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Author Topic: Invisible Inc LP: Introducing FTM  (Read 23032 times)

EnigmaticHat

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Invisible Inc LP: Introducing FTM
« on: August 06, 2015, 03:40:11 pm »

So, as Invisible Inc. isn't well suited to the usual forum LP conventions of naming characters after forumites, I've thought of a new way to play it.

For most of the game, I will do my absolute best to win with my own skills.  However, the moment I have any kind of purchasing decision available, I'll take a screenshot and turn it over to you guys.  You can decide which agents I'll take and how I upgrade them, what I buy, how I upgrade Incognita and I WILL do what you tell me to.  You can use this power however you want.  Try to give me a good build.  Try to get me killed.  Find something funny.  It makes no difference to me, I'll try to survive with whatever you choose.

The game mode I'll be playing is Expert Plus Ironman.  This means five starting power, heart monitors will partially trigger on non-lethal KOs, I can't see enemy vision unless I can see the source, less credits from everything, and a few other miscellaneous changes.  There will be no rewinds, and I won't allow myself pin two guards at once by knocking one out and then dragging another body over it.
Every time the agents go on a mission, Incognita will give her brutally honest assessment of the decisions you've made up to that point.

Anyone is welcome.  So without further ado, what's my starting build?
« Last Edit: September 02, 2015, 09:44:35 pm by EnigmaticHat »
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Cthulhu

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Re: Invisible Inc: Get Me Killed
« Reply #1 on: August 06, 2015, 06:16:48 pm »

If we're being silly, go with Banks and the evil cyborg guy.  Get the alarm-level based lockpick and the program that makes your first program each round free.
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EnigmaticHat

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Re: Invisible Inc: Get Me Killed
« Reply #2 on: August 06, 2015, 08:05:11 pm »

I'm going to wait a bit before starting to let some more people show interest/add ideas of their own.

But yes, that's a fine idea!
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You misspelled seance.  Are possessing Draignean?  Are you actually a ghost in the shell? You have to tell us if you are, that's the rule

Teneb

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Re: Invisible Inc: Get Me Killed
« Reply #3 on: August 06, 2015, 09:10:27 pm »

I'd like to vote for Decker to be one of the agents, but aside from that I don't really care much. Stealth from the start is nice.
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ATHATH

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Re: Invisible Inc: Get Me Killed
« Reply #4 on: August 07, 2015, 12:19:00 am »

I vote for non-archived Dr. Xu. His ability makes Sankaku missions much easier. I also think having Bank's non-archived form will help.
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EnigmaticHat

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Re: Invisible Inc: Get Me Killed
« Reply #5 on: August 07, 2015, 10:01:21 am »

So, that's two votes for standard Banks, Seed + Rapier as the only program votes.  All that's needed now is a consensus on what the second character should be.

Edit: OK, I'll just go with Decker because that's ALL Teneb wanted.
« Last Edit: August 08, 2015, 10:45:19 am by EnigmaticHat »
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"T-take this non-euclidean geometry, h-humanity-baka. I m-made it, but not because I l-li-l-like you or anything! I just felt s-sorry for you, b-baka."
You misspelled seance.  Are possessing Draignean?  Are you actually a ghost in the shell? You have to tell us if you are, that's the rule

ATHATH

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Re: Invisible Inc: Get Me Killed
« Reply #6 on: August 08, 2015, 11:39:32 am »

So, that's two votes for standard Banks, Seed + Rapier as the only program votes.  All that's needed now is a consensus on what the second character should be.

Edit: OK, I'll just go with Decker because that's ALL Teneb wanted.
I hope that you're a pro, or this is going to be a really short let's play.
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Seriously, ATHATH, we need to have an intervention about your death mug problem.
Quote
*slow clap* Well ATHATH congratulations. You managed to give the MC a mental breakdown before we even finished the first arc.
I didn't even read it first, I just saw it was ATHATH and noped it. Now that I read it x3 to noping

EnigmaticHat

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Re: Invisible Inc: Get Me Killed
« Reply #7 on: August 08, 2015, 12:18:52 pm »

*Incognita Uplink Online*

Greetings operator.  Before our mission, let us take stock of our assets.

