with the level 3 shield missions the enemies are becoming a lot more numerous + annoying...

I went with Internationale and Derek to start, their abilities (ranged hacking, teleport) looked WAY better than the others. Recruited Xu and Nika so far, but the team weaponry situation is kinda sad. I have the shocker Internationale started with and managed to find a thermal shocker thing in a fabricator, but Derek's used up his dart gun's entire ammo stock (2, lol) in the first two runs, so those two tazers are all I got. At least Xu can use that EMP thing against robots and Derek can teleport plus beat some people up, but Nika only seems to be good for pinning enemies down. Internationale is a clear MVP -- ranged hacking combined with a +1 KO aug I picked up in some mission is pretty crazy. Monst3r seems to be selling mostly useless shit (if he's selling anything at all), so I've just been dumping my credits into stat upgrades, mainly speed... I may or may not have screwed up there.

Don't suppose there's a way to reliably get more weapons / ammo (400 per charge pack seems crazy)?

 

[spectre]

Don't suppose there's a way to reliably get more weapons / ammo (400 per charge pack seems crazy)?

Max level of anarchy makes it more likely to find additional items on guards, some of them might be ammo, or stuff you can sell to buy ammo.
It also gives you more money, and you will want to maximize your cash gains in a mission so that the 400 credits won't put a dent in your wallet.
There are ranged weapons that don't need ammo, flurry gun can only be used once per mission and biogenic dart has a pretty hefty cooldown.
Generally, you will want to rely on +KO implants and handheld zappers for economy, ammo based weapons should be used for emergencies until money is no longer an issue.
For killing, there is a three-shot pistol available. You will need some armor piercing on the agent using it, but it's the most economic way to spend ammo.

If you need good stuff, you're at the rng's mercy, but you should do security dispatches and nanofab missions.
Nanofab missions have a very good selection of items (though no guaranteed items) because there are two stations in a mission.
Security dispatches are totally random, but you get an item for free (meaning it saves you up to 1,5k depending on what you find).

Nika only seems to be good for pinning enemies down.

She takes some investment to git gud. +6AP on KO augment is a great way to cover ground (you need lots of pwr and volt disruptor or multiple zappers for it),
and can also fire the flurry gun twice. With stim III you get a grand total of 3 attacks per turn.
All in all, she's there to clean up when shit hits the fan.

 

[Zetor]

Good info, thanks! I ended up getting a dart gun and a tazer for Nika so she can pop moles each turn if needed.

Difficulty took a pretty big jump when I reached the end of the story's time limit (which ended up adding another 48 hours after a two-part mission): the "advanced response" system gives enemy dudes 4 armor after the first alarm threshold, I can't even hurt them... and it's getting to be pretty hard to avoid confrontation entirely with all their anti-stealth gadgets. I ended up pumping Nika's str to the max so she can punch out at least the 4-armor ones with that 3 AP tazer in upcoming fights. Does enemy armor get any higher than that?

 

[Athelas]

Keep in mind that avoiding guards is usually the superior option (although it does often require you to patiently 'sit it out' for a turn or two), so lacking offensive options is not as big of a deal as it might seem. There are shock traps which ignore armor by the way.

Good info, thanks! I ended up getting a dart gun and a tazer for Nika so she can pop moles each turn if needed.

Difficulty took a pretty big jump when I reached the end of the story's time limit (which ended up adding another 48 hours after a two-part mission): the "advanced response" system gives enemy dudes 4 armor after the first alarm threshold, I can't even hurt them... and it's getting to be pretty hard to avoid confrontation entirely with all their anti-stealth gadgets. I ended up pumping Nika's str to the max so she can punch out at least the 4-armor ones with that 3 AP tazer in upcoming fights. Does enemy armor get any higher than that?

I haven't played the new DLC content, but before that, guards could have 10 armor, although it was possible to strip it off using Incognita (at a PWR cost).

 

[Zetor]

Hmm, it may be a DLC thing, but the new alert responses after that mission make it much harder to avoid guards. They change their patrol routes as early as tier 1 (+1 armor comes at tier 2 actually), and agents get revealed all the time at tier 4-5 (I think), so I have to use some agents as bait and just run them around while my useful agents take care of the objective (Derek's teleport is pretty great for that). I do use shock traps, but they're less useful when guards can be coming from 2-3 directions at once like in that two-stage lab mission. Then again, I just started playing, so I still have a ways to go before passing the "git gud" threshold!

I saw the 10 armor guards, but dealing with them is fairly straightforward plus there doesn't seem to be more than one or two of them. The main issue is when half of the grunts have armor 4.

e: and I just realized that max strength adds to KO duration instead of AP. Good thing I have two shock traps now...

 

[spectre]

Yep, sending guards on a goose chase is very effective. While program space is very tight, Ping is very sufeul for just that purpose, but so is running around.

The armor thing is basically stuff you have to take into account and plan for. In vanilla, the go to value was 3. The 10 Armor guys iirc can be hacked to lower ther rating.
As you have already found out, shock traps are quite effective at that, and so is holocircuit overloader aug.

It's something to consider when planning subsequent playthroughs, sheds some light on agents you would otherwise undervalue, like normal Shalem. He looks pretty weak compared to other options, but you do get Armor Piercing 2 straight off the bat.
Same goes for archived.Sharp.
Similarly, Decker's starter pack can get eclipsed quite soon into the game, but there's a guaranteed cloak on him. Few things feel as shitty as finding an early holocircuit aug, but then the rng gives you the middle finger when it comes to cloaks.
It's a roguelike at heart, so it's all part of the game.

