Minions are great. They will carry out all sorts of different orders, but they only have limited technical, social and fighting skills. After you have started building your “lair”, you are told to kidnap a maid who is wandering around your island. Once caught you can order one of your minions to interrogate her, the minion in question then gains the special knowledge she possesses, this creates a new type of worker, the Valet.
The Valet is a social minion, good at taking care of agents and the various holiday makers who seem to think your island is some sort of tropical paradise. They are experts in psychology, able to confuse and disorient people, getting rid of them without the need for violence. As mentioned yesterday, violence is an option, but can often bring unwanted attention. However being able to send agents home thinking they never found anything incriminating is good for your public profile. Valets can also use fire extinguishers should some of your precious equipment catch fire.
There are various types of minion you can hire, looking at the minion management screen you can see lots of slots that will be filled later in the game. It is here that you decide the balance of minions. The number on the bottom tells you how many you can have in total, then you input the desired amount with the arrows next to each minion box. You can only hire standard minions, all the others can only be obtained by training or interrogation. The slider adjusts how often new minions are hired (assuming you have the space), it starts on $0 for a minion every minute, and it scales up to $4000 for a minion every second. If you don’t need any it’s best to leave it at the bottom so you get them for free, if however you are being attacked and have the spare cash it’s a big help.
Along with Valets another of the first types you encounter are the guards. Orange suited muscle men, handy with fists and a gun, also having skill in evil “lair” security. One the world map, guards are good at stealing money and protecting any other minions who might be in the vicinity.
The last of the new types of minion you encounter in the early game is the technician. Technicians can fix broken equipment and perform basic medical care, they are also adept at finding out information on the world map. Later on in the game they can also help with research.
Once you have at least one of these minions, you can train more in a training room. Each type has a specific piece of equipment, punching dummies for guards, chemical mixing tables for technicians and chairs for valets. When minions change, there is a bone-crunching sound, it’s great, yet at the same time spine-tingling.
As with the Valet, in order to initially obtain trained guards and technicians, you need to capture someone with the skill and have a basic minion interrogate them. This is done by completing missions on the world map. Once you have captured them you need somewhere to hold them, along with any other pesky individuals, such as agents. The Guard room has multiple uses. It is mainly where you place cells to hold your prisoners, these are unfortunately not fool proof and more intelligent agents can escape ready to cause more trouble. It’s best not to keep people in there for a long time, you need to decide what to do about them.
Three options, the first one is to let them go, I’m not quite sure why you’d want to do this. The second option is simply to kill them, you could have done this in the first place instead of issuing the capture tag, but sometimes you suddenly get an influx of new prisoners and you need a quick solution. A security or basic minion picks up a gun, goes to the cell and shoots them, a bodybag then appears for you to deal with.
The last option is one of my favourites, mostly because of the humourous ways in which you can interrogate prisoners. The first item you get is the basic interrogation chair, a small chair with lamp attached. Using this on a prisoner results in death, but it is the only way to deal with skilled prisoners such as the maid, and it also allows you to obtain information from agents. (Although I’m not quite sure how that works.) A minion escorts the prisoner to the chair, then proceeds to go through various routines in order to break their spirit.
Waving a cigarette in their face then taking it away. (You could say it’s setting a bad example, but I see it as an important detail in the spy setting.)
Early on you gain access to a mess hall, a place where your minions can get some food to help boost their stats. You can place an ordinary kitchen counter, but you also get the option of one with a huge mixing bowl. You can use this as a form of interrogation, a minion escorts the prisoner to the mixer and shoves them in the bowl, they then proceed to turn it on again and again spinning the poor individual around and around screaming, the minion standing nonchalantly to the side. This does not kill them, however it is a great way to deal with agents who have learnt secret information. You might not want to kill them, but you can’t send them back as they are, a quick spin in the mixer makes them forget everything they’ve seen, they can then be escorted outside as if nothing had happened. Throughout the game you gain more and more ways of dealing with them using equipment from various rooms. All of them hilarious.
After I had placed my new devious trap yesterday, I suffered a power cut.
Power management in Evil Genius is very simple, two types of devices can be placed in Power rooms, Generators and Capacitors. Generators are your main source of power, the little indicator on the bar along the bottom lets you know the power situation. The bottom number represents your power consumption, the top your total available power. The bottom one should be green, once you get close to your power limit it turns yellow, this is bad as your generators will start taking damage. If you have a lot of technicians this isn’t too much of a problem, but it does eat away at their time. If they both turn red, you will suffer a power cut and all powered devices will turn off and be unusable.