Seed is my highest potential power generation program.  It makes the first program used every round free, which means it effectively "generates" that much power per turn.  Even using a mere two power, it is still the most efficient.  However, the other generation programs will store up power in rounds where I do not hack anything; seed does not have this ability.  Rapier is one of my worst programs, second only to the suicidal faust.  It is better than the other hacking programs until the first alarm level, past that it is the worst of them all and can only get worse.  In missions were our agents locate many devices in the first five turns it will be great, but that cannot be relied upon.

Banks is one of our more effective agents.  Her ability to pickpocket guards is a simple and practical, as his her paralyzing syringe.  Her ability to open doors is good under normal circumstances.  In areas where there are security doors early on, she could be the difference between being trapped and having access to the entire area.  Decker is uninspiring as ever.  His cloaking rig is an important asset but it has a long cooldown time which encourages using it to escape guards rather than for infiltration.  When he is not using his cloak, his only notable asset is to move slightly faster than our other agents, provided he has not located any alcoholic beverages in the mission area.

We have a lot of work ahead of us.


Alright, let's get this started.
Spoiler: Starting team (click to show/hide)
Since all our hard-drives got confiscated in the raid, we only know about one mission Central sharpied onto the back of her hand:
Spoiler: The map (click to show/hide)
For the first mission it doesn't matter which corp we're raiding, all we'll be facing is a few security systems and standard guards.  Our mission is to steal a corporate boss's Facebook friends list and analyze it to find out who is posting "I'm a security threat LOL".  The only really unfortunate thing is that its in Australia; that will limit which missions we can quickly fly to, and the two corps in that region are both nasty to fight.

Right off the bat, Decker and Banks explore the entry room to see how many exits it has.  This turns out to be one, but it probably won't be bad...
Spoiler: Starting room (click to show/hide)
Oh look, there's no way to leave, and...
Spoiler: Another guard (click to show/hide)
This is EXACTLY what we don't want to happen with rapier.  Rapier costs one power per hack plus one per alarm level.  Every alarm level that cost goes up by one, and even if we don't do anything suspicious the corporate security AIs will slowly detect Incognita's intrusion.  We'll accumulate one alarm pip per turn as a result, and its five pips to the next alarm level where something bad happens.  Basically, we just lost two out of our five turns of sweet, sweet one power hacking.
Spoiler: The Next Turn (click to show/hide)
Anyway, the guards patrol back and the agents move in.  Both of them show their talents here.  Decker's starting point in the speed skill lets him move one tile further every turn, which is great because it allows him to reach double cover.  This game uses Xcom cover rules which is to say that cover forms an invisible, infinitely long line and the person taking cover counts as concealed from anyone on the other side of the line.  This means that agents hiding behind two opposite pieces of cover can only be seen from a single, one tile wide band.  Generally they'll be completely safe unless someone tries to walk through them.  Banks also finds double cover, waiting to show off her skill:
Spoiler: Banks, doing her thing (click to show/hide)
Which is theft.  Her starting point in Anarchy lets her pickpocket guards if she can get next to them without being seen.  This is great, because I really don't want to be knocking out guards to loot them at this difficulty level, for reasons I'll go over later.

Decker heads down, where he finds a safe hidden in a small room and a back room with a safe in it; that path turns out to be a dead end.  Banks follows the guard she didn't pickpocket into the other room he's guarding.
Let's talk about guards.  If guards are blissfully ignorant, which is how we want them to stay, they'll either patrol along the most direct route between two points, which will take them exactly one turn to walk between, or they'll be stationary.  This generally means that if you can watch a room for one turn, and there are no guards in it, you know its safe.  However, there are some weird edge cases to these rules involving blocked pathing.  So Banks walks into the room, observes the guard to see his patrol path, and then pickpockets him and moves outside his cone of vision.
Spoiler: However... (click to show/hide)
His patrol path has changed!  Instead of walking diagonally out of the room, which is the most direct path, he steps to the side and then moves up to the door.  This is because, for whatever reason, guards won't ever try to move onto an occupied square diagonally, they'll only do it orthogonally.  By stepping onto the tile in front of the door, Banks caused him to change his path.  This is a super obscure case I was not prepared for, and I've very lucky Banks ended up outside of his vision cone.