 

[Zetor]

Finished Expert (without the DLC and with rewinds because I'm a scrub). I was getting milk runs for most of the game, my favorite was the cyberlab mission where the cyberlab was directly next to the entrance, and the elevator was like 5 tiles away from it, with the rest of the map being a pure loot-fest. I was getting a bit concerned about not getting anything with AP (except for a 2-shot AP1 tranq rifle and the AP2 bio-dart gun) and only getting Dagger to supplement Rapier for haxxoring, but no big deal, right? Then, in the last mission, THIS layout happened.

haha fuck you

The only guard that had the red keycard was one of the patrolling harbingers whom I had to avoid like the plague (my attempt to pickpocket the key quickly turned into a rewind, fuck those guys), so I had to take the long way around. Everything I had to hack had really bad daemons on it (validate, paradox, labyrinth) so I had to drain my power on Taurus before hacking them with basically just Rapier and Dagger 1.0. The only weapons that could pierce 3 armor were Xu's shock trap and Monst3r's gun -- I tried to use it once and got Validate, so nope. I had to dedicate Decker and Prism to be full-time distractions, it was a miracle they didn't get gibbed (Decker's cloak helped a bit). It's kinda silly that a guard will forget an agent's known location (via scan grenade or daemon) by someone making some really loud footsteps in the opposite direction...

 

[SausageInYourFace]

So the DLC sure spices things up a bit but maaan, that fucking feeling when you barely made it to the teleporter only to realize you can't just teleport out anymore and you forgot to grab the newly introduced teleport McGuffin..

Every. Fucking. Time.



Another variation of making it through an insanely tight security to a vault full of loot, only to notice that you forgot to bring your vault card.

 

[dukeofwhales]

Another variation of making it through an insanely tight security to a vault full of loot, only to notice that you forgot to bring your vault card.

I know it's casual but I wish that if I had a vault card in my storage that it would remind me that it wasn't equipped before I entered a vault mission.

 

[Gondolin]

I know it's casual but I wish that if I had a vault card in my storage that it would remind me that it wasn't equipped before I entered a vault mission.

Yeah, this. I keep forgetting them, too.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Lollers, just finished a story playthrough with Contingency Plan.

By the end of the game, my 3 agents (Prism, Sharp, Banks) all had max stats, max cybers (INCLUDING Sharp and his 6 slots) and maxed inventory (including 3 stims, 2 emp bombs, 1 shock trap, 2 paralyzers, 2 neuro darts, 4 highest-tier tazers and 2 ventricular lances) and I also had all the programs I wanted on Incognita. And yet I had 5k spare cash that I couldn't possibly hope to spend.

Sharp had melee AP 4, predictive brawling and KO damage 7. Combined with those two paralyzers, I basically went through each mission knocking every guard out and leaving the level before any of them woke up. The last mission had 7 OMNI guards that I kept on the ground the entire time, Monst3r never had to evade a single guy while approaching, hacking and moving away from the main console. It was sort of hilarious.

Also, the added "improved" security conditions are actually easier to go through than the regular ones. But maybe I just lucked out given my loadouts 'cause guards getting + armour or KO resistance per security level meant jack shit for me, while getting spammed by additional enforcers could possibly put me in trubble. Although given how ridonk powerful my dudes were, I doubt even that would matter.

 

[dukeofwhales]

I did find that I hard much more cash and gear than I needed in my (so far) singular playthrough with DLC turned on, but I wasn't sure if I just got lucky.

 

[Ludo Lense]

Contingency makes things much more volatile. There is a clear progression and if you are behind you crash like Lehman Brothers but if you are ahead you roll like Goldman Sachs.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Started an endless playthru with Draco, the new 'vampire' agent.

I've gone through barely 4 missions, and *all* of them have ended with alarm level 6 and massively piled up bodycounts

 

[SausageInYourFace]

You seem to be playing it quite a lot Roxor, have you thought about writing a Codex review?

 

[Darth Roxor]

Why would I do that, it's not an RPG.

 

[spectre]

Operator guy has no stats. Q.E.D.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Why would I do that, it's not an RPG.

Probably true, yet it seems that it will be inlcuded in our GOTY poll, so you might as well.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Well, my review of Invisiburu is: Klei is essentially the new Looking Glass and everyone should get all of their shit at the double.

In fact, someone can put this on the frontpage as my official review of their entire catalogue.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

We do in fact even have an offical Codex review of KLEIs Mark of the Ninja.

 

[kyrub]

I love the way you can set your own detailed difficulty and game setting in this gem. It's awesome and it makes for a changing experience.

My found preference/balance is:
- 14 rooms
- more saves (otherwise the rooms are empty)
- more guards (same as above)
- 50% cash (to offset the extra saves setting)
(+ time limit 2 min)

The extra rooms tend to create large halls which is very interesting. No rollover, the heart in mouth stuff if you cannot find the exit early.
Fantastic game, such a fresh and original plot!

 

[DeepOcean]

Well, my review of Invisiburu is: Klei is essentially the new Looking Glass and everyone should get all of their shit at the double.

In fact, someone can put this on the frontpage as my official review of their entire catalogue.

They not being kickstarter hobos is a plus too.

 

[Darth Roxor]

day 4 has just started and not a single dime was spent on the training of this agent



(also, day 4 and still no prison in sight, I have a feeling this playthrough will be rather short-lived)

 

[spectre]

I've yet to play the vampire wannabe, can you drill out his aug once you're done with the stats like this, or is there a point to keeping it around?