This is very bad as your most important devices are powered, in my case this switched off my new shiny control room, traps and doors. All doors become unlocked in a power cut so you need to keep your guard up. Fortunately, as I had only just tipped over my power limit, I just turned off my control room and power was restored. While not good, this was better than losing the doors and my trap. Your base provides a certain amount of power for free, all I had to do now was build a power room and things would soon be back to normal. When you put a time card machine in a room you can control certain aspects of it. Switching it to red shuts the room down, yellow means it will be used normally, and the various stages of green increase the amount of workers in a room, this means that you can have staff already on hand when someone’s shift ends.
The other type of power device is the Capacitor, this uses the surplus energy of your generators to build up a supply that can be used in the event of a power cut. (yes, I know that is not what a capacitor actually does, but the name is cool) However in the past I have found it better to just use the space for more power generators, but you can fit one or two if there is any surplus room.
After completing the first set of objectives to get my “lair” setup, it was time to start planning for the future. The next objectives have you rounding up various criminal leaders for a meeting to discuss your plans. This is no simple task, they require work both on the world map and in the area surrounding your base. A little more detail on the world map; when you send out minions into the world you have three options, plotting, stealing and hiding. Stealing simply increases your funds, hiding is used when enemy agents are active on the world map, if you don’t hide your minions, they are killed off over time. Plotting is used to discover Acts of Infamy, and further your path to victory.
I soon find out the location of the first three, the fourth one will apparently take some convincing with my mixing bowl. Mwuhuhahaha.
He soon joins the others at my shiny new conference table. The objective said the next one would be even more difficult, it turned out he was. Not only did I have to spend time searching several different countries, he would only come out if I was notorious enough. The notoriety bar runs along the bottom of the map screen, every time you commit an evil deed it goes up. I hadn’t spent much time bothering with the Acts of Infamy, only stopping to steal a nice trinket. Most of the Acts of Infamy have no effect beside increasing your notoriety, some however are attached to specific objects you can steal. Once you have completed the mission you can place the object somewhere in your “lair”, it gives stat boosts to anyone nearby like my own field of influence. Minions who work hard can often have their stats drained quite quickly and Loyalty (blue) cannot be replenished by resting in a bed, it requires you to be present, or a symbol of your power. Placing my new prize in the middle of the control room means my minions will be able to work longer, and be less drained at the end.
After I crossed the notoriety threshold a large bright light shone on the world map, signifying an important mission. Going in closer shows a statuette of the criminal leader. Soon the ex-CIA agent was sitting at my conference table. The last criminal leader was going to be another based on my island. He had the audacity to send his own agents to try and kill me! Jubei had just returned having been defeated on a particularly tricky mission on the world map, time to deal with the intruders. Three waves in total were sent to my island, the first two making it inside my “lair” where my guards dealt with them, but unfortunately not before they took out several of my minions, nothing much to worry about though. The last wave headed round the other end of the mountain, so I sent Jubei after them, he only has a sword whereas they had guns, but once he got in close they didn’t stand a chance. The last criminal leader decided to show up.
Once everyone is seated a little in-game entertainment is provided, the middle of the table flips over showing an island, a tower rises out showing some sort of mirror. It turned to the criminal leader who dared to attack me, and fried him with a laser. Now everyone knows who is in charge.
Tomorrow it’s time to start putting my plan into action, time to do a little research…
Another performance note; when I started I was getting a huge FPS, but now more was happening it had started to drop, I decided to put V-sync on in case it got any lower. Also, as I have an LCD monitor it would eliminate tearing, which I dislike. I suffered two crashes during today’s game, when I turned V-sync back off it ran fine. Also, as I found when I forgot to take a screenshot of something, don’t alt-tab. It will crash when you try to get back in.
Mwahaha! This is getting better and better haha! Any ideas of where I can get a copy of the game from?
Sure, I thought it might be hard to get a hold of since Elixir Studios has sadly closed (the main Evil Genius site has gone), fortunately several places still stock it.
The cheapest I found was £6.43 at TheHut.com. Cheap at twice the price. 😉
Here is a list of other places as well.
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