For the next turn, I have a choice: unlock the security door with Bank's unique augment, or go around.  The security door and the normal door both likely lead to the same room.  Guards won't unlock security doors on their own, which means even though Banks has the ability to open up paths doesn't mean that she should open up paths.  Banks opens up the door anyway to speed up her movement into the rest of the level.

The next turns are fairly uneventful.  We find one of K&Os lethal security laser walls (so it actually did matter which corp we went up against).  Fortunately the power supply was visible through the wall, so Incognita could bring it offline the turn that we found it.  Rapier is starting to be a serious liability.  When the alarm level hit one, extra cameras turned on, but none of them were particularly in the way.  Right now, its no worse than lockpick would have been, but the security level is rapidly ticking up to two.  When it hits two, rapier will be up to three power per turn, making it the worst hacking program in the game, AND at alarm level 2 the corporate AIs will upgrade the security by adding another firewall to everything.  In the early levels, everything has one firewall, so that's double the firewalls.  Fortunately our seed program will stlll bring down rapier's cost to zero the first time I use it every turn.

Now, for the fun part: Decker found the office's 3D printer!
Spoiler: See, there it is (click to show/hide)
The 3D printer has to have money put into it to work because capitalism.  This functionality apparently cannot be turned off because even though Incognita has hacked it all that does is let us use it, it doesn't let us print things for free.

Still, its time to go shopping!
Spoiler: The options (click to show/hide)
For those who don't play Invisible Inc: subdermal cloak is a permanent cybernetic augment that causes stims (move faster for one turn) to also function as a cloak (that thing Harry Potter uses).  The T.A.G. pistol sticks a guard with a tracking device so they can be released into the wild.  Every time its fired it spends one unit of Incognita's power reserve to create its ammo.  The charge pack is a clip for any weapon that takes clips, the med gel lets us revive downed agents, the shock traps can be placed on a door to non-lethally KO a guard the same way our melee weapons do.  The level one trap takes two anarchy (what Banks has), the level two trap is slightly better but takes one more point of anarchy.

So, what do I buy?
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"T-take this non-euclidean geometry, h-humanity-baka. I m-made it, but not because I l-li-l-like you or anything! I just felt s-sorry for you, b-baka."
You misspelled seance.  Are possessing Draignean?  Are you actually a ghost in the shell? You have to tell us if you are, that's the rule

RAM

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Re: Invisible Inc LP: Incognita is Judging You
« Reply #8 on: August 08, 2015, 03:44:17 pm »

Buy T.A.G.! Save the rest.
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Cthulhu

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Re: Invisible Inc LP: Incognita is Judging You
« Reply #9 on: August 08, 2015, 04:05:42 pm »

I don't think stims are a reliable enough grab to be worth getting an augment for.  I say get the tag pistol and that's it.

I woudl say get the aug anyway but I already made you get rapier/seed so I'll be good for this one.
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RAM

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Re: Invisible Inc LP: Incognita is Judging You
« Reply #10 on: August 08, 2015, 04:29:58 pm »

With full anarchy you can loot stims, but early-on those upgrades are super-important, so it is sketchy to spend much. But T.A.G. is so unearthly-awesome that you cannot possibly say no. I like to think that they stop to scratch at what they think is an insect, or to run a quick sensor diagnostic or something. But interrupting patrol routes is often more trouble than it is worth, but a tagged guard is almost never a threat. Aand if you loot the bodyguard then she can shoot it twice in a round and get bonus move, very nice stuff.
Unless there has been a patch that removed some of this stuff...
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Thexor

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Re: Invisible Inc LP: Incognita is Judging You
« Reply #11 on: August 08, 2015, 05:21:29 pm »

Posting to watch. Just finished my first run of this game, excited to watch someone who actually knows what they're doing!
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EnigmaticHat

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Re: Invisible Inc LP: Incognita is Judging You
« Reply #12 on: August 09, 2015, 01:57:45 am »

Thanks for your interest everyone!  I'm going to start this off by saying its been a long day and the operator (that's me!) is tired.  I say this because its going to become relevant.

So, Decker buys his shiny new T.A.G. pistol.  He's just itching to take it for a spin, so after hacking a safe he tests it out on a guard who haplessly wanders in:
Spoiler: The expert at work (click to show/hide)
The guard is none the wiser, happily going about his day unaware that his geo-locational data now belongs to Decker for the next 730 days.  Banks goes about relieving a guard of his wallet and a console of its data.  The guard is carrying... a key card.  Banks doesn't need that, but she still takes it and drops it on the floor in case Decker wants it.  This almost never matters so in the future just assume I do that as it comes up.  She checks the next door and finds...
Spoiler: Drum roll please... (click to show/hide)
The exit!  This huge.  See, executive console missions are arguably the hardest type aside from the final mission.  The moment the data is removed, the guard duty changes, which means every guard on the level wakes up simultaneously and picks new points on the level to patrol between.  Effectively, all guard movement becomes random for a few turns and we might as well just cower in a corner.  So if the situation gets bad enough, I might want to avoid that risk and get out without even attempting the objective.  Don't hold your breath for that kind of restraint; looting the facilities in Invisible Inc. is like betting double or nothing.  Its hard to stop until its too late.
Spoiler: Meanwhile (click to show/hide)
Decker walks through the tagged guard's peripheral vision to get to the rest of the level faster.  When the team is split up, you can only advance as fast as the slowest agent and Banks is at a dead end.  So Decker shaving off a turn in his exploration effectively saves the entire team a turn.  The gamble pays off.  I expected to find the objective through the door there, but instead I found another guard elevator.  This means both the guard elevators are at a dead end not really blocking the exit.  He also finds a large safe.
Spoiler: The situation thus far (click to show/hide)
I've already hacked the safe once this turn.  I'm waiting till the next turn to hack it twice, which will cost us power but Decker needs to get out of there.  When the alarm level hits 3 a guard will come to reinforce.  Because of the elevator placement he WILL appear there.  Decker could probably hide but guards are impossible to observe or tag in the elevators and their movement is decently random, so he really does want to make himself scarce.  The observant among you may have noticed this.
Spoiler: This (click to show/hide)
This door.  The last unopened door I can see, probably the last in the level.  Taunting me.  Its back the way we came.  I'm not going to give you the play by play of walking through already explored areas, but anyway, Banks gets to the door and peaks it, discovering that it is the executive's posh office.  Although oddly enough his terminal doesn't have a chair in front of it.  I guess he likes standing, or his boss likes him being uncomfortable.  Anyway, she can't safely move inside this turn so she waits, during which the two guards come back.  Then she goes inside, catching the attention of a guard while she does.  Decker, meanwhile, continues gathering data on office fauna.
Decker closes the door and then waits in front of it, so he'll be one tile closer if he needs to move to help Banks.

...

Remember when I said I was tired?  Well, if you're paying attention you know what it is.  Go look at that last picture again.  The guard Decker tagged and Banks distracted WAS NOT THE ONE WALKING BACK INTO DECKER'S ROOM.
Spoiler: Mistakes were made (click to show/hide)
Decker is found, although if he can break line of site by moving one tile he can save himself.  As is customary in Invisible Inc., I curse loudly, gather myself, and then stare at the screen for a bit.  I measure out some distances and examine everything.  And then I reach a decision: we're going loud.
Spoiler: Going loud (click to show/hide)
Banks sprints behind one enemy and knocks him out.  Then she fills him full of her special mix, which I would show you a picture of because its hilarious but this post is long enough as it is.  Because she sprinted she has enough move to run back and grab the data out of the executive's console.  Sprinting makes noise but the only person who heard her is being introduced to the finer points of the film noir genre.  Speaking of which, Decker steps off the line of attack, and tags his opponent because even though he's about to be knocked the fuck out the guard might still wake up and chase us.
Spoiler: Not quite a duck blind (click to show/hide)
Then he goes into ambush, which is the melee equivalent of Xcom's overwatch.

Sorry, did I say he went into overwatch?  I meant to say he wastes his cloak and moves to the other side of the room because you only get one attack in a turn and the T.A.G. pistol counts as using it.
Spoiler: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK (click to show/hide)
Well, regardless, it works out.  Mostly.  Decker could hide and let the guard move on but his next move is going to be towards Banks and we can't get bogged down.  Alerted guards are highly dangerous because they're one of the few random elements Invisible Inc. has outside of level generation.  Until an alerted guard thinks of his next move, I don't know what it is.  So as long as these guys are standing, my plans get more and more vague the further ahead they are.  Decker decides not to take the risk and introduces the guard to the wonders of electricity.
Guards brought in in this manner move randomly.  Since we got the data out of the objective, the other guards will also be moving randomly for a few turns.  Basically, everyone is moving randomly, there are a lot of guards, they're all being funneled through a single room between us and the exit, and the next alarm level the corps pull out the big guns.  We need to leave.
This move was pretty risky.  Banks takes out the guard above but I know that there's a single guard in one of the four rooms on the way to the exit.  If he chooses to walk through the second security door Banks opened offscreen, Banks will have no cover, and Decker will almost certainly have to leave her behind.

I actually see noise pings from out of sight; he was in the area of the security door, but didn't walk through it.  Alarm level 5 triggers, calling in an elite enforcer (thankfully knowhere near us), and, well...
Spoiler: The worst thing (click to show/hide)
Doesn't matter, just one guard between us and the exit.
Spoiler: Home Free (click to show/hide)
I expected this to be broken up by you guys choosing which programs to buy but I never found a secondary server terminal.  Either the first mission doesn't spawn one or there was another door in the part of the executive's office I didn't have time to explore. Tomorrow I'll post the mission results, as well as our purchasing options and what missions our new Facebook friends list gets us.  I'll give you a hint: the mission choices we got were not particularly lucky.  Now I'm going to bed.
Logged
"T-take this non-euclidean geometry, h-humanity-baka. I m-made it, but not because I l-li-l-like you or anything! I just felt s-sorry for you, b-baka."
You misspelled seance.  Are possessing Draignean?  Are you actually a ghost in the shell? You have to tell us if you are, that's the rule

RAM

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Re: Invisible Inc LP: Incognita is Judging You
« Reply #13 on: August 09, 2015, 05:06:33 am »

My vote is for anarchy spam, more loot means more cash means more purchasing decisions for us means less power to the headdress...
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Vote (1) for the Urist scale!
I shall be eternally happy. I shall be able to construct elf hunting giant mecha. Which can pour magma.
Urist has been forced to use a friend as fertilizer lately.
Read the First Post!

EnigmaticHat

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Re: Invisible Inc LP: Incognita is Judging You
« Reply #14 on: August 09, 2015, 09:55:56 am »

Here are the mission results:
Spoiler: Consequences (click to show/hide)
Not only was most of the level looted, for better or worse we spent almost none of the money.

Here are our agents:
Spoiler: Banks (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: Decker (click to show/hide)

Here is what everyone's favorite hacker/fence is offering to sell us:
Spoiler: Monst3r (click to show/hide)

And here are our mission options:
Spoiler: The map (click to show/hide)
Remember when I said they weren't very lucky?  Well, we really do want to free the agent held in the detention center, but its a Sankaku facility.  Taking on their armored robots with our current hacking abilities would be... challenging.  On the other hand the Plastech missions are a world away and Plastech is ALSO pretty painful to take on with weak hacking.
Logged
"T-take this non-euclidean geometry, h-humanity-baka. I m-made it, but not because I l-li-l-like you or anything! I just felt s-sorry for you, b-baka."
You misspelled seance.  Are possessing Draignean?  Are you actually a ghost in the shell? You have to tell us if you are, that's the rule
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